🌈 Nick Sellen 🌻 @nicksellen@social.coop

Lots of difficulties ahead though!

When moving fluid/volunteer-y/open projects into formalised structures tensions can arise. Why some people get paid, and others work for free?

Do you need to start time tracking? Put on a performance for the "official things". Bank accounts, legal entities... boards...

Maybe accidental inherit the general society culture of secrecy. Fear of sharing, crossing into grey legal areas?

7/

We can also start to ask what our needs really are.

Do we still need a fancy market-rate salary, with a fancy flat, fancy car, fancy holiday, fancy restaurant? Can we "check out" of these social/career/property ladders?

Many of our important needs are non-material and things like being seen, heard, understood, respected feel amazing and don't inherently need money to achieve.

6/

We can go further than this though and start to have more honest discussion about rates of pay, which are often hidden and vary wildly.

We can start to explore experimenting with wider economic networks, connecting to our whole supply chain, and creating a "bigger whole" than our individual siloed projects.

We can rethink what we mean by value, to include care work, not-tech work, and non-monetary ways of seeing our worth.

5/

Accountability is another reason for doing this. Helping understanding where money is coming from and where it is going.

We do open source, open data, but often become more closed when it comes to finances. Why not also open funding, open finances, open culture....

4/

Funding applications are hard for small teams, and it really helps to have templates, examples, to see what other people did.

Not only the final documents, but also the communications between project and funder.

Access to funding is often depending on knowing how to communicate in a certain way, and this is very unevenly distributed.

Transparency can help to share these ways.

3/

I'm coming from the perspective of developer/maintainer (or "gardener" as @cj used as a term) of @karrot a community organising tool, mostly used by food saving groups right now.

@dachary invited me to present because we had done our recent nlnet funding application transparently (https://community.karrot.world/c/karrot/funding/28).

the transparency culture partly came from our history as part of the hippy project yunity (https://yunity.org).

2/

💻 I did a presentation today on the topic of "Funding Free Software projects in a transparent way"

🔗 The presentation is available here https://github.com/nicksellen/funding-transparency-presentation

🧵 I'll make a little thread here as a "fedi edition" of the presentation.

1/

I'm reminded of something David Graeber said:

"One thing that I’ve learned in academia is no one much cares what your politics are as long as you don’t do anything about them. You can espouse the most radical positions imaginable, as long as you’re willing to be a hypocrite about them."

I see quite a lot of interesting things coming out of art and academic worlds.

But then it seems that's often where they stay.

I'm using the wordpress activitypub plugin, posting over at @nick - but despite choosing to only use the excerpt and permalink as the activitypub content, it posts the whole post without formatting, and it looks a mess.

I am using the "more" block in each of my posts, usually after the first paragraph, and I'd assumed that "excerpt" is the bit before the "more" block?

any ideas?

I started a journey to fetch my bike that I had to abandon in Germany last year! 🚴🏕️

The first part is a campervan trip 🚐, then will migrate to a bike trip later.

Updates will be over on my new travel blog https://travels.nicksellen.co.uk (easier for non-fedi people) 📝

But you can also follow in here via @nick (thanks to activity pub wordpress plugin ♥️)

Will be happy for comments! (First level fedi replies come through as comments on the blog) 🗣️

Also, I wondered if @ntnsndr has connected with Cybernetics (anarchist or otherwise) at all?

There is some network/flow between co-ops, commons, anarchism, community organising, cybernetics, ... with some academic connection, some grassroots stuff...

After reading Anarchist Cybernetics by Thomas Swann in our @karrot book club, he pointed us to the Anarchic Agreements 1&2 that he had worked on (see https://anarchyrules.info/publications/) which had been used in some form in the creation of one of the groups that use Karrot (foodsharing Copenhagen). Nice circle!