Making Better Group Decisions by RxC Voice // NEW MODELS OF ECONOMY & GOVERNANCE

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In order to take on the challenges of our time, we need to get better at making decisions as groups. At RadicalxChange, we are developing tools for group decision-making that can help identify stakeholders or impacted persons, facilitate liquid networks of trust, surface shared values or ideas, and steer groups toward consensus rather than disagreement. We have brought some of those tools together in an end-to-end decision-making platform we call RxC Voice.

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Needed all the time

We believe that inclusive, productive deliberation is paramount to a healthy democracy. In order to make this possible for large groups (e.g. cities) and digital communities (e.g. blockchain communities), we need to design digital platforms on which group members can engage in conversations that move toward consensus rather than divisive argument.

In this session, we will discuss the components that make a successful decision-making process. We will also be running interactive demos with innovative democratic tools and share findings and anecdotes from experiments with governments, social movements, blockchain communities, and more. Finally, we will be discussing next steps for the RxC Voice project and democratic innovation and imagining radical futures of deliberative democracy and community self-governance.

This session is for anyone interested in exploring tools for more successful deliberation at scale, digital democracy, or decentralized decision-making. If you think we need to update the platforms on which groups discuss important decisions and issues for healthier democracy, then you will enjoy discussing this project with us.

We hope that our session will inspire you to experiment with new democratic tools such as RxC Voice, Pol.is, and Quadratic Voting. These tools have already impacted the way that many groups deliberate and make decisions, including governments, DAOs, corporate boards, social movements, and more. We hope you will contact us if you would like to pilot RxC Voice with your group, collaborate with us on the project, or fund our efforts.

When our deliberative tools fail to surface the shared values of a group, democracy suffers and lapses into authoritarianism or plutocracy. We hope you will join us in rethinking the ways that constituencies express their wants and needs to each other and to their leadership.

RadicalxChange (RxC) is a global movement for next-generation political economies. It advances plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrades of democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons, and identity.

Alex Randaccio is a Project Developer at RadicalxChange, leading development of RxC’s suite of experimental governance tools. Jennifer Lyn Morone is RadicalxChange Foundation’s CEO and a multidisciplinary visual artist, activist, and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the human experience with technology, economics, politics, and identity, and the moral and ethical issues that arise from such systems. Her interests lie in exploring ways of creating social justice and equal distribution of the future.

Twitter: @RadxChange
Website: radicalxchange.org

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At the theatre by Jussi Helsten Helsinki Marketing

Casino Égalité – diversity and democracy in arts by sortition? by Rasmus Slätis [FI] // HETERODOX INSTITUTIONS

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Casino Égalité is a dream of strengthening solidarity and sharing within the cultural scene. By celebrating chance and the luck of the draw, the idea is to give art and artists space(s) in which to be unexpected and uncontrolled. Sortition could be a way of governing such spaces to strengthen the feeling of equality, where responsibility and possibility go hand-in-hand. This session contains deliberation, gambling and redistributing.

Agenda track: 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Good to have
Day: Friday 24 September

The initiative, which goes under the working title Casino Égalité, aims to create a new cultural oasis for the independent theatre scene in Helsinki and to work as an experiment of an alternative way of governing, tackling the challenges of meritocracy, hierarchy and lobbyism. 

This venture has two exceptional features it wants to experiment on: governance by rotation of responsibility and sharing of resources between institutional and independent players. The goal of both is to allow for greater diversity of approaches in performance arts.

The field of performing arts is often not really lacking infrastructure nor material resources required for production. The problem is rather that the resource distribution is asymmetrical, leaving out the ever growing pool of theatre freelancers. There is a substantial workforce of artists hungering for the opportunity to create and present their art, but they have very limited possibilities to do so. Access to resources is regulated by a set of opaque requirements difficult to decode and held aback by rigid structures. Getting the chance to produce one’s work is often not a question of skills or passion, nor even the luck of the draw.

The whole venture of Casino Égalité is based on exactly that – the luck of the draw, namely; governing by sortition. From selecting the productions of the upcoming season to the curation of additional programmes; to appointing administrative and technical staff; all is based on the rotation of responsibility, selected through sortition. This means that the topics and aesthetics of the productions and additional programming are liberated from conformism to trends and cronyism. It also means that the artists and ensembles creating these have no pressure to have impressive résumés or charming personalities.

Instead, the pool of professionals engaged in the (serious) play of Casino Égalité all have equal responsibility for managing the venture, and equal possibility to produce and realise their artistic work, regardless of status, merit or charisma.

By practicing sortition as the principal modus operandi, which is not a new invention as a democratic practice (see previous examples here or here), this cultural oasis would on a broader spectrum function also as a laboratory for an alternative way of governance that tackles the challenges of meritocracy, hierarchy, bias and lobbyism. These phenomena undermine both diversity in the arts, as well as from a broader societal point of view threaten belief in change through elections and representative democracy.

