Agaric Design and People Who Give a Damn

In the midst of seemingly docile suberbs are suprising patches of radicalism. Ben and Dan, the driving forces behind Agaric Design and People Who Give a Damn comprise one of those patches.

Located in Natick, a 35 minutes commuter rail ride from Boston, Ben and Dan, via Agaric Design, are working night and day designing Drupal sites and other web development projects for movement folks all over the world. The current project keeping this busy is devleping the site for the World Social Forum Day of Action on January 26, 2008.

People Who Give a Damn is one forum where Ben has been able to promote his political vision, one that raises some useful and important questions about organizing through the Internet. The main thesis of the argument is radical departure from modern liberal thinking: groups can and should be trusted to make decisions for themselves. With the Internet, we have the infrastructure to enable decentralized, group-based decision making in ways that never before has been possible.

Some of the practical applications of this thinking are:

1. Categorization - the world is producing a mess of information and it’s only going to get messier and less organized. One of PWGD’s projects is to develop a system where people can categorize information on a web site themselves. Everything is reversible by others, and, in the case of conflicts, simple voting can help determine which categories stand, which get merged, and what information gets tagged to what category.
2. Email lists - another application is email distribution lists. Our current model of email announcement lists is a top-down, centralized system. One or several moderators decide what emails get sent and those emails are sent to everyone on the list. What if, when subscribing to an email announcement list, you were able to choose between: get all email, get 33% approved email, or get 66% approved email. Getting all email is self-explanatory. The other two categories would work like this: If a member of the all email category thinks that a message should go to everyone, they would submit it for consideration. If an email is submitted for consideration, it gets sent to a random jury of subscribers with a link where they vote on whether it should go to everyone. If 1/3 or more approve, it goes to the 33% group, if 2/3 or more approve, it goes to the 66% group.

Both of these ideas relate to a trust concept that Ben and I discussed. Traditional forms of organizing are based on a trust concept that says: I don’t trust people I don’t know. I will only trust you after you demonstrate that you are trust-worthy. This approach makes sense in certain forms of organizing where a breach of trust can result in serious damage or even injury. However, it suffers from a major flaw: you can never be 100% sure that a person is trustworthy until you actually trust them.

On the Internet, with proper backup procedures built-in to our programs, it’s possible to trust someone in a nearly risk-free environment. Not only can we more accurately and quickly asses people’s trust-worthiness, but we can easily recover from mistakes.

If you are interested in delving into these ideas more - please visit them! And if you are New England, look them up. I left with my head full of new and useful ideas (including the location of the only power outlet on the Boston commuter trains - see picture below).

Power on Boston Commuter Rail

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