Navigating relationships

in teams and community partnerships

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Intros and announcements

Code of Conduct

Code for America believes that anyone attending a Code for America event or participating in our online community should feel safe and be free from harassment.

As such, we expect all attendees to adhere to the Code of Conduct at every Code for America or Code for America Brigade event.��https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/about/code-of-conduct

ReVisioning

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From the Network ReVisioning Recommendation:

"We recognize the importance of self-governing capabilities for the Network to support itself and to provide clear pathways for members of our Network to help shape its future…

For decisions that our Network benefits from making together (e.g. adopting governance procedures, selecting locations for important events, weighing in on national actions) we recommend that our yearly Brigade Congress serve as an assembly where key decisions can be made (for both in-person and virtual participants). We will also consult organizations that do this well and pilot new approaches to grassroots governance. "

Announcements

Impact Sprints is kicking off in July!�Sign up to get notified when volunteer signups open up.�https://airtable.com/shrVPsi5C2780jO2G

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Code for America is hiring! �https://codeforamerica.org/jobs/�

Overview

Learning Goal�Build understanding around what it takes to give community partnerships the best chance of success.

What will we be covering?

• The Jemez principles
• Recapping
• Selection criteria & asking for 100%
• Power dynamics: Procurement, gifts, and charity
• Conway’s Law: Cooperate directly, or fork?
• Cleaning up a story
• Navigating requests
• Breakout: What has worked (and not worked) in your community partnerships?

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The Jemez Principles

1. Be Inclusive
2. Emphasis on Bottom-up Organizing
3. Let People Speak for Themselves
4. Work Together in Solidarity and Mutuality
5. Build Just Relationships Among Ourselves
6. Commitment to Self Transformation
• “As we change societies, we must change from operating on the mode of individualism to community-centeredness. We must ‘walk our talk.’ We must be the values that we say we’re struggling for and we must be justice, be peace, be community.”
• Allowing and encouraging change in yourself to happen. Not about being “not good enough” or having to “fix” yourself.
• Wisdom comes from having diverse experiences. Compassionate reflection helps.

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Read the full principles document

A few recaps

Recap: �Cooperative Communication

Cooperative Contract

• In relationships and communities, where it is wise and viable.
• No Secrets. No lies. No rescues. No Power Plays.

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Cooperative Communication

• restores a healthy balance of power
• Asking for 100% of what you want, 100% of the time
• Negotiate to agreement: Where we overlap, we can relate and build together.
• No “should” spirals

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Recap: Points of Unity

7-way

11-way

13-way

Recap: Points of Unity

7-way

11-way

13-way

Recap: Points of Unity honor differences & agreement

Groups must decide how and when big agreements and strategies will be revisited.

At the individual level, it usually represents less than the total of what you want to achieve, but:

• more than you can accomplish on your own
• infinitely more than you can achieve in competition with others.

Take your time. Coalitions are another level of complexity.

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[Assume caveats] a list of things that:

• everybody agrees to,
• nobody debates.

Points of unity are used by action groups that:

• need to be in agreement,
• need to work fast.

An agreement with Points of Unity is essential for participation in the group or partnership.

Can be used to connect large networks (150+)

Points of Unity are always explicit information (in contrast to community lore).

Last recap: Group cooperation in this world is a miracle.

Community Partnerships

Selection criteria and asking for 100%

“Asking for 100% of what we want” is shorthand for being honest, direct, and avoiding manipulation, mind-reading or power plays. It supports your autonomy and accountability.

Starting with what you don’t want can help you figure out what you do want. You can also think about your reasons for being involved.

Once those concepts have gelled at the group level, we can decide on boundaries that support our group’s autonomy and accountability within partnerships. Figuring out standard minimums, ideals, and “anti-goals” can help us develop selection criteria that will:

• Shrink the problem, and
• Script the critical moves

(h/t to Switch)

You can use any voting method. �This is volunteer labor– it can’t be coerced. �Anyone (depending on your setup) can vote, �but minimum amount of labor required.

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Power dynamics: Procurement, gifts, & charity

Whenever we do things for each other, there is some kind of power dynamic at play. We can use different metaphors to help in framing and negotiating agreements with community partners.

Procurement is when someone (usually on behalf of an organization or government agency) purchases a product or service from a vendor. Buyer establishes the parameters, vendor makes the product or performs the service. What does that mean for the power dynamic?

What do you think about giving/receiving gifts? What makes a gift? What makes a gift feel good or bad? How does the power dynamic work?

How do you think about charity? How does that power dynamic work?

Resource: “The Gift of It’s Your Problem Now” article: highlighted; direct

What if app developers who have used Free Software and Open Source pick up expectations of a gift economy mentality? Do we see our contributions to partners as gifts?

This gift economy has some aspects which parallel aspects of volunteering and even charity which the culture at large pick up from Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and other traditional practices. But the gift economy also goes back even further!

Resource: talk by David Graeber, Debt: the First 5000 years

Examine our motivations and reasons for volunteering: where they’re coming from and how they coexist and relate with others’ motivations in our group. This can help us avoid dominating others accidentally.

Conway’s Law: cooperate directly or fork?

Conway’s law: a microscope’s view of a processor tells you a lot about the teams’ structure who created it. How will your group have to change to collaborate—can you imagine what it would be like to embed with the other group’s way of working to a bigger or smaller extent?

