2021-2022 Season
Many open source public interest projects identify as do-ocracies - where contribution and participation guides a project’s trajectory. For many, this structure holds a liberatory potential where seemingly low barriers to entry promise a future of diverse contributors working collaboratively to build open solutions. This panel asks: what kinds of power can do-ocracies build and hold? Panelists offer examples from other movements that have mobilized the structure of mutual aid towards radical solutions to questions of community health, safety and inclusion, and sustainable work.
Join us for a conversation that explores the link between project governance and the horizons towards which digital infrastructure projects strive. As conversations deepen around implementing distributed and transparent governance models towards more sustainable futures for open source projects, we zoom out to ask what visions drive efforts building and maintaining digital public infrastructures? How can work around project governance reflect and inform larger goals around resource redistribution, equality, and transformation of the commons? How to build power laterally towards a sustainability that coheres beyond grant seasons, beyond crisis response, beyond burnout?
Camille Acey is an unschooling mother, a tech worker, public speaker, podcaster, and an activist/organizer. She is a founding member of CoLET (the Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology), a radical woman-run tech collective in Brooklyn, NYC promoting the adoption of free and open software for the solidarity economy. Camille is an advisor to The Maintainers, a global network of people promoting care for our physical and digital commons, and she is also a board chair for Whose Knowledge?, a global campaign to center marginalized voices on the internet.
Liz Barry works on collaboration at scale. She is co-founder of PublicLab.org and Talk To Me, and an elected Councilor of the Gathering for Open Science Hardware. She is a founding board member of The Computational Democracy Project, advisor to Extinction Rebellion’s Future Democracy Hub, and nobody at g0v. She studied landscape architecture, then taught for a decade in Columbia University’s graduate urban design program and Parsons the New School for Design. She has worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), land artist Mary Miss, and Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG). She likes to play outside.
Njera Keith is a practicing, Black revolutionary, whose focus is Black vanguardism, destabilization of Black relationships to oppressive systems, and the development of equitable and alternative economies. She is the co-founder of 400+1, a cooperative federation that re-imagines Marxism-Leninism, Black collective power, and solidarity politics.