eaves.ca: Structurelessness, feminism and open: what open advocates can learn from second wave feminists
Frank Hecker
· 6 months ago
Wow, someone else who's read this essay (which I agree is a classic). As it happens, Nat Torkington linked to this essay on the O'Reilly Radar blog back in 2006, prompted by danah boyd, who had referenced it in a mailing list discussion. I referenced it at the time in a comment on the apparent belief by the Linden Labs folks and others that Second Life didn't need any up-front formal governance, but rather that SL residents could and would just magically come up with some sort of resident-led governance structure on their own.
David Eaves
· 6 months ago
Hey - here's the link. Sadly there isn't much commentary (I assume there is in the Geowanking thread, but I do not have an account).
Liz
· 6 months ago
I love this essay and pretty much everything I've ever read of Freeman's! It definitely applies to open source projects - and I think also to things like conference organizing.
Yay, let the crossover continue between the awesome bits of anarchofeminism and geekery!
David Gerard
· 6 months ago
I find myself posting a link to "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" to Wikipedia mailing lists roughly once every six months.
See also Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - he marked Wikipedia as a group that had evaded this ... he just came in too early.
Jonathan Rochkind
· 6 months ago
I am a fan of Jo Freeman's article -- but only if you keep in mind that the point of view of the essay is wanting the groups to be MORE egalitarian and non-hieararchical -- if we use those terms, does it seem more like something we'd want open source development and community source projects to be? (It is something _I_ want them to be; and i have referenced Freeman's essay in self-reflective discussions in online communities before).
In the political realm where this essay originates, I have sees some people using it to somehow argue that a group, to be effective, then, should NOT try to be egalitarian or non-hieararchical. Which isn't what I get from Freeman's essay at all, what I get from it is that if you want to be egalitarian and non-hieararchical, merely having no formal structures is NOT sufficient to accomplish that goal. I don't think it's _neccesarily_ incompatible with accomplishing that goal either, but one thing's for sure, it's not sufficient.
On the other hand, the argument I often perceiv from Shirky's writing is: It's _impossible_ for a group to be both egalitarian/non-hieararchical and effective, so don't bother trying, you get one or the other.
I don't buy that either! Because I have participated in groups, large and small, that were both effective and egalitarian/non-hiearchical, and such groups have in fact been (both!) some of the most effective and most personally rewarding projects I've participated in.
So I'd rather have Freeman's and Shirky's arguments seen as identification of certain (real!) pitfalls in trying to create egalitarian/non-hieararchial groups, pitfalls that one must overcome to succeed, pitfalls that definitely are (in my experience) relevant to online groups of various kinds, but pitfalls that are not impossible to overcome. The other side of the coin would be identifying 'design patterns' for creating succesful effective egalitarian and non-hieararchical groups -- which is definitely something possible to do. (and from my perspective usually involves creating some kind of formal structures, but formal structures carefully calibrated to achieve the ends you want. For an example of 'human social behavior design patterns', I think that's what much of Karl Fogel's Developing Open Source book is really doing, a nice book.)
(I swear I once saw a response to Freeman's essay called 'The Tyranny of Tyranny', but I've never been able to find it again. In my memory, the point was, yeah, sometimes you can wind up with tyranny despite your efforts to avoid it through structureless, but come on, that's not an argument for just going with tyranny from the start!)
Frank Hecker
· 6 months ago
@Jonathan: I think your comments are pretty much spot-on, especially your point about Freeman's essay pointing out pitfalls as opposed to being an impossibility proof.
Igniter
· 6 months ago
David - loved your summary bullets, and the cautions of exclusion that forms inevitably in groups. Design is always critical to optimize effectiveness and it is an iterative process - not one that incrementally adds structure but one that optimizes/recreates structures to optimize the group's effectiveness as it's composition, objectives, and tasks evolve. For particularly emergent groups this iteration and the explicit ability to fork is what will enable it to thrive.
