Notes from “Allegro Legra”: Metagov’s Practical Governance Workshop #3
By Val Elefante
If you’ve been on a Metagov Zoom call before, you probably know that most of our community meetings are structured to allow folks to share updates about their research, get feedback from peers, and spur discussions generally on topics related to governance of digital space. However, every third Wednesday of the month, Metagov hosts a special workshop series titled “Practical Governance Concepts,” which takes a slightly different format. In these workshops, pre-selected members of the community lead a virtual group through a participatory governance process. The goal is to give Metagov community members a new perspective on governance through hands-on experience, hopefully surfacing new insights and reflections compared to studying governance from a distance.
Another goal of these workshops is to increase experimentation of governance processes within our organization. One common challenge we notice many communities have with governance is that it evolves very slowly, if ever, which can be problematic if a process isn’t working well. However, increasing experimentation–especially in the form of hands-on experience–can be a solution to this problem because it exposes the community to alternatives that may work better. Experimentation with a governance process in a low stakes, trial-and-error format is extremely useful before actually implementing it to govern real resources and real people within a community.
With these practical governance workshops, Metagov hopes to not only enhance our own community’s governance processes but also model what experimentation can look like for other communities. In our first workshop in June, we experimented with sociocracy, utilizing the consent-based working group structure called “circles” led by Alex Rodriguez. In the second, we engaged in a collective sense-making exercise led by Niccolò Pescetelli using a software tool called PSi.
On September 14th, for our most recent edition of the workshop, Chris Wray, founder and researcher on distributed organization and cognitive development, guided us through the completion of a group project using the software he and his co-founder Rob Knight developed called Legra. Legra can briefly be summarized as a multiplayer p2p todo list, but the software instills a distinctive structure for the group that flips traditional, hierarchical project management on its head.
How Legra organizes collaboration without inherent hierarchies
Whereas Trello or Asana accumulates a list of tasks assigned by your manager, Legra codifies relationships of reliance between group members working towards a shared objective. The goal is to move away from a mastermind project manager and towards humans working together to align their intentions so that they can accomplish their goals. The result is a co-mapped dependency graph built from the bottom up.
At the core of this dependency graph are intents. An intent is a record of someone’s responsibility to do something. Individual participants can set intents for themselves, or propose an intent with one other person where that person must consent to enter into the agreement of reliance. Sometimes someone is relying on you to deliver a task because they are your boss, but other possibilities are that they are just giving you feedback, mentoring you, or feeling some meta responsibility for the task. Legra doesn’t constrain that space and does not assume any power dynamics from the start.
For the workshop, the group used Legra to collectively project manage ourselves to the completion of “A Very Short Play About Delegated Governance.” The play components included: a title, setting, characters, costumes, and stage directions.
How our group wrote a play using Legra
Without any one person explicitly “in charge” to begin delegating tasks, it took the group a good 5 minutes to figure out how to start. Someone tried asking if anyone had previous playwriting experience and therefore could help guide us a bit (the answer was no). So it was truly anyone’s game. Similar to other decentrally managed projects (including DAOs), this format naturally promoted a “do-ocracy,” or the organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them.
Our group benefited immensely from being able to use Zoom to synchronously communicate while setting intents on Legra. The contribution flow went something like this: First, someone unmuted on Zoom and volunteered themself for a certain, self-chosen task. Then, they codified that contribution in the form of an intent on Legra, which also included choosing another group member who should rely on them for the completion of the task.
In practice, session leader Chris asked, “Who’s gonna step up to make the first intent?” Zargham responded by offering to write the dialogue for a character. So, he created an intent on Legra for himself and marked Chris as the person who could rely on him. In this moment, I realized that Z would not be able to write dialogue without contextual information about this character. So, I was able to overcome my playwright imposter syndrome and step up to help lay the foundation by choosing “The Charles River in Boston” as the setting and “Ariel the Mermaid” as our play’s first character. On Legra, I set Z as the person who could rely on me given that his ability to complete his task was dependent on the completion of mine. Boom! Now we were well on our way to collectively writing a play.
To see how we divided up the rest of the tasks to ultimately complete the short play, you can watch the video recording of our session.
You can also read the completed play.
