Nancy writes about the importance of endings, a rich source for reflection and of insights. And suggests it as something we should be more literate in, more deliberate in as a practice.

Yes, endings, acknowledging them, shaping them, is important.
When the BlogWalk series already had practically ended, with the last session being 18 months or so in the past, it was only when I posted about formally ending it, that it was truly done. It allowed those who participated to share stories about what it had meant to them, to say thanks, and it was a release for the organisers as well.

In our short e-book about unconferencing your birthday party (in itself a gift we sent to the participants of the most recent event it described, a year afterwards) we made a point to write about a proper ending. We had been at many events where the end was just when people left, but also at those where the end was a celebration of what we did together. We wrote "So often we were at a conference where the organizers didn’t know how to create a proper end to it. Either they’re too shy to take credit for what they’ve pulled off or they assume that most people left already and the end of the program is the last speaker to be on stage. Closure is important. It doesn’t have to be long, it doesn’t have to be a closing keynote, but it should serve as a focal point for everyone to end the day and give them an opportunity to thank you and each other as a group, not just as individuals. We gathered everyone after the last session and made some closing remarks, the most important of which was ‘thank you!’. […] Obviously this was the time to open up a few bottles as well."

In an Open Space style setting as a moderator I find releasing the space at the end for me usually involves strong emotions, coming down to earth from creating and surfing the group’s collective energy and shared attention, from weaving the tapestry of the experience together. When E and I helped P create such a space in 2019 I wrote afterwards "When Peter thanked Elmine and they embraced, that was the moment I felt myself release the space I had opened up on Day 1 when I helped the group" settle into the event and "set the schedule. Where the soap bubble we blew collapsed again, no longer able to hold the surface tension. I felt a wave of emotions wash through me, which I recognise from our own events as well. The realisation of the beauty of the collective experience you created, the connections made, the vulnerability allowed, the fun had, the playfulness. We wound down from that rush chatting over drinks in the moon lit back yard."

Endings such as those Nancy describes and the examples I mention, need their own space. It’s not a side effect of stopping doing something, but an act in itself that deserves consideration. As Nancy suggests, a practice.

Before Techfestival‘s speakers and event partners’ dinner Thursday, Marie Louise Gørvild, Techfestival’s Director, and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, its initiator, said a few words. Thomas cited the Copenhagen Letter from 2017 singling out how our tech needs to be embedded in the context of our democratic structures, and how innovation can’t be a substitute for our sense of progress and impact. The Copenhagen Letter, and the entire Techfestival emphasise humanity as not only the source and context for technology and its use, but its ultimate yardstick for the constructive use and impact of technology. This may sound obvious, it certainly does to me, but in practice it needs to be repeated to ensure it is used as such a yardstick from the very first design stage of any new technology.

At Techfestival Copenhagen 2019

Technology is always about humans to me. Technology is an extension of our bodies, an extension of reach and an extension of human agency. A soup spoon is an extension of our hand so we don’t burn our hand when we stir the soup. A particle accelerator is an extension of our ears and eyes to better understand the particles and atoms we’re made of. With technology we extend our reach across the globe by instantaneously communicating, extend it into the air, into the deep sea, towards the atom level, and into interstellar space. Tech is there to deepen and augment our humanity. In my daily routines it’s how I approach technology too, both in personal matters such as blogging, and in client projects, and apparently such an approach stands out. It’s what recently Kicks Condor remarked upon and Neil Mather pointed to in conversations about our blogging practices, what Heinz Wittenbrink referenced when he said “they talk about their own lives when they talk about these things” about our unconference, and what clients say about my change management work around open data.

Techfestival in Copenhagen takes humanity as the starting point for tech, and as litmus test for the usefulness and ethicality of tech. It therefore is somewhat grating to come across people talking about how to create a community for their tech to help it scale. Hearing that last week in Copenhagen a few times felt very much out of tune. Worse, I think It is an insulting way to talk about people you say you want to create value for.

Yes, some newly launched apps / platforms really are new places where communities can form that otherwise wouldn’t, because of geographic spread, shame, taboo or danger to make yourself visible in your local environment, or because you’re exploring things you’re still uncertain about yourself. All (niche) interests, the crazy ones, those who can’t fully express their own personality in their immediate environment benefit from the new spaces for interaction online tools have created. My own personal blog based peer network started like that: I was lonely in my role as a knowledge manager at the start of the ’00s, and online interaction and blogging brought me the global professional peer network I needed, and which wasn’t otherwise possible in the Netherlands at the time.

