In this episode of the Tao of WAO Law podcast, hosts Doug Belshaw, Laura Hilliger, and guest John Evans from Code Operative discuss the practicalities of running a co-operative and the challenges they may face. We highlight the importance of trust, open communication, and consensus-based decision-making processes like Sociocracy. The conversation also touches on the complexities of intellectual property rights for the COVID-19 vaccine and the need for global collaboration in addressing public health crises.
Books
Find all of our guests’ reading recommendations at our The Tao of WAO book club.
Our guest: John Evans
- code-operative.co.uk
- @dr_the_evidence on Twitter
- @KingMob@refactorcamp.org
Co-op links
Meta Systematic
IP on the vaccine
- twitter.com/epilepticrabbit/sta…1391686950571200513 <- “The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation…”
- IP, vaccines, and capitalism – octodon.social/@silverspookgames…06127965084693344
- Warez book – twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1391701877352456193
- Fractional dosing – marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevol…razeneca.html
Transcript
Tao of WAO S01 E05
Doug Belshaw: [00:00:27] Hello and welcome to the Tao of WAO, Laura calls it the Dao of WAO, a podcast about the intersection of technology, society and internet culture with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure. I am Doug Belshaw.
Laura Hilliger: [00:00:40] And I’m Laura Hilliger. To kick us off, we want to mention Open Collective, which is a platform that allows us to, quote, accept donations and sponsorships, celebrate our supporters, pay expenses, and keep everyone up to date all in one place. It is very transparent and you can find us at opencollective.com/weareopen. Today, we are joined by our second guest. And I’m very excited because John and I have not met before, so I’m very interested to see where we go in the next 45 minutes or so. But welcome, John. And why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about you and a bit about Code Operative.
John Evans: [00:01:21] Uh, sure. So, um, I am a paediatric millennial. I’m from Newcastle, uh, software developer, Um, and Code Operative is a two and a half year old Tech Co-op based in Gateshead, which is near Newcastle. Um, I think that makes it like Generation Alpha or something like that. Um, uh, yeah, our website is code operative Co.uk. And um, yeah, I volunteered to be on the podcast with, with a joke that I wanted to see if Laura not being from the UK and Doug being from, uh, the same region as me would get it as a regional joke. So can. Can I tell the joke?
Laura Hilliger: [00:02:02] Yes, but I’m not going to get it. But go ahead.
John Evans: [00:02:04] Yeah, okay. But you might enjoy it anyway even if you don’t get it. Maybe. Um. Okay. So, um, a man in in Ashington walks into a hairdressers says, Can I have a perm, please? The hairdresser says, Certainly, sir. I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Laura Hilliger: [00:02:25] What?
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:28] So the version I’ve heard of that is Kevin Keegan goes into the, into the hairdressers major. Yeah. So to get that joke, Laura, you’d have to have heard my accent when I was about 15 years old growing up in Ashington. Um, it’s got this dialect which is pitmatic, and so perm and poem sound the same. So can I have a perm? Certainly, sir. I wandered lonely as a cloud, as an I wandered. Lonely as a cloud, as in quoting a poem at him rather than giving him a perm. Anyway.
John Evans: [00:03:02] Why would he. Why would he be asking for a poem?
Laura Hilliger: [00:03:08] My face is just saying this is a very British joke.
Doug Belshaw: [00:03:12] It’s a very. It’s quite a nice joke. Would say it’s very niche. It’s funny between, like, two rivers in the north east of England. Yeah.
John Evans: [00:03:20] No, if you if you think the Kevin Keegan one would travel wider, my friend told my friend that he’s from Oxford and he did tell it to his dad, but he changed it from Ashington to Newcastle just to make it like more of.
Doug Belshaw: [00:03:33] Okay, okay. Got it. I appreciate that.
Laura Hilliger: [00:03:38] Probably do an entire podcast with regional jokes. I think all of mine are not suitable for public consumption. I grew up in like West Virginia, not West. No, don’t push my buttons. I am not from West Virginia. I am from Virginia. And in the United States, all of the states have an enemy state, a nemesis state. And so the nemesis state for Ohio is Michigan. The nemesis, state for Virginia is West Virginia. I don’t know what all of them are, but I don’t know why.
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:08] It’s almost like I remember that on purpose. Just to push your buttons.
Laura Hilliger: [00:04:11] Yeah. It’s almost like that. I don’t know why I get I get like adrenaline shot up my neck when people tell me I’m from West Virginia.
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:20] Born and.
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:20] Raised. Yeah.
Laura Hilliger: [00:04:21] You know, we’re culturally conditioned. We have jokes like, you know, why don’t they have ice cubes in West Virginia? Because they lost the recipe.
John Evans: [00:04:31] Yeah. That’s similar to Geordies and Mackems which is for. Yeah. Mackems aware from, from Sunderland and Geordies are from Newcastle. It’s the same kind of thing. Regional rivalry.
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:45] Yes. So, so what does, what does co-operative do.
John Evans: [00:04:49] Um, we are sort of bog standard Tech Corp. If you want apps or websites then we will make your app and website hopefully that you are not an evil doer and we haven’t had to turn down well, I suppose because it’s a freelancer co-op. Um, when the evil I don’t know, not, not evil doer but like say advertising projects or whatever, like people generally don’t volunteer to do them. Like we get someone goes, I found this lead for this advertising project and then no one does it.
Doug Belshaw: [00:05:20] So it’s a network of freelancers, right?
John Evans: [00:05:22] Yeah. Yeah. Um, we’re sort of in a refounding process at the moment, so we’re trying to decide like how dense do we want the network to be and does it maybe make sense to be, um, employees or to move from, or to have like a worker status or whatever in the UK? That’s a meaningful distinction between I’ll.
Doug Belshaw: [00:05:40] Tell you what, we can totally help you with that rebrand away from bog standard, if you.
John Evans: [00:05:46] Don’t mind it so much.
John Evans: [00:05:47] I’ve been, um, uh, I’ve been because of the refunding. I’ve been trying to think about like what? What I actually want it to be. And for, for from the start of the corp, it was very, very sort of exciting doing this, like, new things, right? And, um, I’ve become more interested in imitation rather than innovation when it comes to like running this, running this business and just being like picking this, picking the easiest thing that I know already works and then having like a reference point to, uh, to build off. Yeah.
Doug Belshaw: [00:06:16] Exactly. When you, when you try and innovate on everything at the same time, it’s kind of impossible. You have to have something which is, you know, the same.
Laura Hilliger: [00:06:24] And Co-operative is also a member of the Kotek network, right?
