Power and Inequality in do-ocracies
I am a member of a London-based community, called MoonCows. The community was initially organised (in 2018) around festivals and parties, both attending and making them. Later, it became more than that, sprawling into theatre visits, music jams, hackathons, art-making, etc. Two interesting aspects of this community are that it regularly assembles around a single goal of making an awesome event, where the predominant audience is the community itself, AND that the community is also very non-judgemental, diverse, and curious. The members of MoonCows have therefore been encouraged to experiment and try their wildest ideas, making these events develop into something pretty unique on the London scene.
The group now counts more than 200 people, and with personal communication between all members becoming increasingly difficult in such a large group, the group decision-making process has come under scrutiny: Who makes decisions? Why them and not others? Can anyone make a decision? How do you know when you can make a decision for the group? People have passionately argued for different governance approaches situated between two extremes: laissez-faire and direct democracy. Tired of these arguments, Olivier Henaff and I have teamed up to solve this once and for all. WITH SCIENCE!
Even though it was initially conceived as a joke scientific article, it actually showed us something truly novel about the lives of communities of a similar type. We believe that this study can be applied to other non-hierarchical do-ocracies, such as emergent scientific communities, open-source/free-software projects, Occupy Wall Street working groups, early Burning Man-type communities and others.