How to Magician: Improving Technological Governance by Boris Mann Greg Colvin, Jamie Pitts (Devcon4)

this is basically talk about how to magician and we're gonna describe the the ideas behind it and then maybe a little bit about the history and philosophy of it so this is something that's been on my mind lately and it's not exactly relevant to this topic but I think I think it's it's in the theme and this is something we need to think about when we say governance what are we gonna do more governing a resource it could be a technical resource it could be financial it could be something that that that a community needs to come together and work on and and and allocate and it's a necessary evil and those resources need to be directed and the thing is when you're involved resources it's almost like heat or something it's like an off it exudes power it just it's nearby it accumulates and anything is power attracts certain personalities it attracts more power it agglomerates and in this is a truism and actually I really think it's true and I think a lot of people would agree with me is that power ultimately corrupts you and it is very difficult to be some as part of an organization or an individual who's looking after resources that offset or give off power and not be messed up about that because we all have goals and power is it's it's alluring that we can see we can do what we want to do and and that that drives people crazy so I wanted to go through a bunch of different slides about how people manage manage this and sometimes they'll define laws they'll use laws to try to constrain people and the in in our case we've we've tried to decentralize so we don't have capture because when you have laws you have potential capture it's inflexible so you decentralize prom with decentralization and this whole notion it's very vague but they really the promise it's it's difficult organize people in a decentralized scenario it's hard to operate and so this is something that the magicians has been developing inside you have self-organization and the key to organizing is that it's I think it's very expensive it's very difficult to train people on and I think it takes a lot of brainpower and effort to coordinate people and one key thing about it is it required oh sorry go I was gonna say another piece of this in fact is a challenge when you say requires taking responsibility a lot of people say I would like to help tell me what to do so what you're doing is you're then reflecting and you are in fact accumulating power and a person and you're putting responsibility on another person who has to do work to think about a problem to tell you what to do never mind about power dynamics or anything else so all of these are our loops that are hard to get out of because we're naturally wired for some of these things on both sides a recognition that that is even happening if you find yourself saying tell me what to do think first what you would assign yourself to do even exposing things that you think should get done is a useful thing even if you aren't gonna do it however one of the things that Kevin oh exede in the council of prague is his new favorite phrase is rather than saying the phrase we should do this is saying i am doing as something to think about on this topic yeah and that's critical and that and that takes because many of us may have been used to either not having any authority govern over us at all we're in totally total indy or we've worked in corporations we expect that structure and so those contrasts make it difficult for people to perhaps learn how to socially coordinate which is a very expensive activity and essentially the magician's formed and and early when when Greg and I were discussing it and in Greg I gotta have to say you were though I see you as a very much primary driver on it but Greg has a lot of experience organizing in a political sense organizing and disorganized I will dare to call it organizing but um but yeah I yeah that's and I would like you to speak to that a bit about where that what that's about and how that can be used in in technology and any issue really yeah I would call it and it's generally called a non organization rather than a dis organization cuz dis organization you know applies what is it Boltzmann law yeah is they see image of a whole bunch of atoms just bouncing around off of each other a non organization can still be organized part of the motivation for a non organization which includes the IETF which I'm surprised to know that many many people didn't know what it was so internet industry task force is what that stands for and they are the people who defined initially the tcp/ip protocol without which we wouldn't be here and continue to maintain various standards and they are a non organization one of the reasons they are a non organization is so that there is nobody to sue and in this world that's important you know there are there's no list of members there are no voting on anything things work by rough consensus and running code is there saying then that can go wrong in many many ways just as anything else can go wrong my personal experiences with it started with participating in in civil disobedience against an atom bomb factory near my hometown and in organizing for though is simply voting on what we were going to - wasn't going to make it because we were going to be purposely breaking the law and going up against heavily armed people whose job it was to prevent us from doing that so we needed to have a pretty high level of agreement as to what we were going to do are we just going to sit down on the road are we going to attempt to climb over the fence are we actually going to assault the policeman if the policeman assault us what are we going to do about it and watching that process of enough organization to pull it off but not so much organization than anybody became you know a leader who could be you know the day after the revolution they became a conservative and you know nobody completely succeeds at that because there will always be certain people currently Boris does a great job of facilitating meetings and getting things organized and if he hadn't shown up magicians wouldn't be what they are because he's just good at getting up in the room and saying okay it's time to do this and the recent meeting I was calling him my keeper because I just youth of staff that he was my keeper I could not keep track of where did I need to be when what's happening in this in this big big old building over there like where where the hell is the room that I'm supposed to be in right down then Boris would be oh you need to be up there and