Deciding on and building partnerships between groups is not unlike building dependencies �between app components because those are also made by people whose world is changing.

Our collaborations shape us: “Interfaces between components made by different groups of people are the most fragile pieces.” ��Walk with the partners for a while and build confidence if the involved groups can benefit from �some kind of connection. There are so many ways to cooperate:

• Connecting with, joining in another effort (contribute Pull Requests back, in app terms).
• Serving some specific part of another efforts’ needs.
• Organizing a new effort: for instance, “Fork” another effort. In the Open Charlotte brigade,� a SNAP SMS balance check project wasn’t adopted by the local government but � the government built its own as a result of the project. Their work was forked.
• Or otherwise decide not to collaborate directly with another effort.

(original article: highlighted / direct; wikipedia; See also Models of Collaboration in brigade network slides )

Link: Types of relationships

1. Organizing
1. A person or group of people initiates the activity and coordinates it, taking on the bulk of the scheduling, planning, outreach to the “organized”
2. Connecting with
• One party or another initiates contact
• Partners equally co-managing something
3. Serving
• The people who might be considered the “user”� of the project/event/service

Read more in this April 2021 Deck by Thad and Melanie for the NAC

Disciplined conflict and communication

Cleaning up your story

When we get mad at people (who we would otherwise want to have a more cooperative relationship with, we make up stories about why they did what they did.

Those stories can contain a lot of “Pig” for the other person or ourselves:

• Stupid
• Weak/Sick
• Crazy
• Lazy
• Ugly
• Bad
• Deserve to die/Worthless

Pig messages don’t represent the truth. They are binary, black and white, with heavy judgements. The truth is nuanced. Pig is full of cultural indoctrination and fear.

Have a hard times conversation with a trusted friend or coach. Get it all out. Throw a fit, it’s ok to be dramatic.

When you’re ready, come back to observable facts, feelings/emotions, and move from a self-centric, pig-filled story, to a concise, clear, other-centric story. Sometimes we call this “cleaning up our side of the fence.”

People are MUCH more likely to be able to hear a clean story. Then you can clear your held feelings and stories

Navigating requests

Speech acts menu

a. Request

b. Decline

c. Intimate Decline

d. Boundary Practice: Push Away

e. Negotiation and Counter Offers

g. Commit to Commit

h. Bypass

i. Insist

j. Quit

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What is your default in negotiation or responding to requests? �Is a change needed?

Try these!

• Test a new default.
• Trade win/losses.
• Slow down, take a break.
• Name any sense of danger, scarcity, competition. Is it real or false?
• Accept the unacceptable. Not about giving up, about saving energy and power for the next choice move.
• Notice if you are competing to not lose. Don’t do that. Come back to your 100%.
• In your 100%, don’t forget to include what’s working already.

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Breakout:

What has worked (and not worked) in your community partnerships?

Community Partnerships

What worked?

• Talk to them like a 5-year-old; keep it simple and be direct; don’t use jargon - eliminate noise
• Knowledge graph to show connections between orgs and members (WIP)
• Feedback loops
• Mixing both in-person and remote gatherings
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions and let them know if you need additional time to review - helps cut through fog
• Partnership Working Agreement Template - address unspoken questions & assumptions
• Code for Boston “User” Types & Personas
• Process & reflections > delivery
• Reflect on mistakes we make, hold ourselves accountable to them and learn from them
• Share stories of outcomes; celebrate!

What didn’t?

• Difficult to maintain partnerships (especially long-term) as volunteer contacts
• Remote gatherings not a good medium when conflicts arise
• Not asking questions → people might go off track
• Tech is not always the solution, how can we frame the relationship & learnings as the win so it doesn’t feel like a failure if we didn’t build a working tool?
• Not talking about what we don’t do well and mistakes we make

Body break

Report out

Brigade Challenge

1. If you already have something like points of unity in your group, work on partnership minimums or selection criteria
2. Do a one-on-one with a current or potential community partner!

To get more help, coaching, or strategize your way out of frustration and into cooperative leadership, sign up for office hours with me by messaging me on Slack (or emailing me at sierra.ramirez.au@gmail.com).

Discussion �and Q&A

Invitation: Appreciations practice

“I have an appreciation for you. Are you willing to hear it?”

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Appreciations are units of power.

Even small ones are bigger than you think.

It’s ok if it’s hard or awkward!

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Let’s try it once or twice, and then we can do �an full version after discussion/Q&A.

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Resources

Read the full Jemez principles document

Points of Unity CommunityWiki page, by Lion Kimbro

“The Gift of It’s Your Problem Now” article: highlighted; direct

Resource: talk by David Graeber, Debt: the First 5000 years

Embracing Conway’s Law: highlighted / direct; wikipedia;

See also Models of Collaboration in brigade network slides

11-way Venn Diagram original geometry paper

Last session:

The Other Side of Power by Claude Steiner

Julia Kelliher's chapters on Power & Oppression & Transactional Power from Access to Power

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Nancy Shanteau on:

• Clearing held feelings and stories
• Power and Trust
• Empowered Boundaries: Expectations, Rules and Agreements
• 5 Responses to a power play
• Video: Embodied Power Analysis
• Types of Power