John Evans: [00:06:29] Yes. I mean, I think, um, um, I think that it came out of the, it sort of inspired by the other co-op in Kotek. Right? I mean, that’s sort of what the I’ve been thinking about what the project of Co-operative is, and it’s sort of like just doing, doing a tech co-op in a particular place more than the structure is experimental. It’s the like context that is experimental in the sense that can this can it work in this place with these people? Um, so we’ve had a lot of advice and support from people in like Agile, collective and outlandish and um, know lots to name people just, it’s just always been good to sort of check in with people and get, get help from them in terms of what we’re doing.
Laura Hilliger: [00:07:16] Yeah, as have we. We are open is definitely access resources from the Kotek network and there’s lots of people in that network that are just really experienced with co-ops, including all of the kinds of challenges that might arise or conversations where, you know, being new to this kind of structure can, you know, some, some of the decisions you have to make when every when you do consensus based decision making or when you have to make decisions about stuff that you’re maybe not an expert in. Like for me, it’s, you know, I’m really glad that other people in we are open deal with like spreadsheets and finances because I get really stressed out not because I’m that horrible at maths, but uh, I’m kind of bad at maths.
Doug Belshaw: [00:08:03] People get their energy from different places.
Laura Hilliger: [00:08:05] Exactly.
Doug Belshaw: [00:08:05] Um, actually, Tim Klafter had some kind of feedback and questions from us, for us from Twitter, which we didn’t get to in previous episodes. But before we get to that, because I think John might have some kind of input on that. John I think you’ve been listening to previous episodes and you had some well, you wanted to reflect on your own experience of.
John Evans: [00:08:24] Oh yeah, sure, so, um, uh, so this is from last episode, so people listening chronologically in a binge binge listening, this is going to be so delicious for you. So, um, uh, this is about context switching, right? And, and basically, uh, last week I was, I had for, for about like maybe an hour task on four different projects. And because the. Context, which was like sort of purely, purely internal in the sense that all that was changing was what I was thinking about rather than the place I was in or what I was doing, because I was just sitting at my computer. I was going to open a different file and different set of folders or whatever for a different project. Um, I could feel as I was like thinking Right now I’m going to go do this. I could feel it being actually physically painful to enter that domain, even though I wasn’t actually I wasn’t moving in space, but moving. Um, moving in, moving in context. I was like just going into it being like, I don’t want to do this and feeling sort of resistance from my brain or something. Um, I played with that a couple of times just to see what it was, what it was like, because it was really, it was quite a novel experience to have a, I don’t know, to have to feeling resistance about that sort of set a set of information of shapes that was just there. Yeah.
Doug Belshaw: [00:09:44] I feel like the pandemic for me has really caused that to be problematic. So previously, yeah, I work from home, but I’ve worked from coffee shops and the library and, you know, my parents house and whatever. And so sometimes I will literally go and do some kind, a particular kind of task like research or writing or whatever in a particular place. Sometimes it’s just I cannot stand these four walls anymore. I need to go somewhere else. And when you can’t do that because you’ve got everything set up and you can’t go anywhere because there’s lockdown, it’s really kind of a problem. You have to force yourself to make that conceptual switch. Yeah.
John Evans: [00:10:23] That’s why I picked up on the, the, the, the mode switching thing was like the reason I think that mode switching feels good in context. Switching feels bad is because the mode you’re taking, you’re keeping the context and you’re just taking the context to a different place, Um, which is probably much more enjoyable. Yeah, it is. It’s almost the opposite of what was happening with, uh, with me changing project. And I was, I was carrying all of the, all, I don’t know, all of the work was being done by me rather than the space or.
Doug Belshaw: [00:10:50] Whatever that was.
Laura Hilliger: [00:10:51] Do either of you have rituals that you do when you’re changing contexts, like when you’re staying at your computer, but you’re switching to a different client project or whatever, a different kind of task?
Doug Belshaw: [00:11:03] Do you mean like.
Doug Belshaw: [00:11:04] Doing like standing up, turning around three times and saying, Yes.
Laura Hilliger: [00:11:06] That’s exactly what I mean. Do you do a couple of push ups and then switch contexts or.
John Evans: [00:11:12] No, that’s a great idea.
Laura Hilliger: [00:11:14] I don’t do that. No, I was actually thinking about the way that. So I basically live in my browser. All of my projects are in my browser, but I have different tab groups for different projects. And so like one of my rituals is if I’m going to think about something else, then I have to switch all of the tabs that I have open so that I’m only focussed on the thing that I’m context switching to and I move, you know, I move tabs between groups because of course I open stuff that’s not relevant to what I’m doing every once in a while. But I find that switching between these 20 tabs and those 20 tabs and knowing I’m going from, you know, Greenpeace to Catalyst and not seeing any more tabs open from the Greenpeace project and only seeing catalyst tabs helps my brain kind of reset a little bit.
Doug Belshaw: [00:12:05] When I had a mac, I did when I was working at Mozilla, I did have a Mozilla login on my Mac and a personal one which worked for a bit. But then like within work, I don’t think it would. The only ritual I’ve got. Um, this reminds me there’s a comedian in the UK called, um, James Acaster. Yeah. And in one of his stand ups he talks about no more jobs then the day. He always says no more jobs. And then he, like, mentally moves on. I don’t do that because that’s a bit crazy. But my monitor in my office, which you too can see while we’re recording this podcast, I’ve also got my PlayStation here as well, which I plan and my son plays on now. One of the HDMI cables died recently on that and I decided not to replace it. And so now when it gets to Friday, I literally turn off my computer, switch the HDMI cable over to the PlayStation, and it’s the weekend. As soon as I do that, which is actually pretty good, it works out quite well. It means I’m now terrible at FIFA, though, because I don’t play.
Laura Hilliger: [00:13:07] So but you’re always saying we should be recording this podcast from Inside Red Dead Redemption around a campfire. So how do you expect that we can accomplish that if you only have one HDMI cable?
Doug Belshaw: [00:13:20] Just curious. We’d either have to. It’s not that I’ve only own one HDMI cable. It’s more like I’ve decided not to replace it for like good reason. So what? I mean. But we should totally record this podcast and actually have all of our co-op meetings around Red Dead Redemption and Brian’s just going to have to buy and John just have to buy a passport.
John Evans: [00:13:40] And you get your kickback from Rockstar.
Doug Belshaw: [00:13:42] That’s right.
John Evans: [00:13:42] That’s right.
Laura Hilliger: [00:13:44] Rockstar If you’re listening to this podcast, you would like to support us. Please send a very large check to.
Doug Belshaw: [00:13:50] Go to our open collective.
Laura Hilliger: [00:13:52] Yeah, go to open collective.com/open.
Doug Belshaw: [00:13:57] Yes. Anyway, let’s get on to let’s get on to Tim Clapton’s feedback and questions. This was on Twitter at the end of April. So Tim for taking so long um, and I’ve put a link there to his question. So he said I’m curious about the practicalities of the co-op. So he had some questions. How do you guys divvy up income? Do you have a consensus decision making process or majority? And then finally, not an easy topic, but you mentioned some members leaving. I’m big picture. Curious as to why and how. So we’ve got John here, who’s also a member and founder of a co-op. Um, shall we just go through those questions one by one? Yeah, sure. Um, John, do you want to go first? How do you divvy up income in in cooperative?
