This pinned topic is for you to add any links for which you think “hey, the Snowdrift.coop community should really check this out!” but you aren’t sure they really warrant their own topic and discussion.
The links may be quite tangential, but keep it to stuff of value or relevance overall.
If something ends up warranting real discussion, we can then move it to its own topic.
I found this specific epsiode to be the most valuable I have ever heard in terms of how to relate to people and communicate well. It focuses on leadership but applies to all sorts of relationships.
The lessons apply deeply to the sort of community, culture, cooperation, and teamwork that we want and need here at Snowdrift.coop.
This is the first podcast episode I chose to not speed up. I even had to pause and think for a while in the middle. And it’s the first I ever chose to save and listen to multiple times.
Update: I’ve since explored further stuff from Jim, per https://conscious.is — most stuff is public, not paywalled. They have a content-use policy that is FLO-ignorant but sincerely pro-social and well-intended (general acceptance of non-commercial use and adaptation, kinda shareware request to donate if you appreciate). I collected their set of meditations from Sound Cloud and compressed to ogg vorbis. Anyone who’d like that, send me a message and I’ll send you the files.
The Knowledge Project podcast is decent overall as well, though the episode with Jim was a standout. I also liked this episode with with the founder of DuckDuckGo: https://fs.blog/gabriel-weinberg/ — tons of Snowdrift-applicable stuff there, including policies and practices for good teamwork and decision-making in a distributed organization.
Newer video from Dan Ariely discusses the Public Goods Game which is core and clear example about the dilemmas we’re engaged with at Snowdrift.coop. He also discusses the importance of trust and designing to support it (and, my emphasis, this is not the same as designing to be without it, a la “trustless” blockchain style). All highly relevant to us:
I recently came across the Microsolidarity proposal by Rich Bartlett of Loomio, Enspiral, and The Hub:
https://www.microsolidarity.cc/proposal
I find the thinking it explores fresh and intriguing and I wonder what implications it has for funding work on the commons.
Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, was recently interview by Douglas Rushkoff on his TeamHuman podcast. It’s a fascinating discussion and full of stuff relevant to the concerns and mission of Snowdrift:
https://www.divio.com/blog/documentation/
This is one of the best explanations and guides I’ve seen around writing good documentation. I think we should follow these ideas and mark our own docs clearly. We can use this also to notice where we lack documentation.
There’s tons of resources about good writing (even our own https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/editorial/style-guide is decent, though it could use updates and read-more links). But rarely have I seen the general scope of writing made so clear as in the article above.
One of the talks that inspire me to develop new kinds of funding and business models: A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth - YouTube
I got out of the habit of using this thread to post useful links, but I’ll try to get back to it…
Pluralistic: Paying for it doesn’t make it a market (22 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow is a very relevant critique of the idea that paywalls somehow incentivize better treatment of people (i.e. less enshittification). It doesn’t matter whether we pay with money or attention or both, the power dynamic is what determines the experience. The question is whether we are locked in, how much we can control of things, and whether incentives are truly aligned (and paying for something does not make that alignment happen, the very idea that it would is baseless on its face).
Incidentally, I think Cory Doctorow’s https://pluralistic.net/ is one of the best of all resources in this space. He has integrity so everything he does with the site is aligned with the ideals he expresses, and he’s of course a great writer who does a good job cutting through the noise and pointing out how most things are pretty damn obvious — if only they weren’t obfuscated so much (which happens because powerful interests have incentive to obfuscate understanding of the many grotesque harms and ills of the system they run).