Applying my theory of organisation design
Principles are useless if one doesn’t live by them
Last week, I put out my theory for how organisations should be defined and held to account. This is the second part of a personal update series. The first:
Theory of organisation design
On the design and practice of community-serving organisations
medium.com
I listed three organisations I’ve been affiliated with: HasGeek, the Python Software Society of India (PSSI), and the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). PSSI has shut down and is covered in that post. This one is about the other two.
IFF was formed by a few volunteers of the SaveTheInternet movement and assumed its mandate. In its two years of existence, it has pursued the goal of full net neutrality, seeing it through towards being an official recommendation from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. It has also pursued related interests, including highlighting the problem of internet shutdowns and asking for better privacy standards. This work has happened without any full-time staff, managed solely by volunteer trustees.
I have an announcement to make at this time: I have resigned from the board of trustees of IFF. This deserves an explanation.
Whither services?
I wandered into net neutrality as a non-expert and as a service builder, but I’ve since wandered into the Aadhaar ecosystem as someone with an informed opinion. IFF seemed to be the perfect vehicle to voice this opinion from, but its structure as an organisation that picks and pursues causes — which was its charter with net neutrality — doesn’t fit well with my theory that organisations should be defined by the services they offer to others (see the linked post above).
Organisations that are structured to magnify the voice of their leadership coalesce to highly centralised entities. This had been a central insight from my time in the various open source communities of the early 2000s, a lesson I took to heart when hosting the Barcamp Bangalore unconferences in 2006–07, and later in the design of HasGeek’s services.
How was I to speak about Aadhaar without turning IFF into a personal vehicle? This conundrum led to two independent experiments in service design.
Kaarana
I had an opinion, but so did others. These opinions were not being heard because they were not prominent voices. We were writing Medium articles, but who was reading? What if we banded together into a Medium publication? We could:
- Improve our mutual visibility,
- Copyedit each other’s writing, and
- Maybe fact-check too.
We named this Kaarana in November 2017, for the Kannada word for “reason” or “rationale” (कारण for you Hindi speakers).
(Since Aadhaar is frequently misspelled with a missing ‘a’, we played on it by replacing ‘aa’ with the IAST long ‘ā’, initially using the spelling “Kārana”. This backfired because most people can’t read IAST and assumed it was for style.)
The power of this simple trio of services is best exemplified in the arc of Anand Venkatanarayanan, who was an unknown voice in 2017, but by 2018 had become a deponent in the Supreme Court case, has a regular byline in many publications, and is the uncredited informant in an even larger number of stories that he researches for. Anand is only one of many collaborators. If you have read any critical story on Aadhaar in 2018 that seemed technically sound, chances are it is within one degree of separation from Kaarana. (We don’t seek a byline for Kaarana itself.)
SpeakForMe
In December 2017, as mandatory Aadhaar-linkage deadlines loomed with no relief in sight, I felt constrained like never before. What was I to do? Exercise the sanyaas option by withdrawing from society as all the services I depended on stopped working for lack of Aadhaar? Would writing opinion columns via Kaarana reach the ears of a government expressly not listening? The Supreme Court had already refused to accept evidence from the media. They wanted government sources, but the government wasn’t exactly putting out data illustrating Aadhaar’s faults.
Potentially millions were gasping for breath. Their voices needed to be channeled. What if we got a large number of people to petition their elected representatives, who in turn could speak in Parliament, the one place the government cannot refuse to answer?
SpeakForMe was born as a collaboration between people who understood how to make these various parts fit. In the space of ten frenzied days we assembled nearly a hundred volunteers who drafted the email templates, translated them into multiple languages (a departure from SaveTheInternet’s English-only participation), built a website, collated contact information for MPs by correcting the errors in official sources, and liaised with the offices of MPs so that they would not be taken by surprise when we launched.
The result? Over 30,000 emails were sent. Aadhaar dominated zero hour discussions during every day of the winter session that Parliament functioned. 33 MPs filed Rule 193 notices to ask about 45 questions between the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and many of them were answered.
Unfortunately for us, the government proved adept at evasive answers, so none of this material was useful in court. This was discouraging enough that we lost interest in SpeakForMe — what use is the provision of voice if no one is listening? — and I went back to working on Kaarana.
The undocumented failure
I went into IFF in 2016 planning to build a censorship detection service. Net neutrality can only be enforced if a regulator can monitor violations. Services like RIPE Atlas exist, but the Atlas network consists of devices hosted by volunteers on broadband networks. It is unable to measure mobile connectivity, and India is a mobile-first country. Atlas (and OONI) also depend on reports from trusted sources as they cannot tell the difference between censorship and subterfuge. If we solved both these problems, accepting reports from anyone who downloaded a mobile app without needing to trust them, we would have made a genuine advancement in technical infrastructure and not just a political intervention.
I was super excited by this project. Two years later, I have done nearly nothing to make it happen. I was stretched thin between my responsibilities at HasGeek — where my absenteeism has resulted in mounting technical debt — and my growing concern for Aadhaar that resulted in Kaarana and SpeakForMe.
It is easy to believe expressing oneself is sufficient to effect change. SaveTheInternet, Kaarana and SpeakForMe are all lessons that true power comes from enabling others. In this, I worry that IFF’s determined pursuit of its causes also hurts its ability to nurture a community of independent voices, and I’m more inclined to the latter.
The censorship detection service will need to find another sponsor.
Meanwhile, if you care for net neutrality or privacy, you should support the Internet Freedom Foundation. Their work remains important despite my reservations on how it should be structured.
Next steps
I started HasGeek in 2010 with Zainab Bawa to address the frustrations I had experienced working on large technical projects. Both programmers and their clients had a poor grasp of the significance of their work and how it impacted downstream users. (In an upcoming publication, I describe programmers as the new priesthood, interpreting the will of the technology god.) If only programmers talked to each other more often, they’d gain the confidence to better explain what they can — and can’t — do.
HasGeek’s intervention is to host discussions in the form of technical conferences. This has been moderately successful in that HasGeek continues to offer this service eight years later without having descended into tyranny. The key to HasGeek’s method is peer review. Speakers at all HasGeek conferences are selected on the basis of review by past speakers and subject matter experts. While a reviewer’s bias does show in the final result, this is easier to correct than that of a benevolent dictator turned tyrant.
In engaging with the Aadhaar ecosystem, I’ve been struck by how well meaning and thoughtful some of its creators were, who largely made the mistake of assuming their clients were similarly minded. They are now horrified at the misuse they were warned about, and yet can’t see their hand in it.
Kentaro Toyama describes it as technology’s Law of Amplification: tech empowers humans to be more effective at whatever they already want to do, whether good or bad. Aadhaar smells of enterprise software design, where intent is controlled by a corporate hierarchy that is beyond the scope of the technology project. This runs counter to a growing recognition that technology creators should be cognizant of how their work will be used.
How was such a fundamental mistake made? One hint is in the poor quality of peer review during the project’s ideation: disrespectful of cross-domain expertise, and degenerating into hostilities. This, then, is the next frontier I’d like to explore: enabling effective peer review. I’ll examine this in future posts.
Nikhil Pahwa, my collaborator in SaveTheInternet, Kaarana and SpeakForMe, has also resigned from the Internet Freedom Foundation for similar reasons:
