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+---
+title: "Coraline Ada Ehmke: Contributor Covenant"
+narrator: Coraline Ada Ehmke
+subject: Contributor Covenant
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-10-10
+approved: 2024-10-11
+summary: "After widespread resistance to codes of conduct in open-source software communities, Coraline Ada Ehmke's Contributor Covenant became the most popular code of conduct in the ecosystem."
+tags: [code of conduct, dispute resolution, gender, open-source software, organizations]
+---
+
+*First of all, I want to begin with the question of how you how you prefer to introduce yourself.*
+
+My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm the founder and executive director of the Organization for Ethical Source. I'm also a software engineer, emerita, having spent about two and a half decades in the industry. I'm best known as the creator of Contributor Covenant, the first and most popular code of conduct in the world for open source communities and other digital communities. And I'm very happy to be here with you, Nathan.
+
+*How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where do you start? And where are you now?*
+
+Career-wise, I would start in 1994, when I was a kind of adrift kind of kid. I was working at an engineering company in Austin, Texas, because my girlfriend got her dad to give me a job there. Back then I'm a smoker, and I'm always having conversations with the other smokers, who, some of whom are software engineers and some of whom are IT folks. So I have a good relationship with them. And one day one of them comes up to me and says, "Coraline, did you hear the company's putting together a web team?" I was like, "Oh, that's amazing. Put the company on the Internet. That's great." And he said, "So what do you think that's going to do for your career?" And that is how I fell into software development as a college dropout.
+
+Then fast forward a lot of years to about 2012, 2013. This is the point where I had made a decision to begin my gender transition. I was slowly waking up to realities of the world that had been conveniently easily ignored by me previously, and that were no longer ignorable. Things that I understood in principle, I was beginning to experience firsthand,  and that made me angry. But it was a righteous fury, and I decided to look for ways that I could use my skills and my life experience to change things, change the world, change the sphere that I was operating in---the sphere of tech and the sphere of open source---to make it less awful for people. And over time I've graduated from less awful to actually, like, maybe pro-social. Maybe we can use technology to actually make a difference in the world, a positive difference in the world. So I am less righteous fury these days, and more hopeful, looking for visions of equitable futures. I guess that's my career in a nutshell.
+
+*Does the does the world word "protocol" mean anything to you? Is that a word that you've used to describe aspects of your life, or that has been an important part of your work?*
+
+It is, in multiple senses of the word. Back in the day I was giving a talk called "He Doesn't Work Here Anymore," which was about my experience of transitioning as an engineer, as a technologist. One of the things I pointed out was that I was learning that communication works very differently than the way I'd experienced it in the past. If you likened it to the HTTP protocol, women were including extra headers that indicated the kind of response that they were hoping to get by sharing a particular by communicating a certain thing. Men on the receiving end were ignoring those headers and answering in a way that was maybe solving a problem or something, but not what was wanted. Other women are sensitive to these headers that are embedded in the messages, and communicate more empathetically for that reason. I was using the HTTP protocol as a metaphor for humans communicating. So I think I've always had the notion of a protocol as a methodology for interactions, whether between human agents or pieces of code.
+
+*I love that you brought up that context, and it reminds me, too, of the what you said earlier about the way in which things become visible in the context of transition. Things that are invisible otherwise visibilize themselves. And you know that, I think, is part of the behavior of protocols---to be invisible as infrastructures, and then to become visible when some kind of the inadequacy becomes clear.*
+
+Sure, or a bad implementation. That's always a possibility as well. A protocol is only as good as its adaptations.
+
+*You identified earlier with the Contributor Covenant. I wanted to focus this conversation as well, but feel free to bring in other projects as well, because I think other projects of yours are relevant. But starting with the Contributor Covenant, can you describe the story of your motivation for developing and then stewarding it, especially for people who are not familiar with what it is. Where did that story start for you?*
+
+It was around 2013, I believe, 2013 or 2014, when a Twitter hashtag emerged from the Python [programming language] community, which was #COCPledge. Basically, conference speakers were pledging to not speak at conferences that didn't have an enforceable code of conduct. This is a time when we have a lot of new people coming into the industry, a lot of people who have seen the salaries that tech companies offer and can see the transformative power of being involved in that economy. And a lot of those people didn't look like the people who came before them. And a lot of those people faced challenges that the people who came before them didn't experience. Those challenges could seem invisible. So codes of conduct were becoming necessary for the peaceful operation of gatherings of technologists. But that was meeting with resistance. It was very controversial. This is something we take for granted now---even department stores have codes of conduct now. But it was very controversial at the time for conferences, and there was a lot of a lot of activism that was required to make it a norm.
+
+In the midst of that, I saw that there are other places where technologists gathered, where their conduct also had the potential to be problematic. This was on Github, in the context of our open source communities and projects. The concept of a "community" was beginning to come into common usage to describe the group of people that coalesced around an open source project, and was not always a given. As we began to see projects as communities, we saw the need for shared values and norms to emerge. This led to the philosophy behind the Contributor Covenant, which was written as a way to establish shared values and norms for how people would interact in these open source communities. Over time, our understanding of what this means has developed and matured, and the Contributor Covenant has become a living document. The team is currently working on the tenth anniversary version 3.0, which will be modular to accommodate the novel use cases they've discovered, such as Discord servers, Slack communities, and even offline events. This evolution towards an "adapt versus adopt" approach is another way the concept of codes of conduct for digital communities is maturing to meet changing needs. The Contributor Covenant has always been a living document, accepting pull requests and being translated into more than twenty-five languages. With Contributor Covenant 3.0, the team is looking to expand their coverage of languages from the global south, in an effort to counteract the export of white western values that often go along with open source by default, and to be a force for decolonization. They have big plans for what a more globally oriented, norm-based instrument can do for the world.
+
+*So, in telling that story, you began in passive voice---it was created---and then you switched to first-person plural. I wonder if you could describe a bit more about the design process for the Contributor Covenant at each stage? From the beginning, what was that process like and how has it evolved now?*
+
+Wow! That's a great question and a great observation. At the beginning, the Contributor Covenant was very much a social justice manifesto, and many critics of codes of conduct in general, and the Contributor Covenant in particular, regarded it as a political document pushing a certain political agenda. I was in full agreement with these critics that yes, the Contributor Covenant was attached to a social justice agenda. And why shouldn't it be? It was very confrontational, and the language was also confrontational, because they were confronting a status quo and a culture that was literally harmful. Of course, what they proposed was antagonistic and confrontational, because that was the context in which they were operating.
+
+Over time, however, the Contributor Covenant has gotten less confrontational and less adversarial, and more reflective. I hope it is more reflective of changing values in our digital communities as well. With version 3.0, the emphasis is on the globalization of the Contributor Covenant as an instrument. To achieve this, we actually have to strip out a lot of the language that would typically be associated with some of the values they're talking about, because it's jargon---social justice jargon. When talking to people who don't speak English as a first language, or people who are from outside the white Western sphere, those words aren't going to make sense to them, and that's not acceptable anymore.
+
+*Was it a collective project from the beginning?*
+
+No, it was just me shepherding it, guiding it, and writing it for a number of years. I gifted contributor Covenant to OES, I believe, in 2021 or 2022.
+
+*The Organization for Ethical Source.*
+
+Yes, I gifted the Contributor Covenant to the Organization for Ethical Source  because I saw that it was too important to be under the control of just one person. I didn't want there to be a single person responsible for it.
+
+There was a GOVERNANCE.md file that got added to the Contributor Covenant at one point in time, and I used CommunityRule to put it together. I established myself as a "benevolent dictator for life," at least for now. But when I did that, it didn't feel right, it didn't sit right. I was like, "Why should I have complete authority over this document that is influencing tens or hundreds of thousands of developers daily?" That's a big responsibility, and maybe I'm not qualified to shepherd that forever.
+
+Bringing it to the organization and bringing it to a community of ethics-minded technologists---that made a lot of sense. And it made sense as a legacy. You have to plan for what happens when you're not around to do the work anymore. It just made sense, and it felt like the right time.
+
+*Why do you think you chose to go in the direction of a code like this? I mean, you could imagine people have taken a lot of different approaches to tech in, or ethics in tech---whether it's litigation or advocacy, petition-signing, or passing laws in
+governments, or working to change policies within companies. Why did this medium stand out to you as the tool you could use?*
+
+There's precedent for codes of conduct as an instrument for setting norms, studying shared norms, and defining shared norms. So a code of conduct as an instrument made a lot of sense to me.
+
+There's a reason it's called the Contributor Covenant instead of the Contributor Code of Conduct. It could be the Contributor Code of Conduct very easily, which would be more descriptive. But it's more about a situation when I am entering a space, I'm entering a community space, and that community is telling me what it values, and that community is telling me what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. We're entering into an agreement, we're entering into a social contract together, where these will be the norms that govern how I interact with you and how you interact with me.
+
+It's adopting a protocol, and that just made a lot more sense than a list of rules or regulations, or policies or manifestos. Not to say that those things don't have value, not to say that those things aren't related or interdependent. But it just makes sense to me as a really general, well-recognized form of social contract.
+
+*Can you talk me through the way it functions? I think this connects to the distinction between code and covenant. How does it work? Maybe in an example or in general practice that you've seen? How does this function in the world?*
+
+The Contributor Covenant begins with a preamble which is basically a list of protected classes from a human rights perspective. This establishes the intent right off the bat---it's saying we are intending our community to recognize, understand, and remediate issues that people who fit these criteria often experience. So first of all, we're prioritizing the safety of the most vulnerable and those with the least agency. We're saying that right from the beginning.
+
+Everything beyond that point is details. Next, we have a list of behaviors---behaviors that contribute positively to the community, and behaviors that contribute negatively to the community. We give examples of positive, pro-social behaviors, and we give examples of antisocial behaviors, as a way of painting a picture and domesticating the high-level statement of values. How does this get put into practice? How do we treat each other? It's almost contractualism---what do we owe each other?
+
+From there, we go into some procedures around how to report a violation, and what kind of pledges the community managers or community leaders are making in terms of equitable enforcement. With version 2, we added a note that I think should have been implicit, but we made it explicit---that these things require human judgment, they require discernment, and that was also the purview of the moderators, to feel free and to exercise responsibly that aspect of responsibility. They had to use their best judgment and acknowledge that they're human and flawed, and that's okay.
+
+At the end, we're hinting that we want people to adapt, not just adopt, by saying this code of conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, with a link to the permanent URL. We're going to make that a little bit more explicit with Contributor Covenant 3.0, but that's basically how it works. It's setting up, "Here's what we value, here's how we treat each other, here's what we do in case of conflict." At a high level, that's the purpose of a lot of governance documents. Right? Here's what we value. Here's how we treat each other. Here's how we operate. Here's why. And here's how.
+
+*How has this been adopted in practice? It's gone from being an insurgent project that encountered a lot of resistance, as you said, to becoming really widespread in the open source world. What kinds of doors opened? Were there particular moments you think of that revealed something about how the protocol was working?*
+
+In the beginning, say for the first 5-6 years, the presence of a code of conduct was a signal that the project leaders, the community leaders, cared about these shared values, had the intention of making their community welcoming and safe. However, with the widespread adoption of codes of conduct, it's become something that people don't think too much about until they have to. It has also become less of a signal, because the adoption is less intentional. Now, the reverse is true. A project without a code of conduct is a stronger signal than a project with one.
+
+In a sense, this is a victory, because we have normalized something that once was an impetus for death threats. But at the same time, it calls attention to the fact that we can't be complacent about something as important as our values, or our protocols for interacting with each other in an equitable way. This is something that has to be actively worked on, actively developed, actively paid attention to and actively checked in on from time to time.
+
+Our relationship with equity has changed and gotten a little bit more complicated, and maybe a little bit more demanding. But the same could be said of governance across the board in digital communities---it requires a lot more work now than it did ten years ago. This is the reality we're facing, and it's something that needs to be continuously addressed and improved upon.
+
+*Have you had experiences of capture? When, for instance, has the covenant been used in ways that you didn't expect, and that you objected to?*
+
+I've had questions about why certain communities have adopted it---communities whose work I think is not necessarily terribly pro-social. I've had mixed feelings about big adoptions by FAANG companies, for example. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. There have been companies whose business models are predicated on human rights abuses. I have mixed feelings about them using Contributor Covenant. But the way I reconcile it is that a lot of developers, a lot of technologists, and others are going to be interacting
+with the open source projects that these companies put out. I care more about the experience and equitable treatment of the people who are in a position where they are interacting with those projects, maybe because they have to. I care more about them than I care about Facebook itself, for instance. So objecting to Facebook's adoption would be negatively impactful on the tens of thousands of developers who use their frameworks.
+
+*Referring to these companies makes me wonder about the question of economy. You've more recently worked to build an organization around this around this work. But what has been the experience so far around supporting the work that goes into developing this project? Was there funding at the beginning? What kind of economic journey has this project been on?*
+
+The Organization for Ethical Source was founded with a grant from Omidyar, in conjunction with a partner organization. This interest was sparked by our work on the Hippocratic License, the Ethical Open Source license that's tied to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
+
+I would say that the majority of OES's funding since 2020 has been because of philanthropic interest in ethical licensure. Meanwhile, the industry is not yet ready for ethical licensure, and there is still work to be done in that domain.
+
+As OES has tried to expand beyond licensing to paint a more holistic picture of governance and norms-based instruments that match every step in the life cycle of an open source technology, there has been less interest in that. We actually applied to an organization based in Germany that funds open source projects, the Sovereign Tech Fund. And we've applied to other places for funding specifically for the Contributor Covenant as well, but the desire for that funding just isn't there. This has been pretty frustrating.
+
+I think it might be because the Contributor Covenant is now something that's taken for granted. People understand the work that remains to be done, but from a funding perspective, the Contributor Covenant has been a disaster. The only support we've had is some donations from the community, but we've never seen a donation or any kind of material support from any of the FAANG companies that have adopted our code of conduct. Nine out of the ten largest open source projects in the world have adopted the Contributor Covenant, and nobody pays those maintainers. So we're certainly not in it for the money or the attention it gets from funders.
+
+This has been a challenge, but luckily the Organization for Ethical Source is scrappy and we're volunteer-led, so we're not going to let that stop us.
+
+*What have been some of the most important and material tasks or decisions over the course of the project? Were there particular pivot points?*
+
+The addition of the Enforcement Guidelines were a pretty big milestone for the Contributor Covenant. A lot of the critiques people had were around codes of conduct being very divisive, as I mentioned from the get-go. And while sometimes those opinions were expressed through violence and threats of violence, I always tried to listen to what people were saying behind those threats, to understand what they were afraid of and see if there was anything I could do to make them less afraid.
+
+One of the things we saw a lot on 4chan, 8chan, and other similar forums was this attitude that "I'll say one thing wrong and I'll be kicked out forever." This always struck me as really odd, because if a project maintainer would do that, why would people be trusting them at all in the first place, if they thought the maintainer was that unreasonable? But this was a very loudly expressed fear---that if someone says something that's politically incorrect, even accidentally, they'll be banned for life.
+
+The addition of the Enforcement Guidelines was meant to address concerns like this, to make the process more transparent and less arbitrary. It was an important milestone in trying to allay those fears and make the Contributor Covenant more effective and accepted. So we decided to include Enforcement Guidelines, which were based on the enforcement ladder approach used by Mozilla. The idea was that different types of code of conduct violations would warrant different enforcement actions, ranging from minor to major consequences. The response would not be the same for someone who casually made a mistake versus someone who was trolling or being aggressively offensive towards another community member.
+
+Including the Enforcement Guidelines seemed to address a lot of the feedback and fears that people had expressed. This did open up a period of "rules lawyering," where people were still arguing that too much authority was given to project maintainers. However, I pointed out that project maintainers had always had the ability to remove anyone from the project for any reason, arbitrarily, regardless of whether there was a code of conduct in place.
+
+Despite this pushback and even vitriol, I've tried to adapt to the changing conditions and demonstrate that, despite the Contributor Covenant's social justice origins, the underlying social justice concepts are pro-social and should not be controversial. I'm not asking someone to adopt an entire political agenda---I'm simply asking them not to discriminate against others and to treat each other as fellow human beings.