Techfestival’s central stage in Kødbyen, during an evening key-note

Otherwise, however, every single one of us already is part of communities. Their sports teams, neighbourhood, extended family, work context, causes, peer networks, alumni clubs, etc etc. Why doesn’t tech usually focus on me using it for my communities as is, and rather present itself as having me join a made up community whose raison d’etre is exploiting our attention for profit? That’s not community building, that’s extraction, instrumentalising your users, while dehumanising them along the way. To me it’s in those communities everyone is already part of where the scaling for technology is to be found. “Scaling does not scale” said Aza Raskin in his Techfestival keynote, and that resonates. I talked about the invisible hand of networks in response to demands for scaling when I talked about technology ‘smaller than us‘ and networked agency at SOTN18, and this probably is me saying the same again in a slightly different way. Scaling is in our human structures. Artists don’t scale, road building doesn’t scale but art and road networks are at scale. Communities don’t scale, they’re fine as they are, but they are the grain of scale, resulting in society which is at scale. Don’t seek to scale your tech, seek to let your tech reinforce societal scaling, our overlapping communities, our cultures. Let your tech be scaffolding for a richer expression of society.

Techfestival fits very much into that, and I hope it is what I brought to the work on the CPH150 pledge: the notion of human (group) agency. and the realisation that tech is not something on its own, but needs to be used in combination with methods and processes, in which you cannot ever ignore societal context. One of those processes is continuous reflection on your tech, right alongside the creation and implementation of your tech, for as long as it endures.

Our group of 150 working 24 hours on writing the TechPledge

We’re in a time where whatever is presented to us as discourse on Facebook, Twitter or any of the other platforms out there, may or may not come from humans, bots, or someone/a group with a specific agenda irrespective of what you say or respond. We’ve seen it at the political level, with outside influences on elections, we see it in things like gamer gate, and in critiques of the last Star Wars movie. It creates damage on a societal level, and it damages people individually. To quote Angela Watercutter, the author of the mentioned Star Wars article,

…it gets harder and harder to have an honest discussion […] when some of the speakers are just there to throw kerosene on a flame war. And when that happens, when it’s impossible to know which sentiments are real and what motivates the people sharing them, discourse crumbles. Every discussion […] could turn into a […] fight — if we let it.

Discourse disintegrates I think specifically when there’s no meaningful social context in which it takes place, nor social connections between speakers in that discourse. The effect not just stems from that you can’t/don’t really know who you’re conversing with, but I think more importantly from anyone on a general platform being able to bring themselves into the conversation, worse even force themselves into the conversation. Which is why you never should wade into newspaper comments, even though we all read them at times because watching discourse crumbling from the sidelines has a certain addictive quality. That this can happen is because participants themselves don’t control the setting of any conversation they are part of, and none of those conversations are limited to a specific (social) context.

Unlike in your living room, over drinks in a pub, or at a party with friends of friends of friends. There you know someone. Or if you don’t, you know them in that setting, you know their behaviour at that event thus far. All have skin in the game as well misbehaviour has immediate social consequences. Social connectedness is a necessary context for discourse, either stemming from personal connections, or from the setting of the place/event it takes place in. Online discourse often lacks both, discourse crumbles, entropy ensues. Without consequence for those causing the crumbling. Which makes it fascinating when missing social context is retroactively restored, outing the misbehaving parties, such as the book I once bought by Tinkebell where she matches death threats she received against the sender’s very normal Facebook profiles.

Two elements therefore are needed I find, one in terms of determining who can be part of which discourse, and two in terms of control over the context of that discourse. They are point 2 and point 6 in my manifesto on networked agency.

  • Our platforms need to mimick human networks much more closely : our networks are never ‘all in one mix’ but a tapestry of overlapping and distinct groups and contexts. Yet centralised platforms put us all in the same space.
  • Our platforms also need to be ‘smaller’ than the group using it, meaning a group can deploy, alter, maintain, administrate a platform for their specific context. Of course you can still be a troll in such a setting, but you can no longer be one without a cost, as your peers can all act themselves and collectively.
  • This is unlike on e.g. FB where the cost of defending against trollish behaviour by design takes more effort than being a troll, and never carries a cost for the troll. There must, in short, be a finite social distance between speakers for discourse to be possible. Platforms that dilute that, or allow for infinite social distance, is where discourse can crumble.

    This points to federation (a platform within control of a specific group, interconnected with other groups doing the same), and decentralisation (individuals running a platform for one, and interconnecting them). Doug Belshaw recently wrote in a post titled ‘Time to ignore and withdraw?‘ about how he first saw individuals running their own Mastodon instance as quirky and weird. Until he read a blogpost of Laura Kalbag where she writes about why you should run Mastodon yourself if possible:

    Everything I post is under my control on my server. I can guarantee that my Mastodon instance won’t start profiling me, or posting ads, or inviting Nazis to tea, because I am the boss of my instance. I have access to all my content for all time, and only my web host or Internet Service Provider can block my access (as with any self-hosted site.) And all blocking and filtering rules are under my control—you can block and filter what you want as an individual on another person’s instance, but you have no say in who/what they block and filter for the whole instance.

    Similarly I recently wrote,

    The logical end point of the distributed web and federated services is running your own individual instance. Much as in the way I run my own blog, I want my own Mastodon instance.