John Evans: [00:14:44] Uh, there’s two ways to earn money in adaptive. You can work on projects or you can, I don’t know, receive it as work that you do for the co-op that people sort of vote for. So, um, um, in general, when we, when we, when we vote out money that happens equally so we just say we’ve got a surplus this month or year or whatever, let’s everyone gets, I don’t know, £500 or something. Um, and then on projects, um, our system is that we in most projects we’re charging clients by the hour. And the way it works is the co-op co-op charges 5% to the client and 5% to the, uh, member or freelancer. So the co-op is making a 10% slice out of whatever you sort of hourly charge the, the projects set their own rates. So if you would like to earn more money in the co-op, then join a project that is paying higher rates. There’s arguments about whether you should whether we should increase or top up or something, but we haven’t really discussed it yet or set a system. So at the moment it’s just literally kind of penetrated by the, by the market quite, quite a lot. Um, and it just is kind of a, it’s kind of a more gentle interface to the freelancer market, but it’s still very much there. It’s not.
Doug Belshaw: [00:16:11] How do you, how do you track sorry, just a really quick one. How do you track your time to make sure everyone’s got their hours?
John Evans: [00:16:16] Uh, it’s different on different projects, generally, some kind of shared time sheet, like a Google sheet or something like that or Yeah, I do it on on a notepad document and then I it all piles up and I have to spend like an hour adding them to all the different time sheets. But in general like it based on I write down like today, today on one project I’ve put start at 12 and I’ll put paused at, I don’t know, 255 before to come on to this. I’ll write down what I did in that time and then I’ll. Yeah.
Laura Hilliger: [00:16:43] Yeah.
John Evans: [00:16:44] And on a spreadsheet.
Laura Hilliger: [00:16:46] Yeah. And when you say that, when you say that projects set their own rates, do you have a sliding scale that you build clients or do you always build clients the same thing? And then, you know, projects set their day rate within, within that limit?
John Evans: [00:17:00] Um.
John Evans: [00:17:01] No, the projects tribes charge plans, different things. Um, and we’re not good at, we’re not good at a scale there is, there is an implicit sliding scale and like what people would accept to go on it and whether you can attract people to the project. Right. Um, it would be good to have one if we had a sort of rational thing, but it’s, uh. I think this is probably probably part of the refining process would be to have some kind of rate card or some sort of like formula to select them. I think at the moment we are aim to get the highest that the client can pay for a reasonable to make the project possible. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But we’re not very good at I don’t know, we’re not we’re not brilliant in negotiating for that. I think it’s. But luckily we haven’t been negotiating with like sharks so far, so it’s not been too bad. But don’t feel like. We would do that? Well, if someone was actually trying to get as low as possible out of us.
Doug Belshaw: [00:17:56] What’s a learning process? We’ve been, what, five years now? And it takes time to figure all this stuff out. And you get you know, Laura said that she, like, just like spreadsheets don’t like spreadsheets either. You get some people who are just attracted towards partnerships and negotiation and some people who are attracted towards doing research and whatever, and you need all kinds of people. Laura I feel like given that you’re very good at documenting all the things on our wiki, which we’ll put in the show notes, um, you might be the most up to date mentally with how we do money things. So.
Laura Hilliger: [00:18:31] Um, actually, you know, we’re quite similar to code operative. We have different, we, we charge by half days, so not by the hour. So that’s one difference that we try to do full days just because it’s easier to keep track of and calculate. Um, we give discounts to nonprofits and educational institutions, um, you know, projects that we think are doing good in the world. And we do have a sliding scale, but I don’t know what the bottom is and I don’t know what the top is.
Doug Belshaw: [00:19:04] The minimum, The minimum is 65, right?
Laura Hilliger: [00:19:08] And, and we sort of reserve the minimum rate for when we’re working with other cooperatives, when we’re working with really small nonprofits, you know, trying to, you know, trying to make sure that we are that we have inclusive rates, really, because we do a lot of different kinds of projects. And there, frankly, there are people that need our help, especially small charities, that they just can’t you know, they just can’t afford like a quote unquote, consultancy rate. I mean, there’s all these consultancy calculators on the Internet. You can go have a look at, you know, I’ve done them for like speaking gigs in the past pre pre-pandemic times. And I’ve never been comfortable with what those calculators tell me. Like I just cannot I sorry but like asking for three grand a day or something just seems absolutely ridiculous.
Doug Belshaw: [00:19:59] The highest thing I think I’ve worked on the co-op was when we got paid partly in crypto, um, for near and I think that was like almost three times our minimum day rate. But because we got paid 40% in crypto and that crypto has now gone through the floor. Yeah. Um, turns out I got paid a lot less than I thought I would do for that project.
Laura Hilliger: [00:20:23] Same and I still have the crypto and I look at it every once in a while and I’m like, I should have sold this back in May when all the crypto markets were like, way up. Oops.
Doug Belshaw: [00:20:33] We should probably say, though, to answer Tim’s question, that unlike cooperative, which takes 10%, we take 25% for the internal pot, which is quite a chunk, which means that for our minimum day rate, for example, each member would be on 500 instead of 65. Um, and then we use that money to pay ourselves for monthly co-op days, just general co-op work, any kind of professional development stuff we do. Um, and so we’ve always got a few thousand in that pot just to kind of if there’s no work on. And so I feel like I know the way that outlandish work, having done a lot of work with them, um, you know, they pretty much guarantee, almost like they’re employed like a certain number of days per year or pretty much working full time. We’re somewhere in between the two, I would say. Yeah. Um, yeah. And we track our time on toggle on an hourly basis and we could get into all of the logic of that. We kind of went into a little bit on that last, last time though. Um, let’s move on to the next one. Do you have a consensus decision making process or majority? So just to make sure for those who are listening, who aren’t used to all of this stuff because it’s usually just their boss decides consensus would be, you know, like everyone has to agree, otherwise it doesn’t go ahead. Majority would be a bit like the Brexit vote. Oh, if you get 51% then you know, it’s.
John Evans: [00:21:59] It’s 52 exercisable. That’s decisive. Um.
Doug Belshaw: [00:22:04] And there’s other ways as well. But what John, what do you do?