+
+*You mentioned the license licensure work, the work with the ethical source licenses. Could you say a bit about how that next phase of protocol development came about for you?*
+
+The impetus for creating the Hippocratic License 1.0, or even the alpha version that got so much attention in 2019, came from Mijente, the Latinx activist organization and immigrants' rights activist organization, and their "No Tech for ICE" campaign. This highlighted the issue for us. We saw that open source was being used and abused in ways that the open source community wouldn't accept, like an individual maintainer's software being used in extrajudicial killings. At least, we hoped they would be opposed to something like that.
+
+It seemed like a clash between values, where we had organizations like ICE using technology, very visibly, to commit human rights atrocities. And I was like, we have no means of defending our technology from these abuses. What can we do? And licensing, this is a fundamental hack that open source is based on, or was originally based on.
+
+So the idea came up for a license where we're saying, "No, you're free to use, you're free to fork, you're free to do everything you can do with an open source project, except commit human rights violations." And that was a bridge too far for open source traditionalists, who insist on "Freedom 0"---that the open source technology can be used for any purpose whatsoever without any restrictions at all.
+
+The thing that struck me about that is that it extends software freedom to freedom that stops at someone who's capable of reading and writing code. But I think software freedom should go all the way down to people upon whom technology is used without consent---the entire ethical supply chain, if you will. And that's a point of contention between practitioners of open source who are ethically minded, and practitioners of open source who are more traditional and more narrow in their interpretation of what "open" really means.
+
+That's something we've contended with, and we've tried to address critiques of ethical licensure, especially in terms of enforceability, which I think we've satisfied pretty well now. This is an evolving field and an experiment. I think it's really interesting, and it's done a lot of good so far.
+
+The Hippocratic License has actually become very popular---the most popular sector of adopters is academic researchers. That's fascinating to me, even though it's not the intended use case we had in mind. It's really interesting to see what's happening with it in the real world.
+
+*You talked about the enforcement there, and that's a point of contrast between the two designs. Right? The Contributor Covenant relies largely on the assumption that there's either an organization or a maintainer, somebody who is exercising a kind of community-scale enforcement power, and they have the ability to remove people, whereas the the Hippocratic license, the ethical source licenses, rely on a level of legal enforcement. Can you say a bit about how that that kind of dependency, so to speak, affects the design of the protocol?*
+
+One of the key goals for the Ethical Source licenses that aligns perfectly with the Contributor Covenant's framework is to make the implicit explicit. The team wanted to ensure that the rights extended to the most vulnerable. Just like in the preamble of the Contributor Covenant, they are calling out specific protected classes as a priority for their community. The Hippocratic Code License 3 introduced an interesting provision on the enforcement side, which a lawyer would call a "supply chain impacted provision." This provision essentially states that if Facebook uses the code licensed under the Hippocratic License, and the use of that code results in human rights violations against a specific population, that population has the right to sue Facebook for damages. This inverts the power, giving the impacted people the opportunity to pursue legal action, which corporations would have to take seriously. As a maintainer of a JavaScript library, they would not sue Facebook for infringement of someone else's human rights. It wouldn't work. But if the people upon whom facial recognition software is used and abused choose to file a class-action lawsuit, that's something very different.
+
+Licenses are the intersection of open source communities and corporations or institutions. Institutions can't be held to ethical standards that depend on their goodwill. Institutions have a different set of incentives than people do, and therefore the norms that we are establishing have to be incentivized differently. That means relying on legal regulation.
+
+*The question of incentives has been running throughout the conversation. I hear that also in what you were describing about the signaling power of the Contributor Covenant. How much of that kind of thinking went into the design process explicitly? Or is it more a matter of observation after the fact?*
+
+II would say it was after the fact. I started writing Contributor Covenant in a moment of inspiration and a desire for righteous retribution. I was riled up by the state of the world and wanted to make a big impact and a big change in the way things were done.
+
+But things have changed since then, and I've become more deliberative. Now that we have an org, we're very deliberative, doing more strategic thinking and less reactionary stuff. And that's just the natural evolution of a project like this. We're still staying true to our roots, of course, and to the values that inspired the original version. But the technosocial context has changed, and we have to adapt with it. What worked at the beginning won't work anymore. And that reflects our changing way of maintaining it. I hope that answers your question.
+
+*Yes, thank you. Finally, I'm curious about earlier legacies. You've talked in the context of the Contributor Covenant about earlier codes of conduct and with the licenses about the way open source in general is built on that foundation of licensing. But are there other kinds of precedents that you think of, that informed your motivation and your designs?*
+
+When I look back on it, I wouldn't say that there were specific things that directly inspired the language of Contributor Covenant 1.0 beyond fluency and the concepts. But in retrospect, I guess the circles I was moving in had more explicit norms.
+
+As a Gen Xer, I think we take a lot for granted. But through my interactions with later generations of technologists, I've found that people are more explicit about expressing boundaries verbally, introducing themselves, acknowledging their disabilities, and other norms that didn't happen when I was coming up. So the fact that these are norms with newer generations of technologists is inspiring and definitely influences what we're doing. It reminds us why we're trying to make the invisible visible and be open to different ways of expression and interaction as the world moves on. We have to adapt, you know?
+
+*Is there anything else you want to bring up before we wrap up?*
+
+Some protocols are very long-lived, and my favorite example is the MIDI protocol. It was established in 1983 and has only gone through one major revision, which was backwards compatible.
+
+I think the most effective and long-lived protocols make the fewest assumptions, are the most explicit, and are just as simple as the complexity of their domain will allow them to be. And I think we can take inspiration from those aspects of successful technical protocols and apply them to social, interpersonal protocols as well.
+
+*Is there a danger, though, in that narrowness of a tightly defined protocol, in the context of social protocols?*
+
+You just want to make sure that the protocol is capable of expressing the things that need to be expressed. Simplicity is not necessarily the same as filtering or losing data or losing resolution, or anything like that. The messages can be very rich, meaning the activities can be very rich. What's passing through the protocol can be very rich, even with a simple protocol. Telephones operate on that principle. Telephones don't care what you say, but they're gonna get that voice communication across the wire right.
+
+*Yeah, or the modem communication across the wire. You can do all sorts of things.*
+
+And that's the beauty of protocols: they're fundamental and they become infrastructure---if they're effective, they become infrastructure. Not to say that we don't want to pay attention to them. They require maintenance. All infrastructure requires maintenance. But you're successful when it becomes when it becomes a normal way of doing things.

content/articles/kiessel-good_market.md

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+---
+title: "Amanda Kiessel: Good Market"
+narrator: Amanda Kiessel
+subject: Good Market
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-10-29
+approved: 2024-12-16
+summary: "Good Market is a digital commons for enterprises that prioritize people and the planet over profit. It enables communities to set and enforce their own standards for doing business."
+tags: [economics, organizations, ecology, standards]
+---
+
+*I want to begin with the question of how you like to introduce yourself. How do you introduce yourself to somebody you've just met? Where do you begin?*
+
+It changes with every single context. But the general introduction for right now is that I'm part of Good Market, which is a digital commons. That's usually my introduction at the moment.
+
+*Part of?*
+
+Yes, I say, "I'm part of." I'm a co-creator. This is a collective effort so "part of" feels more right.
+
+*How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start? And where do you see yourself now?*
+
+I started with ecological systems. My training and early work was environmental toxicology and agroecology---what we would now call regenerative agriculture. I was very concerned about environmental problems, especially the intersections of environmental issues and social justice. So that was the earliest work.
+
+*What were the specific contexts of that work?*
+
+I was involved in ecotoxicology research connected to a Superfund site. After that, I taught at a local university in rural Thailand for a couple of years and became more focused on agriculture issues and community development. I came back to the US briefly for a Masters program, and after that, I joined a local organization in Sri Lanka that primarily worked in agricultural areas.
+
+The country had been at war for years. When I arrived, a ceasefire had just been signed and there was a lot of energy, but then the 2004 tsunami happened and the war started again. The organization I was working with was one of the only local organizations able to work on both sides of the conflict---both the government areas and the Tamil Tiger areas. It was an intense period and it really deepened my understanding of social systems and social change.
+
+The organization focused on social mobilization, community organizing, and network building. They worked with existing community-based organizations, or helped people form new organizations, to solve shared challenges and connect to opportunities. That was their core approach across different parts of the country. When I first joined, there were 300 staff, but after the tsunami, we grew to more than 1,200. I was one of the only international staff members. The organization was very much locally run.
+
+When I was in university, I was focused more on the ecological side of things, thinking that if we just had the environmental solutions, everything would be okay. But over time, I became more aware of the political barriers, the social barriers to change. I ended up getting deep into social mobilization and learning about strategies for social change, and at some point, it just became clear that I needed to be more attentive to economic systems.
+
+The current phase of my work pulls on all of those experiences, but it's much more about understanding our current economic system, looking at the root causes of our ecological and social issues, and finding leverage points that we can work on collectively to address those root causes. The work I'm doing now is very much around shifting economic systems so they are good for people and planet. So, that's the trajectory---ecological systems to social systems to economic systems.
+
+*And what was the story of the creation of Good Market?*
+
+It came out of experiences with the local organization in Sri Lanka. During the war, many of the communities we worked with were displaced. The organization was involved in emergency relief and resettlement work and became dependent on international aid. When the ceasefire was signed, they expected all of their funding to stop. I was asked to join to help with the transition to a more self-sustaining model, so they could continue the community work without international aid. I had some background in fair trade and what we now call social enterprise and I was supporting the local district teams. We were making good progress, but then after the tsunami and after the war restarted, the focus shifted back to emergency relief, and a new wave of international aid entered the country.
+
+Donor aid was not my area of interest, but this was my community. These were people I cared about, so I didn't want to leave. But I really didn't want to be doing that kind of work. I was not interested in writing funding proposals and logical frameworks and reports, so the way to keep energy up was to go and visit groups that had self-sustaining models in parts of the country less affected by war, and also in other parts of the world.
+
+Anytime I had a work-related trip or traveled out of Sri Lanka---to visit friends in Myanmar, India, Japan, the States, Europe, Australia, anywhere---I would go and visit groups in that area working on social and environmental challenges with self-sustaining models. I would try and find them online, but it was difficult because everyone was using different names for what they were doing. What words do you use to search for people doing this kind of work? I realized really quickly that if you found an initial contact in a place, and asked them, "Who else should I visit? What else should I see? Who else is doing this?" they would suggest other groups to visit. They all knew each other.
+
+That is the origin. It was realizing how big and interconnected this movement is. By movement I mean groups that are choosing a different story. The dominant economic story is all about maximizing profit and growing, but there were all these organizations out there---using different language and different structures---but all working with self-sustaining business models and choosing to prioritize people and planet over profit. The full scale wasn't visible because it had emerged bottom up and different communities were using different words.
+
+I wanted to work on something that wasn't donor-dependent or project-focused and I was interested in supporting groups that were working on social and environmental issues with self-sustaining models.
+
+*How would you summarize what Good Market does?*
+
+What we are doing now is making the broader movement of self-sustaining enterprises and networks more visible. We are making it easier for these groups to find and connect with each other, and to collaborate on systems change, whether that's changing the narrative or changing rules and policies. Our goal is to create a digital commons that is shared by all the groups using it.
+
+*What do the groups have to do to be part of it?*
+
+It's a commons, so there's a very clear boundary. That's been there from the very beginning. There are community-owned minimum standards for each sector of the economy. There's a free online application form. It's free to be included, but the standards are a very critical part of the process. And then there's a crowdsourced monitoring system. So to be included, participants have to fill the free online form, meet the community-owned standards, and have a public profile on the site.
+
+*Are those standards things that groups usually already have in place, and are monitoring? Is it something that they already have in place before they come to you, before you encounter these groups? Or are they developing these kinds of practices in relationship to the platform?*
+
+It varies. The minimum standards are designed to be accessible and work across regions, languages, and business types---social enterprises, cooperatives, not-for-profits, responsible businesses, and initiatives that aren't legally registered. For people signing up because they identify as part of the movement, meeting the standards is very straightforward. They are fully aligned with these values and they often go way beyond the minimum requirements.
+
+If people are signing up because they are trying to access a specific benefit or market opportunity, there are more applications that don't meet the standards. They might not be prioritizing people and the planet at all. When there is a financial incentive to join, the risk of social-washing and green-washing is higher. Even then, no one is ever fully rejected. They receive feedback and recommendations for improvement. We offer to connect them with other organizations and networks that can support them, and we encourage them to make changes and reapply. Many of these groups reapply weeks, months, or even years later, and they are very proud of the changes they have made.
+
+For those who are already in this space, the minimum standards are a relatively easy bar to clear. For those who aren't thinking about their impact on people and the planet yet, the goal is to encourage them and support them on this journey.
+
+*How would how would you characterize the difference between these kinds of standards and, say, the fair trade labels that people might be more familiar with?*
+
+These standards are just minimum standards that enable people to be part of the digital commons, but there are many networks that use the site that have additional criteria. To join their network pages, enterprises have to meet additional standards. For example, World Fair Trade Organization, Fair Trade Federation, and B Lab, which offers B Corp certification, all have network pages on the digital commons. Enterprises in those networks have all met additional standards and go through their verification or certification processes.
+
+Some verifications and certifications and networks have started using the minimum standards and free online profiles as the first step of their own processes. The online form includes questions about an organization's environmental practices, how they treat the people they serve, their workers or members, and their suppliers, and how they benefit their community. If they are approved, their answers appear publicly on their profile page, which enables the crowdsourced monitoring system. The online form is free and usually takes around 30 minutes, so it's much more accessible than third-party certification.
+
+The enterprises that have third-party certification only represent a small percentage of the enterprises doing this work. They are the tip of the iceberg. The goal is to increase the visibility of the broader movement. There are producer groups in India, for example, that might not have a certificate or any web presence but they are doing amazing work locally. Third-party certification might not make sense for them.
+
+This is set up as a minimum level of recognition. It's built in a neutral way that lots of people can use because it's shared infrastructure. It gets used in very different ways by different networks and communities.
+
+*How involved were participating groups in designing the model?*
+
+The idea for an online platform came from discussions with all those groups I mentioned earlier, the people we visited in different countries. They wanted a space where they could be visible, connect, and share best practices. But software development can have high upfront costs, and because of the experiences during the tsunami and the war, we were very aware of the risks associated with different types of funding. We'd seen expensive donor-funded software platforms that became ghost towns after the project funding ran out. We'd also seen platforms that took on what gets called "impact investment" and were pushed to become more profit-oriented. We didn't want to take on funding that could lead to mission drift or cause it to become pulled away from the community.
+
+So we talked to these international friends about testing the concept before building any software. We started by hosting a weekly marketplace event in Sri Lanka to see if the basic ideas were feasible. Does the concept work? Do the minimum standards work? Does a crowdsourced monitoring system work? We had paper applications in three languages and had weekly meetings to review applications and handle any crowdsourced monitoring issues that came up.
+
+The intention was just to test the concept. We thought there would be about ten stalls. We didn't expect it to become so popular. It became the main place for people who cared about social and environmental issues to connect, and many groups began to depend on it, which wasn't the original intention. If we stopped, it would have affected their livelihoods, so we told the international friends that we were going to have to wait on the software development. It ended up taking four, almost five, years to make the local operations self-sustaining and generate enough revenue to start software development. We had four years of paper applications and weekly meetings, but by the time we built the software we knew what worked and what didn't, and it was based on what people really wanted.
+
+Even after we had the initial software functionality, we told people we were beta testing in Sri Lanka. We wanted to make sure it worked across all sectors---agriculture, fishing, mining, renewable energy, tourism, tech, and all kinds of services. Once it began expanding globally, we focused on serving different enterprise networks. The enterprises signing up were usually invited by those networks or by other enterprises that used the site. Today, it includes enterprises across economic sectors, registration types, languages, and regions. The form can be filled in twenty-two languages and there are enterprises and networks from nearly 120 countries.
+
+*What kinds of inputs informed the design of the marketplace?*
+
+There were many co-creators, but there were three of us who really served as stewards and we all had been working for that same local organization for almost ten years. So we all had experience with community-based organizations like revolving loan funds, funeral societies, women's welfare associations, producer cooperatives, and groups managing natural resource commons. We had learned about mobilizing people for collective action, developing self-sustaining models, and building trust through transparency and clear community rules. These experiences informed the design process, even though we didn’t explicitly plan it that way. It was only much later when I was re-reading something from Elinor Ostrom that I realized our design followed the eight principles for governing common resources.
