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Book Thoughts: Inspired by Good Faith Collaboration by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.

Where to begin? As a student of how we monkeys organize and make meaning, reading this book was like skipping through Disneyland. I really enjoy ethnographies.

What stands out the most is that this reflection on Wikipedia underscores the fact that that Wikipedia is extraordinarily self-reflective , that it is a community attempting to understand itself and its circumstances, and that it is imbued with many aspirations - from its legacy and lineage from the collectors of human knowledge, the values it has acquired from the open source community from which it sprung, and the high standards with deep philosophical roots which it sets for itself and then needs to try to live up to.

It is part of the nature of human beings to be aspirational. The biochemist Charles Pasternak described heightened propensity to quest that human beings exhibit as the major drive of ongoing human evolution and achievement. Pasternak talked about challenge being one necessary condition, yet support also necessary because if challenge is too harsh (as in the Antarctic), it's just not possible to overcome it. In that sense, the role of the Wikimedia Foundation as offering a source of support in what is clearly an organization in the middle of things.

The difference between ideals and where reality falls short is the opportunity for practice.

Some thoughts on a few topics:

NPOV

I so enjoyed this part of the book and its grappling with the question about the nature of truth! Both the sense of the absoluteness of truth and its utter relativism are things we live with so intimately that it's almost hard to see. Gravity works (absolute), and yet who am I to say that the Vietnamese calling the "Vietnam War" the "War of Liberation from the American Puppet Government" (relative) is wrong? What is truth there? I'm so fascinated that some of the fundamental philosophical questions of existence are grappled with in the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. It permeates the way that this incredibly distributed mass of human beings has gone about collaboratively building something, and that is just incredible. In one way, I see NPOV as a fascinating expression of a famous saying from the Third Zen Patriarch. "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised." Obviously it IS difficult, because the Way is hard for people (except when it's not).

Women & Wikipedia

I was struck by how core issues that we face on broader levels in culture and society are echoed in examples like WikiChix - in this case, having a group that is inherently exclusive, the discussion of its value, its challenge to the notion of openness, and what I still see as a necessity for groups of women to exist and yet also see the perspective that it can seem to promote discrimination to use a exclusive category to define a private group. I'm biased as a facilitator of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Women in Management group. Women make up about 30% of the population at the major business schools, and the goal of the program is to create a protected spaces where conversations can happen that would not otherwise happen, for women to experience support from other women. As a community, we engage in this inquiry about whether or not it's okay, and we engage criticism from others in the community, including men, as to whether these Women in Management groups are discriminatory and should exist. My personal experience is that women sometimes give and receive support differently than men, and certainly the dynamics can be different in women-only groups, having protected groups actually improves the functioning of the whole organization if the purpose of the group is to enhance the ability of the specific sub-group to engage the whole in a more healthy manner. I think the intent really matters here. It's not women to the detriment of men. A Klingon supremacist group, one would expect, would have an intention to the detriment of other groups by definition.

A couple weeks ago, I did a film screening of the documentary Miss Representation, which talks about media bias and women in the media. It raised for me the huge complexity of independent freedom (which to me is always suspect given that we are always in contexts that people have varying degrees of awareness of) while working for anything that involves societal good - a dynamic distinctly at play in the value of transparency vs. legal issues that sometimes arises in the Wikipedia community.

I think countries that have mandated corporate board representation and mandated political representation are actually using policy well to address systemic issues. It's interesting to see that America, in protecting individual liberties, has chosen not to institute those which implicitly impacts systemic inequalities which it espouses protecting. There are no easy answers because ideally, we'd live in a world where policy isn't a necessary intervention. [See http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-gender-gap]

One of the projects that I'm familiar with through my work with Spark is The Op-Ed Project. The statistics on the Op-Ed banner seems to reflect a similar demographic to the percentage of female editorship. I wonder if similar programming would help Wikimedia, and also if pairing women to co-write/co-edit articles would help.

Fun, relevant article: Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “ComputerGirls”

Humor

The Wikimedian sense of humor throughout the book as exemplified by the rules and quotes cracked me up to no end, and it's something I've appreciated as I've read more commentary and essays beyond what's included in the book.