John Evans: [00:22:07] Um, we have transitioned, we are transitioning to a consent based decision process called Sociocracy. I wouldn’t say that we have fully enabled it yet, but that’s what we’re sort of we’re aiming to get to. Um, uh, we have, I think formally, I think formally we still probably have the consensus decision process. The only difference between as far as for me, the difference between consensus and consent based is about preference versus tolerance. So with consensus, you’re aiming to satisfy everyone’s preference, whereas with consent based, we’re aiming to satisfy everyone’s like tolerance for what they can tolerate being remaining a part of. Um, um, I think that in, in, in it sounds like very clear distinction when you just say it, but in real life I feel like the, I feel like the tension is going to be why, why are we always why am I always tolerating this when you clearly prefer that? Um, uh, yeah, maybe that’s perhaps just pessimistic, but feel like that it’s. Yeah, I can feel like they’re still going to be a little bit of that horse trading aspect of like, you take this, I get that, that kind of thing.
Doug Belshaw: [00:23:17] Yeah. It’s never as clean and clear as it as it seems. I think for us, this is going to feed in a little bit to the third question, because we had people leave our co op the end of last year and then we moved to a consent based decision making for proposals. Um. Yeah, there’s something different about the size of it. We did have six members. We’ve now got four members, but only three are active. So it’s a lot easier when you’ve got fewer members. Like it’s just easier to make decisions. Um, but yeah. Laura what I’m curious about your thoughts around consent based decision making because.
Laura Hilliger: [00:23:52] Well, I mean, I sort of feel like we used to be quite good at consensus, but we are also transitioning in the last year or so to sociocracy and consent based decision making. And sometimes we forget that that’s the way that we want to do things and then we know have a discussion and then at some point somebody is like, Oh, you know, we should do a proposal, Remember that? So we all everyone in our co op took the sociocracy course from outlandish, which we’ll link to in the show notes, which is really interesting because I think understanding and learning the process is once you’ve done that, then, you know, actually running the process on a regular basis becomes quite easy. Um, so I’ve really actually quite enjoyed our foray into Sociocracy. But yeah, because consensus, even amongst small numbers of people, there are times when consensus is just absolutely impossible. And so I think, I think that this, this new way of really thinking, thinking about how can we have a conversation and do, you know, try things that are good enough for now, um, has really benefited us as an organisation.
Doug Belshaw: [00:25:08] I was going to link.
Doug Belshaw: [00:25:09] To Sorry, go on.
John Evans: [00:25:10] John was my first, um, my first experience with Sociocracy was before Cooperative actually started. I was in, um, I was in a student housing corp in Edinburgh and we had, we, we had a consensus. We had what we call the consensus decision process. But because there was 100 people, it was we’d refined it like quite a few times. So it was, it was um, partly my responsibility to manage the like keeping, keeping track of what the rules actually were and then like applying them and then letting people know how it works. Um, we had, we had over time refined it to switch to a system based on, um, reservations. So rather than, rather than, rather than blocking. So basically because, because the, the, the stuff you get for like, if you go on like seeds for change or something, you can get a consensus decision process from there. Um includes like blocks and objections and, and stuff like that. And we introduced reservation which as I understand is very similar to a sort of concern, critical concern like boundary. Um, and then, and then someone found out about this incredible new thing called sociocracy. And in my head was like, We already do this. All you’ve done is all you’ve done is you’ve found something. You found like a brand name and a sort of advertises this fantastic process. And as the solution to our problems, it is. These are not our problems. The problem is that we’re it’s a student housing corp and everyone leaves as soon as they learn how the system works. Right. That’s not it’s like that’s the, that’s the um that, that that to me was the that and also that the um, the common like the, the spaces that we use as common areas were being sort of redeveloped. So they were unusable for a long time because they were building site which basically meant there was no neutral space for the members to have like co-op co-op gatherings where and to build up that sort of reserve of like goodwill and trust. Um, that I think is foundational for a co-op. And I think that once you lose social gatherings, you yeah.
Laura Hilliger: [00:27:10] I think that the goodwill and trust is one of the problems of consensus based decision making because consensus based decision making, if somebody doesn’t agree, then typically what happens is somebody who has a good relationship with that person kind of like goes behind the scenes, tends to shark them into one decision or another. And if they’re just not budging, then that person who maybe has a good relationship with somebody else will go and try and change their opinion. And it’s kind of like I mean, it’s behind the curtain sort of politic way to handle an organisation. And I think that is ripe for misunderstanding, miscommunication and a really good way to really, really damage relationships between people because not everything is happening in the open, conversations are not transparent. And, you know, there’s kind of like a weird manipulative factor that happens.
Doug Belshaw: [00:28:03] Um, and lack of lack of trust just kills co-ops or any kind of association or organisation, right? So you could implement, you know, some of the organisations I’ve worked with and, and in you could apply Sociocracy but if you didn’t change the culture of that organisation at all, it would still be horrendous. So for those listening, I’ll stick links to some blog posts I’ve written about this, but basically if I get this right, correct me if I’m wrong. Um, you make a proposal, someone makes a proposal, someone else then runs that process. And the first thing is you. Around and you ask each person individually, do you have any clarifying questions? So if anything doesn’t make sense or you’re not sure of the scope of what someone’s proposing, whatever, just to make sure it’s clearer in your mind. And usually you’ve got something to write down. It might be online or you might be writing it on a clipboard and you literally have the proposal there in front of you. Um, once everyone’s asked all the questions they want to ask, you can test for consent. So it’s usually kind of a thumbs up. You go around and see if people are thumbs up in the middle or thumbs down.
Doug Belshaw: [00:29:08] Um, there’s different ways of running it, but often if everyone’s thumbs up, then it just passes. But often there’s someone wavering, in which case you go to critical concerns. And again, you ask everyone individually and you ask for a critical concern. And this goes back to what John was saying earlier about the difference between an objection and a preference. So the example often given is to do with like food preferences. You might not like or you might prefer a different bar of chocolate to a different one, but the difference might be, well, my critical concern is that you’re proposing that we have Snickers and I am. I will die if I have not. So there’s all that kind of stuff as well. And often they’re just teases out things that you weren’t expecting sometimes. And I’ve seen this in arccorp and outlandish. These these conversations go really quickly. The proposal takes about two minutes, but sometimes it can take more than an hour to do one proposal. But that’s okay, I would say, because it’s actually showing that there’s other things bubbling under the surface that need to be addressed as well.
John Evans: [00:30:16] I’m just thinking about what Laura said about the, um, the politicking of consensus decision making by sort of based on relationships. And my only reaction to that is I find that very fun to do. But like, I suppose you are right that maybe it isn’t the best, probably isn’t the most, maybe long term sustainable kind of thing. I don’t.
Laura Hilliger: [00:30:37] Know. It’s it’s fun until conflict arises and when it’s when it’s low bars low stake then that’s it’s kind of okay. But when conflict arises, it can get really, really hairy, especially for the person who’s trying to serve as a bridge. Yeah, well, I mean, I’m just, you know, I’m sort of projecting here because I’ve been that bridge person before and hearing to two different sides of a story that you’ve experienced and that you also see the narrative quite differently means that you have three different perspectives to pay attention to, one of them being your own, and then two other truths that you have to kind of manage. And the conflict can. It just it can be very stressful. I would say.