+
+Diversity was a big consideration. The goal was to increase visibility across different sectors, legal structures, certifications, regions, and languages. Bridging those divides was a core principle.
+
+Inclusion was also a crucial design consideration. It had to work for people who don’t speak English or use computers, but only have access to a mobile phone. We started by testing the software with people who lived in the city, had international exposure, and used computers, but we didn't consider it ready until we started getting applications submitted in Sinhala and Tamil by mobile phone from rural areas. That's when you know the design works.
+
+*Have the standards been subject to ongoing evolution? How are those standards developed, and who governs them?*
+
+There are a few basic principles that don't really change. Members prioritize people and the planet over short-term profit maximization, have a purpose that includes social or environmental goals, communicate about how they are good for people and planet, and have a sustainability strategy that goes beyond a one-time project or event.
+
+The minimum sector standards are standards for each sector of the economy and those were developed to evolve over time. They were initially developed by looking at sustainability certifications for different sectors. There are more than four hundred with varying levels of credibility. What you find is that most sectors have a shared understanding of best practices for people and planet. This is particularly true in the high-impact sectors with a greater risk of exploitation. So we started by looking across all of those and finding the overlap and patterns, and then simplified the language to make it easier to translate and more accessible. They've been improved over time based on feedback from approved enterprises and networks. The full process is available online.
+
+These minimum standards serve as the low bar, and from there, other certifications or networks can have higher levels of criteria. Networks are able to use the site to manage their networks and have their own additional standards and verification systems.
+
+*What kinds of patterns have you noticed in the interactions among these these groups as they're setting standards? What kinds of dynamics emerge as people are developing and choosing their the standards that they're going to enforce for themselves?*
+
+One pattern is that many groups start with a narrow focus in one area and then recognize the need to be more holistic in their approach as they engage in dialogue and explore the space further. For instance, some groups that were previously focused solely on social impact have started to recognize the connection between social and environmental aspects, leading to a more comprehensive approach.
+
+I've also noticed an increased openness to collaboration across what were once seen as divided groups. Some groups that used to use very exclusive language are now open to a more inclusive and collaborative approach.
+
+I can provide a specific example if it would be helpful.
+
+*Please.*
+
+The Social Enterprise World Forum works with social enterprise networks around the world. Most countries don't have a separate legal registration for social enterprises, so it can be difficult to identify them. SEWF worked with national networks to develop shared characteristics and a shared definition, and they wanted to establish a global verification for social enterprises that complemented existing local systems.
+
+They used Good Market to test the process because the site worked across sectors and countries, and it enabled them to keep the investment and verification costs low. The original badge said "SEWF Verified Social Enterprise," and the standards used language that was more common in the UK and Commonwealth countries. During the initial pilot period, they realized that the terminology wasn't widely recognized in many places, and it was excluding groups that met the standards but didn't identify with the term social enterprise.
+
+After a community feedback and review process, they changed the name of the verification to "People and Planet First" and simplified the language of the standards. This works for most of the social enterprise networks because it puts the definition in the name of the verification---social enterprises put people and planet first---but it also enables them to engage with groups that have the same core values but use different language like fair trade enterprises, cooperatives, steward-owned companies, post-growth enterprises, regenerative businesses, and others.
+
+I'm seeing this trend in many different spaces, where groups that were once focused on their own "tribe" are now recognizing the value of bridging across and working with other groups. Community identity and trust-building are still important within their group, but they're more open to collaboration and cooperation with others.
+
+*How does the platform or the organization support the verification process?*
+
+They use the minimum standards and the free online application as the first step of the process. This works well because it is a free first step. Even if an organization isn't eligible for verification yet, they still benefit from having a public profile. They have a positive feeling and something to work towards in the future.
+
+The second step is a verification fee which is paid through the digital commons which makes everything integrated. The final step is a verification form that covers the five People and Planet First standards and enables them to submit their financial documents, governing documents, and other evidence. The global network partners are able to review the forms, add comments and feedback, and submit their decision. All of this is managed through the shared software.
+
+Because Good Market is a digital commons it's set up as a shared resource. When people contribute to developing it, everyone benefits. If a network needs new functionality, they can mobilize funds and invest in developing it, and that functionality is available to everyone. The People and Planet First verification benefited from existing infrastructure. The previous year, an organic farming network invested in developing a verification management system. They were already using the digital commons for their directory and they wanted to use it for their farm visits and their full verification process. They invested in the infrastructure that enables networks to create their own forms, collect data, manage the status of applicants, and vote. This infrastructure is now used by other other networks. It's why People and Planet First was able to pilot a global verification without big startup costs.
+
+Now, when other networks want to collect information or implement a verification or certification process, they can use the existing infrastructure. People and Planet First has also mobilized funds and invested in new functionality like activity tracking systems and the ability to download certificates, which benefits others using the system. This is how the shared infrastructure has been working, allowing different groups to contribute to and benefit from its development.
+
+*How does it help uphold the standards that communities set? What is the process for enforcing those standards?*
+
+They are also able to use the crowdsourced monitoring system to flag the standards, but they have their own review process. I think that's a crucial aspect. Different contexts require different approaches. What works for one community may not work for another.
+
+By giving each group the autonomy to decide what works best for their community, they can collect information, update their standards over time, and evaluate and verify their processes in a way that suits their needs. They can also have their own design principles and processes for changing standards, which is essential for their unique context.
+
+At the same time, having a common infrastructure allows them to keep their information organized and accessible, while still providing the flexibility to adapt and evolve their processes as needed. This balance between standardization and customization is key to making these systems effective and sustainable.
+
+*Is there a particular moment when you saw this system being tested, when you saw it confront its own limits or face challenges that community had to rally around solving?*
+
+It has been non-stop, but that's what makes it fun. I don't see the obstacles as challenges, but rather as opportunities to learn and adapt. Every time something new comes up, it's a chance to think, "Okay, we hadn't thought of this. How can we address it?" It's a process of continuous learning and evolution.
+
+In the early days, when we were testing the software in Sri Lanka, we were cautious about expanding too quickly. We wanted to make sure it worked across all sectors and languages. But as we started getting groups signing up from different countries, we realized that there was a demand for this kind of space. These groups were looking for a sense of community and connection. They wanted to be part of something bigger.
+
+One of the key questions we had was whether the crowdsourced monitoring system would work beyond Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, people would flag enterprises because they cared about the concept and they wanted to maintain the standards. We weren't sure if it would work in communities without the same level of in-person connection. One of the earliest international networks was a national food store in Pakistan that used the site for their curation process. The first time an enterprise in Pakistan was flagged, we knew that the process was going to work.
+
+It's been an evolution, with each new development and each new group that joins, we ask ourselves, "Does it work at this level? Does it work with this type of group?" It's been a fun and exciting journey, and I'm grateful to have been a part of it.
+
+*In a context when somebody's flagging somebody else, what does the procedure look like?*
+
+While it's less common now than it was in the early days, issues can still arise. The upfront process has improved significantly, making it more likely to catch potential problems early on. The initial application form has been refined and improved over time, reducing the likelihood of issues slipping through. That being said, there are still cases where a change in ownership, management, or governance, or a significant influx of financial capital, can cause a group to lose sight of their original values and mission. This is where crowdsourced monitoring comes in.
+
+Every claim made by a group on their application form is publicly visible on their profile page. If someone knows the group and has evidence that a claim is false, they can flag it by clicking on the flag icon. This opens a checklist with all the claims. The person flagging has to select which claim or claims are false and provide some kind of evidence to support their concern. This starts a review process. Most issues are straightforward to resolve. Sometimes it's just a matter of updating information or correcting a mistake. If there's a more serious issue, they may be unpublished while they take corrective action, and if there's an intentional false claim, they may lose their approval status and be removed from the digital commons.
+
+We've had instances where workers have flagged their own organization, suppliers have flagged groups that no longer source materials in a certain way, and customers have flagged products that don't meet the claimed standards. We've also had third-party certifications flag enterprises. For example, there was a group in Sri Lanka that had organic certification in the past. They were no longer certified, but still had the logo on their packaging. An international organic certification agency used the crowdsourced montoring system to get them to remove the false claim from their packaging. We even had a wife flag her husband's company because they had scaled quickly and started buying from outside sources that didn't meet the standards. The flagging process is anonymous.
+
+When we first started, the concept was new and Sri Lankan enterprises were applying because they were trying to access market opportunities. Now, most applicants know the concept and they understand what the standards are before they sign up. This has reduced the number of flagging issues and makes them easier to resolve. Most groups are deeply committed to prioritizing people and planet. They are are more likely to take corrective action and resolve any problems that arise. They want to make it right. They care about it.
+
+*In the fair trade movement, there has always been a give and take between a certain set of values and the temptation to compromise for adoption---especially when certification processes are funded by the certified organizations. There's always this threat of capture, of a certification being used in ways that the people who devised it didn't intend. Does that experience of capture resonate with you as something that you've had to deal with?*
+
+Yes, it resonates with my earlier experiences in both organic and fair trade. I've seen how certification systems can be co-opted by companies that don't necessarily share the values and principles that underpin the movement.
+
+For example, fair trade started with fair trade enterprises. These are businesses working for systems change and they embed fair trade principles in all aspects of their work. As the term "fair trade" became popular, certifications emerged that catered to large businesses. Now a profit-maximizing company could get a fair trade certification for a single product line. These product certifications had more resources, bigger marketing budgets, and much greater visibility than the fair trade enterprise networks that founded the moment.
+
+Similarly, the early organic community had a deeply holistic approach and included principles around building soil health, increasing biodiversity, and ensuring fair labor practices. As the term "organic" became popular, corporations entered the space. Current organic certifications allow for large monocultures and industrial organic practices. Now the types of organic farmers who started the movement have had to develop new standards and certifications to raise the bar.
+
+These are patterns we need to learn from. It's part of the reason the People and Planet First verification was developed. The five standards that underpin the verification were designed to prevent co-optation. Verified enterprises have to exist to solve a social or environmental problem, reinvest the majority of their surplus towards their purpose, and have a structure that protects their purpose over time. Profit-maximizing companies aren't able to meet those criteria.
+
+*Have you paid a price for setting the standards the way you have in terms of limiting your reach?*
+
+We haven't had to pay a price in terms of the actual standards. The entire purpose of the digital commons is to speed up the transition to an economy that's good for people and the planet. Having a clear boundary is critical for increasing the visibility of the movement. It builds trust and a sense of shared ownership and that has expanded reach.
+
+The price we've paid is more related to inclusion, which is common in this space. We consciously chose to make it free to apply, become Good Market approved, and have a public profile on the site because we want to increase the visibility of the broader movement, which means including all enterprises that meet the standards, regardless of income level or status.
+
+Financially, it would have been easier to pilot this type of initiative in a place like Europe or the US, but we chose to test in Sri Lanka because it needed to work for people who don't speak English and don't have access to computers. We were only able to start testing the revenue model once we began expanding to countries where more enterprises have the ability to pay.
+
+*What is the platform's primary engine for economic sustainability?*
+
+This initiative is different from others I've been involved in. Most of the things I've worked on have been revenue-generating from the start. With software, there's a big upfront cost, but the cost to scale and sustain is relatively small. We've had to invest a lot to get the software up and running, but the revenue from the marketplace events and shops in Sri Lanka helped to subsidize the software development costs.
+
+The site has what's called a freemium subscription model. It's free to have a profile and use many of the basic services, but people can become "cocreators" and pay a monthly subscription to access additional services and also support the commons. This enables people to contribute to the commons and help it grow.
+
+It's also possible for approved enterprises to receive payments through the site. There's a 6 percent marketplace fee to help cover the costs of that service. Networks are able to use the software to create white label marketplaces for their own communities on their own sites. If a sale happens through a network marketplace, the network receives half of the marketplace fee.
+
+Subscriptions and marketplace transactions are growing, but that will take time. In the meantime, there are many networks wanting additional functionality. They're mobilizing funds to invest in software development, and that's helping to cover costs for now.
+
+*What have been some of your most important decisions, you, either individually or collectively, in the in the process of building this framework and and an organization, and what prepared you for making those decisions?*
+
+The key to building a community-driven initiative is recognizing that it's a never-ending, ongoing process. Every decision feels like the most important decision at the time. It requires being attuned to how things are evolving and changing, and being able to pivot and adapt constantly.
+
+I think what prepared us is that the three co-founders have been through a lot of challenging experiences together. We've been through natural disasters, war, terrorist attacks, regime change, and major economic crises. Each time, we had to figure things out together and adapt. These experiences have helped us be more comfortable with uncertainty and approach challenges with a mindset of "we'll figure it out." When an issue comes up, we see it as a data point, a useful piece of information that requires attention and possibly adaptation.
+
+This has made it easier to navigate challenges. It's about being present and listening to the needs of the community, and being willing to adjust and adapt as needed.
+
+I could really feel the impact of these experiences during the pandemic, when I was talking to other organizations that were struggling. Having gone through so much change in the past, I was able to be in a good listening space and provide support to those who were trying to figure out transitions. I know how hard it is, and I was able to be more present for them.
+
+*You're in some respects creating something new with a platform, a digital tool, but you're also building on existing communities. Do you see Good Market as continuous with or departing from pre-existing legacies in the communities you're working with?*
+
+I absolutely see our work as a continuation of the efforts of those who came before. We're building on the lessons learned from community organizing in Sri Lanka and other traditional communities. This way of working is not new, but we're adapting it to the current context and using digital tools to enable it.
+
+What's exciting about this approach is that allows for both bonding and bridging. It recognizes the importance of bonding within smaller networks, whether they're place-based or focused on a particular topic. These communities provide a safe space for people to experiment, build trust, and feel understood. We're committed to preserving this aspect of community building, even as we use digital tools to enable it. In fact, a lot of our work is focused on localization, creating local tools to support local movement building and face-to-face interactions. We believe that change requires in-person connections and a sense of community, and the software is designed to enable these kinds of interactions.
+
+The digital aspect of this work also enables bridging between communities and networks. Even if groups have different specialties or approaches, they may have shared interests or leverage points that can be used to drive change. The digital commons makes it possible for these groups to come together, share information, and collaborate on issues that matter to them. It also makes it easier to fill gaps. People can find products or services or solutions that aren't available in their area. That can be really fun.
+
+*Is the language of "protocol" something that you've used in in this work? You're working across many languages. What kind of words do you use to describe Good Market? You talked earlier about the commons, for instance.*
+
+When working with software engineers, I'll use more technical terms like "protocol." Beyond that, we try to use more accessible language that resonates with people. We talk about "community rules" and "minimum standards," which are more relatable and effective.
+
+We've also found that using the term "digital commons" has been helpful in conveying the idea that the platform belongs to everyone. This language has been particularly useful in shifting the mindset away from a profit-maximizing, platform-monopoly approach. When we started using the term "commons," it clicked with people and created a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. It's no longer just about using a platform, but about being part of a shared community.
+
+Initially, it was hard to find the right words to describe the different types of groups that use the digital commons. Some don't identify as businesses, others don't identify as organizations. Some call themselves a brand, and others find it too marketing oriented. Some prefer initiative, others feel it doesn't sound established enough. Over time, we've found "enterprise" to be the most effective bridging word. The original meaning is an undertaking, working together for a purpose. It's a neutral term that includes everything from informal voluntary initiatives and mutual aid groups to large businesses that have been around for decades.
+
+We use the term "network" to describe an enterprise that works with many other enterprises. This can include member organizations, certification bodies, and community-owned spaces. These terms have worked well, but it's taken time to find the right language that can bridge across different divides and be used effectively across the community.
+
+*What is holding this kind of model back from becoming more widespread than it is?*
+
+We've seen a significant financialization of our economic system, resulting in a huge concentration of wealth and power. This has made it increasingly challenging to undertake this type of work. The current system's rules and regulations only exacerbate the difficulties. There are deep-seated, structural issues that make it hard to effect change.
+
+I think this is why there's a growing interest in collaboration now, more so than even a decade ago. People who are pioneering new approaches are recognizing that these challenges are too big for any single organization or network to overcome alone. When we talk about the need for collective action, it resonates. People recognize that we need to come together for meaningful change. Collaboration is the only option. We can't do it alone.
