DIY Modular Organization Structure Kit: Democratising Organizational Theory

[Marcus Clayman]

Hello, my first post here. I've been becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the level of critical dialogue in my local occupy group, which has been my introductory experience into the world of activism, organizing and direct action. I'm itching to learn as much as I can, through both first hand experience but also learning from others. I have a lot of problems with the way the occupy groups are organizing, and would like to discuss these things. I study(as a hobby) organizational theory, and am most interested in developing a "modular organizational structure"(structure may be the wrong, depending on the final product) which will effectively be a "DIY Kit for Organizational Structure Options" in an attempt to democratice and dessiminate the various pros and cons of different organizational methods.

I am mostly focused on non violent popular movement organizing. Assuming that such a movement is possible, and the most effective way of dealing with a specific issue(which is always arguable, sometimes an underground vangaurd that employs various non violent, and other tactics, may be more effective), say, culture/system change. I think that inclusiveness, diversity of participants/tactics/feedback, and relivancy/agreeableness/aproachability of the agenda to those participants are essential aspects to the "success" of such a movement. now just for a disclaimer, so im not called hipocritical by the anti-fascifists(extreme passifists) for advocating for non violence, I say diversity of tactics, following an appeal to "non violence" knowing that various tactics are employed in various situations, whether or not they are organized. Fostering a safe and open dialogue about various tactics to be used, is et ssential, in my eyes, for a non violent movement. If people who advocate for diversity of tactics are alienated from a group, simply because of their advocacy for a certain tactic, then their ideas are lost to their group, their support is lost to the group, and their tactics may be employed anyway, but in a less focused and less effective way. Space has to be provided, and to maintain transparency and democratic participation, should be welcomed to some degree.

non violence vs diversity of tactics
inclusiveness vs taking explicit stances
consensus vs autonomy
decentralization of power vs efficiency/expediency

these issues come up a lot, and I'd like to discuss them. Obviously, some big topics, too big for one thread each, nevermind all together. But I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on these things, and my goal to create(not alone, but with the help of every one of you, and everyone interested who I come across) a DIY framework for creating your own modular organizational structures. I think that organizational processes are often naively selected based on tradition, or some misguided sense of morality, when certain structures have noticable effects on group culture and how effective a collective will be in different situations.

Anyone interested in this sort of thing, I would love to talk with you in more depth about it.

[Martin Blank]

Moved to DIY

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I do not have understanding what this organizational kit of yours is all about but it sounds interesting. I spent a month at a Maine occupy and I have been dissatisfied with the way things ran as well. Things were far too micromanaged for my tastes.

[Kotze]

That kit could be a website that asks you some basic questions, the answers you click are used to generate specific follow-up dialogue, and finally it outputs your custom charter.


inclusiveness vs taking explicit stancesAs the number of explicit stances of an org increases, the probability that anybody agrees with all these, the probability that they even know them, can only move down.

How about something less rigid?

Suppose that instead of, or in addition to, core stances that you must agree with to be a member, a party has a list of items where you have to overlap with a certain minimum. Suppose it's 2/3, that may look like quite some overlap. However, that means it might happen that 2 people from the same party disagree about 2/3 of these items. If the overlap minimum is >3/4, then any pair of people from the party will agree about more than half of these items.


consensus vs autonomyConsensus is widely disliked here (I don't know anything where we are closer to consensus than that). Ideally, we want that group decisions give more weight to concerns of those who are strongly affected, and majoritarian decisions do not necessarily respect that. This is often brought up as if it were an argument in favour of consensus over majority voting, but there is no logical connection.

If consensus isn't an alternative, that doesn't mean there aren't alternatives left. Proportional voting on issues could be used to structure debates about an action even when that action is ultimately decided by majority, and in instances where doing several different actions doesn't come at high cost. Dumb example: Consider a bunch of kids that have a sack with marbles in it, and whoever draws one special marble gets to decide which game to play. If they regularly meet, this kind of decision process gives proportional representation to the games.


decentralization of power vs efficiency/expediencySpatial relations are often put into tree hierarchies local-regional-national which would work perfectly well for a bunch of islands with every point on an island being closer to another point on the same island and the islands being in several clusters with every point on an island in a cluster being closer to another point in the same cluster; that is, if any part were more connected with any part in the same group than with some part outside of it, which is virtually never the case. (Even in the island example one may interject: What about fishing?)

