Infrastructures of autonomy and dynamic equilibrium of collaboration

[unknown_author]

[Editor note: The following notes were made by @cindy during the “Infrastructures of autonomy and dynamic equilibrium of collaboration”, of OpenVillage Festival (19th October 2017). Quotes are not verbatim but summarize what was said. If you feel something is mis-represented, please tell us in a comment or with the “Flag → Something Else” feature and a mod will fix it. – @anu]

---

@Cindy Regalado

From what I seen so far lot of opportunities. Background: I started my work in 2004 in Baha california, working with communities there as part of masters research. I researched People who were providing care.

@Eta

The difficulty of organising your work and what you are trying to build, how to overcome certain dynamics, for example gender and racial…

How are we able to give each other care when we are trying hard to give our best?

###Cindy
Worked with communities In Cabo San Lucas fishing village of 300 people in Baja California, Mexico - it had a 20% growth rate by cca 2010. People were running day to day services - medical, legal etc. Cindy was working to integrate those networks in the masterplan of the town.

Later she worked in the Ontario Public Service research group - enable students to gain credit in their course but applied at the community level i.e. work with an organisation or group. Cindy’s group built their capacity - to being understanding, to have facilitation workshops, grow empathy etc, complementing i.e. engineering skills.

Now based in London, runs Citizens Without Borders, using improvisation methods to build enthusiasm and playfulness in taking initiative.

@Cindy

I am involved with the Public Lab, which produces a suite of open source tools to open/citizen science (https://publiclab.org/). Group of community members realised they need to get together and get their data. Formed after oil spill? Main job formative evaluation: Making sure people care for themselves …DIY air photography project used air balloons to surveil the hot spots and get info in real time. → i.e. Israeli and Palestinian children working together.

@DITO

Do It Together Science at the uni of London (?) consortium - Cindy does formative evaluation, making sure that the partners are actually taking care of themselves. Build into design of activities the notions self care, self value and self responsibility.

@John Coate

I will talk about deep collaboration,
Who I am…
I am older than most of everybody here, everything in my life was a collaboration, started for me as a teenager in San Francisco in the 1960s. And joined a group of people who wanted to come together and live and work together in new ways that makes sense for us, seeking a life of peace, self-sufficiency and care, started by living cheaply and trying to take what we can take from the roads in the US, at the time of war we wanted to be like messengers for peace, the core group of 250 people started to live together in buses in small groups and tour the country.

“We wanted to be messengers for peace”

I found myself 19 living in a bus with 7 people that I don’t know, we started to know each other, and to start, being in a bus, we had to sit in a circle and talked in everything and developed trust, and then it is simple to sit in the bus and tour the country. That meant deep conversations. It’s where I started experiencing “going deep”.

That ‘s where I began, then after this experiences, we decided to continue living together, bought land in Tennessee. That was the start of a 12 year that we lived collectively so that I didn’t even have my own money, in a way it was ultimate collaboration: we had to learn everything and how to take care of each other.

We started to age and have families. We had neither the money nor the desire to go to the hospital for anything that occurred to us. So, we we taught ourselves to deliver our own babies, instead of going to the hospital, and that was a learning by doing. Throughout this, we had to collaborate with professional medical people, because bad things happen, and you can’t always DIY your way around them. A couple of local doctors who liked what we were doing helped us, and paved the way for us to deliver our babies and be self-sufficient, …
If you fast forward some years, our skill levels up and we could try to do good for people besides ourselves. So we founded a nonprofit. I found myself in NYC, in the South Bronx, at the time the poorest place in America. We started a free ambulance service for the people; again, in order to do that, we had to collaborate with local people.

My point is that here, we set a counter culture of people who are doing good. But, in order for us to fulfil our goals, we had to collaborate with people who belong to the ”establishment” and we couldn’t have survived without doing so.

Later on, we moved onto a new project: starting a free, bilingual clinic in Wash DC, the first of this kind. Again, the same thing: we collaborated with a bunch of doctors who could see the problem. We (the hippies) drove the initial fund raising, and provided the administration and structure behind it. The clinic is still working.

After this I choose to move on with my family and moved to california, after being there for a few years, offered a job helping with a computer network that I knew nothing about, The WELL (The WELL - Wikipedia). It had itself grown out of a very successful countercultural project, called the Whole Earth Catalogue. … before that I was fixing cars to support my family.

This is the mid 1980s the idea of people who use the computer to talk to others in a network was a new thing, I was hired to help it grow and support it, because of where I come from, when I got there the only thing I could do is to apply what I learned, so I made this term “online community”.