+
+I think there are people who initially believed they could create change through their individual enterprises, actions, or choices. Or they thought that voluntary action by corporate leaders would be enough. Now, there's a growing recognition that the challenges we're facing are interconnected and deeply ingrained, and they're going to require a more systemic approach.
+
+An example of a shared challenge is access to financing and appropriate financial services. Mainstream finance is focused on maximizing profits and endless growth. Even in the impact investment space, the dominant narrative is that it's possible to have social and environmental impact *and* market-rate returns. For many of the enterprises we're serving, this narrative is detrimental. They are looking for patient, non-extractive finance that serves their actual needs. While many enterprises are finding creative ways to generate revenue from the start, others---especially those working on large community infrastructure projects---require financing to get off the ground.
+
+*Are there ways in which you've seen that developing shared standards can enable groups to get over those barriers?*
+
+I feel like it's just beginning, and this is one of the things that excites me the most. In almost every sector, people are collaborating to find solutions to the challenges they're facing, and because they are working in different contexts, many diverse and innovative approaches are emerging. But when we look across all sectors, the biggest ecosystem gaps are in the finance sector. Finance is lagging behind.
+
+I think the entry point is increasing the visibility of groups that are testing out new models of non-extractive finance and transformative finance and trying to do things differently. There are some very new efforts to increase collaboration and sharing in this space. That's the first step to developing shared language, shared standards, and a range of financing options that are better suited to the needs of next economy enterprises.
+
+*Thank you. Is there anything else you want to make sure to include in this story, that you want people to understand about Good Market or about your your work?*
+
+I'd like to offer some advice to others who are setting up protocols. Having been involved in and supported many groups in this process, I've learned that it's much easier to establish basic protocols at the beginning of an initiative. I've seen groups, such as marketplaces, that try to introduce protocols later on. It can be extremely challenging to add new protocols and boundaries when you have current members who wouldn't fit within those boundaries.
+
+At the same time, I've seen start-up cooperatives and other initiatives that get caught up in trying to design the perfect system before they begin the work. They can spend years in planning meetings without much real action. The key is to strike a balance between having a solid foundation and not overthinking it. It's important to articulate shared values, the boundaries of an initiative, and very basic protocols or community rules, something simple, yet effective, that allows you to begin working and gathering real world feedback. From there you can learn and adapt and evolve as needed.
+
+Another crucial aspect is using simple language. This helps bridge divides and ensures that your protocol is accessible to everyone, regardless of their background or expertise. If you can explain your protocol in a way that your aunts, uncles, or other family members can understand, it's more likely to work. Using clear, concise, and simple language helps make community rules more inclusive and easier to implement.

content/articles/littauer-constructed_languages.md

@@ -0,0 +1,238 @@
+---
+title: "Richard Littauer: Constructed Languages"
+narrator: Richard Littauer
+subject: Constructed Languages
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-02-04
+approved: 2025-02-11
+summary: "Constructed languages, or conlangs, are the basis of a hobby, a science, and a community that now occupies a small corner of the entertainment industry."
+tags: [fiction, language, open source, software]
+---
+
+*Can you tell me a bit about how you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+Hello! I'm Richard Littauer. I use he/him pronouns. I have chronic ADHD and am probably on the autism spectrum, which means introducing myself is impossible. I saw someone recently on Bluesky who said, "My hobby is having hobbies," and that definitely applies to me.
+
+How I define myself really depends on whatever is happening in a given moment. I'm currently a PhD student at Victoria University Wellington, Te Herenga Waka, in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, New Zealand. I'm not a New Zealander---I'm American by birth. I'm also an open source aficionado, polemicist, pundit, community organizer, and developer. I'm in that ecosystem of open source things.
+
+I'm also a conlanger, which is the most common term I use. Sometimes I say constructed linguist, sometimes computational linguist, because I have a linguistics background. Sometimes I just say linguist. But conlanger---someone who makes languages up---refers to what I'm probably going to talk about most today.
+
+Xenolinguist is another possibility I've used before---*xeno* as in alien languages, from the Greek word *xenos*. I sometimes introduce myself as a classicist because I have formal training in Latin and Greek. I did five years of Latin in high school and two years of Greek in university. *Linguist* kind of subsumes classicist under it for some definitions, but not for others. Usually one of these terms is how I introduce myself.
+
+*How would you tell the story of your development as a conlanger? Where would you start that trajectory, and how did that beginning bring you to where you are now?*
+
+There's this funny book---it's red with a black stripe down the side---called *The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth*. It's by Ruth Noel. I've had multiple versions because people keep giving it to me. There's an interesting bit where the author mentions that Tolkien's first conlang was the word *woc* for cow, which is just *cow* backwards. It's a really boring language since that's all we know. I'd argue that's not even a language---that's just a code word.
+
+That particular reference to Tolkien often comes to mind when I think about where I started with languages. One of the first things we do as humans is talk. I've been working with languages my whole life. My parents didn't teach me French even though I was homeschooled, which was a shame. They would talk in French over me with my sisters about my birthday presents. I was paid a quarter for every Latin name of a plant I learned when I was around six to ten, which was a great incentive. I probably got an easy buck that way.
+
+*Why was that important to them?*
+
+For my mother, being literary was always very important. She wanted me to become C.S. Lewis---a preacher or academic writer about the kingdom of God.
+
+This took a side quest turn when I was around ten or twelve, and my aunt Theresa Littauer gave me a copy of *The Hobbit*. I read it immediately, then read *The Lord of the Rings* in the next year or two. I've read it pretty much every year since, so at least twenty times now. I'm a very fast reader of fantasy literature.
+
+I learned about Tolkien very early on. He's often an entry point for conlangs because he was a linguist and academic. He was head of the Anglo-Saxon department at Oxford for twenty-five years, and he made an entire world of languages, then peopled his world with novels. They were badly written and kind of discursive, but they introduced epic fantasy to many more people than before. He's not the first fantasist---people like George MacDonald had been doing excellent work before. There's tons of fantasy literature. But Tolkien started something new, and much of its strength came from setting his worlds in this complex milieu of languages, where you see Elvish---Sindarin and Quenya---and Dwarvish.
+
+As a young kid, that was it for me. I was really excited. I started writing all my notes in Dwarvish runes and making my own languages for the fantasy worlds I was inventing with my friends. I never got into Dungeons & Dragons or role-playing games because I listened to an evangelical radio show called *Adventures in Odyssey*, which scared me and said getting involved with D&D would mean turning to Satan. I swore never to do that or drugs, which was probably one of the best things to happen to me---I feel like that would have been a hole I'd never get out of. To this day, I still haven't done cocaine or played D&D.
+
+I got involved with languages, and this turned into a love of languages in high school. I was lucky to go to prep school. My teachers were excellent, particularly Dr. Munich, my Latin and Greek teacher. I loved Latin but was bad at it---I was a bad student because I had a huge amount of issues from religious trauma and parental trauma. I was raised in a very strict evangelical household, and that's not what I wanted to be, so I wasn't good at focusing in class. But the love was always there.
+
+I loved Latin more than any of my other classes. When I went to university, I started doing English lit and classical lit, then realized---why do classical lit when I've already read half of these in Latin? So I switched to Greek. Then I did English and Greek, realized I didn't want to talk about English---I just wanted to read books---so I switched to linguistics and Greek, also doing Japanese for a year. I ended up dropping Greek because I did poorly, being so depressed from dealing with my trauma. So I just became a linguist.
+
+For one particularly stressful Christmas---when my mom told my sisters to tell me she was remarrying, among other things---I distracted myself by looking up this movie I'd just seen: *Avatar* by James Cameron. I wanted to know if other people had learned this language from the film called Na'vi.
+
+There was a new website called LearnNavi.org. I joined and started typing away with all my internet friends. No one had made a dictionary, and I'd just made one for my Anglo-Saxon class in university, so I thought, "I'll make a dictionary in LaTeX." I made this little three-page dictionary of all the words we knew. The language creator, Paul Fromer, couldn't release them legally because of copyright laws with Fox, but he could tell them to people in interviews. We could collect those and release them without legal issues.
+
+Over the next two years, with probably two hours a day of effort, minimum, that turned into the LearnNavi dictionary of about forty pages, translated into thirteen languages, including Na'vi---that was a good April Fool's joke. I became one of the main moderators of the community. My name was Taronyu, meaning hunter. They took me to San Francisco to meet other nerds in a cabin in the woods, and I became fluent. I can still speak it, though not as much. The only people you can talk to in Na'vi are other Na'vi learners, which over time I realized wasn't really the subset of people I wanted to talk to all the time---no offense.
+
+I went viral in *The Sun*. I was a centerfold---they painted me and then libeled me in the press, saying that I'd painted myself, which isn't true. They took all my sarcastic remarks at face value, so it's printed that I said I couldn't find a thirteen-foot-tall blue girlfriend. That's accurate, but it was a sarcastic remark.
+
+Over time, people would reach out asking if I could make a conlang for their game. I also joined the Language Creation Society, dedicated to building these things together as a consultancy for movie studios. I bombed out pretty quick because I had to make money. I had a master's program in computational linguistics, and I needed to pay off my student loans---I'm an American, so I paid my way through college.
+
+*Conlanging was not lucrative?*
+
+No way. At one point, I estimated I made maybe $2,000 total from all the Na'vi stuff, which included interviews on radio and getting flown to California. It wasn't a very good use of time, but it was incredibly fun.
+
+Eventually, a few people would reach out here and there. I translated some Latin for a game from a Seattle contact. Then there was this one friend who was in an audio maker Slack, and someone said they needed help. He connected me, and I ended up making the language for Philip Pullman's books. *His Dark Materials* was turned into a film by HBO, Bad Wolf Productions, and BBC in Wales. I went to Cardiff at one point.
+
+In the third season, there are these creatures called the Mulefa who have these long trunks. They use the trunks to signal various words lexically like tones. I spent a lot of time in my living room just wandering around going, "Is that going to work? How do I display this?" I made this language based on the words from the books, and it's now in the movie. I taught it to the actors and did sound recordings. They had a really famous actress actually speak the language---she did a great job.
+
+That was a full contract, a professional-grade, "Richard made some money" contract, which was really nice. That turned into more work eventually. I can't talk about all of it because I'm still under NDAs, but I've made goblin languages for a video game and worked with other people to continue doing this. It's been quite fun as a side-quest career.
+
+I also taught Latin at a small high school in Vermont, coming full circle. I taught for three or four years, taking students from nothing to reading Virgil. I taught a course of six students how to make their own language, covering syntax, morphology, and world building. That was really fun---they learned a lot and have gone on to make their own languages.
+
+At this point, I'm about as professional a conlanger as you can be without being David Peterson, who does this full time for major film studios. I've got an IMDB profile---I had to make it, but legally I was allowed to. I'm in the credits.
+
+*As somebody who has these dual interests of linguistics and computer systems, I'm curious about how you see parallels there. I see this concept of protocol as something that bridges both. Do you see working with computer languages as something parallel with building linguistic languages, or does it jog very different parts of your brain?*
+
+I have to be careful here because a lot of people say, "Oh, you know languages, you must be very good at programming and computer languages." But computer programming languages are quite different from conlangs. Conlangs tend to look like human languages most of the time. There are some that aren't, like Lojban, the logical language. There are some that really do, like Esperanto, which has about 100,000 native speakers---kids who've learned this language from birth.
+
+Noam Chomsky has these really cool things on types of languages. I never remember perfectly, I just know they're subsets. I think of languages as various protocols or methods for parsing information according to set structures. For me, it's just a code---a way of encoding arbitrary information attached to arbitrary sound files. There's syntax and morphology and phonetics and phonology that get in the way, but they also encode how language can be structured.
+
+I see them as being very related. I have a whole degree in computational linguistics, and the entire point of that field is to explain how you get a computer to understand humans and how you get humans to understand computers---that's it at the end of the day. Everything else falls into that bucket.
+
+What's interesting for me as a conlanger is that a lot of people discount constructed languages as being incredibly boring or silly or stupid, not worth studying or being interesting. For me, I'm like, "Why?" Because they're also human---they're human sets. I see a lot of things that other people don't recognize as conlangs as conlangs. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a good example, where there are codes for how scientists can use Latin names for creatures.
+
+These Latin names have really strict ways of being presented together, and for me it's just making a conlang.
+
+*By putting new rules around Latin names?*
+
+It's not Latin, right? It's something that looks like Latin and that uses the Latin dictionary, but the rules they have and the protocol that scientists follow isn't actually Latin. It's another subset of Latin based on particular rules they put out. For me, that's very similar to prescriptivism---like saying, "Oh, you can't say, 'Me and my friends went to the mall,' you have to say, 'My friends and I went.'" All those things are just trying to make subsets of language for specific usages, so I see them as identical in terms of computational tools.
+
+It always becomes fuzzy for me because when I make conlangs, I use code to help me generate word lists and types of words by defining the phonotactic possibilities of the language. When I do that, I'm aware I'm making a subset of all possible languages that's actually unlike human languages, because human languages aren't perfect---we mess things up all the time. I live in an area of the world that has English as its language, New Zealand English, but there's also a suburb here called Ngaio because it's from Māori. You can't start words in English with "ng," but New Zealand doesn't care because it has Māori influences. That's kind of why conlangs aren't quite human---you try to set these strict structures.
+
+*Can you describe some of the process of how you go about developing a language? You talked a little bit there about the way you use computers as part of that process, and you also talked about walking around the room, flapping like an elephant. So how do you do this? Where do you begin?*
+
+Let me scope this to how I professionally make languages for other people. I don't make a lot of languages for myself at the moment---I would like to, but I'm doing other stuff with my time.
+
+When I make professional languages for work, I first define the phoneme set. I look at the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet--- You know, it's also the word for "fern" in Na'vi, which was chosen because I told Paul Fromer that I wanted to have more words for ferns and also more words starting with "ì." He asked me what I was drinking that night when we were at the bar in San Francisco or Petaluma, and I said "IPA," and he said "How about *eepa*?"---and that's why I have a tattoo of a fern on my foot.
+
+Anyway, I look at the IPA and decide what sounds I want. Do I want to have weird glottals or clicks? Do I just want to have initial sounds? I edit these nowadays with a script that does this for me. My friend Joe---we met in Boulder, Colorado---and I work together using William Annis's code. We have this whole system where we write the phonemes out and automatically generate all possible words.
+
+The second thing I do is phonotactic structures---how these sounds can go together. The beginning of a word "ng" is a good example of a phonotactic structure in English. You can't do that in English, but you can in Māori.
+
+After defining the phonotactic structures, I have a giant list of auto-generated sounds. This is really good because I don't want to sit there and try to make up a thousand words---I'll end up making words that sound stupid or too English, and I'm not a perfect translator of phonetic sets into words. A computer can do that, and then I can pick and choose from them much easier, with less bias.
+
+Then I fiddle with it and often send it to a client. I put a lot of the words together randomly and say them out loud, asking how it feels to them.
+
+After that, I do syntax and morphology. That's when I figure out the basic word order and morphology. How is it going to be weird? How is it going to be different? I often mess around on Wikipedia, looking at cool languages until I get inspired, then take some bits and put them together.
+
+Then I read out some sentences and translate basic things---"Joe saw the fox" or "I will drink your blood from the skull of my enemies," something like that. I try to translate that and see how it sounds, then send it to the client. Eventually we converge. I try to send a few different examples, and they can say "more like this, less like that."
+
+Remember that bit about flopping around sounding like an elephant? It becomes very difficult if the speakers don't have human mouths, so I have to figure out how it's going to work. Or with whistle languages---I've made a few of those now. How am I going to write that down? How's that going to work? I have to figure all that out. It's actually quite fun.
+
+*Have you done original written languages, like distinct alphabets?*
+
+I haven't done a lot of them. I will be doing it for one contract I'm on right now. Written orthographies are really variable and different---that's a whole other subset of making things that's really fun and interesting.
+
+I made my own runes when I was an early teenager. I made my own set of futhark, but they were very dwarven. Let's face it, even Tolkien himself took all his stuff from other languages. A lot of conlangers just steal and then say, "Oh, I borrowed it." It's kind of fun.
+
+*You talked some about social dynamics in this process---your relationship with a friend where you are developing these together, or relationships with clients. What makes for a good collaboration in this context?*
+
+I'm really bad at collaborating because I'm really scattered, and it takes me a while to get back to people. I've always been that way, and that's not going to change. I wish it could, but it's not. So I don't know what makes a good collaborator, except it's not me.
