---
# System prepended metadata

title: Engagement criteria (bullet points)
tags: [todo, ' strategy', ' ethics']

---

---
tags: todo, ethics, strategy
---

# Engagement criteria (bullet points)

[TOC]

## Guiding questions

- What anchors or waypoints help us make coherent decisions about who to align with or what to work on?
- What makes something a clear no?
- What are the attractors we/you are looking for?
- How do you know it when you see it?


----

## Things to note when articulating this

- Some of these things are in tension with each other; that's a good thing. Nobody is likely to fill them all; it's about weighting stuff.
- THink of this like a job interview; everything is aspirational



----



## Goal anchors

Ways in which our behaviour should direct human action, flows and potential.

### Implement contextual solutions

- Implicit oppression in the "everybody ought to" / "one size fits all" of universal solutions
- Things which do not require universal adoption to have impact are vastly more likely to succeed
- Business models which are not based on numbers of users
    - place-based platforms which aim to assist a single community and have no growth imperative beyond that
    - commons-producing models that primarily aim create common works or steward natural commons, particularly where the goal is to create knowledge commons & transparency in supply chains
    - efforts moving towards a [degrowth economy](https://www.degrowth.info/en/what-is-degrowth/) in some sense or another, particularly where the goal is to reduce complexity in the supply chain
- Targeted, separate currency systems rather than "one to rule them all"
- Works in a specific context or community; but is designed to be interoperable with other systems
    - "interoperable rather than universal"; focus on connectivity
    - fitting with modularity

### Facilitate sovereignty, agency & autonomy

- Disperse power to those without it
    - Decision-making and governance being retained within communities (not deferred, especially not aggregated to external forces)
    - Member-directed, not board-directed
    - Prefer non-hierarchical, "leaderful" governance
    - Mandate clear articulation of necessary hierarchical structures & organisational power dynamics (it's a necessary predicate for the implementation of agent-centric tech)
- Uphold individual & collective autonomy of technical infrastructure and data
    - Data ownership linked to place; resilience to access in the face of infrastructural uncertainty
    - Agency over software updates & changes
    - Responsible management of individual & collective sovereignty / identity
        - Loss in value when leaving a collective due to lost context; but retention of one's own data provenance
        - Individualism is an illusion: everything is in the relational space between people
    - Data autonomy on its own isn’t enough because the data is also linked to the context in which it is generated
- Build sensemaking systems, not game-theoretic models
    - Aversion to big data and AI; prefer "little data" and human reasoning
    - Game theory & economics as a "rivalrous game"
    - Working with usergroups to understand their needs, not designing the models as an architect
    - ~~Game theory as a statistical / modeling tool, not an operational paradigm~~
    - ~~Bazaars rather than global markets~~
    - Context & awareness of externalities, rather than blind to them but (hopefully) manipulated to work in service to them
    - Room for manouver, flexibility (agency)
- Provide unenclosable carriers
    - Data ownership linked to provenance; agency over sharing
    - No eavesdropping or monitoring
        - Self-monitoring is often a practise, but visibility of information by those outside of communities should be discouraged, and carefully considered.
    - Self-managed keys, "social encryption", peer recovery & shamir-sharing
    - Facilitate compassion along the whole supply chain

### Create deep wealth

- Leverage self-generative wealth, avoid injected capital
    - Dropping capital on things tends to also drop hierarchy on them
    - Avoiding money as a way of elevating from poverty
    - Creating sufficiency, abundance & thrivability
        - TODO: unpack these?
    - Recurring, localised income streams
- Acknowledge existing value & wealth
    - Making pluralistic value forms perceptual, meaningful and actionable
    - Embrace what is already working

### Practise generative finance

- Build mutual & interest-free debt issuance systems
- Avoid extractive funding models
    - Preference to avoid equity-based investment entirely
    - Limited investments with capped returns considered reasonable
    - Private equity as a way of involving community members
- Optimise for non-exploitative, non-extractive business models
    - Turn externalities into internalities

> [name=pospi] *To-do: calculation of 'degrees of abstraction' from value created; formalisation of thresholds.*

### Reduce inequity

- Elevate marginalised demographics to reduce gaps in empowerment
- "Nothing about us without us!"
- Avoid solely empowering those already advantaged (especially in the socio-political context of the problem space; but more broadly as well)

### Build commons

- Prioritise groups growing natural, knowledge, social & technological commons (in that order?); collective benefit
    - Further prioritise groups working to preserve Indigenous knowledge systems
- Preference for OSS contributions
    - But we will accept paid work for proprietary contracts; need to define how that input flows back into commons-supporting or sponsorship initiatives
- Make up-front commitments towards commons contributions, not deferring to "phase 2 & beyond" & beholden to investment / income streams

### Create relationships

> [name=Sid] there's more here, needs better words

- Gratitude as an indication of a healthy relationship
- Prefer localised & place-based solutions
- Create local sufficiency, abundance and autonomy
- Facilitate human connection & build mutual aid support systems
- Deepen cross-cultural understanding & socio-economic dependencies between local groups
- Integrated software interfaces; "non-sided marketplaces"
- Engage with diverse stakeholders from a variety of cultural, racial, social & political backgrounds
- Change as an emergent, accountable and collaborative process; not a destination

### Hold awareness for subjectivity & diversity

Subjectivity is an ongoing creative struggle which we aim to continually and consciously explore. We welcome others looking to live into new possibilities for diversifying their relationships, increasing representation in their circles and widening their personal expressive capacity.

- Widening the possibilities for personal expressive capacity.
- The forces of Colonialism and Patriarchy require an active resistance in order to be overcome.
- Projects which do not normalise maleness in the way that data is aggregated.
- Favour efforts which widen the availability and accessibility of different roles, rather than elevating "women's work" or "soft skills" as a separate category of effort.
- Physical characteristics do not show us the whole picture.

- Work with organisations considering themselves "intersectional", "justice-oriented", "feminist" or compatible with these ideologies
- Aversion to techno-utopianism, market-based solutionism, misoginy & chauvinism
- Consent-based decision making (not consensus or control-based)
- Humility

<!-- - Value non-productive labor; reverance for stigmergic organising principles, "soft skills", "connector" and "care" work -->


----



## Constraint anchors

The pragmatic questions we must weigh in whenever deciding on engaging with a new collaborator.

### Time available

- Projects should be weighted against the market opportunity & time window available to maximise impact
- Estimated time to delivery & energy expenditure

### Sustainability of the work

- Do we have the people-power?
- Do we have the financial runway?
- Yes we want $, but not at the expense of ethical/moral criteria
- Defining spaces for reflection at the start of a project



----



## Weighing anchors

- How to weigh goal vs constraint anchors?
- Any particular violations of an anchor which make something a clear no?
- Cost (social, political, natural, financial, ...) of not having anchors fulfilled?



----



## Characteristics we might articulate

- while functioning in neoliberal context actually transcend it by creating agency without overly exposing agents to centralized control.
- demonstrate that we not only want to move beyond corruption and extorting middle men but also transform the implied power relation of "aid" schemes
- lean toward organic growth of ideal forms brought into lived practice rather than grabbing wave of opportunity to have fleeting garbage which doesn't work in practice but does bring short term visibility or funding.