This session is for everyone who enjoys culture and arts, indeterminacy and gambling, art practitioners, institutions and funders. The aim is to gather unexpected perspectives and connections to further develop the initiative. Also, the session hopefully awakes the pleasures of sharing and gambling and gives a glimpse of the possibility of sustainability without austerity to the participants.

Rasmus Slätis is a Finnish theatre maker engaged in acting, teaching theatre and trying to make spaces of freedom for artists and art. Having been based in Berlin the past decade he has recently returned to his hometown, Helsinki.

Twitter:  @rabbeson
Website: www.rasmusslatis.com

Some links on sortition as a democratic practice:
Voting undermines the will of the people. It’s time to replace it with sortition.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/14/voting-undermines-the-will-of-the-people-its-time-to-replace-it-with-sortition

The Irish citizens assembly chooses representatives by lottery not election.
https://www.buildinganewreality.com/the-irish-citizens-assembly-chooses-representatives-by-lottery-not-election 

What if We Selected our Leaders by Lottery? Democracy by Sortition, Liberal Elections and Communist Revolutionaries
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.12651 

Brett Henning: What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people?
https://www.ted.com/talks/brett_hennig_what_if_we_replaced_politicians_with_randomly_selected_people?language=en

Photo by Jussi Helsten, Helsinki Marketing

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Reimagine Wellbeing Part II by Life Itself & Moral Imaginations [UK/FR] // ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS

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Fighting climate change with technology and changing consumption behaviour won’t be enough. The pivotal answer may be to finally pursue a world where cultivating better ways of being, for current and future humans, is the goal of social and economic policy. 

Agenda track: 2 Ontological politics, 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None
Screen need: All the time
Day: Friday 24 September

Any social or political envisioning or policy is constrained by an invisible frame: by the implicit values and views on which it is created, such as its views on the nature of human beings and the good life. Life Itself will be hosting two sessions to work on changing the narrative of what we are capable of as humans and the narrative of wellbeing, and what it means to bring this shift into policy-making.

This second session on Friday is a workshop organised together with Moral Imaginations. In the workshop, participants – using collective imagining methods – will dive into the implications on policy and current possibilities to progress this shift in policy-making.

You can participate in one or both sessions. Attending the conversation on Thursday is not a requirement for participating in the second part on Friday. The first Thursday session is organised together with Prosocial World and the conversation is fuelled by professor David S. Wilson‘s key insights from his wide work on group or multilevel selection in evolution, and applying evolutionary theory to different aspects of humanity, such as studying cultural evolution or group health.

Life Itself is a community of pragmatic utopians, committed to practical action for a radically wiser, healthier world. Life Itself creates co-living hubs, starts businesses, does research and engages in activism to pioneer a wiser culture.

lifeitself.us @forlifeitself 

Moral Imaginations is building a movement of moral imagination: collective imagining to increase radical kinship with the human and more-than-human worlds, present, past and future. They facilitate and develop collective imagining to empower people to create shared imaginings of the future. Phoebe Tickell is co-founder of Moral Imaginations, who believes that we need new stories of what it means to be human.

moralimaginations.com
@moral_imagining @solarpunk_girl

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RegenerativeGovernance-ImageByJessicaPerlstein

Regenerative Governance – An experimental simulation of decentralised organisation by Bloom // HETERODOX INSTITUTIONS, NEW MODELS OF ECONOMY & GOVERNANCE

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In this session we will be organising a simulation experience of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). This done by playing a game to learn peer-to-peer governance. This game is based on 13 years of real world R&D, finding and experimenting with replicable solutions in over 200 cities around the world. The session relies strongly on audience participation and interaction.

Agenda track: 4 Heterodox institutions, 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen need: All of the time
Day: Thursday 23 September

Prior to the DAO simulation in the session, Kiwi child-friendly city expert and curator Hannah Mitchell will be hosting a meditation session.

After the festival, Bloom will be hosting the first Bloom Womb cohort. This program seeks to bring to real-life the experiences gained in the DAO simulation.

Bloom Womb is a two-month in-depth introduction to regenerative cultures. It utilises a short syllabus, and a weekly meeting to engage and encourage deep connections and support among peers. At the end of the two-month period, there is a real-life weekend where participants near each other physically carry out a part of their goals or interests together. This program tangibly supports Untitled participants in following through on gems from their Untitled experience. It also builds deeper connectivity between our communities, and would support Bloom Network in starting a small revenue stream to continue bootstrapping our collaborative efforts.