Malcolm
· 6 months ago
Dude, "code is king"?! Don't you mean "code is king/queen"?! "Code is sovereign"? : )
And yes, it took a bit of effort to find a unisex word for "king/queen".
Otherwise, good article. Thanks.
Clint
· 5 months ago
"She argues there is no such thing as a structureless group, and that structurelessness tends to be invoked to cover up or obscure -- and cannot eliminate -- the role, nature, ownership and use of power within a group."
I'm a member of a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society down here in the states. The group operates as a pure democracy with no hierarchy, and I would agree with Freeman here. While there's no official power structure, certain people inevitably participate more, are more aggressive and so on. They become the de facto elite.
Selena Deckelmann
· 4 months ago
Thanks for pointing back to that article. It is precisely her arguments that convinced me to get more involved in working on a women's group that had structure and rules. I didn't quite know it at the time, but Clay Shirky pointed me to her after I referenced a talk of his from 2003. I posted about this back in 2007 - http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2007/08/02/group-c...
Since then, I've found that structurelessness is often a barrier to transparency in several projects I work on unrelated to increasing women's participation in open source. What's been freeing is realizing that there's a structural change that can be made to improve the situation. And for the most part, the projects worth continuing to work with are incredibly open to making changes that increase accountability and create "interfaces" for outsiders to get more involved. I think of this as "social APIs".
All Comments
Yay, let the crossover continue between the awesome bits of anarchofeminism and geekery!
See also Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html - he marked Wikipedia as a group that had evaded this ... he just came in too early.
In the political realm where this essay originates, I have sees some people using it to somehow argue that a group, to be effective, then, should NOT try to be egalitarian or non-hieararchical. Which isn't what I get from Freeman's essay at all, what I get from it is that if you want to be egalitarian and non-hieararchical, merely having no formal structures is NOT sufficient to accomplish that goal. I don't think it's _neccesarily_ incompatible with accomplishing that goal either, but one thing's for sure, it's not sufficient.
On the other hand, the argument I often perceiv from Shirky's writing is: It's _impossible_ for a group to be both egalitarian/non-hieararchical and effective, so don't bother trying, you get one or the other.
I don't buy that either! Because I have participated in groups, large and small, that were both effective and egalitarian/non-hiearchical, and such groups have in fact been (both!) some of the most effective and most personally rewarding projects I've participated in.
So I'd rather have Freeman's and Shirky's arguments seen as identification of certain (real!) pitfalls in trying to create egalitarian/non-hieararchial groups, pitfalls that one must overcome to succeed, pitfalls that definitely are (in my experience) relevant to online groups of various kinds, but pitfalls that are not impossible to overcome. The other side of the coin would be identifying 'design patterns' for creating succesful effective egalitarian and non-hieararchical groups -- which is definitely something possible to do. (and from my perspective usually involves creating some kind of formal structures, but formal structures carefully calibrated to achieve the ends you want. For an example of 'human social behavior design patterns', I think that's what much of Karl Fogel's Developing Open Source book is really doing, a nice book.)
(I swear I once saw a response to Freeman's essay called 'The Tyranny of Tyranny', but I've never been able to find it again. In my memory, the point was, yeah, sometimes you can wind up with tyranny despite your efforts to avoid it through structureless, but come on, that's not an argument for just going with tyranny from the start!)
And yes, it took a bit of effort to find a unisex word for "king/queen".
Otherwise, good article. Thanks.
I'm a member of a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society down here in the states. The group operates as a pure democracy with no hierarchy, and I would agree with Freeman here. While there's no official power structure, certain people inevitably participate more, are more aggressive and so on. They become the de facto elite.
Since then, I've found that structurelessness is often a barrier to transparency in several projects I work on unrelated to increasing women's participation in open source. What's been freeing is realizing that there's a structural change that can be made to improve the situation. And for the most part, the projects worth continuing to work with are incredibly open to making changes that increase accountability and create "interfaces" for outsiders to get more involved. I think of this as "social APIs".
They just take a while to implement. :)