Nati and I are putting the finishing touches on the course design for our guided learning program: Patterns for Decentralised Organising. I’m feeling totally jazzed because I reckon this will be our best training yet. In this post I wanna share some of the details about our pedagogy and curriculum in case you’re curious about how and what we teach.

Approach

In an earlier post I explained the pedagogical approach we were using for our face-to-face workshops in 2017, based on the neuroscience of learning explained in Sharon Bowman’s excellent book Training From the Back of the Room.

Essentially our job…

Hosting events is a big part of how I earn my livelihood and how I do my community-building work. My year started with a plan to hold at least four retreats, each with around 40 people living together for a few days. Then the pandemic happened and we had to change plans. In the end we decided to cancel everything, apart from one gathering we hosted in France in September.

Event production is always a big job but the health situation made it significantly more difficult. In this post I’m going to share some of what I learned in the…

This is partly a tutorial about how to make awesome spreadsheets, and it is partly about how we manage a flexible profit-sharing agreement for our collective of freelancers (The Hum). If you’re familiar with “microsolidarity”, this is the point where things get really spicy: sharing money between peers.

We currently have 3 partners in our collective, and we sell a combination of consulting services and digital products. We have a separate profit-share agreement for each product and each consulting job. The idea is that anything we sell through the company makes a contribution to the “common pot”, and the rest…

I’ve been experimenting with different methods for improving the audio quality of my videocalls, both for meetings and for recorded conversations like podcasts. So I have a few suggestions to make your next call sound less like a laptop, more like a studio.

I’ll start with some microphone basics. Then, I’ll show you Zencastr, a tool for recording audio without losing any quality due to the compression of sending realtime audio over the internet. Finally I’ll show you how to use OBS to apply audio processing in realtime to remove background noise and change the dynamic range.

1. Get a mic

Option A: cheap earbuds headset

You can spend…

Today I had a call with Manu Alzuru from Fight Pandemics, a brand new volunteer project enabling peer-to-peer mutual aid in response to COVID-19. I gave him 30 minutes of rapid-fire advice, some of the “top tips” for a new self-organising network like this. You can watch the video here or keep reading for the ultra-condensed version of the top 5 tips.

Thanks Manu for learning out loud with us 😻

1. Don’t expect 100% engagement.

“Participation inequality” is to be expected, e.g. …

I’ve been producing my own charts to understand the Johns Hopkins coronavirus data. Here’s the situation on March 21st.

Reported Deaths

Here’s all the countries with 100+ reported deaths. I have zoomed in on the first 4 weeks since the 10th death.

This linear scale obscures what’s happening. We need to switch to a logarithmic scale to get a better view.

Living in Italy is intense right now.

It took only 17 days to go from first noticing the COVID-19 outbreak, to having to refuse people care because hospitals are overloaded.

Human brains do not intuitively grasp exponentials. We need prosthetics. That’s why I have been learning a bunch of math and amateur data science this week, to help me get my head around the spread of the pandemic.

I’m not an expert at all, so my epidemiology opinions are not relevant. I’m pretty handy with a spreadsheet though, so read on if you want to learn how I used Google…

Last week I published the latest story in my Microsolidarity series, explaining how to start a new mutual aid community (a “Congregation”). That chapter was exclusively focussed on the initiation process: where do you start?

For this chapter, I want to advance the clock a few months. Assume you’ve had one or two amazing gatherings, and there are 20 or 40 people ready to commit to supporting each other. What’s the minimum organisational structure needed to hold them together? I’m going to make a short sketch of a complete structure, as a first guess. …