+
+The main thing about a good collaborator, besides that, is passion and interest in making something beautiful together. That's art, because you're making art at the end of the day. It's very unlikely that someone will die because they mispronounce the shibboleth in a conlang---which does happen in human languages. That's where the word *shibboleth* came from. If you couldn't pronounce "ear of corn," you were killed when trying to cross the river if you were a Palestinian back 2,000 years ago.
+
+With conlangs, it's almost never that bad. There was one conlang I made where I used a common morpheme that sounded like an English word for excrement, and all that stuff got cut. I should have thought through that better, but things happen.
+
+With collaboration, you want to make sure you're working together to meet your goals. Sometimes your goal isn't just to make it sound nice---sometimes it's to make it sound realistic. I always try to make languages feel natural. If it's a small group of people, I try to make a very complex morphological language. If it's a large language being used by many people, I try to make a simpler language that's going to have lots of second-language learners.
+
+It's always fun to try to make that balance work because I try to make languages look like real languages. Chinese is very simple because so many people speak it. Hungarian has 1.8 million inflections on their verbs---you've got to be born in that language to be able to speak it. That's just the way it is. It's really tough.
+
+Trying to explain that to a client really helps. Back when I was a kid, it was the language that was most fun---we never actually bothered to make a world, we just made some languages and had a good time. The guy I did that mainly with went on to do a postgrad, and he's currently a postdoc at MIT studying gravity. You have to have a certain type of mind to really enjoy this sort of work. I just happened to know someone who had that kind of mind, which is great.
+
+*So what makes a conlang great art? What do you appreciate about a really beautiful language? What do you look for? And I'm sorry, I know any variant of "what makes art good?" is a horrible question.*
+
+It's not a horrible question. I almost said "it's a good question," which is my least favorite thing to say when I'm interviewing.
+
+*Usually when people say "that's a good question," it means it's a bad question.*
+
+It means they're stumped and don't know what to say. It's a really interesting question because it is hard to define the parameters of what makes art beautiful. I would say it depends on what I'm working on---it depends on what the goals are.
+
+For me, a good conlang doesn't feel like a conlang. It doesn't sound like another language, like it's Arabic or "foreignese" or something. It sounds like a language that has a clear culture, where the words are coherent and mesh together well, where the way people say it sounds natural. I can imagine a grandmother speaking it, and also a really buff security guard, and also a child. I can imagine the poetry and see how clever it is in that language by trying to translate it and thinking, *Oh, that's a pun for this!* That's always really fun to me. That's a good language.
+
+A bad language is one where it's really difficult to pronounce. I made this language called Llérriésh (or Llama), and even I couldn't say it well. I mean, I tried really hard, but there were all these weird tone things going on. It was cool for me to do, and I think it ended up being kind of beautiful because it was really complex---I just wanted complexity at that point. But I would never curse anyone to try to learn that language, to try to speak it to other people. But it was beautiful to me.
+
+*How do you teach, say, an actor who has to speak a language that you've created?*
+
+First thing to do is go through some basic words and say, "Here's how this is pronounced, here's how that's pronounced." You have to make sure that your orthography is standard. You can't use English orthography because English orthography is the worst. You have to be like, "Okay, 'a' is always 'ah', it's never 'eh'."
+
+*Do you use a phonetic alphabet?*
+
+Yeah, so I try to use a pseudo-IPA. I don't really give them IPA because that's too hard. But I try to say, "This is always like this, and that's always like that." The j's are always j's, they're never y's, something like that.
+
+It also involves accepting that when they mess up, that's part of the language. Now that was the language---that's how it worked, actually, in this back-formation. I've heard this from other conlangers as well---when people mess up the language, it's like, "Well, that's just their dialect." That's really cool about conlangs---there's no ultimate truth at the end of the day.
+
+It's definitely difficult for some things. English speakers have a lot of weird stuff going on. English is not a normal language---it's a unique language, just like every other language. Our r's---the American r is a really rare sound in the world. It's not a common sound. So trying to convince other people that "Oh no, every r is"---it's tough. You have to explain that over and over again, like "Oh no, it's not 'Sauron,' it's 'Saurrron.'"
+
+*What are some of the most important decisions in creating a language?*
+
+How many vowels are there? Is it tonal? How many tones are you going to have? What's the syntax going to be? That's always a really common one. Is it SVO, is it VOS---verb, subject, etc.? What's the order of words? Is this a language that's going to be written or not? Is this a language that's going to have a lot of things translated in or not?
+
+What format are you storing your lexicon in? How are other people going to be able to edit that format with you? How will you present the information to a client is one of the main things. I often use a tripartite interlinear gloss translation where I have the original writing, then each word written out with all the morphemes in it, then the translation. I always try to do that, at least, because otherwise you end up with them not knowing where to put the emphasis on words.
+
+*Do you generally deliver a dictionary and a grammar? How do you---what do you deliver? Say more about that.*
+
+A .docx file, or maybe a Google Doc, with all the lines that have been translated or need to be translated, and a short dictionary of how it works, and maybe a short grammatical primer. Not massive. For the Mulefa language, I also had a whole two or three pages on how the finger movements should work for humans talking. I decided you just use your primary finger instead of a trunk---the great thing about humans is we don't have large proboscises. We don't have---it's really hard for me to signal with my nose "to the left." I don't know how I would do that, so it's like, just use your finger. So I had to explain how that works, and how the different variations would work---wiggling or harsh movements.
+
+For another language I made, it was really important that I explained the different types of weird sounds that a goblin might make, and what clicks are, and how those work together, and how you would write that because I was giving it to sound people who then had to implement this.
+
+*Is there a lot that you have to develop on the back-end that you don't show the client? Is there a more complex grammar?*
+
+Yes, but it's also smoke and mirrors. A lot of the time, because I'm a contractor and have to cut down on my hours at some point, I can't spend ages debating whether a word should be something. Sometimes I'm like, "Okay, here's the thing," and I just thought of that in two minutes---but that was the two minutes I had to give you.
+
+A lot of your job as a contractor is making them feel like there's an adult in charge who knows what's going on, authoritatively stating, "This is how this works." What I have to do is keep good notes on my end where I don't write conflicting things later.
+
+So what I'm actually doing is making a grammar for me. That's always a bigger document, because it's important for me to know, "Okay, I made this decision, and here's how this decision is going to play out in the long run." That's where conlangs end up dying---when you end up with "well, this word is going to be a regular word, and this word's an irregular word," and then you get to like twenty pages of that and you're like, "Oh crap! What was I trying to do with this language? How do I translate 'I see the sun'?"
+
+You have to write these things down. Otherwise you end up completely confused because there are so many different types of decisions you have to make: pronominal usage, subjunctive usage, future imperative usage. You know, all these sorts of things you have to figure out. Am I going to bother with that? Is there going to be an optative? Is there going to be a thing marked on the verb where the listener had to signal that they heard it firsthand? Some languages have that narrative morpheme---am I going to have that in every word or not?
+
+Writing all these things down really helps you out, and the best way I've learned how to do it is to do it ad hoc, but document it well. Then trust your earlier decisions and listen to them, and don't mess up.
+
+*How constrained do you think of the range of linguistic possibilities as being? I'm thinking here about the old Chomsky debates about whether language is a kind of cognitive structure as opposed to something that is an infinite playground. Even when you've developed languages for non-human beings---do you think of it like, "Okay, here's a checklist, there's a structure, there are some rules that you can't break"?*
+
+Yes, there's always some rules you can't break, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to signal. I have not yet written a language that's entirely identical to the HTTP protocol---I could do that, that is a language, it's a way of signaling information.
+
+The movie *Arrival* is a really good example, based on the Ted Chiang story, where the language is outside of the normal constraints of time. The way that they display that is really cool---the ink on the glass, if you haven't seen the movie.
+
+When I'm making a language, normally what I'm doing is making a language where the assumption is that the brains of the other creatures are similar to humans. Or the assumption is we have a budget this large and we need this to be delivered by this time. You always have to balance time for yourself as well.
+
+There's a really awesome resource called WALS---the World Atlas of Language Structures, at wals.info---made by the MPI at Leipzig, Martin Haspelmath and others. I've been using this since I was a linguist years ago, professionally, academically. It's really awesome because you can figure out what most human languages do. It's also really useful because if you have, say, prepositions, you're more likely to have adjectives before the noun---that's just how it works, they normally go together. So if I were to make a language with prepositions but post-nominal adjectives, that's actually quite rare. It's cool, it's possible---nothing says it's not possible. There's one language in Australia that does that, because there's always a language in Australia that does something.
+
+What helps me when I have to make these hard decisions around bizarre languages is remembering that every language would be bizarre to the next person to see it. There are so many examples in the world of things just being bonkers. There's a really good example from northern Russia I saw a few months ago, where one word that's pronounced like "pet" is allophonically identical to another word that's pronounced like "dag"---they would hear them as being the same. I mean, those aren't the actual words, but in that language, allophonic variation is really different from how we think about it.
+
+I have also tried to make languages that are impossible.
+
+*What do you mean by that?*
+
+The less we talk about that the better. I mean, it doesn't really work because I'm human and I use a human brain. Languages that don't make sense according to normal human structures---it doesn't work at the end of the day. I haven't found a way to make one that doesn't make a ton of sense.
+
+Bird language is a good example. With whistling languages, humans are just never going to be able to do that well. I'm not pitch-perfect in the first place, but on top of that, it's just really difficult. You can make languages, but they're more like codes because they're never used to communicate effective things. I mean, Na'vi had a vocabulary of like 2,000 words last time I was using it, and we had long conversations. We translated *A Midsummer Night's Dream*-type things into it. But the conversations were mainly like "Hello! How are you? I'm good. I'm having some eggs with the rock that you get from the ocean where it is bitter"---because there's no word for salt, so you have to do these weird circumlocutions. We're always limited by our time and ability.
+
+*Is there something that, if you had infinite time, you would love to be able to do someday?*
+
+My immediate thought was, I would like to fix the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
+
+*Tell us about why it's broken.*
+
+Oh man, like there are agreement rules where adjectives have to agree with genera, but not if they're not a Latin or Greek word. And if it's a Greek word but it's been Latinized, then you have to change it---but they don't really talk about what Latinization is.
+
+Basically, the people who made the code and other scientific codes are not linguists---they're zoologists. So they've sort of fudged things. Like "Latincize" in the glossary is "to give Latin shape or form to a word," which is the least descriptive glossary entry. And it all says, "Latin is ancient and medieval Latin," but they don't specify when the medieval period ends or what medieval Latin even is. No one knows what medieval Latin is, because everything was just bonkers during that period---you had words being used in completely the wrong way all the time.
+
+A good example I just wrote about in my paper was *branta*. *Branta* is in one dictionary, the Dictionary of Medieval Words from British Sources, from William Turner---not Bootstrap Bill, very same name. William Turner wrote a book on birds in 1544, published in Cologne, and he said "*branta* is the word that English people called this goose." He wrote that in Latin, and that's in the dictionary. But he's clearly using an Anglo-Saxon word there. He's saying *branta*, and it's in the dictionary as *branta*, but it's not Latin, and also it's not medieval Latin because it's after 1544. He was clearly in the Renaissance---he was going to Switzerland and talking to people like Gessner. It doesn't make sense because these things haven't been thought out fully. You end up with these weird edge cases all the time where the code is not good.
+
+It means that scientists' names get changed all the time for reasons they don't like. I just had a long argument on Taxacom, the taxonomist mailing list, about *dacites*, which has been masculine for the past 200 years. Someone just realized it's a feminine name for a fish. We're like, "Do we have to rename everything?" And they're like, "Yeah, you kind of have to rename everything." That's how it is---it just could be better. So that's something I would like to fix with my time, and I'm actually working on that.
+
+In terms of other stuff, if I had infinite time and infinite play---because play is also a finite resource in some sense---there's a lot of stuff I would like to do. I would like to imagine what would have happened if Gaulish were still around, the language that pre-existed Latin in France. How would France be different? What would the French speak today? Would it look like Celtic?
+
+Malta is a really good example of what happens when you mix Italians and Arabs, and then you end up with Maltese. "Chocoholic" is one of my favorite words because it's the stem "chocolate" combined with "holik," which is Arabic. Why not make a whole language that's mixed like that? That would be really fun, just really weird. I'd like to have Algonquian languages spoken on the east coast again, so let's figure out how to do that really well. I like those sort of historical "what if?" questions. What if Hastings had never happened?
+
+*You've talked about a lot of histories as you're doing this kind of work. How do you think of yourself as part of these earlier legacies? I mean, you talked about Tolkien, and you talked about zoology and taxonomy---whose shoulders are you standing on?*
+
+Everyone's shoulders. Patrick O'Brian wrote a really awesome series of books called the Master and Commander series---there's like twenty-one of them. I just finished reading them all for the first time a few months ago. They were truly exceptional, and one of the great things about the books is that they're character-driven. They're about the friendship of two men, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.
+
+Stephen Maturin is a really fantastic character. He's a bastard child, half Irish, half Catalan. He's a doctor, a surgeon in the Navy, but he's also a member of the Royal Society of France and Royal Society of Britain. He goes around the world with Jack Aubrey, this blonde, kind of portly, ruddy, go-straight-at-'em-boys commander, a ship captain. Their friendship is really weird and great.
+
+He spends all his time trying to describe new species and trying to stop Napoleon destroying science and presenting things on cool specimens in the world. Reading the book, I realized that's kind of who I've always wanted to be. It may have been influenced by the fact that when I was thirteen, I had a homeschool assignment where I read Patrick O'Brian's biography of Joseph Banks, who was the president of the Royal Society in Britain and was also one of these gentlemen scholars who went to New Zealand and came back and described a lot of species in a very colonialist kind of way.
+
+I don't want to be a colonialist, but I do want to be someone who adds to the edifice of science, which I see as an edifice---it's something we've built together, it's a shared thing. For me, being a linguist is no different from that. It's part of the world of understanding and looking at things. I think looking at things is the most we can do as a species. There's really not much else that we're good at. We're just good at looking at things and maybe writing them down and talking about it to other people.
+
+I try to have more fun, because I think that people should have more fun in the world and less not-fun. That's kind of how I see myself. I see myself as part of a long chain of linguists. I'm also part of the Tolkien world, also a Latin teacher and part of the Latin world, also a scientist and part of the science world. All these things sort of come together for me in a really fun way, and it makes it easier for me to code switch and task switch between them because they're all related.
+
+Fundamentally, I try to think of myself as not being much different than being a dude sitting next to a fire 10,000 years ago and telling a story to the person next to them. Because historically, I haven't changed much. Evolutionarily, I'm basically that same person---maybe I'm a bit stupider and a bit less tall. But that's what I want to do with my time.
+
+*Finally, are there any lessons you think this practice of conlanging has to offer to the rest of the world? Is there anything that you wish other people understood that people in this world do understand?*
+
+I think about this interaction I had a lot. I went to a friend's house---she's a mother of three or four kids, she was a birder in Vermont. I was having tea on her back deck, and I saw this little common grackle come by, a bronzed grackle, and I said, "Quiscalus quiscula," or whatever it is.
+
+She said, "What's that?" I said, "It's Latin," and she said, "Oh, we don't do Latin here."
+
+I was like, "Why not? It's really fun. Just try saying it." It was really interesting to me because she was pushing back on a bunch of old white men who say, "Oh, the Latin is this, and you have to know it"---which, yeah, those people are jerks, that's not right.
+
+What I wish people understood is that it can be a joy to mess around with language. It could be a joy to decide that "mess around with language" is now going to be the word *sploo* It could be a joy to sploo. You understood that, I understood it---why not? Like, hey, that's really silly. We just made this little code right here, and I wish people did more of that.
+
+The other thing I wish people would do would be to stop explicitly judging other people for their use of language.
+
+We do it implicitly all the time because that's how our brains work. If I hear someone with a Southern accent, I'm going to judge them, and that's unfortunate. It's bigoted of me, and I wish it didn't happen. But it does happen. I wish I didn't correct people in my head, and I wish other people didn't correct people for their use of language. I wish we were able to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, "This academic paper was written by someone who's incredibly smart, but they just don't know academic English, and that's not their fault. It's our fault for imposing this really crappy version of the language on them."
