Meri Leeworthy 8:48 Test, test, test, test, test. Speaker B 29:09 Cool. 29:09 Thank you. 29:10 Thanks so much for coming. 29:11 Hi, I'm Mary. 29:15 I'm here all the way from Wurundjeri land, that's so-called Melbourne, Australia. 29:21 I'm one of the creators of Roomie. 29:24 That's an app-based group chat app for communities. 29:31 I'm a guest here on this beautiful land, which is unceded ancestral territory of Musqueam people. 29:41 And I want to extend my respect to them and to all indigenous people around the world. 29:49 Who are protecting life from, life and communal cultures on this planet against colonial destruction. 30:00 I guess if I had to sum up what I really want to say, it's that communities are critically important and poorly understood and most of our tech is very individual-oriented and that understanding how communities work, especially the role of organizers, and in particular when that community is about cooperating and coordinating to achieve something. 30:27 If we can understand that, we can better understand how social systems change more broadly. 30:35 And with that, I also just want to thank the organizers of this conference for bringing this event together. 30:42 It's a massive job. 30:45 I also personally really need to acknowledge this book, which has just like had a really enormous impact on my thinking. 30:53 It draws on a lot of different thinkers on the topic of civilizational transition away from our capitalist colonial developmentalist extractive society in crisis. 31:08 It draws on critical thought and practice across disciplines, and particularly from indigenous and other communal cultures in the global south, and especially in Latin America, with the goal of articulating an approach for design. 31:23 And by design, I mean if we need a civilizational transition, what are we transitioning to? 31:32 Who gets to decide? 31:35 If our current civilization is one that systematically destroys communal cultures, how can we design one with the conditions for communal life to flourish and where cultures can practice the design of themselves? 31:52 That's my north star. 31:57 Rimi's what we've been working on. 31:58 It's a tool for communities to chat stay connected, work on things together. 32:05 When I first got involved, I wasn't necessarily thinking that another chat app was what communities really need right now. 32:13 But one of my co-founders, Ellen, had written up this idea that I found compelling, which is that Group Chat is minimum viable community. 32:28 Or in other words, chat can be the basic foundation for communities to connect online. 32:37 There are so many things that we could and should be building, but chat is where we start. 32:44 Anyone with internet access is familiar at some level with the UX metaphor of a chat room to mean a specific context for communication between specific people. 32:57 You can absolutely do community in a chat room. 33:02 My partner and I had a baby in 2021, and at the time we weren't close with any other queer parents. 33:10 And before I go on, I couldn't be here without my partner holding the fort while I'm away, so thank you, Asia, and all the carers who make our connection here possible. 33:25 Becoming a parent can be isolating in a similar way to how coming out as queer can be isolating. 33:32 It was scary, but people put us in touch with other friends in the community having kids and we started a Signal group chat that has honestly been a lifeline sometimes. 33:45 We try to practice mutual aid and show up for each other. 33:50 We organize to bring meals when someone just gave birth or is unwell. 33:55 We share advice and emotional support. 34:00 It's just a group chat. 34:02 But that shared context lets us do community. 34:06 It's simple, but it's precious. 34:15 What happens when the needs of communities get more complex? 34:25 My drawings are a bit messed up. 34:30 6 years ago, my friends got me interested in a project. 34:33 They wanted to make a website with a calendar for activists and community organizers. 34:41 We'll just keep it updated each week and with whatever we're seeing out in the world. 34:48 And I didn't really know how to make web apps at the time. 34:51 But somehow that didn't stop me from saying, what if we made a web app? 34:58 What if we gave organizers the tools to publish what they're doing and we created a map of all the different parts of our entire social movement and create new ways for people to connect with existing groups and for different groups to work together and share resources all around the world. 35:28 I guess you could say that at the time I didn't really understand the value of taking small steps. 35:35 We absolutely should have started by just manually updating a calendar. 35:43 Fast forward 5 years and I, by total chance, stumble across these guys, Ellen and Ziklag, and they had this old motto, find the others. 36:00 We had both independently spent the last few years trying to build community-scale social apps using Matrix protocol, given up on that, and started on a local-first web publishing app. 36:12 We both had strong visions for what tech that puts users and communities first should look like. 36:18 And we had both learned the hard way the importance of taking small steps. 36:22 We were both thinking about how collective resource sharing can defeat monopoly network effects. 36:30 We were both wondering what gets us in good loops to create good systems. 36:36 And we happen to live in Melbourne, Oslo, Arkansas. 36:43 We met in a group chat. 36:47 Sorry, there's more on this slide. 36:50 We found each other in a group chat. 36:51 The hypothesis that chat is minimum viable community is what led the three of us and the whole crew of other people to spend the last year focused on Roomie. 