Bloom is a grassroots international community of people and projects working toward regenerative cultures, founded in 2008. Local Bloom hubs around the world grow participation in practices such as food security, local economies, celebrations of diversity, and art as cultural transformation. There are tens of thousands of solutions for climate restoration and social equity all over the world. However, they are invisible to the general public and disconnected from one another. Bloom aims to connect people and existing initiatives, locally and globally, to build capacity together and inspire a billion acts of regeneration.

@ourbloomnetwork
bloomnetwork.org

Illustration by Jessica Perlstein / Bloom

Photo by Bloom

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Associate, the resident AI Poet of Untitled, by Otso Havanto [FI]

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Untitled’s resident poet Associate is back. Associate creates an experimental and poetic digital documentation from the various discussions that take place within the Untitled events. Associate is at the same time an independent artwork and experimental documentation of the festival. It is displayed online at associate.associates

The recorded discussions in Untitled meetings and festival events are processed through a machine learning algorithm. This process picks up parts of sentences and individual words that accumulate and mix in the ever increasing database. The algorithm forms new connections between various textual elements based on machine learning models that analyse the context and statistical properties of individual words and phrases.

The machine learning model aims to bring light to emerging and new connections between textual nodes, and reflect on various alternative meanings and paths derived from the language used within Untitled discussions.

Privacy and anonymisation of data is a core function of the artwork. All the conversations recorded at Untitled Festival that are used for Associate, are processed in a way that it is impossible to identify an individual speaker. The recordings are not published. 

The version at display on the website creates new textual interpretation clusters and poetic variations from the Untitled discussions, ultimately aiming to foster the creation of Untitled’s own unique discourse engine. 

Associate uses a statistical machine learning model that has been trained by the Common Crawl dataset, and by the OntoNotes source material from the University of Pennsylvania. The work accumulates ever expanding textual material from the Untitled discussions and produces novel statistical vectors between the various meanings of words and concepts. Over time the work trains a model that is unique to the language used by the Untitled community and platform.

The artwork aims to encourage us to use big data as a tool and resource for the various communities, movements, and other non-commercial organizations, that aim to create a more just and fair future society for all.

Otso Havanto is a new media artist and a maker creating digital art that leverages data and experimental analog/digital interfaces, and audiovisual sculptures and instruments exploring both new and obsolete technologies. Otso works cross-disciplinary with different tools and methods, focusing on generative processes and automation.

The artwork can be found on the following link: associate.associates

More of the artist: otsohavanto.net

A poem by Associate

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Universal Basic Mobility by Robin Chase [US] // CIVIC IMAGINATION & HETERODOX INSTITUTIONS

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At any given movement, 50% of the population cannot get into a car and drive somewhere. Yet this lack of mobility by so many people appears invisible to most of us, including planners and policymakers. Freedom of movement is a key human right for a more equitable future. 

Agenda track: 3 Civic Imagination & 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New perspectives 
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Possible to use audio only
Day: Thursday 23 September at 16-17.30 UTC | 19-20.30 EEST

The transition to EVs alone will not meet our 2030 climate goal of a 50% reduction in CO2 output. We need a transportation paradigm shift to introduce meaningful change: one founded in equity and opportunity, as the young, the poor, and Black people have the least access to a car, and.

In this session we will be imagining a mobility network that requires no government license or money to participate: A baseline of real autonomy for everyone. Everyone is welcome to join us! A diversity of ages and life experiences are needed to consider this basic human right.

Together, we need to find a narrative that makes this invisible/lost true freedom of movement salient and desirable to everyone, not just liberal, or urban, or green, or progressive populations. How do we tell reveal this story and the benefits in a way that encourages others to tell their stories and build/maintain momentum? and carry it to those deciding on which infrastructure and green investments are to be prioritized.

Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur. She is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world; as well as co-founder of Veniam, a network company that moves terabytes of data between vehicles and the cloud. Her recent book is Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism. Her current passion is working with cities to maximize the transformation possible with the introduction of self driving cars.

@rmchase

robinchase.org 

 

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The Future of Work – the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we’d like to be true by Chipo Hamukoma [ZA] // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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In 2000, 11% of the global labour force was in Africa, and 25% in China. By 2100, 42% of the global labour force will be in Africa, and only 8% in China. As our future narratives are increasingly orientated towards a technology-driven world, where do all these people figure in? This session led by Chipo Hamukoma investigates the stories we tell ourselves about the future of work and the ones we’d like to be true.

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives 
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some (Warm up at the beginning)
Screen need: Good to have

Our imaginations of the future are largely embedded in the past. New narratives of the future are shaped by climate realities and corporate forecasting. What does it mean to pause and collectively imagine a new world of work that honours the things we know to be true and creates space for more possibilities?

My name is Chipo Hamukoma, Research Manager at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. I’ve worked with governments across Africa solving complex problems in challenging contexts and am now exploring how to get more young Africans engaged in income generating activities. 