+
+I wish people knew that more and were more sympathetic. But that's really difficult---it only comes through playing and realizing, "Oh, this actually isn't that hard," or, "Oh, this is hard, and now I know it's hard, so it must be difficult for other people." I wish we all did that more.

content/articles/mannan-diplomatic_protocols.md

@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+---
+title: "Mosud Mannan: Diplomatic protocols"
+narrator: Mosud Mannan
+subject: Diplomatic protocols
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-12-13
+approved: 2025-03-04
+summary: "A diplomat for Bangladesh describes the role of protocol in high-profile international visits and treaty negotiations."
+tags: [diplomacy, government, friendship]
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourself?*
+
+I am a career diplomat, a professional diplomat. I was with the Foreign Office of Bangladesh for 37 years and 9 months. I did an MA at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, USA, and completed trainings in New York, USA and in Japan. I also did a short course at the University of Westminster in London. I have been posted as ambassador to four capitals, beginning with Rabat, Morocco. Then I went to Berlin, Germany. After Germany I was posted to Tashkent, that was formerly part of the Soviet Union. After Central Asia, or you can say Middle Asia, I was posted to Turkey. Since Bangladesh doesn't have an embassy in all capitals, one embassy takes care of about six countries. Altogether I was appointed Ambassador of Bangladesh to 18 countries.
+
+I served as a junior or mid-level diplomat in London, my first posting. There I got two promotions and became a counsellor from second secretary. Then I was sent to open a mission in the Sultanate of Oman, which was previously a consulate. It became an embassy, and at that time I was also a counsellor. After this I went back to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), Dhaka. From 2000-2002 I served as Alternate Permanent representative to the UN based in our mission in New York. Before becoming ambassador, I served in Beijing. Beijing was going to host the Olympics, and many changes were taking place. Wen Jiabao became the new Premier of China. I was there for three long years. 
+
+In between my appointment to different missions, I served in MOFA, Dhaka in different capacities from desk officer to Director General, then as Additional Foreign Secretary. I was promoted to the rank of Permanent Secretary while I was serving in Tashkent. I went into retirement after completing my ambassadorial assignment at Turkey with concurrent accreditation to Georgia and Turkmenistan. On my return to Dhaka, I was offered a position by FBCCI the Federation of business and commerce in Bangladesh, since I have long experience negotiating business on behalf of my country. Promoting business and commerce is part of an ambassador's responsibilities---we don't have commercial counselors in all our missions, so generally the ambassador takes care of commercial and business negotiations alongside political negotiations and protocol. I also took keen interest in cultural diplomacy.
+
+I may add that I did a defense course to learn more about how the military operates and to develop better civil-military relationships among our Third World countries. I completed a one-year course at the National Defence College of Bangladesh, which was established in Dhaka with the help of Great Britain. 
+
+This is, in a nutshell, my background as a career diplomat and ambassador. I was instrumental in the negotiation between Bangladesh and Myanmar on the issue of the demarcation of legal territorial rights in the Bay of Bengal which took place at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in Hamburg. As Bangladesh Ambassador to Germany, I was instrumental in negotiations with Myanmar, while the Bangladesh High Commissioner in India handled arbitration with India regarding the sea borders and sovereign rights to undersea resources in the continental shelf. We had good results.
+
+I also did negotiations in the field of business and defense cooperation during my tenure as Ambassador in Turkey during the global Covid crisis. 
+
+*What does the word "protocol" mean for you in the diplomatic context?*
+
+Protocol has two meanings. Protocol can be a kind of document or agreement. It could be a treaty or a memorandum of understanding. Sometimes you can sign ordinary notes that might last for a few days or a few years. Protocol can also be a special understanding between two friendly countries. 
+
+But protocol also implies an established set of formalities. I was the longest-serving deputy head of protocol in Dhaka, or in some countries they call this the head of ceremonies, in the Protocol Division. I looked after visits and ceremonies for long three years during my tenure as Deputy Chief of Protocol. 
+
+This gave me the opportunity to be included in organizing state level visits of dignitaries and also be responsible for arranging important state functions. The most salient among these for me was the first ever visit to Bangladesh by a US President while in office---we had Jimmy Carter coming to Bangladesh after retirement, but William Jefferson Clinton was the only US president who visited Bangladesh while in power. 
+
+I had to do almost eight months of preparation for this particular visit---his advance team came, and then a second team came just before his landing, and finally the President of the US came to Dhaka. For security reasons, I will not tell certain things even now, even though it was 30 years ago. Many meetings took place as meticulous planning is required when arranging visits of heads of governments or state. 
+
+When you are in charge of protocol, you have to work day and night dealing with big and small facets of the event. It may include working out the details of what negotiations will take place, designing the airport reception to arranging which room the VVIP will stay in, what his/her eating habits are like, paying attention to his/her preferences of cultural activity. Sometimes the VVIP is interested to meet specific individuals. Since President Clinton was very interested in the microfinance system of Bangladesh, for which Grameen Bank and Dr. Yunus got the Nobel Prize in 2006, he was interested to visit a project related to microfinance. 
+
+Of course, any head of state will also visit his own embassy or one of his own projects if he wishes to. Then, as part of protocol, we also invite all heads of state or heads of government who comes to Dhaka to visit the National Memorial of the Liberation War of 1971 in Savar. We finalize all these things in advance, by communicating not just with the embassy in Dhaka but with also with concerned ministries . 
+
+Arranging the US President’s visit to Dhaka was one of the important events during my three years as Deputy Head of Protocol. During my time we had British PM John Major visiting Bangladesh. There was a visit by then Prince of Wales, Prince Charles. I flew with him and had breakfast in his royal jet. With him I flew to different parts of Bangladesh to see social programmes. 
+
+Apart from high profile visits, there were multilateral programs as well. We hosted the D-8, an organization of eight Muslim countries what are focused on developing their economies. It started in the middle of the 1990s in Istanbul. We hosted the second meeting after the Istanbul meeting---it was known as the Dhaka meeting. 
+
+As Deputy Chief of Protocol, I was the main person who coordinated things on the protocol side, it involved being present when our PM or President received or bade farewell to the VVIP dignitaries. I was also responsible for accompanying the dignitaries to different sites and parts of Bangladesh. I'm telling you this because these are the real work of protocol. Everything has to fine-tuned, synchronized perfectly so as to create the best possible impression. 
+
+You have to be very careful, from choosing the menu that is to be served to the smooth conduct of the negotiation meetings.
+
+Let me recount another event. After a long day at the office---I was at a music performance in the evening. I received an urgent call over the walkie-talkie that three cabinet ministers wished to see me immediately at the State Guest House. They said "Is it possible in five days to organize a Tripartite Meeting between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh?" The first thing, the most arduous task would be to ensure that the Prime Ministers of India and of Pakistan would attend and also that they agree on the gamut of their discussions. Then follows the hospitality elements---the hotel, the food, where they will stay, how many people will accompany them, what they will visit so on and forth. I immediately set to work, impossible as it sounded, to begin arranging Bangladesh’s hosting of a Tripartite Meeting between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh at such short notice. It normally takes months to arrange events like this. I organized it on five days' notice. Even our Prime Minister was a little apprehensive that the Tripatrite Meeting could be hosted successfully on five days' notice. 
+
+The then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif expressed a desire to see a Royal Bengal tiger or the spotted deer---we have very beautiful deer in Bangladesh. He wanted to go to the Sundarbans and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Chittagong Hill Tracts had spots of unrest in those days and arranging a trip was going to be a big security concern. Our PM said "If Prime Minister Sharif is going, you will accompany him." Security was provided by the armed forces, of course, because those are border areas. I flew with the Prime Minister of Pakistan and went to different parts of the country. He was enchanted to see the beauty of the landscape. I am sure he was thinking about the political consequences of the Liberation War of 1971 that led to the birth of Bangladesh but I along with my colleagues were praying that the trip concluded satisfactorily without any security incidents. 
+
+One has to be very meticulous when offering protocol. This is the diplomatic protocol I'm talking about, not just signing a protocol. Signing a protocol is also interesting, but that is different. Many small things---the understanding and exchange of niceties, even the exchange of gifts---can be part of protocol. When a mayor offers a key of the city to a visiting dignitary, that is also part of diplomatic protocol. 
+
+*How much of the rules of diplomacy are understood to be universal, or are already in place, as opposed to the details that you have to work out?*
+
+First, basically, between two countries, or even in multilateral cases, you have the Vienna Convention, which sets some basic guidelines around embassies and treaties. Then there are diplomatic niceties. There are many formal things that you have to maintain. Protocol is not a light matter. There is no room for whimsicality.
+
+In protocol one has to work out all the details when you are organizing an event or ceremony. A plethora of things play a role during a very high-level visit. No mistakes can be made. You can't play the wrong national anthem or have the flag unfurled on the wrong end. Even with all the attention given to details, mistakes occasionally happen. 
+
+Once in an embassy National Day event---I will not say which embassy---this was when I was in Tashkent, the CD player suddenly stopped, guests waited for the national anthem to resume, the ambassador turned red in the face. You understand, all the dignitaries were present and the national anthem had halted because of a technical glitch. I'm sure next day the person in charge, whether it was staff or junior officer, was packing his baggage and was headed back to his capital. In Bangladesh too, once when the Prime Minister came to attend a formal program, there was a technical problem that prevented the national anthem from being played, and the next day the chief of protocol was fired. These things happen. With protocol, you have to be extraordinarily careful, you have to be calm and collected under pressure, and you have to be well-trained on how to swiftly handle a *faux pas* or unmeditated disruptions. One has to understand the enormity of any failings and one has to always be on alert. 
+
+*How did you learn to develop that sense of detail? *
+
+I took interest, that's the main thing. From the very beginning I knew this is one of the most interesting jobs because you will be meeting the heads of state and government, and at least the foreign ministers. My opportunity came as a junior officer to be a guide to a visiting minister---showing him around, taking him to the market, taking him to another ministry, just accompanying him---I was very alert from the onset. And I received very glowing commendations after the visit. No matter how difficult the task was, I never said ‘no’ to anybody---I tried to manage. That is another hallmark of a diplomat, protocol instills this quality because we are entrusted to create positivity and an atmosphere of confidence. The objective has to be achieved, no matter how difficult. At the same time the process has to go smoothly, almost seem effortless. 
+
+Having social connections always pays off in the protocol world. Arranging a visit to a factory or visiting an institution at moment’s notice would otherwise be difficult. If you don't have a good relationship with the top RMG industrialists for example---you know, the top seven in the world are in Bangladesh---then you will not be able to, at a moment's notice, arrange visits. 
+
+One has to know all the key protocol people at the ministry or the visa section and so on. Once, a VVIP dignitary from Bangladesh sent a message from the plane that for some urgent family reasons, he needed to go to Europe after his London visit. I was at that time, President of the London Diplomatic Association. I just called up a diplomat friend at one of the embassy's visa section. He told me, "You are our President. Just send the passport. We will do it while he is in London." And so within couple of hours, the visa was arranged. 
+
+Having a network of friends and contacts can help you in multifarious ways. When we were doing the negotiations in Hamburg, I found there many of my friends with whom I had worked in New York. They were posted as officers or judges in Hamburg. They were very understanding with regard to the Bangladesh position while Bangladesh and Myanmar were having this arbitration over the demarcation of the Bay of Bengal. It became easy for me. When you have a known face, they say, "Mosud, don't worry, we'll take care of that." 
+
+*What is the difference in your relationship to these protocols when you are the protocol officer as opposed to being the ambassador? Those are both roles you've held, but they seem distinct; one is designing the protocol, and one is performing it.*
+
+A protocol officer, or in my case the Deputy Chief of Protocol, generally doesn't sign any agreement. An Ambassador is authorized on behalf of the country to negotiate everything. I did it a couple of times. 
+
+Sometimes you can come back after serving as ambassador and become the Chief of Protocol, because generally the Chief of Protocol is the most senior one, just below the foreign secretary. He doesn't do all the running around. That is done by the head of ceremonies, which I did for three years. 
+
+At the presentation line or during the credential handing over by an Ambassador, the Chief of Protocol is seen often next to the President or the Prime Minister. When you are ambassador or Chief of Protocol, you are permitted to go inside the aircraft when a visiting dignitary is coming and welcome him. 
+
+Chief of Protocols have deputies like the head of ceremonies. When you are Ambassador, you have the Minister Counsellor, Counselors, First Secretary so on. So you know all is being taken care by this team. As Ambassador you just offer the bouquet. The head of ceremonies has a more intricate job. The head of ceremonies has to be everywhere and get everything done plus he is still young and is learning to juggle more efficiently and with better ease. 
+
+I remember a particular visit. Alberto Fujimori was the President of Peru. He was visiting Dhaka with his daughter. At the airport, in the course of the conversation, he remarked that his daughter would be celebrating her birthday in Bangladesh during the visit. The visit was only for two days, but within that span I was asked by my ministry to organize a birthday party for Mr. Fujimori’s daughter. I organized a fitting birthday party the following afternoon. Mr. Fujimori was of course, delighted at the gesture. 
+
+On another occasion, we were informed that Yasser Arafat was arriving in Dhaka in two hours. The Prime Minister's office called and told me our Prime Minister would be at the airport to receive Mr. Arafat. I was instructed to do the needful including arranging a lunch for one hundred people. I was enjoying my weekend with my son, showing him one of the Mughal era antiquities in Dhaka. I took the instructions and calculated how best to get all this done before the aircraft carrying Mr. Arafat arrived at Dhaka in less than two hours. I returned home scrambling to dress for the occasion and rushed to the airport before our Prime Minister arrived. 
+
+*When you're training younger people coming into this work, what kinds of skills do you focus on helping them develop? *
+
+First and foremost, patience. In the dead of the night, you may have a call from the Prime Minister or President's office to do something right away. Let us say, for example, the Finance Minister from China will be landing shortly, and Mosud Mannan has to accompany. The price of one’s patience and dexterity is of course, sweet. You get to enjoy unique perks: as a young official I got to see the gold-plated interior of the royal jet of Saudi Arabia, and I shook hands with Mr. Nelson Mandela. 
+
+So first and foremost, I will advise young diplomats to cultivate patience, not to get stressed out with the high-voltage tasks they have to deliver and the tightropes they have to cross. You have to know how to think quickly, act fast. That just comes with the territory. You have to be culturally sensitive and know how to negotiate with the different embassies. When I joined the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industries (FBCCI), I had to negotiate with Saudi Arabia again, because during their Dhaka visit they wanted a brand new hotel for their Commerce Minister. I tried to offer reputed hotels that we had in mind. But no, they wanted the newest hotel in Dhaka---I had to see that it got reserved for the 21 or 31 member entourage. So you insist, or yield according what is the best choice under the circumstances. And you prepare yourself developing a certain mindset. Life in protocol demands that one is capable and success-oriented. These things are acquired over time, not overnight. 
+
+You also have to be very careful about your appearance. Our principal at the Foreign Service Training Institute taught us that--- whether you eat or not, buy two good pairs of suits, two good pairs of shoes. If you are wearing spectacles, they should be clean and nice. Always carry a pen with a notebook, too, because if you don't have a good memory you need to keep track of what people are requesting. You have to learn these things quickly. You will not have all of your thirty-years-plus career to learn. You have to do it within the first two years of your service. 
+
+Not everybody is suited for protocol. You have to be by nature outgoing---not a person who is too academic, and who only knows to write good speeches. Speechwriting will be your bonus if you can write. Maybe your minister is not a bureaucrat---he is coming from the business sphere and doesn't know anything about China--Bangladesh relationship, because maybe he mainly does business with India. He looks at the Ambassador and asks “Who will write my speech? I forgot to bring it from Dhaka." And naturally we prepare it, while we were in a car or in the residence, or in the office. 
+
+You have to be very well versed in how to check the proposed protocol, MOU, or treaty that is going to be signed. Once a certain cabinet minister from our country was ponderously going through a draft text that was going to be signed when the Prime Minister arrived, I had to nudge: "I have checked it thoroughly, Sir. Please approve it now, because it has to be translated into three languages, and the Prime Minister is arriving tomorrow." I didn't show disrespect, but I just told him, "We are running out of time---the Chinese authorities are waiting for us downstairs in the embassy". 
