OpenCollective is a financial & legal toolkit for grassroots communities. It’s awesome! We’re using it to transparently collect & spend money in the Microsolidarity Network. Anyone who contributes to our fundraising is welcome to join our monthly members meeting. Until today, whenever a new member joins the Collective, I have…

The making of an amazing online course — 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…

How to take care of people at an event that could kill them — 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…

Running the Finances for our Freelancers Collective with One Awesome Spreadsheet — 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…

How to: record great-sounding podcasts over Zoom — 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…

Engaging volunteers; learning loops; decision-making; care; celebration — 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…

Updated March 21st — 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…

A practical guide for the aspiring DIY data scientist — 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…

A Simple Structure to Hold a New Microsolidarity Community — 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…