Inside Catalyst — Sept 23: liberatory practices vs mainstream tech business models
Weekly reflections from the Catalyst team on tech design biases, decentralising power, working our values and trimester planning.
This week we’re happy because of…
Prioritising personal and family needs
Ellie: I am celebrating how we are learning so much about what it means to welcome peoples’ ‘whole selves’ to work. This includes incorporating the beautiful, complex and sometimes messy reality of that into our rhythms and rituals. So often people have to fit personal needs like health and family around work rather than the other way around. This is seriously messed up when you think about it. We’re grateful for prioritising the flexibility that allows us to care for children, parents and ourselves when and how we need to.
Questioning how we define success and failure at living our values
Ellie: At our culture meeting this week, the exec directors were reflecting that to truly live our values we need new definitions of success and failure. It’s all too easy to feel like our efforts and contributions are never ‘enough’. We need to adjust our expectations of ourselves and each other, and remember what’s really important: things like how well we make space, care/show up for and hold each other in our wholeness (including our dependents) even over how much we ‘achieve’ or ‘get done’.
This is a feminist and disability justice principle and reminds me of a quote I captured in a blog at the beginning of Catalyst’s transition process:
“We need to create spaces where people can show up bleeding and suffering and not being able to cope — that’s real inclusion.”
Because otherwise, after all, what and who is it all for?
Experimenting with trimester planning
Megan: We’ve made good progress this week on planning our work for the next few months.
We’re experimenting with a new approach to planning. We found that planning in quarters didn’t fit with the rhythms of our work across the year. So instead we are experimenting with planning in three trimesters. We’re currently in the second trimester which runs from September to mid December.
We plan so that we can:
- Set the right pace — we want to work at a pace that supports our wellbeing and allows for genuine collaboration. Being realistic about how far we can get with something, in a period of time, supports this.
- Focus on the right things — we have big ambitions and there is always a lot that we could be doing. Agreeing priorities helps us to make space for the important things, as well as the urgent things.
- Signal our intent — we are committed to working in the open. Agreeing a plan allows us to share our intentions, which makes it easier for those we work with and alongside to decide what role they would like to play and how they would like to be involved.
Setting intentions over goals
Megan: We set our annual intentions, and then trimesterly intentions that work towards that annual intention. Intentions are like goals, but we chose the word because it speaks to our principle of ‘experiments over strategies’ and because ‘goals’ can be bring up associations with unhealthy work cultures that we’ve all experienced. We map out what we think are our ‘next best steps’ to support our intentions, knowing that these are likely to change and are not fixed.
Challenges ahoy
How mainstream business models don’t support liberatory tech practices
Ellie: The business models of mainstream tech platforms don’t accommodate the collaborative, equitable and networked ways of working we’re trying to establish. Tools like Slack, Airtable and Asana charge on a ‘per user’ basis, and the design of their different access or permissions levels presumes a hierarchical structure where a few people at the top have access to all the information, and this gets more and more restricted as you go down the power ranks. For an entity trying to work with multiple partners on an equal footing in shared online spaces, with everything open-access and editable by default, this quickly gets very expensive!
This is one example of how certain biases baked into standard tech design prevent liberatory practices from getting off the ground. It’s partly what we’re here to challenge. I’m excited to explore what it might mean to reimagine these platforms’ access and pricing models from a liberatory perspective.
Too many Catalyst decisions are centralised
Megan: Because we’ve been busy establishing the new phase of Catalyst, with a new organisation and a new mission, too many decisions about what we will and won’t do, and what we prioritise, are centralised. This does not yet reflect our mission to build collective power.
So we are working with our governance circle to design a structure, based on sociocratic circles, so that over time we can devolve or distribute decision making and budgets to people within the Catalyst network.
We’ve also been…
Ellie: I’m super happy to properly onboard our ace new colleague and Participatory Engagement Lead, Hannah Turner-Uaandja onto the team. I’m enjoying seeing her plan Catalyst’s Tech Justice Road Trip. It will have a focus on community-led participatory activities that build on the research and manifesto we published earlier this year
I’m also appreciating the fab new vision and mission blogs from content superstar Dawn Kofie that explain what we mean by ‘liberatory technology’ and ‘just and regenerative futures’.
