Hylo's Collaborative Technology Alliance discussion

Simon Grant commented on Digital Life Collective here in the Commons Transition group. Both I and Strypey have responded with some points of concern there regarding their "fundraising first" approach. It's certainly an approach which raises questions, although they may have some good answers to those questions.

Totally understand how you came to the impressions. I don't think it's vapourware as Strypey suggested; Michael Linton (who some here will know, LETS founder and a friend of mine) had good things to say from inside the effort, and we've both been watching on from (various degrees of) afar for a year and a half, watching its emergence from the hi:project.

The early ask for money may or may not be reasonable. I haven't taken time to poke further but the commitments to open accounting are fairly impressive... and I did get the feeling that 16K makes sense as startup funds for the breadth of network they are hoping to create space for.

One thing worthy of note, perhaps, is that Christina Bowens, a core organizer, said that a lot of "libertarians" were showing up (libertarians is a quote, she might have said techno-libertarians or cyber-...)

Some early outtakes:

A pilot-map of the ecosystem they seek to support
^ very early WIP, not yet agreed upon by their whole Collective
The tools they're currently using

I appreciate the added perspective on the complex and ambitious goals of Digital Life Collective; thanks. I expect to read more of their current goals and their evolution later.

That link didn't work for me @coopchange

Fixed (Loomio appended a "loomio.diglife.com", i guess bc I'd left off http

@coopchange I have a very strong negative reaction to people talking up a project, and especially asking for money, without actually implementing anything to demonstrate their ability to deliver. Not even hosting an instance of existing free code software to prove they have at least basic sysadmin skills. This is precisely what the term "vapourware" was coined in criticism of.

I once investigated a pyramid scam that a guy I know fell for, where the "product" the mark is supposedly going to on-sell is a bunch of free downloads off the net. Before people ask for money from random strangers online, they need to go to some effort to prototype something, to support the claim they can provide something of value in return for that money. Someone from DigiLife told me all their more detailed planning documents are not on their HTML5 website, but buried somewhere in Slack! facepalm. To be blunt, this does nothing to convince me they are capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a secure hosting platform for other people's digital lives.

I hear your concerns. I think they're worth keeping an eye on; as I mentioned, I've been familiar with at least two of the primary actors for some time, as has my colleague Michael Linton- who's a sceptic if I ever knew one. Anyways; not really caring to debate it, but since I have info on part of your critique, folks might care to hear this:

Not sure if it counts, but they are now hosting a MatterMost instance (using Cloudron I think I saw?), and seem to be nearly migrated from Slack to that.

Thanks @coopchange for providing this background and update. I apologise if I've over-stated my case. It seems I'm still carrying a lot of anger towards the people who fleeced hundreds of dollars from people I know. I certainly don't mean to write off DigiLife completely, and again, I apologise if my comments give that impression. It's great to hear that they're migrating from Slack to a self-hosted MatterMost, and hopefully they're also moving more explanatory documents to their HTML5 website.

My main point is that people giving money to invest in digital services need to do due diligence to make sure the people they're giving money to are a) not just scammers, and b) competent enough to deliver at least some of what they promise. Organisations asking for money would be well-advised to due everything they can to make themselves transparent, so that due diligence is easy for potential member-investors to do.
EDIT: added last two sentences to the first paragraph.

I just discovered this group which might be a good operational trial of the DigLife.com Social Ledger Mattermost integration.

DigLife began with great enthusiasm as people willing to put their money where there mouth is enabling tech we trust for the world we want. I expected many members would become engaged and participate enabling us to produce great things together. But now we are facing the same challenge Hylo and all the other projects are facing. The number of active participants has declinrd.

This is to me just another case of self organizing decentralized groups including Hylo becoming dysfunctional over a certain size. While we all may have a theory of how we might overcome this research and the history of humanity suggests it won't happen spontaneously without deliberate organization substituting for organizational hierarchy.

It has been shown that small teams work most effectively and so we might expect an organization of small teams could be effective. But the teams we have formed have different vocabularies and culture. They fail to interoperate as each is on a separate path.

Doubly linked sociocratic circles are a reasonable choice for organizing teams designed to foster cooperation and collective intelligence. DigLife is applying principles from sociocracy, bossless self management, working out loud, etc. moving control to the edges. I am encouraged that the process may be fruitful. It might be a beginning of a sociocratic polyarchy with no top that can scale without limit. Peer to peer agreements might create the fabric of society with decentralized governance according our personal consensual agreements rather than the tyranny of the majority. Proactive linking related circles with ambassadors translating between the language and norms of different team cultures having shared values can enable cooperation and interoperability.

While engagement of diglife members has proven more difficult than expected, the engagement there is has been quite productive. While the material in the diglife google folder needs better presentation a wealth of great material has been produced.

In my view the greatest accomplishment has been in the Social ledger Lab (video tool demo 14:30) producing a mattermost integration recording circle membership, goals, norms, commitment to activities while building interactive visualizations of the social graph of connections between people and the holonic structure of the organization and its activities. A the same time the ledger gives people credit for their involvement in activities. While the initial target is mattermost integration it could be integrated into any communication environment supporting webhook type triggers, actions and /commands. A web dashboard for the social ledger is also under construction.

In what has become our deploy or die project success environment I agree diglife must produce something to be credable. The website 2.0 under development must be completed. The process of engaging members improved. and I am hopeful that we can deploy operational trials of a an initial release of The Social Ledger mattermost integration.

I suggest individuals proactively linking the various projects in our space may facilitate the mutual success of our projects.

This is to me just another case of self organizing decentralized groups including Hylo becoming dysfunctional over a certain size.

I don't think it was size. It just wasn't going anywhere. Most of the people did not actually want to collaborate, and those that did, went elsewhere and did it.

I suggest individuals proactively linking the various projects in our space may facilitate the mutual success of our projects.

I agree with that, and think that projects starting to work together is what we need at this stage. Not "come help me with my project", but "let's do something so our projects can collaborate with each other from where we are".