Agreeing On The Internet: Protocols for Consent Online

As everyone knows, the internet is famous for the way its users miraculously and spontaneously agree on everything. In this digital town square, all of its virtual denizens are kind, deliberative, and deeply considerate of the nuances and context that inform one another's needs, preferences, goals, and values, leading to novel, creative solutions to the complex problems we all face on this shared habitat we call Planet Earth.

... haha, just kidding. Of course—tragically—the internet is famous for none of those things. For whatever it's worth, I've been enjoying this podcast from the writer and technologist Cory Doctorow on how and why things have gotten so bad.

But as we know here at social.coop, our online social lives don't have to be so bleak! Since joining this Mastodon instance as part of the wave of emigration from Twitter in 2022, I've come to better appreciate what is possible when cooperation informs how we organize online. To support these ongoing efforts, I'll be offering a free, three-hour online workshop on how to make decisions together on the internet, turning an ear towards how we can create little pockets that resist the tendency towards misunderstanding and misinformation that pervade what Doctorow calls the "enshittified" internet. The workshop will take place next Thursday, May 29, 2025 from 12-3pm EDT (16:00-19:00 UTC) via our meet.coop service.

If you're interested (whether or not you can make it at that time—I'll likely do something similar again soon!) simply fill out this very brief from and I'll follow up with the video call link. And if you know someone who might be, please forward the link:

Register for Agreeing On The Internet

As many of us have already experienced, it's hard to make a good, durable decision in a group trying to do something together online! My journey with this conundrum began in earnest about ten years ago, when I was organizing young meditators' groups in the Buddhist community I was part of at the time. Aware of the frustrations and limitations of trying to decide anything conclusively over an email thread or chat group, I started looking for software tools that would help make it easier—this led me to become an active user of Loomio with many groups I've worked with since in all kinds of contexts, from activist collectives to nonprofit boards; I've also implemented decision-making protocols in other project management software tools I've worked with like Trello and Basecamp. Since 2021, I've been training in a method called Sociocracy, which includes a specific approach to this known as "consent decision-making." In the workshop, we'll go over the basics of the approach and show how the protocol can be applied to a variety of online collaboration tools. My intention is that we can all come away with a better understanding of how to design consentful protocols for our own online collaboration wherever it arises.

I hope to see you there! (Again, just click here to let me know you're interested.) Feel free to leave a comment here or hit me up on Mastodon if you have any questions for me about the offering.