We can't change the world by focusing only on dismantling, we have to really build up the alternative and show that it can work in a different way, and radicalize people, not through convincing them of the rightness of an ideology, but through their lived experience of true participation, of the collective power of livelihood in a non-capitalist... See more

It's hard to sit there complaining about paying money if you can see it costs $300 get the accountant to file that thing we need, and that the person you enjoy talking to gets paid this much. Seeing it all transparently is quite powerful.

One of the really challenging things about an E2C is how to set things in stone enough that the mission and the values persist, post ownership transition, without setting it too much in stone so cannot evolve with the times. We want to genuinely put the future participant-stakeholders in charge. It shouldn't be the ghosts of founders past setting... See more

People know what it feels like to be on a tech platform where they are the product instead of the ones using the product, which is the case for so much mainstream tech out there. We don't want that, and our community doesn't want that. They really see the downside. We have different sub-communities, like open source people, who deeply understand... See more

People know what happens on tech platforms when the governance is done by a tiny group of elites behind closed doors. So what's the alternative? We all have to do governance together.

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more

I've worked in a lot of "non-hierarchical" organizations, and management or leadership do not go away. You don't succeed in that space by removing them and leaving a vacuum. You succeed by reinterpreting things like management and leadership into distributed processes, transparent roles that can rotate and are accountable back to the community at... See more

There's what I mentioned about the mission failing to translate across time. For six years, Open Collective has had people in the center holding very strongly to a certain set of values. If those people are no longer there, where's that strength going to come from? That's difficult to design. You can see lots of examples out there of large, diverse... See more

If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.