Background #

The Community Systems Working Group (CSWG) began its focus on development of open-source infrastructure for operations and governance of communities, organizations, schools, and workplaces, with NOMCON, Nation of Makers, the Maker community, and our shared physical and virtual spaces as reference implementations.

We launched the CSWG at the end of NOMCON 2022. The conference relied on nearly a dozen third-party services, thousands of lines of custom Python and Go code, and hundreds of hours of volunteer and staff time to fill in the gaps between and outside those systems.

See the data flow diagram – we’ve managed to make these events work, but existing and third-party systems are not really up to the task, leading to a lot of extra time spent filling in the gaps and dealing with exceptions, both ahead of time and in-run.

This high-friction environment impacts decision-making and progress before, during, and after these events and leads to burnout and a loss off momentum throughout their related communities year-round. Given that many of these communities are on the forefront of human creativity and innovation, it’s reasonable to expect that this loss of effectiveness is impacting society as a whole.

Goals and Methods #

While we can’t yet know global conditions at the time of NOMCON 2023, for instance, we do know that we may be called upon to host a hybrid conference with both in-person and virtual access in order to include those who would otherwise be marginalized.

Hybrid is harder than virtual, and harder than in-person.

In this working group, we’ll refer to some existing communities that demonstrate the seeds of the innovations needed. We’ll document the infrastructure we have so far, and put together a roadmap for the next five years, including preparations for NOMCON 2023, support for our own spaces and organizations, and better infrastructure for working groups right now.

We need this – not only for our communities and organizations, but also for better work/life balance as well as economic and supply chain health. We need this in order to encourage a healthy, vibrant social ecosystem in a far-flung, networked world. We need this in support of the new renaissance era that will ultimately be required to resolve the multiple crises now facing our species and planet.