Doug Belshaw: [00:31:21] This might be a nice segue to the third question, which is not an easy topic, but you mentioned some members leaving. I’m big picture curious as to why and how. Um, who would like to pick up the baton and go first on this one?
Laura Hilliger: [00:31:35] Oh, I think we should punt immediately to John and say, Hey, John, has anybody ever left Co-operative?
John Evans: [00:31:42] Um, we have had. I’m just trying to think. We’ve had, uh, we’ve had three people. We’ve had three people leave ever. Um, the first was an Italian guy who I think expected the co-op to do a lot more. So we had just started and he sort of arrived. I don’t, I don’t know how he found out about the co-op, maybe Googled it or something. So I think in Italy, co-ops are much sort of bigger, more developed thing or the court movement seems to be sort of more naturalised. So I think he was expecting there to be like quite, quite a quite a mature co-op ready to get a ready to take on his, his skills. So he was quite, quite a senior um, Apple developer. Um, and we weren’t really ready for. We weren’t really ready for him. We didn’t have loads of, um, iOS app projects lined up for him or anything. Um, and yeah, so, so, so he left basically for like I suppose business reasons. He also moved away to get a different job in near London. Um, uh, similarly, that’s how the one of the most recent people left, um, because of the pandemic move back to Bulgaria, where he was from, and was just not really in communication with any of us for quite a long time and got another job at that point. It’s like there’s no reason to. There’s no we don’t really have a rule about people being dormant or inactive or active or whatever. But I think in his mind it was like, don’t want to be a member of a corp that have no, uh, that don’t do anything for or does anything for me. I think it’s better to better to just pause the relationship on good grounds rather than have it sort of just a silent thread continuing on.
John Evans: [00:33:22] Um.
Laura Hilliger: [00:33:23] It’s interesting that you mention a dormant policy. We are open actually does have a dormant policy that we put into place a couple of years ago because as Doug needed a break, actually just had too much stuff going on in the co-op was just an extra amount of stress. But he didn’t want to leave the co-op and all of the sort of membership rules were really about participation and we realised that it doesn’t make sense for the co-op to not allow dormancy in members like we should. If people want to pay the membership fee and they want to be part of what we’ve built, then by all means we should encourage that. And so we came up with a way that like a policy with how you can be a member of where open without having to come to every meeting and participate in the running of the business. And that’s something that we have to go back to each and every year just because, as you know, as a business grows, as the co-op grows, as we get different kinds of clients like the the active members constantly need to check in with each other about how they feel about the organisation as a whole. And so that’s something that we’ve really built into like our um, our monthly co-op days and stuff. We check in with each other. How are we feeling about different levels of participation, How do we feel about dormancy policy and these kinds of things?
Doug Belshaw: [00:34:41] Yeah, so that co-op day. But the other thing, like Laura said, we have to go back and not not only check in with each other, but check actually what we decided. So that’s why having things written down, not a constitution, but like just a these are our policies at the moment and then sharing those openly can be quite useful. So we’ve got installation of wiki at Wiki urbancorp and it’s got a kind of rules around dormancy there. I think the most important thing about dormancy is that they’re still a member of the co-op and they sell very welcome. They can turn up at any point and they don’t have to explain themselves. But while they’re not there and while they’re dormant, we can go ahead and make decisions without them being there. They can’t block it. That’s the deal. Yeah.
John Evans: [00:35:25] I think that’s the implied thing that we have, but it’s not written down anywhere. We are we are writing stuff down. So that’s part of this refounding process is, um, we actually do have a set of membership guidelines that are referenced in the membership contract that people signed. But the, the set of guidelines is a 404 page at the moment. It’s so what you’re, what you’re signing to is, is a not found at the moment to abide by that. Um, um, and then obviously if we want to put anything there, we do have to agree as a co-op like what what ends up there. Right. So something. Yeah. I’m, I’m going to be delving into your wiki later on to, to steal some stuff from that.
Doug Belshaw: [00:36:04] Cool. And just for John or anyone who’s in co-ops who would like to see some other pages, like there are other pages that are private to us because they mention either personal details or whatever. So with the agreement, although the co-op members can or we can show you those as well. Cool. Um, do we want to go into any more detail about why people left our co-op law?
John Evans: [00:36:26] Didn’t finish. Didn’t finish the.
Doug Belshaw: [00:36:27] Oh, sorry.
John Evans: [00:36:28] John All right. So we also had we also had one person who. Um, was think finding the like the non-hierarchical nature of it quite quite difficult in that um it difficult to sort of figure out figure out the, I don’t know the intentions or what what people were wanting in the co-op um, from, from him, um, and then didn’t, and then also find it difficult to communicate with them what he was, what he was wanting. Um, and it ended up creating like a sort of a large rift where he was there was sort of like a social deficit. Um, and yeah, things, things, things weren’t working out very well. And eventually, eventually he just said that it wasn’t, the co-op wasn’t helping him grow. Um, which was. Yeah, which was true, I think. Um, so I don’t think that at least, at least our co-op, which is very, very loose and flexible, works well for some people, but not for others. I think if they want a very clear expectation or very, I don’t know, a social environment that has lots of cues and um, the decisions are already made of like what to do, when to come in, what, what, what to work on when you do come in, like how to do it, that kind of stuff.
Laura Hilliger: [00:37:45] Mm. Yeah, I think, I mean I think that the, that the structure of a co op isn’t for everyone and I think that, you know, it’s, it’s quite hard. I think that if you’ve grown up in western industrialised society it’s quite hard to understand a model other than capitalism as an economic structure that can work for you. And, and I think that, you know, in our case, I think that there were some some real value differences around that and sort of the difference between, you know, a growth mindset versus maybe a sustainability mindset and particularly in relationship to capital. Um, yeah, I don’t know. It’s tricky if you, you know, you get the more people you get in a room, the more the dynamic changes and, you know, finding a finding a group of people that that can work together in a long term way is, is tricky, which is why people, you know, often move jobs or it’s not always just a sort of personal decision, but also a social decision. And so I definitely think that that there’s something about the equality and equity of a cooperative structure that is difficult for people, especially when you’re, you know, you’re raised up in a society that values hierarchy, and that’s what you’re taught to understand, having, you know, having a completely flat structure where everybody has one member, one vote, that can be really difficult for people who are, um, I don’t know. I mean, I feel like I’m very strong willed, but I find it not difficult for me. So I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what it is about the particular value structure that makes it hard to participate in a cooperative. But I think it’s just hard for some people.
John Evans: [00:39:34] Uh, Doug, I think you’re muted.
Doug Belshaw: [00:39:38] Yeah, but.