I grew interested in understanding the future when I led a project on the Future of African Cities. Which gave a really granular perspective on how to build cities for the future.  My current work is in solving youth unemployment in South Africa and that puts me at the intersection of futures and work. With our narratives about the future as old as they are, there’s a really interesting opportunity for us to introduce contemporary hopes and dreams to the stories we tell about the future.

This festival session will be a collective intelligence exercise in identifying 3–5 core principles to improve the nature of work, created for people who enjoy thinking, complex problems and creating.

From the insights developed in this session we can work towards distilling the fundamental nature of work, focusing on the ideas that will allow for more inclusive advocacy in discussions of the post/inter-Covid future of work.

@n_hamukoma
www.linkedin.com/in/nchamukoma 

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Helping you to hear me by Pehmee The Soft Collective [FI] // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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Time to practice softness and being present and intentional in your hearing. 

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination & 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New perspectives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement: None
Screen need: Needed all the time
Day: Thursday 23 September, 15–16.30 UTC | 18-19.30 EEST

In this session we investigate how to connect and use our observation skills. We try to create a common space and communicate without physical presence by stripping down the daily routines and roles we might hold. You don’t have to bring anything but yourself to this session. We will be guiding you through this experience, so close off all distractions and the let the process talk. 

The session is for those who want to recenter after a long day with human-to-human interaction, and for anyone who is willing to listen. If we listen but do not hear each other, we cannot work intersectionally. In today’s world being present is active work that we need to practice. When the focus is to listen, rather than to concentrate on oneself: What could emerge from that? What kind of connections could evolve?

Pehmee aka The Soft is a collective from Helsinki, Finland. The collective members, artists and media workers are Caroline Suinner and Meriam Trabelsi, but you can also call us incurable rnb-babez_91. Our mission is to create space for the representation of marginalized bodies in media and fashion. The collective curates, hosts and creates content on several different media platforms, such as podcasts, radio, video and social media. The Pehmee collective also offers consultations for universities, seminars and international companies. They have also designed festival concepts, journalistic content, and safer spaces for movement amongst other events.

www.pehmee.com

@pehmeeog

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What kind of organisations survive in a regenerative world? by Halogen & Future Fit Leadership [NO] // NATURE–HUMAN

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We as societies need to move away of our current forms of action based on extracting resources from people and the planet around us. This form of action is pervaded by a sense of separation from our own true nature, from each other and from the natural world around us. Moving beyond sustainable, we believe the future will be regenerative – finding harmony with our own human-natures and the wider nature of life on Earth. But what kind of organisations have a role in a regenerative future, and what are the characteristics of a truly regenerative organisation?

Agenda track: 1 Nature – human
Session type: New narratives
Day: Thursday 23 September

In order to open up possibilities for regenerative futures, we will need to reinvent our organisations. Join Halogen, Future Fit Leadership Academy and Demos Helsinki to explore the qualities of a regenerative organisation and discover how our business becomes life-affirming for ourselves and all life on Earth.

Our businesses are powerful forces of agency. Each organisation has both an inner-collective of people within its culture, and also a network of stakeholder relations and communities through its ecosystem connected through vision, values and value.

In enabling organisations to become more regenerative we unlock potential in the people and stakeholder communities touched by regenerative organisations, hence help system-change beyond reducing harm into life-affirming futures.

This two-hour workshop is for a diverse group of cultural creatives, social pioneers, leadership and organisational development practitioners, sustainability specialists and regeneration explorers.

A rich picture of themes will emerge from this session and be shared after the event with the
participants, along with information on the systemic tools, frames and methods used throughout the
workshop.

Halogen is a cross-disciplinary design and innovation agency from Norway. halogen.no

The Future Fit Leadership Academy is a community of forward-thinking practitioners involved in transforming leaders and organisations. ffla.co

Demos Helsinki is a globally operating, independent think tank, which believes that
only together can we fight for a fair, sustainable, and joyful next era. demoshelsinki.fi

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Everything is a citizen by Dark Matter Labs [UK] // NATURE – HUMAN

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There is a river in New Zealand that has been granted citizenship. What if everything were a citizen? In this session we look at the world from this perspective. 

Agenda track:  1 Nature – Human 
Session type: New perspectives
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen needs: Possible to use audio only

There is an urgent and increasing understanding that humans’ relationship to the material and biological world is deeply flawed. At the same time there’s an increased understanding of non-human actors – from viruses to climate systems – playing a massive role in our everyday lives. However, “protecting nature” or “fighting the virus” for example seem approaches that do not address the real issues.

Could we instead give “everything” agency, see everything as a citizen that has rights and can make contracts with us? 

The session is for all creatures interested in biodiversity, governance and exploring a vision of the world where humans are not at the center of it all.

@indy_johar

darkmatterlabs.org

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Contact us

untitled@untitled.community