Reflections and analysis: how Legra affords agency to workers
Legra supports the governance system of do-ocracy with relational, consent-based task management. Personally, I love do-ocracies because they grant individuals more control over their work, responsibilities, schedules, and daily tasks. They also give participants more capability to set and enforce their own boundaries, rather than allowing others to decide what’s on their plates for them. It is an individual’s responsibility not to overcommit to the point where they either cannot accomplish all their tasks or their work quality is compromised. However, at the same time, it is also up the individual to take on as much work as is needed by the group so that together everyone can accomplish the group’s collective goals. I see do-ocracies as directly in contrast to the traditional project management structures adopted by many corporations, which are infamous for increasingly stripping workers of this agency and control.
At least in my experience, people with more agency are more motivated to complete a job and do it well. When someone steps up to assign themself a task (or, on Legra, set an intent for themself), they do so either because they currently have the necessary skills or they desire them and are committing to learning them in order to accomplish the task in a specified timeframe. But the idea that “this job was my choice” is empowering to the individual.
In some do-ocracies however, you can still have rigid hierarchies separating managers from task completers. Legra, however, empowers participants not only with “this job was my choice” but also with “choose their own boss” or, more precisely, choose the person who should rely on them to complete a certain task. Although it should be noted that it is also possible to assign a task to a colleague and set yourself as the person who relies, but that person would have to agree to accept the intent before it gets added to their list. In other words, Legra allows either person–the person doing or relying–to originate the intent. The point, again, being that Legra does not constrain that space.
Using Legra made me view my relationship with other group members and the group as a whole in a significantly different way compared to previous collaborative projects I’ve worked on. If you, like me, are already used to working for a decentralized organization, you are probably used to the sensation of holding roles as both a task completer and manager simultaneously. However, using Legra to get consensus with a fellow group member for every task made each of these roles feel more reciprocal. After all, a person I was managing or “relying on” chose me because, perhaps, they were building off of my previous work or domain expertise. Therefore, it made more sense as to why I was overseeing their work as opposed to me just being their boss. Plus, this relational aspect also made it feel more like we were working together to see the task to completion.
The idea behind Legra is that you are supposed to be able to accomplish more ambitious goals with this format because you better align people’s intentions. When every intent is established as a two-way agreement, as opposed to an assignment or a bounty, tasks are more precise because two people have come to shared agreement over what the task should be and when it should be deemed complete.
Syncing up outside of Legra
As described above, our group relied on Zoom for synchronous communication throughout the workshop. I can imagine that for larger projects, it would be even more beneficial (if not necessary) to have an open verbal communication channel where group members can ensure that all the needed tasks are being covered without overlap work. Some organizations might be skeptical of a need for synchronous communication (especially in the age of Zoom Fatigue), as it can certainly lead to tangents, off-topic conversations, and ultimately wasted time. However, Legra might help limit distractions for a group with the clear goal of mapping out a project and its tasks.
In my opinion, the need for synchronous communication in project management is not a bad thing. The opposite is often just as bad if not worse when a group member is completely unmotivated to perform a task that has been assigned to them without even a conversation, which is common in traditional, hierarchical organizations. Or, in more decentralized orgs (i.e. DAOs) using solely asynchronous task management software (i.e. Clarity) when tasks are put up as bounties but never completed. The motivation to contribute comes from Zoom, followed by a mutually consented upon agreement codified in Legra. Could Zoom and Legra be a match made in heaven? They certainly complimented each other well in this unique experiment.
Conclusion
In my opinion, a Legra supported do-ocracy could be a great format for young organizations such as startups where multiple people are juggling multiple different types of roles and responsibilities and approaching a goal from various different backgrounds and life experiences. There are certainly limitations, but DAOs and other decentralized organizations are demonstrating that there doesn’t have to be a compromise on quantity or quality of work done when a more do-ocratic structure is adopted.
With Legra to support with task management, I am hopeful for the future of consent-based do-ocracies. By the end of the workshop, the group was already using Legra lingo to manage our self-adjudicated tasks outside of just playwriting including this very blog post when I said, “I propose that Cent, you rely on me to write a blog post about the Legra workshop!”
Future workshops:
Stay tuned on Slack in the #seminar-discussion channel for the next practical governance workshop! To join the community, get involved at community.metagov.org.