Doug Belshaw: [00:39:41] Um, it’s cause my mouse is super clicky. Uh, what was I saying? So, yeah, I think the. I agree with everything that Laura said. And I think the other thing is that. Well, the point is that I’ve just completely forgotten my train of thought because I was thinking about muting and. What? Never mind.
Laura Hilliger: [00:39:58] That’s the best part of the podcast. When the podcast host is say, what was I talking about?
John Evans: [00:40:05] Whenever you come across, um, Robert Keegan’s of adult developmental theories, it’s kind of like there’s, uh, it’s like a, it’s like a five stage thing taking you from childhood to like post-modern or meta modern kind of, um, sensibilities, right? So it’s basically like, um, it’s a whole framework. I can, I can skip it if we, if we don’t find it interesting. But it’s like, um, it’s basically the difference between what adolescence is trying to teach you and like what, what our society is set up to teach, which is to be a sort of social human being, which is that you, um, rather than, rather than not vandalising people’s cars because you are afraid of the police, it’s because you genuinely think that you feel like you’re part of a society. And if you vandalise the car and hurt someone else, in a way, you’re kind of hurting yourself, right?
John Evans: [00:40:57] Um, and then. Yeah. So that’s like, yeah,
Laura Hilliger: [00:41:01] I was just going to say that is a great segway to the vaccine topic.
Doug Belshaw: [00:41:06] It really is.
John Evans: [00:41:07] Okay, sure, sure. We’ll leave that. But basically, basically the my, um, the thing is basically the, the social reality, the, the, the, the stage right of getting to a social sort of way of understanding is what our society is geared up to like produce. And then the, the one after that is the sort of systematic self which is more about understanding like your own interests and what you want. Um, and I feel like being part of a co-op requires having a systematic self in the sense that instead of, um, being your relationships with other people, you have relationships with other people. You have it as like an object that you can, um, put priorities on and set. I think without, without a, uh, without an authority figure to sort of decide what people’s relationships should be. You have to do it for yourself. And if you are, if you don’t have that systematic way of being, then it’s not going to work very well.
Doug Belshaw: [00:42:02] I’ve remembered what I was going to say. That’s really interesting. John, If you can find any links to tick in the show notes, that would be fantastic. Um, what I was going to say is that we, you know, it’s, it took us a while to understand what a co-op was and what we were trying to do, yet we just assumed that the members joining our co-op understood what a co-op was, even though we’d had to grapple with us and figure things out. Like we didn’t offer really any training or anything like that. And we ourselves have done training since they’ve left. And so I think I think there’s lots for us to learn from from the experience.
Laura Hilliger: [00:42:36] I’m really. What? I’m interested in this. Yeah, I’m segwaying.
Doug Belshaw: [00:42:41] You are? Segwaying.
Laura Hilliger: [00:42:42] Well, I’m trying. I’m interested in John. If you can find a link to that framework, I’d love to, to see what that’s about, because I think there is something about being part of a cooperative and seeing it from a collective perspective. So, you know, the example you gave about vandalising cars rather than, you know, being afraid of the police, that’s a very individualist perspective. I will be harmed or I will get in trouble versus I don’t want to hurt somebody else’s car. That’s like a more collective sort of way of thinking. And I think that that that kind of collective viewpoint, um, has been coming up more and more for me in terms of understanding some of the problems in our world and thinking that if we were going to solve them, we need a lot more people thinking from a collective perspective rather than an individualistic one. And I think that, you know, I think that that collective mindset is something that would help with climate change, for example, but also specifically because we’ve been saying we’re going to talk about the IP on the vaccine for two episodes at least. You know, in thinking about whether or not there should be IP on the vaccine, I think that that collective you know, that collective view is really important here. And I’m curious to know whether the framework that you mentioned can help guide that conversation, whether the levels if you can tie that to IP on the vaccine or if you have any thoughts there.
John Evans: [00:44:13] I can try to. So the so the, um, the, the framework. So the framework has a fifth level, right. Which is, which is the post-postmodern or which is he’s called it postmodern because the framework is from the 90s. Right. But it’s like, um, um, but a better name is meta systematic. So, so instead of, instead of just, just applying your system to everything, which is kind of what, um, which is kind of the same activity whether you’re a corporation or you’re some sort of Marxist revolutionary group, which is you have one system and you see the world in, in, in that way everywhere, right? Whereas with the meta systematic perspective, you have an array of sort of systems and in your sort of toolbox and then depending on the context, you pick up the right system for that, for that situation. So with the on the vaccine, I think the, um, the, the question would be what system are we going to pick up in order to sort of regulate this? Right. Because the the the patent system is meant to encourage investment and innovation. Right? It’s basically saying you can you can have a monopoly on something, but you have to release how you made it to the world and they can license that idea from you. Um, and that’s supposed to incentivise people to invent and do things. Whereas if you think with the vaccine, the incentive system is already there in that the governments would already pay lots and lots of money for it to exist. So maybe you don’t need to do that. And maybe the, the incentive once it’s been produced is different from what you need to distribute it globally everywhere. So I suppose that’s the the systematic part is, is once you have is reflecting on your your system and asking is it the right one of all the ones available rather than just learning a system and applying it. So that is that that, I think, is how it would work. And Doug has posted something there. Cool.
Doug Belshaw: [00:46:18] No. Well, I was just I was stuck on something in the show notes because I think we all, as humans, have a tendency to go, Oh, that sounds a bit like the thing that I’ve been thinking about or whatever, but there’s this thing called the structure of observed learning outcomes or the solo taxonomy. So this is to do with, I guess, pedagogical theory which goes through pre pre structural understanding unit, structural, multi structural relational. But then the bit that you’ve just been talking about sounded a bit like extended abstract in the sense that you understand the world in a metaphorical way and also you, you distance yourself from the ideas like they’re not so bounded up as part of your, your own rationality. But.
John Evans: [00:47:02] Yes. Yeah.
John Evans: [00:47:04] It is very similar to that. Yeah. So, um, yes I have the book this is from is called In Over Our Heads, which is quite which I enjoyed a lot. And it’s basically about the, um, um, society. I mentioned this earlier that society is built to produce social people and you can’t be a systematic person unless you already have that sort of social thing because there’s no, there’s no real it doesn’t really work without it, but there’s no the demands of society are usually that you are a systematic person and that you have to review, review the contract for your mobile phone in like a lawyer would, or organise the privacy settings on your browser like a software developer or paranoid sort of security consultant would do. Um, even though there’s no there’s not a lot of support set up to get people to that that system. And there’s not an awareness that, um, maybe, maybe a lot of people don’t want to get to that, don’t want to develop in that way or they don’t have the resources to do it. So why are we making it a requirement in order to participate in society as well to do that?