+
+Sometimes you have to know how to be not rude, but a little bit firm--- you have to know how to negotiate with all kinds of people: people who are easy; people who are difficult. Because many of the ministers are good in politics but necessarily not so in diplomacy or specific topics. 
+
+A diplomat should be well-read. He should read books on diplomacy. He/she should learn one or two languages. There's no ending---if you want to be the best, and survive and continue in the service, there is no end of learning. There are books of the best speeches of the world translated into English. You have to learn when to crack a joke in diplomacy. You have to know how to appreciate music, dance, and other things, and you have to have the habit of reading---not just political or history books. You have to know how to read between the lines of the newspaper. You have to learn about your own language, your own literature, and the country where you are posted--- their literature, language, and culture. It's not so easy. That's why many people, after a few years, fail to continue, or spend more time back at home, or they are not very good in diplomacy. 
+
+You have to know your strength. First you negotiate through niceties, and then in the long run you have to exert your power or strength at the table. You should know how to softly negotiate, and then put your cards down and say, "I have 42 votes, and you have 15, so I already have won. So it's no good negotiating anymore." 
+
+When Bangladesh was a member of the Security Council, I was one of the alternate representatives. Sometimes, the US permanent Representative to the UN would drop by to discuss things with my Ambassador. Behind closed doors, they would talk amongst themselves. Security Council votes mattered. Since I was part of many negotiations to gain votes for Bangladesh, I know how diplomats can accomplish these things. It is not as easy as it sounds. You have to know the game. You have to know international law. More than that, you have to know about history, and you have to make good friends. My Ambassador did all this, and I believe, I did too. It is not a bookish thing. It is not an academic thing. You have to have two or three options, and make sure that one will work.
+
+*Have there been times when you've had to break the rules?*
+
+Generally, countries like Bangladesh don't break the rules. The rules are generally not broken. I will say the rules are pushed apart by powerful countries, because they have other powers, because they are not only negotiating politically. They will push the rules by offering to give you some help, maybe in defense or commerce. 
+
+I would say it is not rule breaking. It is power. And you know which are the countries who have that power. There are not more than 15--20 countries who are that powerful, who can push you with, "I promised you this thing, so you will promise me a vote in the Security Council." 
+
+I will not say that this is not a correct thing to do. This is human nature. Everyone wants to do their negotiation successfully. But you have to know the right moment to be nice and when to get what you want. 
+
+Rule breaking generally happens when countries are at war. However, I mainly got things done with friendship. 
+
+Let me give you an example. At the time we were working on negotiations for the Millennium Development Goals. That was before the Sustainable Development Goals. Bangladesh had several proposals for the MDGs. My ambassador told me he knew I was good in negotiation. He said: "Mosud, go and get all our proposals included the MDG list." This was a tall order! I went to some of the good friends I knew from London and told them, "Please help me to get all these things through." Happily for me, they supported me, and I got it through. My ambassador mentioned this to the Speaker of the Bangladesh National Parliament, who was also a former foreign minister and a career diplomat. The Speaker stood up and congratulated me: "You have put all of Bangladesh's demands in the MDGs." I said, "Yes, sir." He shook my hand warmly pleased by the outcome. 
+
+You can do these things through friendship and networking. I encourage the next generation of diplomats to build friendships. My advice to them would be build your network and show your charisma.
+
+In Bangladesh we don't train two hundred diplomats at a time. We take ten to fifteen, maximum twenty, and they are the best of the best out of maybe 100,000 people---graduates from different universities. If they're not good, that's their bad luck. They will not get the best postings---nothing will happen for them. They will see in the long run that it is their own fault. If you are good, you will enjoy many things. 
+
+That's why I will say, I was given the best postings---London to begin with, then New York, during the Security Council, then ambassador to Germany, ambassador to Turkey, deputy head of mission in China. I went to Central Asia, which was very nice. 
+
+*What makes countries follow the international rules? It's not like there is a police officer that's going to put them in jail. What makes countries want to follow these norms and participate in the shared protocols?*
+
+There is an incentive to follow the norms and uphold shared protocols. Things gain a certain clarity because of maintenance of protocol codes. You do not misread or misjudge situations. If you do not observe protocol, you will land in trouble. Others will not show respect to you because you have broken the rules. Generally, diplomats don't act on caprice and generally they will not act on their own whims to make another country upset. Even when situations between countries become hostile, terse or tense, protocol is observed. Countries diffuse situations or can improve relations by handling things on the basis of protocol requirements. 
+
+*After this career, do you have thoughts about what kinds of rules or protocols could make this international order fair?*
+
+The world, to some extent, doesn't revolve around only protocol. It depends on whether we are fair or not. Whether we are fair or not fair will be decided by the culture you follow in your day-to-day life. If you're from the USA, a big, strong country, they have their own culture, they have their way of life, they have their wealth, and they have their might. In Russia, they have different culture and literature, a distinctive way of thinking. China is totally different. Chinese people have their own way of seeing things, their own ways of doing things. 
+
+It is not that we just need to make some protocol rules fair, and then everything will be good. You can say the world would be fairer if we had more countries on the Security Council, not just five. Out of the 194 countries we could have maybe twenty or twenty-five countries, or even fifteen. There should be more. That is one thing which can make things fairer. 
+
+But total fairness will come when we will all start appreciating each other's culture, religion, education, and characteristics, and not think about our differences. Changing our mindset will take a long time. I mean one or two centuries. Perhaps then people will not be bothered with all these things like they are today. They will think a human being is a human being. He needs this this thing just like I do. Maybe I earn more because I'm more educated---let me give you more opportunity. 
+
+We should also have a balance in population growth. It is very difficult to be really fair without taking into consideration all these things in everyday life. We have to balance all these things, and it will take time, this balancing act. We have to try to understand, have debates, and then have a peaceful world and love each other. 
+
+Protocol alone can't give you a fair world, I'm sorry to say. A fair world will not come out of diplomacy. Protocol won't ensure the stopping of all wars. Even if you stop all the wars, you may still look down on a poor person. We have to bring an end to poverty and the diseases that have spread all over many parts of the world, and the problem of narcotics. We have to take into consideration all these things, and these have nothing to do with being fair in protocol. You will not stop a powerful warlord or a drug lord through protocol, through being very kind to him. It will not do. He has to understand that he is spoiling the lives of millions. When I was a kid, how big was the world? Only 3 billion. Now it is 8 billion. We need balance. Maybe I will write a book on it when I have time and am not running around so much.

content/articles/zargham-ultimate_frisbee.md

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+---
+title: "Michael Zargham: Ultimate frisbee"
+narrator: Michael Zargham
+subject: Ultimate frisbee
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-11-04
+approved: 2024-12-02
+summary: "As a sport often played with no referees, ultimate frisbee has developed a strong set of norms for addressing conflict and self-governing."
+tags: [frisbee, sports, organizations, dispute resolution]
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself to people as you encounter them in the world?*
+
+I tend to introduce myself differently depending on who I'm meeting. I've lived many lives, and if we're talking about ultimate frisbee today---while it's not my primary activity now since I'm retired---I would probably talk about the teams I played for and the school I played at.
+
+For the purpose of our conversation today, I'm Michael Zargham, a researcher and engineer, and a retired competitive ultimate frisbee player. I'm going to focus on my experiences in the ultimate frisbee communities, ranging from work on a nonprofit that operated leagues and youth outreach programs to helping found and run teams and organize tournaments. These experiences span the various practices and processes that made up the ultimate frisbee community broadly, ranging from experiences in the US to playing pickup in various countries.
+
+*How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career in ultimate frisbee?*
+
+When I was in high school, I played lacrosse. Lacrosse players were jerks, or at least they were jerks to me, and while I still wanted to play sports, I didn't have an overwhelmingly good experience with the social dimension of lacrosse as a sport. When I got to Dartmouth, they were out on the green throwing during orientation week, and there was a bunch of frisbee players who had led freshman trips. They were recruiting like crazy, saying "Oh, we have this great sport!" All these new people were showing up, and they were actively being friendly---like, "Oh, you want to learn how to throw a flick? Here, let me show you." All of this time and attention was spent on new folks, just showing them the ropes. They were playing pickup out on the green and hanging out with people, making it feel really welcoming. I thought, "Wow, these people are nice and they play sports. Maybe I should try this sport."
+
+I started going to formal practices, and I was not very good. I'm small---I'm not a very tall person, and this sport favors height. There are some other confounding attributes, but for the most part, being small is not good, so being new meant not having many skills, and being small meant not having many built-in attributes to help me succeed. So I was pretty bad.
+
+But people were encouraging despite that, and I still got to play and learn. People continued to teach me, which says a lot. Interestingly enough, because of the social aspects and because I'm an extremely overachiever type of person, I realized that I enjoyed throwing and that there were skills perpendicular to size that I could cultivate. I spent time with some of the really strong throwers on the competitive team, and I threw every day for at least an hour.
+
+There's a thing called focused throwing, which you could think of as a skill development protocol where you throw ten flicks, ten backhands, and then as you get better, you throw high-release flicks, low-release flicks, high-release backhands, low-release backhands, inside-out flicks, inside-out backhands, outside-in flicks, outside-in backhands. As you get better, your array of throws grows, and your focus throwing regime gets bigger.
+
+I did this for my entire first year, throwing every day, often for at least an hour, with other people who were also practicing focused throwing. I was able to develop a set of skills that sufficiently offset my size disadvantage that I was considered for the competitive team. But I did not make the competitive team in the fall---size was still an impediment.
+
+What I did pick up from the competitive players who were teaching me to throw was the training regime. Starting the first winter, and especially the second winter, I followed the same training regime---lifting and running and the workouts that were put together for the team. By doing these training regimes in addition to the throwing regimes, by spring of my sophomore year, I made the competitive team, and I actually also made the local club team out of Burlington, Vermont. So I started playing two competitive seasons a year in my second year of playing ultimate frisbee.
+
+The precondition for all of this was a lot of welcomingness, including people investing time, effort and attention into developing my skills, when they might have just as easily dismissed me because of my size. That was the entry point. The very idea that I could be a competitive ultimate frisbee player and play for clubs with cuts and travel schedules, both at the college level and at the adult non-college level, was probably not something anybody was thinking when I showed up on the green as this former lacrosse player who just wanted some friends.
+
+*Before we get into the organizational side and your role in that side of the sport, I wonder if you could say a bit about the niceness you encountered and its relationship to the way that this sport operates. I played for a year or two in high school, and the thing that really stuck out to me was that there were no referees. It was a sport that, as I understand it even at the highest levels, is built on cultivating a set of practices and cultures around not requiring third-party intervention to resolve disputes. Did that have something to do with the culture you encountered?*
+
+I think so. As a quick caveat, there are a couple dimensions we might want to come back to when we talk about some of my other experiences. But at base level, it's totally self-officiated with some specific competition regimes having augmentations. At the social level of pickup, or college competitive and club competitive (with some exceptions we'll discuss later, regarding observers), you can basically call a foul or infraction whenever you want. This means that when you're first learning, especially really competitive people tend to overdo it. They can get antsy and start making lots of calls.
+
+What's interesting is that in your onboarding to the sport, you have to learn norms, and the norms differ based on competitive environment. I saw this when helping run youth outreach and recreational leagues in Philly---stark differences in norms depending on age group, background, or whether it was a beginner league or a more competitive league. What constituted acceptable behavior under the rules of ultimate was different.
+
+This is one of the nice things about protocols. The rules for ultimate just say that you can call a foul if you believe an infraction has taken place. Obviously you have to know the rules, and then the person can either agree or disagree. One just says "contest" or "no-contest". The rules have a fork in them---if the person says no-contest, one thing happens; if they say contest, the other thing happens. Except in cases where people get really litigious and start arguing over what happened (which does happen), it mostly just becomes part of the flow of the game. People want to play the game, so even your own team will tell you to stand down if you're wasting time arguing.
+
+You learn to get a feel for what is and isn't actually an infraction within your social context, learning to handle that kind of incompleteness while still using the rules. The sport attracts people who are both interested in rules and willing and able to understand and abide by them, but who won't abuse them---because you get shunned if you do. This can happen at the individual level within a team or between teams in the competitive scene. Teams that pushed the rules too far got a reputation for being "bad spirited." A team might come in second in a tournament, and people would say, "Oh yeah, but they're really bad spirited," and somehow that took away from their achievement within the social standing among the teams.
+
+There's a strong cultural component, but I want to be careful to note that it varies widely---things that would be considered fine in one environment might be considered bad spirited in another. You see some of the worst issues when competitive and non-competitive players share an environment without adequate socialization about what's appropriate in that context.
+
+At the college level, you're talking about hard-charging overachieving competitive people---people who got into an Ivy League University and then wanted to compete in this club sport too. When I arrived, the team had been at Nationals the year before. So it wasn't just about being nice---understanding and applying these principles of self-officiation were tantamount to success. If you couldn't do it, you couldn't play the sport.
+
+*How did that kind of practice and culture and norms translate into the organizational structure? Were there respects in which the practices on the field were reflected in how the organizations you worked with were set up?*
+
+The college team was a club---it did not have a coach, though we'd had volunteer coaches in the past.
+
+*And was that by choice? Was that a sense like "we don't have referees, and we don't have coaches"?*
+
+It was a little different. I'll talk more about coaches later since I coached for a couple of years. But at the time, it was more that there wasn't an authority figure. Even in years where the college team had a graduated player staying on to help coach, they were effectively in a support role, not an authority. You delegated certain kinds of strategic decision-making and education functions to them, and they were welcome insofar as they fulfilled those functions. It wasn't a paid role---club sports have relatively low budgets so they wouldn't really have been able to spring for a paid coach anyway.
+
+The teams were run by captains who turned over year after year. Our team at Dartmouth almost always had two captains and a president on the men's competitive team. We also had broader cultural leadership that included the captains of the women's team. There was a kind of group-level organization because we hosted usually at least one, if not two, tournaments a year. We had a mixed tournament in the fall that was half fundraiser, half tradition. We'd show up and say, "Oh, we run a tournament in the fall. Who's going to run the tournament?" Well, I guess we're going to run the tournament---nobody else is going to run it.
+
+A lot of it was entrenched---we had everything from cheers to organizational patterns that were just the way things were. As the class of 2007, we showed up and did what was expected: "Oh, it's our turn to do this now." The organization had to continuously turn over because, as a college team, you didn't have any continuous infrastructure at the human level. Everything was rituals and traditions, and the thing that we do, we do.
+
+Captains generally called lines and picked teams. There were important annual rituals like tryouts and off-season training regimes, and certain tournaments were the main deciding points for who was going to try out and make the roster. There were boundaries---it wasn't just showing up to play. There was a fixed number of roster slots, someone had to decide who would get those slots, there were interviews, there were debriefs. There was quite a lot of institutional infrastructure, but it was administered by the students for the students, everything from selecting teams to coordinating travel logistics to organizing tournaments.
+
+*How did you get into league-level organization?*
+
+I moved to Philadelphia. The story goes: I finished at Dartmouth in 2008. I got two degrees, so I was there for five years, which allowed me to play out my full competitive college allotment. The college infrastructure is run by the USAU, and you're allowed five years of competitive play. I used all of my college-level eligibility at Dartmouth.
+
+When I moved to Philadelphia for grad school to do a PhD in a robotics lab at the University of Pennsylvania, I had a brief hiatus with moving and relationship stuff. Then I started needing to build community---a relationship to place. I needed the same thing I needed when I went to Dartmouth: people to hang out with who were like my kind of people---smart and hardworking and capable and self-organized, all those things that I get excited about.
+
+I found the frisbee community in Philadelphia. But now I was not a college player, so I needed to get involved differently. I started by joining the local leagues. The nonprofit that runs the local leagues in Philadelphia is called PADA, the Philadelphia Area Disc Alliance. I joined Summer League first. They have Winter League, Summer League, Fall League, Spring League---different leagues targeting different groups of people.
+
+I started to get to know people and learn about the landscape. I figured out what the competitive teams were and started to meet people. My journey in Philly started by way of two access points: the local leagues and email listservs for workouts. Coming from a competitive background, the first thing anyone who was competitive told me was to join the listserv.
+
+This is a very Philadelphia thing---we'd go run the stairs at the art museum. The best thing about this workout was that sometimes there'd be as many as 25 people, sometimes as few as three. There were always tourists running up the stairs making little *Rocky* gestures, while we would have an hour-and-twenty-minute workout running ladders on the stairs---up a flight, down a flight, up two flights, down two flights. We were running ourselves into the ground on these stairs, and the tourists would come by and jog up one step and do some poses. I thought it was the funniest thing because it was like the actual montage versus the movie version---we were doing the thing that the montage was of.
