Or: What To Do in the Last Decade of the Anthropocene
I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse. After an enormous amount of consideration, I have a strategy that feels good enough…
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. …
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. …
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…
3 Essential Pillars For a New Mutual Aid Community
I published the Microsolidarity proposal a year ago and really struck a chord with people. I’m overdue to give folks an update, and there’s really a lot of exciting news. So first I’ll give a quick recap, then I’ll share what’s happening in 2020.