    I also do see a place for federation, where a group of people from a single context run an instance of a platform. A group of neighbours, a sports team, a project team, some other association, but always settings where damaging behaviour carries a cost because social distance is finite and context defined, even if temporary or emergent.

    I am deeply disturbed by the images coming out of the USA this week.
    The sheer despair and suffering of the people involved, to which my thoughts go out, are certainly the main point but not what makes me worrisome. Worrying are the tales of systemic failure this tells:

  • The failure to get help into the area, days after disaster.
  • The way hardly any action was taken before disaster struck. (The evacuation of New Orleans seems to have been announced only, but not facilitated, leaving people to fend for themselves. Other areas that are heavily hit because the hurricane changed course, which they often do, were not evacuated.)
  • The way the government and initially the US press seemed preoccupied with looters more (shoot to kill orders etc.) than rescueing people.
  • The way the US President talked about rebuilding, getting oil-refineries to work again, listing stuff that was being shipped into the area as if it were groceries, without providing any human comfort, empathy or indication thereof.
  • The way US Government has not requested, and in some instances refused, international offers of help, although offers abound. (Meanwhile the press harrasses UN officials why the international community isn’t doing more, to which everytime the answer is that the US Government must ask and allow itself to be helped.)
  • The way different levels of government seem to be total strangers to each other. (The New Orleans Mayor highly emotional and swearing at the federal government on the airwaves. FEMA stated to be unaware there were thousands of people sheltering in the sportsdome, after days of televised reporting of that fact.)
  • The way local offers of help, by private aviators, by private helicopter companies, general citizens, etc, are turned down by authorities. The Red Cross being forbidden to enter the area.
  • The way how being safe seems to correlate with whether you’re poor or not.
  • The way a government provided ‘safe shelter’ such as the sportsdome turns into a hell with people being raped, killed, running out of sustenance and spiralling down into despair.

    I know from personal experience in my hometown that when disaster strikes that general confusion, disorder, anger, and fear are to be expected and unpreventable, that communication and other infrastructure breaks down initially. It is the way people respond to that that is the most telling. Disasters can strengthen well functioning communities, by providing common cause, and generating feelings of deep solidarity. We saw that here, when our city was in flames in 2000. People and authorities alike started doing a myriad of little things that helped work towards dealing with a situation none could face alone.

    In contrast the impression I get from US authorities is that they seem to think that they are the only ones that could and should deal with it, even though mistakes are made, refusing to build on the feelings of solidarity from their own citizens and the international community. As if they themselves are not part of the community but outside it, supposedly guarding it, the archetype of the benevolent despot. Every toddler goes through a phase where it refuses help by saying “I can do that alone”. I have been watching a lot of uniformed and pin-striped toddlers this week on tv, and it is reminiscent of how the US Government succeeded in turning the world’s outpouring of sympathy and help after 9/11 into alienation, irritation and down-right anger in mere months. Except this time they’re doing it to their own citizens.
    In my KM experience the aftermath of the hurricane so obviously runs contrary to everything I know and have experienced concerning communities, that I don’t know where to begin how to list and explain them rationally or list the symptoms and examples of it from the past week. The current chaos and suffering are not entirely the consequence of natural disaster, but the telling and horrific result of systemic weakening of community and societal structures. Rot at the core spreads outwards. In the past days we have seen how human capital has been carelessly squandered in the US, apparantly for years already.

    I am in no position to judge the US people (even if it were possible to do that in sweeping generalization) and the leadership they choose for themselves, but I am in a position to look at a situation from my professional experience, which is what I try to do here.
    Of course there are also much more positive examples to be found, of acts of individuals that show humanity in the face of disaster. Quite a number of Tsunami relief effort alumni among them, as far as on-line responsiveness is concerned. Thing is, in our societies and communities we build structures and governments for that purpose as well. These structures have failed here, and in instances appear to have made matters worse, much worse.

    Meanwhile US blogs are starting to call the flooded regions Lake George, which seems to be the proper caption for this systemic failure of community. The buck ultimately stops there. Or at least it should. Those who’ve been calling George Bush ‘American Nero’ in the past days on their blogs seem to think it won’t.

  • While I was referring to posts by Ross Mayfield on audience sizes and blogs, he himself brings them together in Social Capital of Blogspace.
    Also interesting: John Udell on Scopes of Audiences. (via both Ross Mayfield and Lilia Efimova)
    I would like to argue that overlap in scope is not only a matter of addressing other numbers of public (3, 300, 3k, 3M etc) but I believe that overlap in scope is also hugely interesting in terms of multidisciplinarity. It is very often that I pick up ideas from other disciplines that offer a view, or approach that enriches what I do in my own field. Now of course KM is multidisciplinarity turned flesh as it were. So is KM the art of finding scoping tools, and learning to be ‘human routers’ (Lilia) / ‘community straddlers’ (Ross)?
    (edited comment I posted in response to Lilia Efimova)