R107 Sessions @ g0v summit 2014 unconference

more info: g0v summit 2014 unconf hackfoldr

#2 11:35 - 12:15 主題 Topic: Negotiations

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發表者 Present by: David Eaves (@deaves)

討論內容 Discussions

First experience of contributing to open source, made a bug report, immediate response was "bet its a duplicate" - factually correct but emotionally unwelcoming. Dis-incentivises participation. 

In a movement building like in open source, your social capital is your only capital. Your people are your only asset, and how you manage it will determine your success rate.

Even when people agree that they need to agree, they suck at it.

Substance/relationship tension: binary choice between relationship between people and outcome of conversation (e.g. stronger relationship = less factually correct outcome). 

Different groups stabilise in different quadrants, the aim is to stabilise in the upper right quadrant, where you can be confident that a relationship is strong enough to withstand any substance. When you’re operating in that quadrant, you’d never call it a negotiation. Calling something a ’negotiation’ is a symbol that you have predetermined that it is likely to go wrong. It sets you up for failure. 

Exercise: people pair up, no talking, given partial rules of a game, 10 seconds to earn points. People recognize the game as ’arm wrestling’, but it is never explicitly named, and yet we still bring the default behaviours of arm wrestling with us. 

The same goes for negotiation, we have partial rules and default behaviors. The only solution is to find an effective means of communication. (Consequently power accumulates in those that are most effective communicators.)

A common pattern in conflict resolution is "I did something nice to them last week and they spat on us, now it is all on them to make reparations." It may take 2 or 3 attempts at concession before the notion is effectively transmitted, as the first response you got was just a reflex.

This is why it is so fundamentally important that groups of diverse people getting clear alignment of their goals, because the default behaviours and partial communication problem can very rapidly corrupt the original purpose.

You can come to a negotiation with different assumptions e.g "the other person is stupid/crazy/evil" vs "they are doing what they believe to be in their best interest". Different assumptions can be either debilitating or empowering.

Traditional positional bargaining: start from extreme positions, make small concessions and threats, and eventually make enough concessions to get to a deal. This model is based on lying: ’yesterday I said I can only make this concession, but today I actually can make more concessions.’ If your opponent sees that you are lying, they can rationally assume that your ’final word’ is not the final word. E.g. you can always assume the opening offer is the start of a negotiation position that will eventually result in further concessions.

Interpersonal interaction models don’t scale effectively, but culture can. e.g. When you’re starting an open source project, you can establish a healthy culture in the early days, that can then scale up as the project grows. 

Better model: Interests | Options | Legitimacy

Rather than thinking ’what is the demand’, think about ’what motivates them, what do they care about, what do I care about’ - that is what we’re actually negotiation about: different parties getting their needs met. If you can establish the interests of the other party ("What do you want?"), you’re much more likely to get to a mutually beneficial resolution.

This works well when it is fuelled by a relationship (e.g. a sense of mutual respect) and effective communication. 

Big communities have big interpersonal problems. Need to establish strong relationships and effective communication protocols at the outset of any project. Without it, whenever there’s a negotiation, it will frequently result in people going to alternatives (e.g. I will leave), and much less likely to commit to something constructive (I will stay).

Increasing the frequency of interactions is one way to improve the likelihood of positive negotiations, e.g. I get to learn to trust you over time. 

A mediator’s job is to work on the relationship and communication, to establish a healthy foundation from which to start a productive negotiation of interests. 

總結 Conclusions

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#3 13:30 - 14:10 主題 Topic: Organising without bosses

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發表者 Present by: Rich Bartlett from Loomio (@richdecibels)

Transitioning from a swarm to a coherent organisation without compromising on principles of radically participatory democracy.

  • Scenario:
  • Loomio crowdfunded $130k (USD), made some promises for what will be delivered and when it will be delivered. This ’scarce resource’ needs to be divided equitably between a diversity of stakeholders. So we are developing a framework + processes + roles + tactics to solve this dilemma, relatively happily (so far so good!)

  • Framework:
    1. Purpose: Why do we exist, what are our goals? Write it down! 
    2. Principles: How do we want to behave? Slightly more dynamic and flexible.
    3. Priorities: What do we want to achieve in a given timeframe with given resources? 
    4. Programs: How can we group those distinct tasks into coherent work programs?
    5. People: Who is the best person to perform these tasks? 
  • Process:
  • The purpose is set in stone so it needs to be established by long slow consensus: everyone needs to love it. 