I tried to help peple to have a meaningful expericne so they feel they are in a community and stay.Some examples…

One is that we had the big computer , server, was a big box but slow for what we needed and did not have the money to buy a new one, so everybody who are using the system had interest to improve, it. We made this if people paid in advance for the subscription we can buy and improve the system… The community itself came up with the money to do it

Another one, a woman was a member of the community decided to go to india and become a buddhist monk , after some months , she became ill terribly. She was going to die. Word got back to us and a doctor in the community found a contact person to work with; and the community itself raised the money to airlift her with a helicopter, take her to the hospital where the doctor’s contact had prepared the ground, and treat her. She could then go back to the monastery. No one, I think saw, here again.

That the community itself could do so for a person who didn’t see for month and may not see again, this was an incredible experience. It blew us away. We were clearly onto something.

One thing I found, when going deep with people (not doing something for a week or month, not a collaboration), you are on a journey you make together, not a marriage, but you trust that collectively you can figure it out,

Some people have leadership roles and some have supporting roles, like in a kitchen , not everyone is a chef. These roles can switch, you can have a supporting role then change and so on.

@Cindy

An innovation setting creates a context where you can deal with uncertainty. In fact, dealing with uncertainty is central: you are trying to do something that’s not been done before. What’s the infrastructure for that?

I have a very broad definition for infrastructure, and I want to hear more from you about it, includes ethos …….then there are the frameworks and actual processes, the legalities, the technical infrastructure, and physical infrastructure,

The setting and the environment created by the people, creating safe spaces in order to nurture innovation, and organizational team , individual …as infrastructure. And that forms multilayered infrastructure as well.

This includes a critical review of the infrastructure; a common language and lexicon; common meanings; common or shared interests – they are all part of the nurturing infrastructure.

@Eta

How do you balance the organic dynamics of the group with the need for infrastructure building and management?

@Cindy

In the current project that I am part of coordinating we have 11 partners different types of organizations they all have different structure,
2 levels here:

• Creating an understanding
• Then going back to the individual teams

One of the roles that I do, listening to each organization and make capacity building workshops, the individual values and how this relate to the organization and their local environment and to the project
By having the discussion framed this way, this creates a common understanding towards common shared interest, these are teams that hardly do so as they have different structural levels, ( this is within the same team )

( this in between different organization )
The other aspect of it, each org, they are very particular and I organize exchanges in between each other

@John Coate

We started out by talking about values first. That’s where we began. We as a group came to mutual understanding to what you can call a right life, we came into alignment, to be the change you want to see and we focused on that first. We were not very skilled in survival, some college degrees but mainly in English and literature, this doesn’t really help in building a water system.

We made the values clear. At the same time, if you try to get everyone to agree on the every single thing that you believe, well… better bring lunch, because it might be a long process. We discovered we could find enough common ground, without necessarily agreeing on 100% of the issues. Our focus on medical care reflects that: we needed it to survive, and it was somehow uncontroversial among the group. Even if we do not agree on the fine points of doctrine, we can still do good work together, and bring about some concrete improvements. The clinic in DC, the ambulance service in NYC, these were concrete, and they were good. They would not have come about without collaboration with others, that often did not share all or even most of our values.

You can’t hit people too hard with your values. For instance: non-violence. We were all vegans, but you can’t require others to be. Don’t judge other people as “selling out”. What is a deal breaker or not? This little group isn’t going to solve the world’s problems by ourselves. We need to work with other people.

@Georgie

Q: Can you preset boundaries – define them in advance?

@John Coate

Yes: at what point do you feel so compromised that you can’t work with the other person?

But not too tight or not with too much restrictions… ( example of being a vegan community but collaborate and work with non-vegan, ……….but not work with violent groups for example )

Also depends on the situation, for example just before coming here in the last 2 weeks the place where my mother and family caught fire ….and you will not stop and discuss political stands in this situation.

Q: What do others think of the idea that it is hard to work without a leader?
Constantly reassessing the tactics used in a groups. Often some people take on leadership roles, etc.

@Eta

There are people’s natural tendencies – some people dive in and do a lot. Some people take on a more supportive role. Problematic when those roles reify and are not addressed. How do we also recognise that this week, this month, I may need to step back and take care of myself, or conversely have the energy to come to the fore? How do we let those roles organically switch between participants in the group?

@Cindy

We struggled with in public lab – roles were fluid, hadn’t been defined. Different roles have different speeds which don’t match. Community organisers takes a long time to build trust. Tech people work at a different speed. Recognise parallels between different roles. We hadn’t defined the speeds and roles. Having playful times helped us to get to know body language and tacit signals etc. Knowing each other and knowing ourselves.
Q: How do you define the boundaries? Need to know where you are at a particular time.

@Gehan

Sometimes we over-focus on leadership. More important is “power literacy”. Many groups aspire to flat structure with no leaders, but the power dynamics are dubious. Needto understand how power works in groups of people. Flat structure doesn’t work without power literacy.

@Eta

Re-evaluating is important as you go along.