Milan: Patterns for Decentralised Organising

Rich and Nati from The Hum, have been supporting non-hierarchical organisations for the last decade, co-founding Loomio (a tech co-op building software for collective decision-making) and Enspiral (a network of self-organising companies).

We spent 2017 travelling through 14 countries, meeting with all kinds of groups who are trying to work in a decentralised, collaborative, non hierarchical management structure. Co-ops, startups, NGOs, companies, activist networks and government departments.

We discovered that all these groups face common challenges when they remove the traditional command-and-control structure: How can we be inclusive without spending all our time in meetings? How do we deal with power imbalances? How do we prioritise what to work on? How do we develop an open collaborative culture? And where does accountability come from if there is no boss!?

In this workshop we'll share 10 collaboration patterns that have been proven to help groups overcome these challenges. We start with culture and relationships first, tools and processes second.

Most importantly, we don’t just tell people about participatory organizing, we practice it together, co-creating the workshop and learning by experience. You can bring real challenges that you are facing in your team, organisation, or collective and we'll work together to design solutions you can try immediately.

In our workshop we bring together a diverse cross-section of people to share experiences and find new insights together. If you identify with any of these, this workshop is for you:

- Founder -- you’ve built a startup or launched a new NGO

- Networker, consultant, coach -- you’re connecting all the dots in the future of work: Agile, Teal, Holacracy, Sociocracy, Deliberately Developmental Organisations, etc.

- Intrapreneur -- you’re leading change within an established organisation

- Community organiser -- you coordinate people for positive social impact

- Facilitator -- you host collaborative processes for co-creation and collective intelligence

- Collaborator -- you’re in a co-op, freelancing, working in Agile teams, or contributing to community projects

To maximise accessibility, tickets are priced on a sliding scale, please choose accordingly to your financial circumstances. Spaces are limited.

“Through these patterns I could see how my past adventures with non-hierarchical groups had fallen apart. It gave me new ideas to bring back to my own fledgling cooperative. I imagine that everyone in the room was experiencing a similar revelation; the uncovering of something known but also unnamed, the implicit patterns that are present in every group of humans, which so often are never identified, seemed here to be explicit, finally.” Continue reading...

Drew Hornbein, Good Good Work

“Patterns for Decentralised Organising” is hosted by WeMake at Milano Luiss Hub for makers and students, and it’s one of the event within the learning journey promoted by DSI4EU project

The broad definition of “Digital Social Innovation" promoted by the European Commission for the past three years helps to describe a new area in which digital technologies are used to tackle societal challenges and to promote alternative models to increase quality of life.

Technology can be designed to support people find better work by facilitating new connections but also enhance the quality of organisations who needs new tools for horizontal decision-making.

More info about WeMake in Italian

Learn more about DSI