    The principles are slightly more dynamic and flexible, they evolve over time. 

    The priorities change every X months: which part of vision do we want to achieve in that time? 

    All members participate in a collaborative process to establish the relative priorities between programs, like participatory budgeting: we have $100k or 200hrs to spend on these programs, how would you split it up? Diversity of opinion at this point exposes where there is incomplete information - focus your energy on developing further shared understanding. 

    It’s important to establish all this groundwork before deciding who should do what job, otherwise you are just hiring based on social hierarchy. Instead, want to find what are the actual needs of the project and who is best positioned to meet them. Tradeoff between selecting specialists and generalists.

  • Roles
  • Contributor: someone making tangible improvements to the project, voluntary or paid

    Member: someone who has been contributing > 1 year, invited by consensus of the other members. 

  • Tactics
  • Every work program has a stated outcome (e.g. "engaged and growing userbase") + a coordinator (person who knows the status of all the tasks, and interfaces with other work programs to ensure alignment) + a budget (as allocated by the members).

    Hiring is done by a panel composed of the coordinator + an expert (internal or external) + any member that has an interest. 

    Delegations are temporary and retractable, e.g. coordinators are reaffirmed every 3 months. Any member can veto anything. All work programs are as transparent as possible, and as participatory as makes sense (e.g. the Loomio roadmap is public, and the Loomio Community helps set strategy).

    All Hands Meeting - same time and place every week, open to anyone interested in the project, creates collective identity, converts interested people into contributors and then members.

    Check-ins: start most meetings with a round where we hear from everyone - ’how do you feel? what’s on your mind?’. Creates ’politica afectiva’ - people relate to each other with affection, the care about each other = strong relationships. Also safe space to challenge strategy (’I feel anxious that we made some bad decisions...’). Gives everyone space to practice self-expression, which is first fundamental skill of real democracy.

    Conflict resolution - every contributor/member must have direct line of communication to every other contributor/member. Creates immunity to informal hierarchy. If we see one of those lines weakening due to some conflict/tension, immediately mobilise to resolve it and reestablish healthy communication. 

    Peer support: every member has a steward, and they are a steward to someone else too. Stewards provide accountability + support that you would normally get from a boss. 

    #4 14:15 - 14:55 主題 Topic:

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    討論內容 Discussions

    What next after we Win!?

    So we won and we get there.  Suggestions of next move?

    Once you succeeded and if the next thing does not add up the success, it is seen automatically as failure.

    Conflict arises.

    The problem is not the politic.  Say we have a very brilliant party secretary who is also a very beautiful girl, and the media is all reporting the color of her lipstick.  Media is picturing the pirate party as always fighting, saying "fuck" on twitters, anarchists, etc.  It’s easier this way.  It’s harder to write about what pirates party has changed, our success, etc.

    Media in Germany is a kind of strait to a traditional way.

    It’s like first you fought, then you win, then they fight you.

    I am pretty sure in 5 or 10 yrs, we will be there.  No, we are not dead yet.  But we are not completely prepared for when we win.  We are prepared to vote the bills, go to politics, but we are totally unprepared for the media, the reports, etc.

    Why not start your own media?  Good idea, we actually tried this in several cases but it is hard.  If you do youtube broadcast it is cheap but you can only reach those people that are already listening.

    Showing other political parties that you are not there existential threat might help.  Seek collaboration with other parties, get some bills passed, then that would be a demonstration of your commitment(?).

    總結 Conclusions

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    #5 15:45 - 16:25 主題 Topic:

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    總結 Conclusions

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    #6 16:30-17:10 主題 Topic: Lessons learned in financial transparency by Dutch governments

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6vBHkfX2jQ&feature=youtu.be&t=7h15m51s

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    發表者 Presented by: Breyten Ernsting (@breyten ) & Sicco van Sas (@siccovansas ) from Open State Foundation (NL)

    討論內容 Discussions

    Lessons learned in financial transparency by Dutch governments.

