PWGD Principles

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[Very initial first rough start of a beginning of a draft.]

PWGD rules for being a PWGD service:
1. People rule. People who use your service can communicate with everyone else should they make a collective decision to do so. (This is why the democratically moderated communication is the base functionality.)
2. Free software (ideally, Affero GPL).
3. Transparency in the service's decisionmaking. Even though the code is viewable by all, there is a further need to 1) make processes clear to non-technical (and simply time-bound) people and 2) strive for transparency in decisions about the tool.

Note: You do *not* have to make decisions about the tool's feature sets or other things democratically. Aside for the necessity of most any open source free software project to be a do-ocracy, innovation and effectiveness have roles for individual and small group vision, creativity, and creating.

For an organization, rather than a service provider, it is the same three rules become guiding principles. Only the first can be a definite condition of being part of the PWGD network:

  1. People can communicate with others in the organization without mediation by the organization and become part of the broader communications network of people who give a damn. (In both cases overload is prevented a random sample of people in the relevant grouping deciding on the importance of messages.)
  2. Technology developed will be available under a free software license.
  3. Decisions will be made with the greatest possible transparency.

The web development firm Agaric Design Collective offers 50% off projects for people who give a damn about what we're trying to do and agree to follow these principles.

[Note: This does not mean they can do your project, as all web consultancies can only do a fraction of projects that come their way– from people paying full price or not.]

Update: I put this more succinctly in an e-mail to some true movement builders, the people at May First People Link, describing the new distillation of purpose: "it's really one point: give up some of your organization's control over communicating with the people you serve or who work for you, so that we can all build a more powerful movement together."

Comments

Thanks, Ben. FOR PWGD,

Thanks, Ben.

FOR PWGD, what's the difference between a service provider and an organization? Could you give some examples? What sort of services are you imagining? Are they all communications-based?

Dan

I replied:

Thanks Dan,

The three principles are really the same for organizations or service providers, just described differently, so it doesn't really matter there. But you're right, many or most organizations would be service providers in the usual sense and I'm talking about communication service providers I guess.

So take one example of a soup kitchen, an organization, would be encouraged to allow all its supporters and volunteers and constituents -- people served -- to be in one conversation. The software PWGD would like to provide (but doesn't have yet) would help do this explicitly. It has to be about more than software, of course, but just the donors of most organizations being able to communicate directly with one another would be a dramatic change.

A service provider, say a clearinghouse for getting volunteers to multiple soup kitchens, would likewise need to provide tools for the potential volunteers and the benefiting nonprofits to talk among one another and to their own staff.

The PWGD twist on all this is to keep the number of messages each person receives to a manageable amount with democratic filtering.

ben

To Boston Indymedia

what I'm asking is if Boston Indymedia can commit to using People Who Give a Damn democratic messaging tools for internal communication. These tools do not exist yet: a mailing list that some people can subscribe for every message, and others can choose to only receive messages rated as important by a random, always-changing subset of the Boston Indymedia group. The "catch" is that messages from a larger network may be deemed important enough to send to the entire network, or some sub-grouping, that includes Boston Indymedia volunteers. If Boston Indymedia can commit to this, then it falls in line with my main goal helping build a movement of movements through this very specific type of democratizing technology. And somehow I will make time or money (from PWGD) to help Boston Indymedia get going on full cylinders (helping with the Drupal web site) and on this path (creating this software I keep going on about!).

What PWGD is trying to do isn't immediately intuitive, but we feel very strongly that this sort of democratically moderated communication is a key part of how people can build the desperately needed movement of movements larger and stronger.

That's where my volunteer time and effort must go to have a chance to realize this, and I think it's actually a very good fit with Boston Indymedia.

... I hope some people can see the unifying, broadening, and coordinating potential of democratic communication for people who give a damn!

To repeat a point in here so that I do not forget it: I am now limiting my volunteer and subsidized time to organizations and groups that can get on board with People Who Give a Damn's vision for building a network of networks based on democratic communication.