With a tree hierarchy you have to draw lines somewhere so that there are always places that are pretty close to each other that are administratively separated and grouped with places they are physically less connected with. Imagine overlapping districts instead. Imagine that by being member of a specific movement and living in a specific place you do not become a member of exactly one group that meets in one specific place, but instead this makes you a member of several groups that meet in places in a cluster around where you live.

Given that voting-trees are vulnerable to Gerrymandering and get more vulnerable the longer the voting chain from the bottom to the top is, they should be avoided; and if they aren't avoided altogether, the chains should be kept short and questions of districting and where to meet should not be delegatable.

Another issue to consider: privacy vs transparency.

[ckaihatsu]

non violence vs diversity of tactics
inclusiveness vs taking explicit stances
consensus vs autonomy
decentralization of power vs efficiency/expediency


These are timeless dynamics in the realm of action, and your post immediately brought to mind a recent exchange:








To elaborate: we do not currently have remotely near the numbers needed for a mass revolution of the working class. It is currently out of reach. What we need to be focusing on is drawing more numbers to the cause, and to work on not alienating those who are even remotely sympathetic, but wary. Propaganda needs to be increased on ALL fronts.

Acceptance, cooperation, community.





It's a *dialectical* thing since we obviously want to reach people "where they're at" but there's no reason to *cater* to them or to compromise our own political principles and positions.

Conceptually it may be helpful to visualize just how broad a "platform" may be supported by our fixed political principles on the far left (most progressive) end of the political spectrum.

(A broader platform is more accommodating but less principled, and a narrower platform is more principled but less inclusive.)


So I'll reiterate that in the realm of politics-strategy-tactics, it's impossible to "please everyone" -- revolution implies *making a break* from those whose worldview and practices hold the world back from progressing beyond the commodity labor system.

That said, though, if it were so easy to just draw the line based on this political principle, we could just readily set up a formal institution and issue IDs on this basis, and proceed from there. In the real world there are allies -- depending on extant conditions -- who may be able to contribute in a leftward direction, but who are not technically *comrades*.

I borrow from social science on this concept, and visualize the accuracy-and-precision model -- like shots at a bullseye:


http://gotoknow.org/file/nopadol/precision_6.png


Ideally we'd want everyone around us to have the same precise politics we do, *and* to make correct political points/arguments on political issues that are *tightly related* to those politics -- this would be both 'precision' *and* 'accuracy'.

But often, in the process of struggle, we're working with others who will have *less precise* (or other) political principles, and may not be as accurate in their assessments of what's going on.





Proportional voting on issues could be used to structure debates about an action even when that action is ultimately decided by majority, and in instances where doing several different actions doesn't come at high cost. Dumb example: Consider a bunch of kids that have a sack with marbles in it, and whoever draws one special marble gets to decide which game to play. If they regularly meet, this kind of decision process gives proportional representation to the games.


I'll agree with this approach entirely, since politics *should* be about the issues and policy, anyway -- these days we can even realistically potentially transcend *representational democracy* and go straight to *direct participation*, as over discussing and deciding-on the issues themselves (thanks to communications technology), as on a discussion board like RevLeft, perhaps.

So, I'll suggest a proportional weighting, per person, over each-and-all of a mass-contributed pool of issues -- each participant has 100 points to distribute over all issues put forth, for the sake of prioritization. (Issues from the list are then prioritized according to most points received from all participants.)


[17] Prioritization Chart

http://postimage.org/image/35hop84dg/


[16] Affinity Group Workflow Tracker

http://postimage.org/image/1cqt82ps4/


Ideologies & Operations -- Bottom Up

http://postimage.org/image/1d4wy29dw/


[3] Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals

http://postimage.org/image/34modgv1g/


[21] Ideologies & Operations

http://postimage.org/image/1d2pk9lok/