don't worry just take the staircase that's right and there's there's a bathroom on the left so I'm going too far on that [Music] I don't know where the bathrooms in this building are yeah it was a mystery sometimes but but but the motivations were pretty personal at first I'd done [Music] months of work on a proposal that somehow got cancelled I didn't really know why it had been canceled but you know my con you know my contract with the foundation we couldn't agree on and I moved on and I'm thinking if I want to do a whole lot of work and then have my project cancelled by a middle manager for no apparent reason I should go back to corporations and get paid a hell of a lot of money for that so I I think one of the things that I learned about the magician's was that it it I was really impressed by Aya's presentation this morning talking about the galaxies in the universe not once did she claim the etherium foundation of being etherium but being part of the galaxy and Hudson's List ordered by length of name I love it it's not alphabetical it's just length of letters and so that is sort of a signaling mechanism that there are some entities that are appearing twinkling in the universe and I think part of the eat magicians what I'm seeing the non organization is still emerging in what its joint goals are or individual subgroups or other things like that but definitely some of the principles are things like transparency so whenever we see decisions of the ecosystem being made in closed forums we pointed out when we say how do we how does this decision get made right we're not attacking we're asking a question we're not saying why were we not consulted which is the classic internet thing oh yes but if we're saying okay how does this work how do people get involved what is the open model for this if we believe so we're a force I believe and again I can't speak for it this is my particular point of view of the elephant that I see and as of other people grow come in eat itself will evolve of what the shared culture goals and values are the other thing I was observing was everything seemed to be happening on things like jitter channels reddit there were no open forums where people came together to work not to sit as currently we are you're sitting down and we're talking at you and I knew by the time I finished graduate school I can hardly stand that anymore I to sit in the chair and that people talk at me I just want to run and I knew from years of work on the antsy c++ committee just the power of doing that that the people that online appeared to be you know hostile people who appeared to hate each other when you actually put them in a room to work together things get much more civilized that's where you you build the trust and one another and that's a key component of this because you can organize online but you need to have these in person meetings like what we're about to do here essentially and so I guess I'll start to close it but in terms of how does help organize I think a key piece of it is declare your goals like finder goals find your principles as a small group you know if you think you know like you're reaching out you see you see a problem domain you want it you want to take it on you have some somebody or want to work with find find your principles together find your values together and that process could be difficult because you might find your differences but the key is to set them down before you start creating your operation that will guide you that that is a mistake I think a lot of organizations make or non organizations make is they have a goal they want to do this goal they're really interested in this go there you're on the same page about the goal but they haven't defined the principles so they don't have anything to fall back on when they reach a potential conflict and so early on in the magician's and this is something Gregg really helped with and he took it from the ietf was to define these principles openness and is it in person meeting no that's not is that a principle no that's a practice we don't you get that deep into it yeah we're not going to dig into it but we have these set of principles that we follow and it's every time we we come in and essentially it's in the back of our minds and I think that's a really big piece of it and I think there's a lot of organizations in the community that have not declared that and committed themselves that have read it maybe have not reached consensus on that so when they have a difficulty in their operation they were they might resort to two rules but they might resort to Authority right so I think that's the that's a lesson I'd like to convey and if you give a or anyone out here as a lesson to convey other than that oh yeah just I think that's exactly some of the closing things that Sarah pointed out basically being vigilant about looking out for centralizing forces and fighting back against that using different techniques using principles to lie against it right and always try and self check yourself with that partly that was possible because we're a community but were not like a nation where you have a border and a whole bunch of people who simply have to get along one way or another and so the magician started simply as an invitation and I'm actually you know just amazed that it worked out at all as far as I knew the invitation would be you know you give a party and nobody shows up and for personal family reasons shortly after that happened I had almost no time to devote to it and people like Boris Danny other people just stood up and said oh we need to have a meeting in Paris will will take care of it you know someone who was it stood up and said Oh web three can do this I don't know who actually yeah I wasn't much involved so but people just did it and what I tend to say here is that in this sort of decentralized community people just stand up to do a job that they think needs to be done and the community either accepts that yes they're doing that job and will let them do it or they say no they're not doing that job and we're going to ignore them so the core devs the community could just say we don't care what you say and sometimes you wind up with a hard fork the IP editors um we just started doing it people are going yeah somebody needs to maintain a repository and establish some basic standards for what a document should look like and give them numbers and simple stuff like that but the community could have just said yeah we don't need that who are you guys and how long how long we can keep that up better it scales I don't know but I hope it scales for a fair way one of our things thank you great so