Laura Hilliger: [00:48:14] There’s there’s kind of a tie back to what we were you know, what we were talking about last week on this podcast. And John, when you came on and you were saying that the context switching thing stuck with you. And I’m sort of making the connection right now. I’m wondering if it’s a certain kind of people who are. Sort of thinking about at that abstract level, about the system that’s in play and what kind of relationship it has to context switching. Because I also know I know specialists who are absolute genius, brilliant at their the thing that they’re specialised in. But if you throw a monkey wrench in there, their sort of work world that that it’s very hard for them to switch context or to take on new information. I think we all know people like this. Um, and I’m just wondering if there’s, you know, if that is part of a particular set of skills or a particular education or like why is it that some people can kind of see like take a step back, see the whole system, and then make a decision based on, you know, what might be a more applicable system? Um.
John Evans: [00:49:25] I think it’s a set of, it’s, it’s, uh, the, the phrase Robert Keegan uses is way of understanding. So that’s what these stages are. They’re not like they’re not knowing specific facts. It’s like a way of constructing, constructing the world like a set of skills. Um, so I think what you’re describing is the boundary between, uh, systematic and meta systematic, right? Which is about, um, if you, if you’re behaving in a systematic way, it’s about repairing, repairing around the edges enabled to, in order to go back to systematic systematic behaviour where you’re, where you’re doing something. If you, if you can’t create the conditions for a system to operate in, then it’s not going to work. I think that the key thing with meta systematic is that there’s no, uh, there’s no, there’s nothing that will work in every context for that. So that’s like, it’s like, um, the idea that there’s no, there is no single scientific method. If you actually drill down into what are you actually doing with your like time and brain, when you do biology, you do a very different thing from when you do quantum physics. Even though they’re all called doing the scientific method, it’s not it’s not the same thing at all. Because sometimes as in in physics that when you actually do it, you spend years building a model to subtract every tiny bit of noise. And then your actual experiment might only last a single second. But it’s all the years you spent creating the model to take away all the noise and just get the signal. That’s the important part. Whereas with biology, it’s like maybe a long time of like prodding a particular cell to try and express a particular behaviour or protein or something, and incrementally you get closer and closer to it, which is very different from, I don’t know, the final thing doesn’t happen in seconds. It might happen over the course of days or weeks or something.
Doug Belshaw: [00:51:12] Oh, interesting.
John Evans: [00:51:14] Yeah. So the, so the, so the five is like saying you it’s about creating the conditions for people who just want to follow the system so they can just do that. Um, but you have to be able to recognise when is this system going to break soon or is it going to keep on working or is it going to. Fail because of reasons outside of itself. Maybe that’s maybe that’s what it is. I don’t know. Obviously, it’s the it’s the top highest one. So it’s the one you. Uh. Yeah. It also, uh. I could talk about the book for a long time. It’s a very good book. I highly recommend it.
Doug Belshaw: [00:51:47] There’s so many different parallels here because it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s and let’s not go too far down this rabbit hole because we haven’t got time. But it sounds like, you know, in Plato’s Republic, where they talk about philosopher kings and like people getting to a certain level of rationality such that they are in a good way to make those decisions. But that spills over into fascism because then, well, these people can’t make those decisions. Therefore those people shouldn’t be part of society. And it’s a really difficult balancing act, I guess.
John Evans: [00:52:21] Yes, I agree. I think that’s, uh, um. I think that’s part of the, the thing. The thing to remember is, even if you have a perfect way of understanding, if you don’t have if you aren’t in the context where that’s happening, you can easily lose and get it completely wrong.
John Evans: [00:52:37] Um.
Laura Hilliger: [00:52:37] And that happens all the time.
John Evans: [00:52:39] Yep.
Laura Hilliger: [00:52:40] Yes, we see that often in society.
Doug Belshaw: [00:52:44] Laura Is there a particular link in here? I’m just looking at a time. Is there a particular link in here that you would like to discuss given that we’ve punted this twice?
Laura Hilliger: [00:52:54] Um, yeah. I mean, I feel like we wanted to talk about IP on the vaccine and really I just wanted to say there should not be IP on the vaccine and I will argue that up and down all day. Um, but I’m not sure that either of you A, disagree and B, I think it would be really interesting to hear what the arguments are because thus far I have not seen a single argument saying that there should be IP on the vaccine that I’ve agreed with or thought was relevant even.
John Evans: [00:53:24] And then if you if if we can start from the assumption that we think there shouldn’t be on the vaccine, um, so what open source license should the vaccine the vaccine have if we if we just pick the, I don’t know, the Pfizer vaccine at random? Like is that the because when you go on GitHub and you pick a license like you can pick from, there’s like a uni license or whatever, which is just releases it everyone available forever they can people can sell it, people can change it or whatever. Or you can have the, the license, which means no one can ever sell it. Or even if they, if they even introduce, even if they use a little bit of the vaccine to make a whole new thing they put all the work into. They can never sell that thing because it has the GPL in it in a little bit. Like people say things that projects have been like poisoned sometimes because you can’t because if you use even a small amount of that of something with that licensing, it means that you can never it can never become a proprietary product again. Um, because of the way the license is written.
Laura Hilliger: [00:54:24] Hmm. This is hard. That’s a hard.
Doug Belshaw: [00:54:26] Well, I know. Like, so I’d be torn between. On the one hand, as I mentioned in a meeting Laura was in today, when I wrote my thesis, I put a cc0 license on that which. Which is donating to the public domain. Right. Um, but then you lose all control over it. Like you can’t put any conditions onto it. Someone could pretend it was their thesis, Whatever.
Laura Hilliger: [00:54:48] That’s what I did, actually.
Doug Belshaw: [00:54:50] That’s what you did as well.
Laura Hilliger: [00:54:51] Yeah, I just. I just took your thesis, put my name on it, and.
Laura Hilliger: [00:54:55] Yeah. Great.
Doug Belshaw: [00:54:56] Well, congratulations, Dr. Hilliger. And, um. But the other thing is, I remember having a long conversation with someone I think at like the Mozilla festival or something about whether you should, and this was Creative Commons licensing, whether you should do the share alike license because they said that was like forcing what did they. I’ve forgotten the term they use, but it’s basically forcing people to to share things in future. So if they make any changes, they have to share the changes as well. And so I can see I have sympathy for that kind of view because it’s it’s kind of working the system of licenses against people who want to abuse it.
Laura Hilliger: [00:55:36] But I feel like the I mean, I’m a pretty big fan of the share alike feature on Creative Commons licensing because I feel like copyright has a lot wrong with it. And I would like to push Copyleft as a into the mainstream so that it’s, you know, so that it’s something that is much more common than it already is. I think that it’s, it’s very common. But like we had a meeting yesterday, um, with a, with a catalyst charity, with a recent graduate who had never heard of open licensing, had never heard of open source, had never heard of Creative Commons licensing. And she’s a creator and you know, helping people to understand the benefits of those. I feel like the more we can convince people and even by share alike forcing them, maybe it helps the ecosystem grow. Yeah. And I think with the vaccine.
