[HacktionLab] Picnic table zoom

Sun Apr 19 13:52:23 UTC 2020

Hi Hacktion,

How is lock down treating you?

I wondered what kind of comments people had about software and use of software for online meetings/discussions/organizing
  Or even online organizing (!!break the rules! The rule that tech groups only talk about tech and never tech as a social relationship)

I think at first the lockdown has shut down the left, or certainly curtailed much of activity that was based on face to face meetings.  Although in some other ways things have taken off, like Facebook mutual aid groups.  Momentum, for example, was already mostly an online organization before this and is now organizing workshops about online-organizing (zoom, whatsapp, slack, airtable).
  I do think it is pretty important that our anarchist/lefty/feminist/eco-or-whatever types of stuff that we do, doesn’t just take a hiatus.  The entire economy is shutting down, small business and independent contractors first, the handouts designed to hold capitalism in place (placeholder) til it can get back to normal except worse (greater acceptance on online surveillance aka public health protection, greater state role overall at the same time as fiscal policy of Tories will want to be claiming back as much of their placeholder expenditure, austerity?).  Economic crisis like 2008 or worse.  Within 6 months of that autumn 2008 crisis beginning to reveal itself we had 10,000 people at the Bank of England (in a different type of lockdown- a kettle, but the governors knew people were mad and organized and willing to break the rules).  We’re potentially looking at 18 months of lockdown before a vaccine.  Confronting the total inability of the economic system to deal with civilization threatening climate change has been shelved in favour of the more immediate life-threatening inability of the economic system to care enough about care workers (or service sector/renter/lowly economy) to protect us from death/generational eclipse/gera-cide/genera-cide of the 60s generation/pre-babyboomers.  Yet at the same time the transition from automobile manufacturing to ventilator manufacturing by factories at short notice shows clearly that (if the social relationship dictates the technology then) we can have socially useful production: A green new deal of the titanic proportions necessary to confront climate collapse is possible!
  But this isn’t going to happen by itself, especially with BoJo coming back to life on Easter Sunday to do a sermon on the mount about Tory reverence for NHS workers.

  Physical distancing, social solidarity
  So practical question – what types of software, training, practice etc. do we need to provide as techies to support online organizing?
      Are there relevant security/privacy/cooperation-when-you-aren’t-face-to-face trust issues that we could solve?
      Is it better to emulate geography in virtual organizing, i.e. do “local” organizing that can both now (mutual aid groups) and after lockdown (square off against austerity round-two) translate to the streets?   Streets are always local, local to someplace.  Or do we have meetings that are people from every-anywhere?  Or mixed?
      How does the British direct-action community deal with lockdown?  Is there a special type of lock down organizing for this (our) community or does it just play scrabble (online) for 18 months?
      Should we be trying to build new software that better does what we need or do we work better with what is out there already?  Remember in organizing you can bring the people to the mountain or the mountain to the people.  Wouldn’t most of us say it worked badly trying to bring millennials internet 2.0 kids to the encryption/secure communication mountain? Or is there still debate about what went wrong with our abstentionist strategy?
      So, here is an example of what a tech conversation might be able to answer: How would we do picnic table zoom?  The direct-action community has in the past used large scale (200 people or so) consensus process meetings [or consensus/dissensus - in most circumstances there is no need to agree about everything (‘diversity of tactics’) in order to participate in mass action against capitalism/capitalist globalization/militarism etc.].  And one social innovation (social technology!) to do this was using picnic tables arranged in a circle with a swivel chair in front of each one, facilitators at the centre of the circle, and each group at the picnic table was an affinity group.  There were proposals with lots of time for each picnic table to discuss among themselves, then all people still sitting in place turn their attention from their picnic table conversation to the circle of picnic tables and a feedback session begins.  Each picnic table has a person in the chair at the front of their picnic table who speaks from their table in the circle of tables conversation.  So 200 people in a 20 picnic table circle has only 20 persons in the speaking circle doing a facilitated conversation about specific proposals- but everyone can hear, tables can talk (quietly) among themselves, advise their speaker, or even swap out who speaks from their picnic table (so its 20 persons in speaking circle at any given moment but not necessarily the same 20 persons throughout). If a new proposal or synthesis comes out of the circle of 20 speakers (plus facilitators, scribes, notetakers, etc) the tables can go back to individual table conversation to discuss among themselves before returning to the circle of picnic tables conversation to finalize what the group of groups agrees/disagrees.  After which all can enter the mass action knowing what others will be doing (although not necessarily controlling what others will be doing).
  I know zoom and other software have a ‘breakout groups’ function.  Is there a way to adapt this for picnic table zoom or would we need different software?

  Picnic table zoom is an interesting example.  But just more generally: what types of software, training, practice etc. do we need to provide as techies to support online organizing?

Social Solidarity and Autonomy, (physical distancing),
  Michael 😉

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/hacktionlab/attachments/20200419/b66209dc/attachment.html>