    Since 2008, Open State Foundation. Like mySociety but smaller. Their main project themes are: Open Education, Open Culture, Open Health Care, Political Transparency, Politwoops... etc. 

    [ Open Education ] Basically school data so people know about the schools to go to. [Open Culture] Also about museum digitizing works but with 40 API. Open culture API has 800.000 artworks. Politwoops collects deleted tweets by politicians, usually stupid ones. Most of them are typos, but they also contain things they shouldn’t have said.

    In this presentation they talk about: Open Spending  (municipality budgets), Dutch Budget and Subsidy Tracker.

    Open spending: Live demo. This is the Dutch version of the, you know the famous thing.

    We started with municipalities, then progressed to other fields with the same data. They went quite far with 100+ municipalities. 

    10 main categories

    Amsterdam has 6 billion Euro yearly budget. Visualizes the different expenditures. 

    Both expected revenue and expected expenditures. The Aldermen did not like coloring expenses as red. So they use blue now. They normalized the money in Euro or for the amount per person was being spent. All standardized so that they can be compared. Comparing 2012 among municipalities close to each other in the same area. Differences across years can be shown. spending per capita for each type of expenditure is listed. So Rotterdam is spending more on social welfare, economic affairs, and such than Amsterdam. Rotterdam spends more on industry because it is a port, whereas Amsterdam is basically a tourist destination for British people (laughs).

    Question from Malaysian participant: Have you been checking 

    Getting the data was basically keep calling and contacting the government.

    Question: Did you get data in a machine readable format?

    They usually send PDF files. Printed out excel , easy to parse back. But they still don’t like it. This absolves the government of responsibility so that they will keep giving the wrong files. 

    They eventually get data from municipalities, but still get weird results. The guys writing motions in municipalities responded by saying they will wait for half a year. After some negotiation this gets reduced to a month. 

    Question: What’s your argumentation when you write to the government?

    The argument is that civilians think it is important. Also frame it not as freedom of information request.

    We try to do it in a nice way. So that they would like to work with us.

    Question from Engels (Pirate Party): Do you ask about previous budget, or the background accounting data behind the data.

    A: Only the files sent to the statistics bureau. Files they already have. next question: are they structured int eh same way? because this would affect comparison. Otherwise this will take a lot of work to categorize.

    Still they have 400 municipalities in Netherlands, but need to contact each and everyone of them. In German state of Hessel: 1600 municipalities. There is an API, even if not well documented, people can download it. A commercial company used this to provide information to municipalities. 

    Q: does the budget need to be approved by the congress? 

    yes, national level. Budget usually comes in April. They show Budget and Realization. On national level there is an additional level of pre-approved and executed budget. 

    Q: the statistic bureau collect the data but publish only aggregates. They don’t have copyright of it, so cannot publish details. 

    Live demo of treemap Budget. Currently only 2 levels deep. Will be deeper. The website is copied from Solomon Kahn, US national budget visualized for the last 40 years with inflation adjusted info.. 

    Compare: tw budget g0v.

    Easy work: Code already on github. Data is already available. Found the right guy in government. During the process found problems in the data. he guy in government fixes the problem. There are still good guys in governments. He is also happy because the data gets used. The guy is in the information department. he sees the use of data by Open spending as a reason to get data from other departments. data only 4years now. Previous sites use different structure. 

    New project: Subsidy Tracker

    Simple website built by CEO, which is fine for the programmer (LOL). They emailed all the ministers that do you have subsidy data? Most reply. Now they can stuff this with much more data. Also provincial data available. Did not spend much time to build it. Technical universities were called to ministries and reprimanded because they are found out to have taken subsidies from other organizations. They get asked what the hell are you doing XDDD

    Q: about budget in TW. Was it easy for g0v project to get the data? The data is from Central government. But they do not have detail. Only aggregate data. Only on high levels. What about municipalities? 

    For city level we do not have ability to extract that information yet. Right now is election time, there is resistance in government. We can know about who suggested spending in each government. 

    From loomio guy: Chewydata.com/budget2013.html

    German experience: the parliament member demanded excel files. The answer is that they accounting software cannot putout it. The administration does not like to have easy data. like to keep it complicated. 

    New Zealand: journalist like find scandals, after he did the j

    總結 Conclusions

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