Doug Belshaw: [00:56:26] Yeah, I think with vaccines, it’s it’s different. So creative work, we pointed out in that particular meeting that we were pointing to Brian, Brian was in that meeting as well. Brian’s basically built his business where he he draws people’s ideas. He’s built that on top of Creative Commons. You know, his, his ideas and his drawings kind of go viral because of those open licensing with the vaccine. We’re still dealing with things going viral, but we want to do the opposite. We kind of want want to remove that viral load instead. And so the fewer barriers we can put in that way, probably the better. So people don’t have to think, Oh, I’m allowed to do this with it, or if I do this, is it going to cause any unintended consequences, that kind of thing. The only decent, maybe way I can think that there might be an objection would be you might want to control who has access to it because mRNA based vaccines, you could you could deploy biological agents in there, which could really mess people up.
Laura Hilliger: [00:57:29] Yeah, there’s yeah, there’s a whole level of complication when we’re talking about a vaccine that doesn’t sort of stretch into kind of bits and bobs on computers. Although if you were, I don’t know, going back to John’s question about which, which license would you choose and should people be able to sell the vaccine? And, you know, I think it’s a really hard question because pharmaceutical companies don’t really need any more money, to tell you the truth. And if you look at the pharmaceutical industry, how it’s grown in the past 100 years and the kinds of stuff they do, I don’t think there’s a lot of argument for social good there. I mean, obviously, like having advanced medicine. And, you know, I was at the dentist today and I was really happy that I didn’t have a lot of pain, although my face was numb. And, you know, these kinds of advancements in medicine are really important for society and for our longevity as human beings. But at the same time, it sort of feels like with the vaccine in particular, with a pandemic in particular, we are literally repeating exactly the same kinds of advice and the same kind of social issues and conflict that we had in 1918 with the Spanish flu. And we’re over 100 years later and we’re, you know.
Doug Belshaw: [00:58:47] Oh, I have a story about the Spanish flu. Do you know why it’s called the Spanish flu?
John Evans: [00:58:51] I think I’ve read I think I’ve read and forgotten.
Doug Belshaw: [00:58:56] At the time when the Spanish flu hit, most countries in Europe were under censorship, so they were censoring the news that was coming out. Spain was not involved in the First World War and so wasn’t censoring his news. So it was the only country reporting its death due to influenza and therefore everyone assumed it came from Spain.
Laura Hilliger: [00:59:18] Wow.
John Evans: [00:59:23] I had forgotten. I had forgotten that.
Doug Belshaw: [00:59:26] But that’s interesting, isn’t it? When it comes to, like, working openly and sharing, sometimes it can. It can backfire. That kind of thing. I think it’s interesting that the UK government, or I think the World Health Organisation has changed the naming of different variants of Covid 19 away from the Indian variant, the South African variant to like, you know, Alpha, beta, you know, Delta, all that kind of stuff. It’s much better.
Laura Hilliger: [00:59:51] Do they forget Charlie? Is there a Charlie variant?
Doug Belshaw: [00:59:54] I don’t think Charlie is always forget Charlie.
John Evans: [00:59:58] Oh, that’s not a Greek word. That’s the Greek at all. No, I’m in the.
Laura Hilliger: [01:00:02] Maritime alphabet right now.
Doug Belshaw: [01:00:05] Okay.
Doug Belshaw: [01:00:05] Does it make does not make all of the variants Greek if we name them after the Greek alphabet. Yeah.
Laura Hilliger: [01:00:10] And isn’t that offensive to the Greek people?
John Evans: [01:00:13] There are small, There’s not big like India or Britain on the on the world stage so they don’t get to complain about it.
Laura Hilliger: [01:00:19] Oh, I feel like this, and this was brought to you by Everything is derogatory. A regular segment on this podcast and we forgot about.
Doug Belshaw: [01:00:29] We should probably wrap things up because we are over the hour mark for the first time on this podcast.
Laura Hilliger: [01:00:34] I know I feel like we did a good job making it to an hour.
Doug Belshaw: [01:00:38] Yeah. John, you should stop being so interesting.
John Evans: [01:00:41] Have a lot.
John Evans: [01:00:42] Of podcast experience. I used to run. I used to do a podcast with my brother called Love You Bro. Where we would do it was like a catch up. It was basically just us catching up every week and then we would just release it and oh, cool. It was meant to promote his career as a, um, as a writer performer of like one man shows and stuff. Um, but it didn’t stop his audience, basically. So it basically the podcast did not spill over into him. It was just like he was, he was pointing people to, he was doing shows and flowering and stuff. And then some of those people would listen to the podcast. So it wasn’t it wasn’t enabling him very much. So we haven’t done it for a while. It was good. It was a lot of fun.
Doug Belshaw: [01:01:19] Yeah, nice idea. Cool. Well, John, thank you very much for for joining us on this podcast as ever. This some stuff which we’ll have to point punt to next week. Where can people find you if they want to hear more from you? Where can they go?
John Evans: [01:01:35] Uh, sure. If I can remember my, uh, Mastodon stuff, then I will. I’m going to quickly look that up. But on, on Twitter, um, I am at Dr. underscore the underscore evidence and then on, uh, on this, on Mastodon, I am at King mob at refactor camp.org. So find where does.
Doug Belshaw: [01:01:59] The king mob come from.
John Evans: [01:02:01] It’s a it’s from, uh, so I got it from a situationist like art collective in like the 70s and 70s London who call themselves King mob. And then they got it from a, um, a riot in London that opened up a jail. And then it said a mob basically opened up the jail and then they left a sign that said Freed on the orders of King Mob. And there was this king, this king mob was always a thing where it was like, um, just, uh, the authority of the crowd, basically.
Doug Belshaw: [01:02:34] Nice. I like it.
Doug Belshaw: [01:02:36] Cool.
Laura Hilliger: [01:02:37] Well, well, include your contact links in the show notes. So if you want to throw them in the etherpad for us, that’ll make my job easier. And I don’t know what we’re talking about. Next week. Um, ramble chats. We will ramble chat next week on the Dow.
Doug Belshaw: [01:02:53] And if you would like to join us for a future episode, if you’d like to be a wonderful guest like John’s been and Brian was last week, just get in touch. You can get in touch via Twitter Mastodon, our email address. You can just type in, you can mash the keyboard at opencore or you can just type something nice like podcast at We’re opencore. It’ll all get to us and we’d love to have you on, so don’t be shy. Um.
Laura Hilliger: [01:03:19] Cool. Cheers. Carrier pigeon would be fine to just. Just be clear.
Doug Belshaw: [01:03:23] Yes.
Doug Belshaw: [01:03:24] To South Terrace Morpeth. There we go. Cheers. Bye bye.
Laura Hilliger: [01:03:27] For now.
John Evans: [01:03:28] Right. Thank you.