The Story of the Water of Life

One of the things that the book Good Faith Collaboration evoked was this story about the Water of Life. It's cited as being Carl Jung's favorite, and goes something like this: “A tribe sent seekers out into the desert searching for the Water of Life. The Water showed itself in the world by bubbling forth from an artesian well. After a long journey the seekers came upon the well and drank from its invigorating waters. They felt life surge through them and were truly satisfied. They sent for the tribe, which soon arrived. There were many people gathered around the spring, so a wall was built to protect the purity of its crystal water. As the people arrived shops and buildings sprang up. Roads were built. Eventually to organise access and pay for the necessary administrative costs a charge was made for drinking from the vitalizing waters. Still the people came. And then one day the people woke up and the Water of Life had gone. Water still flowed, but it was not the Water of Life. People drank, but in time realized their loss. The people sent seekers out and the cycle began again.”

Something of the story of Wikipedia, and as the steward of it, the Wikimedia Foundation, is echoed in this story. I half jokingly told someone I interviewed with that I am still mad, all these centuries later, that the great library of Alexandria burned down. The story above is actually quite an optimistic one, because it speaks to the tenacity of people and to the capacity to find a way. Mythically, you could talk about the nature of water, how essential it is, and it's very unbounded nature. It's the nature of water to flow, much like information, and I think one some level that the Wikipedian quest is as akin to bounding water, and yet as essential.

Dynamic Steering

"Wikimedians must achieve a delicate balance, this time between rehashing tired issues and reconsidering vital ones: between 'the need for open and fair consideration of the issues against the need to make forward progress.'" I laughed at this line, because it's such a fundamental human issue and yet, so necessary to successful negotiate.

One of the organizational structures I've studied is Holacracy, which is built to test out principles of new organizational operating systems since many of our ways of organizing come from the industrial era which 1) has a different relationship with the human beings that make up those systems and 2) doesn't account for the ways our very patterns of interaction and sense-making have been impacted by technology. Inherent to new organizational structures that actually allow people to organize, apportion work, and deal with different organizational boundaries in a technological environment must be the capacity to deal with rapid decision-making amidst impermanence. The ongoing quest for the relationships and structures that work, as so well exemplified in the foundation-l mailing list, is going to require an inherent agility in the Foundation, its leaders, its people, and in the broader Wikimedian community. That said, it is going to be really, really interesting along the way if the mirrors can keep being held up, the dialogues continued, and ways found to meet the challenges with requisite support.

I have heard it said that heroism can be redefined for our age as the ability to tolerate paradox, to embrace seemingly opposing forces without rejecting one or the other just for the sheer relief of it, and to understand that life is the game played between two paradoxical goalposts: winning is good and so is losing; freedom is good and so is authority; having and giving; action and passivity; sex and celibacy; income and outgo; courage and fear. One doesn't cancel out the other. Both are true. They may sit on opposite sides of the table, but beneath it their legs are entwined. - Gregg Levoy

Hybrid Leadership

The discussion of Wales as a leader and the hybrid leadership model he advocated is SO INTERESTING. I have a ton of questions that arise for me here about what it takes to lead in service of the greater whole (whether mission or community), maintain a vision, tread softly, manage a tangled web of stakeholders with occasionally competing interests, and yet operate mostly in public scrutiny in the midst of compounded cultures and sub-cultures. Responsive, resilient, distributed models of leadership that doesn't compromise necessary and requisite authority is a challenging thing to embody, and I have the sense that the movement and the organization are still playing on the teeter totter of what that looks like - and will be for as long as the organization exists. HOW it plays on the teeter totter, though, will have a lot of influence.

The Changing Role of Expert

What If found interesting about the criticism that Wikipedia has elevated the amateur at the expense of the professional is that it's already framed as either/or. I see a need for there to be both, especially arising out of my work with Spark.

