Governance Questionnaire
It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge, opportunity, or transition.
#power
11 posts
- Read more → More from Relational Tech →
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The Privilege of Play
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →"Move fast and break things" was the internal motto of Facebook up until 2014 they realized, a little belatedly, that perhaps a corporation with worldwide reach and hundreds of millions of active users shouldn't make recklessness its motivating principle.
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How Feedback Loops and Interpretive Labor Help Us Develop Better Software
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →Information naturally flows from those who have more power to those who have less.
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The Politics of Feedback in Software Development
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →As we've discussed previously, all systems are built on abstractions, and all abstractions are at least a little bit wrong. The more complex and important a system is, the more likely it is that a leaky abstraction will gum up the works. So systems need feedback mechanisms to detect when an abstraction is leaking, so they can identify and fix the problem.
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Technology, Constraint, and Control
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →Technologies are built with a model of the world in mind. A hammer presumes a nail, a screwdriver a screw, and so on. But there is, necessarily, a gap between the model and the reality, a gap between how a technology is meant to be used and how it actually functions in the world.
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Five Reasons People Don't Give Feedback
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →In my last post, I talked about how all systems have flaws, and how these flaws require interpretive labor to be patched or worked around so that the system can keep running. These systems become dysfunctional when it is hard or impossible to learn from that interpretive labor what those flaws are. Without good feedback mechanisms, none of the flaws will be fixed, and the system will not adapt to changes.
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Interpretive Labor: Bridging the Gap Between Map and Territory
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →As I've said a few times now, all models are wrong. That includes laws and norms, employee handbooks and product roadmaps, system diagrams and city plans. If something is abstracting away from reality, it's creating a gap. What happens when that gap causes problems?
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Whose Context Counts?
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →I've posted before about why it's important to delegate decisions to the people impacted by them. For example, Toyota put the power to halt production in the hands of factory floor workers who were better able to see problems as they arose, and the German Army pushed local officers to be decisive in the midst of battle. This is such an effective strategy because factory floor workers and army officers tend to have much better knowledge of the local contexts where problems first arise.
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Power and Domination in the National Women's Soccer League
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →Sometimes, you just want someone to tell you what to do.
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Stakeholder Decision-Making in the Heart of Hierarchy
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →"Nothing about us without us!" is a rallying cry, a catch-phrase with a clear moral imperative: that those impacted by a decision should be involved in making the decision.
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Power, Judgment, and Love
Read more → More from Out of Many →Back in high school and college, I had friends who offered to do tarot readings for me. I always turned them down. “What a dumb idea,” I’d think. “How could a deck of cards predict your future!”