37:03 So what happens when the needs of communities get more complex? 37:06 Like I said before, the core of a chatroom is shared context. 37:10 Add more voices into the mix and we start to lose track of context. 37:14 And we've seen that organizing into channels and threads works. 37:18 So these are in Rumi available to use now. 37:22 We call the big shared community context a space. 37:26 If you haven't checked it out, this is the AtmosphereCon Rumi space. 37:31 So channels are on the side and they're in categories. 37:36 And if you open a channel, you can see recent threads. 37:43 We have reactions or replies, chat stuff. 37:45 And if you're an admin, you can move messages into a thread if you want to retroactively introduce some more structure and organization. 37:54 Ruumi's not the first open source group chat app that has these features, and there's still a lot of rough edges. 38:01 But the difference is that I— the difference is that Ruumi is an app proto app. 38:11 With this caveat, messages aren't on the PDS because we want to launch private spaces ASAP. 38:18 They live on our equivalent of a PDS called Leaf. 38:23 It has a DID you can control to adversarially migrate it to your own self-hosted Leaf server. 38:31 The data is formatted just like at Proto Records. 38:35 And you can build an alternative client too Auth is just an App Proto Service token. 38:41 All of which is to say we care about credible exit and interop. 38:48 And with permission spaces on the horizon, we're going to keep working to make interop as easy as possible. 38:54 And we're really excited about what that's going to unlock. 38:57 Because users deserve easy access to their data on whatever app they want. 39:06 A lot of communities currently have a home on Discord, including us when we're working on this. 39:11 Most communities want to try out and progressively move to using Rumi without losing users in the process. 39:21 So I built a Discord-Rumi bridge this year, and we started contacting the first few communities to test it out. 39:32 This is the roomie, roomie space showing roomie messages interwoven with bridged Discord messages. 39:41 You can see them with the little badge. 39:45 So you can be on either side of the platform and just communicate like normal. 39:53 You might have also noticed that we're bridging in messages from the stream place. 39:56 Stream plays chat. 39:58 So when the stream ends for this talk, the chat in the stream should also appear in Rumi. 40:04 @proto makes that easy. 40:10 Tom Scanlan, who's building OpenMeet, also built this @proto calendar viewer into Rumi. 40:17 So these are standard like community.lexicon events for the conference. 40:22 They're published by atmosphereconf.org. 40:25 It's the same events you can see on the conf website and other calendar viewers like Flowbits, atmo.rspp. 40:36 Shout out to Flowbit who's done heaps of work on Rumi as well, incredible UI work. 40:43 We could take this so much further, but that's just a— a taste of what we've been building so far with Roomie. 40:53 Less control to apps means users are more free and we can build cool stuff. 41:00 The whole point of social software is interconnecting. 41:04 App Proto lets us do that while meaningfully giving more control to users and to some extent communities. 41:14 At the start of this talk, I said communities are critically important and poorly understood. 41:20 But most of our tech is made with individuals in mind. 41:25 @proto was designed for big world social networking where individuals publish data for broadcasting across the whole network to be aggregated and consumed. 41:36 Just a name and shame. 41:39 Communities need to be somewhat separate, protected from the big world to really flourish. 41:47 Like I said before, the essence of a chatroom is shared context. 41:51 When we can reliably establish shared context, shared norms, we can speak more freely, trust each other more easily, and get more stuff done together. 42:02 Okay, so I mean we live in an individualizing often isolating world, and sometimes it feels like there is no alternative, nothing outside of that. 42:11 How do we enter the communal? 42:13 What happens in the intertidal zone between the big world and the protected space? 42:22 The late union organiser Jane McAlevey made some useful distinctions for the different levels of agency in collective action. 42:32 You can donate. 42:34 You could be advocating for an issue. 42:39 You can be mobilizing people, and mobilizing means you don't just want to inform people, you want other people to get up and do something. 42:48 And when I think about how broadcast-based social media can help social movements, I think about mobilizing. 42:56 You can mobilize a car. 42:59 But what good is that if you don't know where you're going to drive it? 43:03 So collectivity is made by organizers. 43:09 Organizing is about empowering other people to have agency within the frame of your shared work or shared problem. 43:20 It's an evergreen meme. 43:24 Union organizing is all about building collective people power, or fish power. 43:32 Each of us on our own might have pretty limited leverage in whatever problem we're facing, but when a lot of us with our limited leverage choose to cooperate, we can collectively get big leverage. 43:44 That's the theory of change. 43:49 Organizers need tools that help communities create, refine, and communicate an effective mental model of the system that they're trying to gain leverage in. 44:01 We want Roomie to be that tool where it's not just about keeping the chat going, but reflexively going back through the chat to strip out the noise and keep the key insights. 44:15 Putting messages into threads, letting threads become the seeds for refined documents. 