VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE_OIJo4BmA

RECAP

Nadia leads the strategic development for Edgeryders Environment and the Climate unit and was born in Sweden to African parents, raised in Europe and Asia. She is an engineer and designer and specializes in building platforms for citizen engagement and distributed collaboration.

Nadia’s mission is to boost our collective ability to live and work well in times of upheaval. She lives at the intersections of tech, culture and large scale crises.

Nadia trained as an engineer in Human Computer Interaction, and specialists in getting geographically and demographically diverse groups of individuals to make sense of messy issues. How to prepare populations for upheaval, the coming decades of environmental collapses & changes we can no longer stop.

She posits that if we are to make any headway we need three things: Multiplicity, Speed and Convergence.

• Multiplicity and Convergence: Slow, organic change

• Convergence and Speed: Effective Centralism

• Speed and Multiplicity: Decentralized Autonomous Action lives here. So does a lot of duplication of efforts.

The sweet spot is where all three overlap: To do the range of things needed, at the speed necessary while still converging on impact.  Distributed but Networked Cooperation lives there.

She believes using tech and automation to facilitate this makes sense to explore.

And, she asks how do you do this in a way that enhances day to day wellbeing of individuals and communities. Especially for the most vulnerable.

1. Can truly distributed collaboration and governance be trusted with important things (read: critical functions in society) at scale over long periods of time?

2. How to navigate power? Society attacks what it cannot understand. Ultimately you are up against physical violence, whether its from the state or armed neighbors.

3. How do we ensure that human autonomy and agency are not engineered out of our system?

Edgeryders thinks one key is to establish and spread a humanist approach to data: Nothing about or for humans, without humans.

She says:

As the collective intelligence company, our business is deep listening and participatory sense-making. We use anthropology techniques to seed and encode conversational data. We model these conversations as living, networks of interactions that carry meaning. We turn them into beautiful, intuitive visualizations that evolve over time. These are then interpreted together with the participants.

In Edgeryders practice, they have developed a methodologically rigorous approach for deep listening and sense making:

• States/power cannot deal with anecdotes. No small group of actors can see the whole picture, no matter how smart they are. In practice, organize activities for groups to exchange and make sense of experiences e.g on stewardship of Immaterial, Relational and Physical assets. Edgeryders developed their approach and tech through research projects with universities etc.

• Edgeryders approach is to increase legibility and provide functional interfaces for interaction and dialogue. Embed decision makers, and media in different feedback loops with environment. Through immersive experiences like UnMonastery.

Nadia also explained how culture contributes:

We also build a culture robust to capture.  Keep it calm, quiet and authentic – no bombastic claims, no pitching. We don’t care about opinions. We are not a democracy. Know to be quiet. To get radical new things done in policy or politics, you need to stay under the radar. Once things get too big, they draw attention and attacks. We have managed to have policy adopted at European level, written adopted strategies for ministries of foreign affairs, and shaped large EU funding programs.

Here are some of her insights for doing this work, based on over a decade of experience:

• Slow and thoughtful interaction for sense-making. We are only interested in experience, and longer thoughtful posts – not chatter.

• Accountability, Rights, and Responsibilities. There are grown ups in charge, and it is clear who they are. It’s the people who are legally responsible for running the organisation that keeps things going. They decide who gets to stay and have no trouble kicking people out if needed.

• What recourse is available? People vote with their feet. There is no formal process for one’s voice being included in decision-making. But there is an open listening culture, and respect for people’s input as a basis for making good decisions. In any binding contracts we have an arbitration clause – if there are any disputes they are resolved in such a way as to preserve good relationships.

• Let things be a bit messy. When things are broken or imperfect, it creates an opportunity. Things that overly focus on tech become anti-human, optimization becomes an ideology. What can you solve with just adding more humans?

• Reject code as law. Hard DAOs are hostile to change – forks work by human to human conversation.

• The people who scream the loudest about how thing should be run tend to contribute least to its running.

Nadia clarified a difference in how they operate from how I outlined it:

When Jean opened the series, she talked about governance as perceive, decide, act. For us it’s Invite, Perceive, Act – rough consensus and running code. Alignment trumps vote.