At Spark, part of our theory-of-change has been recognizing the shift in the field from experts to allies and leveraging that through our network. (We grapple with what it means to function as a network, with the belief that the issues of this world are so complex that they can only be dealt with via networks.) We operate knowing that if we want influence with millennials and developing millennials as philanthropists engaged in global women's issues, it is as much about empowering our allies and peers to find their own information. If we want effective interventions, domestically or internationally, it's not about coming in with a pre-determined plan and an agenda based on "best practices", but figuring out through a discovery process what works in partnership with small, grassroots organizations on the ground. Monolithic, centralized structures that cling to recognized experts cannot function without decentralized aid and access to distributed knowledge. Democratization of our grantmaking process away from experts and towards cultivating allies has been a core strategy for millennial engagement because of an inherent distrust of institutions. Trust is built through "trust filters", one's peers and allies making information accessible that is bite-sized, believable, and seems to come from a relatively transparent source. Yet, with a knowledge economy and increased specialization, we need our experts to also behave as trust-filters - just not from a reified place.

There's actually a stage developmentally, in process of becoming an adult, where experts are a large part of the worldview. Some contested research exists that not only do individuals go through these phases, but we develop societally through them as well. The phenomenon of Wikipedia juxtaposed against, as an example, Graves' spiral dynamics theory for looking at evolving memes is really interesting!

An Applied Developmental Perspective to Wikipedia

I also look at Wikipedia through a developmental lens, and I wonder what each evolutionary truce will look like in the ongoing development of both Wikipedia and Wikimedia. To add some definition, one of my favorite influences, Robert Kegan states that, “Every developmental stage...is an evolutionary truce. It sets terms on the fundamental issue as to how differentiated the organism from its life-surround and how embedded.” The embedded life-surrounds are contexts like open-source, Wales, wiki technology, etc. The ongoing question of how differentiated and how embedded as the strategic plan calls for growth in particular areas is really interesting.

I've been thinking about where the Wikimedia Foundation is in its stage of organizational development, and where it may be separate from the movement (and what stage the movement is in at ten years old) and where they're conflated. What I know on the individual level that has some (not complete) application to the systemic is that development happens when Subject gets moved to Object. To clarify what is meant as subject versus object, in Kegan’s scheme, “things that are Subject are by definition experienced as unquestioned, simply a part of the self. They can include many things – a theory, a relational issue, a personality trait, an assumption about the way the world works, behaviors, emotion – and they can’t be seen because they are the lenses through which we see.” In contrast, things that are Object “can be seen and considered, questioned, shaped, and acted on.” They include things that can be subject, such as theories, assumptions, relational issues, emotions, behaviors, etc., but because “it isn’t the lens through which we see, something that is Object can be held out and examined.” Thus, development is moving more things from Subject to Object. “The more we take as Object in our lives, the more complex our worldview becomes because we can see, reflect on, be responsible for, and act on more things.” (If this is confusing, which I'm sure it is, and if anyone is interested, I can do a crash graduate-level course on this that should make it clearer.)

If the course of each person's development is understood as the fundamental movement of that which is subject to object, a person in seeing more of themselves in a way that is visible and malleable, there is something about the way this whole book is also part of the attempt of an entity to understand itself, as it attempts to make the world it inhabits more coherently visible to itself. The book makes the constructs of Wikimedia more available to itself - as do the mailing lists, the essays, the rules, the talk pages, etc. Wikimedia itself becomes one of the thousand-eyes of the world for seeing itself. That's just really cool.

Work as Political Act

My travel god for Europe is Rick Steves, a noted travel guidebook author who has deepened many of my experiences in foreign countries. He wrote a book called "Travel as a Political Act", which I loved. It somehow aligns for me with the notion of disseminating knowledge as a political act, and not as a political act that smarmy politicians engage in, but one that offers options for actions stemming from access to a breadth of perspective. (Even if, and perhaps because, that perspective includes synopses of every episode of Buffy...)

I think it means something to bring a consciousness to the work one does as a form of practice, yet holding it so whisper lightly that it is part of what you do and yet is not imposed on others.

I was sorting through old email and this quote grabbed me, regarding "the work of millions of solitary individuals" and what we can collaboratively - even with all its trials - build.

"One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other place for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. 'Every wall is a door,' Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is -- in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come to the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation, others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever-threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundations of his own suffering and joys, builds them for all." -Albert Camus in his last published lecture, "Create Dangerously"

At the very least, this process may well make me a Wikipedian editor. As I combed through some of the articles in my areas of specialization that are seriously lacking, it seems to me to that I have some responsibility in its representation.