44:21 Potentially even publishing those documents for wider distribution. 44:25 Maybe sharing the key insights with other groups, other communities to coordinate and to find the others. 44:34 The public @protosocial graph can really help us with these points of interconnection. 44:42 So the rest of this talk is like a vision board for what comes next. 44:49 One thing we want to build is a bit like webrings between communities. 44:57 Like honestly, bring this back. 45:01 Webrings are a really cute practice back from the Web 1.0 days. 45:06 People would form a network of personal sites by linking to each other in a ring. 45:11 So you keep clicking next and you loop around back to the same site. 45:16 Like for us, I'm not sure if it should be in a ring, but we do really want to see how distinct communities that are aligned in some way can interconnect without having to form a hierarchy. 45:32 So I'm gonna tell a story. 45:34 About a decade ago, I got involved in an environmental campaign called Stop Adani. 45:40 Adani is a mining company that was trying to build the biggest coal mine in the Southern Hemisphere, and our government was funding them to do it. 45:51 I just hated the total inaction on climate change and needed to do something about it. 45:59 So this ended up being my introduction to direct action, which is where you go and put your body on the line, trying to stand directly in the way of something that a just society wouldn't tolerate. 46:16 When I got up to the camp, everyone was practicing consensus-based decision-making with this idea that we don't pressure or coerce anyone to be part of an action. 46:26 We're working towards collective consent for whatever we do. 46:31 I started getting skilled up in facilitating meetings to learn how to make that happen with a big group of people efficiently. 46:40 And being part of this practice really changed me. 46:46 I also learned that we had a few strategic goals. 46:50 But our main focus was to show investors that the project was unreliable. 46:55 To do that, we needed to identify choke points in their system and their process and work out ways to exploit them and blow out their costs while minimizing our own. 47:09 I've participated to different degrees in a lot of actions and campaigns since then with ups and downs, but I think that campaign was where I really got a sense of how much is involved to organize on that scale. 47:24 Ultimately, the mine did go ahead, but it was only a sixth of the scale that they'd proposed, and the primary reason is they couldn't attract the capital. 47:33 So this is a review of the secondary targets for the campaign, including financiers. 47:43 How many of them publicly ruled out supporting the mine. 47:49 In the Commons analysis in 2022, the mine had been delayed by 9 years, and the primary tactic they identified used by groups active in the campaign was information sharing. 48:02 So I came in to stop Adani in a relatively brief and limited capacity, and I learned that what we were doing was just a small part of a much bigger system. 48:14 There were nonprofits doing campaign research, strategic litigation, there was volunteer community groups doing public campaigning, there was a Wangalungur traditional owners group opposing the mine. 48:26 We had links with groups based in student unions around the country, and all of these were different communities that were all coordinating with each other and supporting each other with no hierarchy. 48:38 I only got a little sense of how much overhead went into that coordination, but I'm going to say it was a lot of very thankless admin that is also critical organizing work. 48:50 But I hope with this example you can imagine a future or a version of this reality where you could have the Brisbane chapter of the nonprofit, which is all volunteers, and the Sydney chapter and the funded national group and a group for lawyers against Adani, the traditional owners group and the direct action camp, probably being pretty quiet until we get into an encryption. 49:15 And these are all autonomous community spaces accessed with Rumi or whatever client makes sense. 49:22 And none of them have to own each other, but they can express something about the relationship with each other in their UI and their access control settings. 49:32 All of these groups want and need to be autonomous. 49:36 And they also want and need to collaborate. 49:39 Current solutions force us to choose between the two. 49:47 To be clear, I'm not just saying— trying to say hierarchy is bad. 49:51 Big communities often naturally have concentric rings of values and mission alignment, experience, capacity to lead and act as an organizer. 50:00 And that's why we see hierarchical role-based moderation, for example, working pretty well for a lot of online communities. 50:11 It shouldn't necessarily be the default. 50:13 Yesterday Blaine mentioned Nathan Schneider's concept of implicit feudalism, and my thinking is that We can avoid that by creating tools that empower users to step into governance, into organizing. 50:29 If people know Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, one of my key takeaways from that was the ability to participate in modifying rules is one of the principles of successful commons governance. 50:44 In apps like Rumi where a space can have many channels, or other structures. 50:49 Some of them might be private or have different access boundaries. 50:53 That structure can become complex in a way that's culturally integral. 51:00 We don't want that structure bound to any one app. 51:02 So I think that's just like something to think about as we move into permission spaces world. 51:09 How can we make governance structures interoperable? 51:16 Just to keep expanding the vision board, maybe there are some citizen scientists using a separate app on App Proto where you can record observations of endangered species. 51:31 And at the same time, the lawyers against Adani are trying to mount an environmental regulation case against the mine. 51:38 And they have a feed set up where they can track observations of the black-throated finch, the yakka skink, the ornamental snake within the specific region affected by the mine. 51:55 And they're all showing up automatically in their space as usable evidence. 52:00 The UI for rendering that data could be a plugin someone published on App Proto, maybe like a web tile or an inlay component. 52:09 And the lawyers can choose how they want it rendered. 52:13 Soon there's a new space for organizing citizen scientists in the area to all travel out to the field together, specifically to gather observations to benefit the legal case. 52:26 So open social means the opportunities for people everywhere to coordinate and get aligned on things we care about can just explode. 52:44 I wanted to talk about a climate-related campaign because the climate movement is full of really smart people who have gotten good at system modeling. 52:53 Weather systems, sure. 52:56 Ecologies, yes. 52:57 But also Working out how to coordinate and align incentives between really diverse actors, states, market actors, nonprofits, community groups around the whole world. 53:10 What we're doing with the open social web is really similar in a lot of ways. 53:15 Monopoly control of global communications infrastructure is also a planetary problem, and we've been stuck in reinforcing feedback loops causing so much destruction. 53:26 Consider the effort with which fossil fuel companies have tried to prevent increasingly cheap renewable energy from entering the market and cutting into their profits. 53:35 Like renewable energy, the benefits of everyone having control over their data will be obvious to everyone once we break out of the monopoly feedback loop. 53:46 And there's no question that we will. 53:52 As I finish up, I just want to come back to this question from Designs for the Pluriverse. 53:56 What does it mean to design a civilization in which communal life can flourish and communities can practice the design of themselves? 54:07 The author argues that the concept of autonomy, like self-determination, is a keystone in decolonial Latin American thought that could shape how we answer that question. 54:18 He proposes a framework called autonomous design. 54:22 I'd like to go into it more, but I'm going to just wrap up now, but I'd love to talk about this with anyone. 54:40 This idea that communities are living systems. 54:43 Basically. 54:44 They self, they produce themselves. 54:46 And the more that they can reliably produce themselves within the assurance of the holdfast, like Aaron said, the better they can learn and adapt. 54:56 If we as technologists give communities tools to protect themselves against assault, but also to learn and adapt to the broader environment, we cultivate the conditions for a world where many worlds can fit. 55:10 We're working on really enormous, important, and very particular problems here, and it can be hard, but we are so much more powerful together. 55:18 So let's find each other. 55:19 Thank you. 55:30 Thank you so much, Mary. 55:31 That was a beautiful talk. 55:33 We have some time for questions. 55:35 Yes. 55:36 Oh, sorry. 55:36 Wait, I, I must give this to you so they can hear you in the streaming. Meri Leeworthy 55:42 Yeah. 55:42 So during the pandemic, a lot of us spent a lot of time on the computer, and there were a lot of musicians that went to Discord and found new collaborations with each other. 55:54 This was really important for me because I didn't really have local community that partook in the same kind of music that I liked. 56:01 So it completely changed my life as an artist. 56:03 I know there are some significant technical boundaries with implementing multimedia via support, but do you have any plans for VC in the future? 56:09 Because I feel like that would unlock a whole new community of other people that communicate via Sonics where words don't really serve the same purpose. Speaker B 56:19 I agree it's a really important problem. 56:23 It's not at the center of what we're trying to do right now. 56:27 And I guess I'm hoping to see that we can as a community come up with solutions for this and share resources around this. 56:38 Because yeah, like I think these are tools that we need and it makes sense to have it on protocol. 56:45 Hopefully we can get there. 56:49 Awesome. Meri Leeworthy 56:49 Thank you. Speaker B 56:58 Thanks for the inspiring talk. 57:02 You mentioned in passing this kind of aspiration to resist monopolies through cooperative sort of federation, and I wonder if you had any more thoughts on like, yeah, just expanding on that a little and where your head's at with that. 57:17 I think, yeah, I guess like it's interesting like what in one of Paul's essays like talking about lexicons as a tool for negotiating the governance of how interoperability works. 57:36 And yeah, I think these kind of emerging organizations like lexicon community are gonna become more and more important because to me, our biggest shared resource is the kind of shared data on the protocol. 57:52 And so we could end up in a place where everyone's trying to keep their cards close to their chest to gain leverage. 58:01 And I guess the point that I really wanted to make is that we're all small fish and there are some really big sharks and we need to destroy that world. 58:13 We need to move way past that world. 58:16 So we only do that by working together, by sharing our resources. 58:20 This is like the theory of change of cooperative businesses. 58:25 So yeah, I think like, yeah,