+
+I got involved and started doing these workouts, and they absolutely crushed me because I had had a year off. I was so out of shape---there's no way I would have made a competitive team in Philly if I had not joined those workouts. That was in 2010 when I was starting to try out for teams, and if I hadn't been doing this listserv workout training, I'd have been out of luck. There were other things besides the stairs, but the memory of the stairs really stands out for me.
+
+I got involved in that community, and there's a high overlap between the competitive players and the organizers. While there are far more competitive players than organizers, the people who built and maintained the competitive teams also had a really strong interest in recruiting and talent development. They had an interest in having healthy social infrastructures around the sport. They had relationships with the city of Philadelphia to get field sites---the competitive players are the ones who need fields. They're usually the ones helping organize at least the more competitive tournaments.
+
+Sometimes you'd get retired players or people who aspire to be competitive helping build out the org infrastructure. When I was involved, maybe about half of the senior volunteer corps was still active competitive players. They often were the captains in the leagues because they were the ones teaching the more junior players. There's a cultural aspect where talented players have a relatively high norm of teaching, training, and volunteering in ways that aren't immediately obviously beneficial to them---it might benefit the team in four years, but not necessarily the team in the moment.
+
+I think it goes back to self-officiating. There's generally a higher receptivity to norms. People would recognize and conform to norms, even if they didn't explicitly talk about them that way, because the sport itself requires that kind of awareness.
+
+I started by playing Summer League. I agreed to be a captain because I was a strong player with background experience. I ended up on a team with two very senior competitive players---both Penn students. One was a dental graduate student, and the other was an economics person who had already graduated. I was at Penn and was a former competitive player from a recognizable school, so I got drafted early. I spent a lot of time getting engaged that first summer, and the second summer I was asked to be a captain. Getting my own experience leading a team, drafting and leading, pulled me into that whole ecosystem.
+
+I don't remember exactly how I got sucked in deeper. I know how I got on the board, but there was a whole intermediate period which was all slippery slope. You know how people say that work accumulates to the competent? Every year over year that I spent in PADA, I had more responsibilities. I think that's a common outcome in volunteer-based organizations---they rely so much on unpaid labor to exist that there's really no other resource allocation strategy besides asking people who show up and succeed at things until they say no or stop succeeding.
+
+That led me all the way to being on the board and actually being president of the board---just following up the "keep asking me to do stuff" path. The board is elected, not appointed. I didn't actually want to run for the board---a bunch of people put me up to it, and I said, "Oh fine, there's no way they're going to elect me." And they did. So long story short, I fell up through levels of engagement in that community just by showing up and being willing, then delivering on the stuff I agreed to do.
+
+*How does leading this organization work? How does it compare to other organizations you've been in? You've also founded a company and served on other boards. What were some of the peculiarities of governance in the context of ultimate frisbee?*
+
+At the time I thought it was an utter mess. It was my first experience in formal accountability. I was president of the PADA board in my first term, also not something I wanted. I think I was put there partly to help deal with a situation which I won't go too far into, but it involved people overstating their expertise and authority. This is an environment where you've got artists and teachers and engineers and lawyers and doctors all mixed together, and board composition can be pretty different at any given time. There was a lawyer in a relatively senior position that many people felt no one could argue with effectively. I'm pretty sure I ended up on the board to argue with this guy---that was apparently why the community elected me, for my ability to argue.
+
+In practice, what I did was almost entirely dispute resolution. The organization ran quite well, and looking back now, with experience in open source software, research nonprofit governance, forming an engineering firm, and helping early tech startups---it turns out it wasn't all that messy. It was actually remarkably contained given the diversity of stakeholders served, the physical geographic distribution, and the variety of activities undertaken. By all reasonable complexity measures I've encountered since then, it was amazingly well-organized.
+
+I spent quite a lot of time on the phone, usually reflecting what I thought were steel-manned versions of other people's positions back to each other to diffuse situations. I had to do some agenda setting, but that organization was already about 30 years old, and like my experience with frisbee at Dartmouth, there was a lot of "the way things were done" already established. It had annealed, stabilized itself.
+
+I dealt with some interesting challenges, like our relationship with the cricket club. We shared physical field space with them, and as president, I also had to sit on another board---the board of cricket and ultimate. This entity existed solely to be the container of the two organizations for dealing with city contracts because we were sharing stewardship of the field site. We had a cricket and ultimate association thing where the presidents of both boards and about four other people served as officers, just as an adapter to the city. We had a historic clubhouse, this beautiful field site, and the legal interoperability required this other board.
+
+That was a strange, bespoke artifact---suddenly being told, "Oh, you're on this other board too now, good luck!" We didn't have to do much, but we did have meetings about repairs because this building had very specific requirements around what you could do to it. We had to take care of it in certain ways.
+
+But in terms of the social stuff, it was almost entirely mediating dispute resolution and presiding over board meetings. The org had a lot of inertia, and challenges arose more when things wanted to change than from maintaining existing operations.
+
+*At the time you were studying engineering and developing a career as an engineer. How did these two modes of thinking intersect? How did engineering overlap in your mind, and maybe in others' minds, with the nature of the sport and the organizations around it?*
+
+Starting around 2005 or 2006, I was working on flocking coordination, multi-agent consensus problems---basically multi-agent coordination problems in robotics. So literally, the subset of robotics which was entirely about algorithms and rules and protocols for coordinating distributed activities with distinct agents.
+
+It wasn't a big leap for me. In fact, I almost didn't think about it much because I was used to thinking in terms of a bunch of individual actors using protocols to coordinate their activities. My dissertation was on distributed optimization strategies in networks with constrained resources. Any economic or operational problem reduces in some form to a network of actors, both individual and coordination loci---entities or organizations or teams---and then they have decision-making that affects each other.
+
+As that was the subject of my engineering work, being involved in founding teams, playing on teams, line calling, team roster selection, as well as figuring out how to get resources set up for leagues---all these roles fit together into a structure that got things done. From my perspective, these were extremely complementary in hindsight, though at the time I didn't think about it at all. I just did both things, and I could do both things. The fact that one was the social dimension and one was the technical dimension---I definitely benefited from that by seeing through both lenses.
+
+*How long were you actively involved in the sport?*
+
+About 15 years, all told. I started playing ultimate in 2003. I started in Philly in 2009, so 15 years ago, and I think I was on the board from 2012 to 2014. I graduated from my PhD in 2014, so I must have been on the board 2012 through 2014. That sounds right.
+
+I didn't stay on. It was a lot of work. Being in grad school made it possible to do the work at the level I was doing it. After two years I stepped down, but I helped onboard the new president and other stuff. I couldn't carry that level of unpaid labor outside of grad school. I moved into a full-time job, was still teaching at Penn, and in 2015, I had also blown out my knee. I wasn't able to play competitively anymore.
+
+This was a very difficult and challenging time for me. So much of my identity was built around competitive ultimate frisbee. When I shattered my knee in summer of 2014, I got hit from behind---somebody who was a young, talented, athletic player, mistakenly believing that the tiny little guy could not jump up and catch that frisbee, dove for it and hit me in the back. I caught it and landed on the ground. We tilted forward and I shattered my left knee---ACL, MCL, both sides of my meniscus.
+
+That was pretty devastating. At the time I was playing for the men's competitive team out of Philly. I was recruiting and team-building too, so I was already deeply involved. I was effectively the defensive coordinator---not a captain, but the person who organized the defensive squad. And suddenly I couldn't play. There was no way---I went to the doctor, I was going to need surgery, it was going to be who knows how long before I could play again at all.
+
+But my team sufficiently valued my non-field contributions that they asked me to stay on and continue to be the defensive coordinator. So I became the D-line coach. The player part of my role evaporated---I didn't have a roster spot anymore, which made sense because I couldn't play. But I transmuted from D-line coordinator-player to D-line coach in a matter of a month. Once it came out that I wasn't going to be able to play, my team was like, "Cool, you can't leave." I was like, "Wait, what?" I thought I was out, but they were basically like, "No, no, you're not---you do not have our permission to leave just because you blew out your knee. We need you."
+
+That was my last competitive season---2014---and I only made it through to June or maybe July. It was pretty depressing but cushioned to some extent by my team refusing to relinquish me. I actually stayed on as coach of that team for three years until I moved to California.
+
+That's an important cultural aspect---while the game is obviously being played on the field, coaches are uncommon. They're more common now---in fact, most competitive teams do have coaches, but they're not paid staff for the most part. They're members of the team that come into their roles by invitation. I have a friend up here in Albany who's currently coaching a women's team in New York City, and he had to go through a very rigorous tryout process. He's an extremely talented player who played in the championship game five times---great guy---but he has also been teaching and training. I can't help but emphasize that even though coaches are really common in competitive ultimate now, it's like a roster spot---the team has to pick you. If anything, the captains have more authority than the coaches.
+
+*Are there contexts when you saw the sport confronting what we might think of as capture? That is, attempts to take over the sport, to co-opt some of its norms?*
+
+There was a largely failed corporate takeover, this is good. Philly was actually one of the main sites of the founding of the MLU---Major League Ultimate---which the Philadelphia Spinners won. But let me backtrack first. There was the AUDL---American Ultimate Disc League---which still exists. The AUDL was run very unprofessionally, at least in the first year it was a mess. A bunch of the Philly players played for the Spinners in the inaugural season of the AUDL.
+
+I did not play on that team. I was too involved in other things---I didn't even try out. I was like, "Whatever, professional frisbee is going to be dumb." A bunch of my friends did play, and they actually won the first season of the AUDL as the Philly Spinners. But the whole league organization was kind of shitty, and then somebody---I think a coach from this scene---took it upon themselves to drive the MLU.
+
+The second year, Philly was in the MLU. I played for that team one year, I think in their third or fourth year when they had enough momentum. As a community, we decided that while people hated the term "semi-pro," this was a great place for resources and training. But they didn't pay super well, the stands were reasonably well attended but mostly by our friends, and it was a weird vibe. They had refs, they had a slightly bigger field, and they really shot themselves in the foot by trying to use a different disc.
+
+There's almost nothing more sacred to a frisbee player than using the right disc. Never hand them a Wham-O---it's a Discraft Ultra-Star 175 gram. Do not mess with that. If you mess with that, you're immediately out---you're not part of the real frisbee crew, that's not a real disc.
+
+The semi-pro leagues rolled in competing with the clubs for talent, but the clubs basically owned all the hearts and minds. The semi-pro leagues got subjugated to the clubs except in second-tier cities that didn't have good competitive clubs. Even today, if you look at the AUDL, which still exists, its main home turf is in places that don't rate in the club series. The club sport is still the dominant form of achievement, and the semi-pro leagues appear and stabilize in places that are under-served by the club scene. Maybe in some cases they're routing resources to people who would not have otherwise gotten to compete. I've heard there's been some success in the semi-pro world with the women's sport, but I haven't followed it closely.
+
+It's a little bit painful to reminisce about it with the whole knee injury thing. But there was this attempt, this belief that capitalization of the sport could work because it has huge reach, so many players, so much enthusiasm and love. These leagues spawned up, but my impression was that they just couldn't win the hearts and minds of the people who are the backbone of the ultimate frisbee community.
+
+*It's fascinating that the semi-pro is regarded as under the club. What do you think contributed to that resiliency against an attempted takeover?*
+
+I think it could have gone either way. On one hand, I think the capitalist mentality just couldn't see what everyone loved about it. They inadvertently squashed things and didn't focus on things that were part of the real value. If they had been even a little more aware---not that you would expect them to have been---but if they had been a little more aware of the intangible forms of value that were created and stewarded within these communities, they could have made more space for them and possibly had more success.
+
+Conversely, you had all this self-organization, and people were just like, "Yeah, but the way they do it sucks---we get to decide. Let's just keep doing it our way." They might have actually done a good enough job and offered a materially better value proposition. Because it's worth noting that a competitive ultimate frisbee player is out several thousand dollars a year. Some of them subsidize the cost of people who couldn't afford it, because you didn't want to cut people from your team just because they couldn't afford to go to tournaments. If you're on the team, it's now a team-level problem, not an individual-level problem.
+
+So you're out thousands of dollars a year if you're on a competitive ultimate frisbee team, in addition to a lot of your weekends and evenings and all sorts of commitments. The way the semi-pro teams approached this was to try to offset some of those costs, as if that was what mattered. But if you look at it from an economics view, that completely discounts a ton of intangible sources of value. They thought they'd made it better because you don't have to pay $5,000 or whatever---"We solved that problem, we can successfully provision our team." We had been provisioning ourselves for years. If you're provisioning us, great, I appreciate not having to pay that. But if in the process you're taking away a lot of the other intangible value, then it's not going to cut it.
+
+What happened was that a lot of people would play in the semi-pro season during the preseason period, but then they would prioritize their clubs come midsummer. They'd play to get the resources and training, but when push came to shove, the prestige stayed on the club side. It had history, it had norms. I think it goes back to the point that these were actually relatively mature institutions. They're not new. The incumbents were the clubs, the clubs were prestigious, and even in cases where the club's name turned over, you could trace the community basis.
+
+Take PADA---PADA is old. But the teams I played for had turnovers in names. The old school Philly team was called Rage, and after Rage there was Southpaw. Southpaw only lasted for two or three years because it had this coach who was super rigid in certain ways that just didn't jive for people, and the team imploded. Then after a hiatus, they formed Patrol, which was the team that I helped organize and played on. That team turned over too---I forget the name of the Philly team now. But there's still cultural continuity within the competitive scene in Philly.
+
+Running in parallel, there's the women's team, which was Green Means Go when I was there. I'm not sure what it is now, but they had their own lineage. And then there were mixed teams---one of the longest-standing Philadelphia teams which still exists today is called AMP. I played for AMP in 2010. AMP has since won a national championship. AMP is almost twenty years old now---it was the mixed team in Philly. They were over five years old when I played for them, probably closer to ten, and they still exist. So that gives you a sense---it's a twenty-plus-year-old mixed club frisbee team in Philly.
+
+Actually, my COO at BlockScience---he joined later, he's not technically a co-founder---is a former teammate of mine from Philly Ultimate. He's a professional mechanical engineer who worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and had his own completely separate life that I barely knew about. But the ultimate frisbee connection is how I knew him. I used to play against him, used to cover him in practice. He also played for AMP and for Patrol.
+
+Just as a point of reference, much of BlockScience's coordination infrastructure---our ops---is people who were part of that same scene. That means a lot of the norms we've been talking about got transferred across contexts. When ops are breaking down or inefficient, the running inside joke is basically like, "Man, we're worse than frisbee teams at logistics or operations." And that's because AMP's logistics and operations were so tight, entirely on a volunteer basis, that there's so much commonality in the community that you can just say, "We're worse than a frisbee team!"
+
+*When you were involved at the organizational level, did you run into challenges around your relationship with those norms and that culture? Did you have experiences where you ran the risk of doing harm to the sport's culture in trying to bureaucratize or systematize?*
+
+That's a good question. I'm going to say I did not have that problem. I think some people did. This goes back to my answer before---the fact that as an engineer I'm focused on multi-agent systems meant that I had a much higher expectation of distributed locus of decision-making and heterogeneity than most people who would come in and systematize things. So I actually didn't systematize much frisbee stuff. When I did, it was out of necessity and in a minimalist frame.
+
+This might not be obvious about me, because I'm an engineer and I work on a lot of complex systems. People see what I do and sometimes think I'm approaching it from a "structure is good" perspective. I'm actually kind of the opposite---I want as little structure as possible. I also want the thing to work, and my experience in life has been that most people take a really idealistic view of this. They either overdo or underdo structure, but don't have the register for figuring out how to satisfice---enough, but no more.
+
+That's a tricky skill. There was lots of political stuff to deal with, but it was way more that than the structural stuff. The political stuff would come up when you're responsible for calling lines, or building rosters, or setting up a program, or figuring out who the coordinators for Summer League are going to be. There are all these very social dimensions, and whenever anything is dependent on norms, there's always going to be room for politics---little-p politics.
+
+Most of the difficulties were because the ultimate frisbee community as a whole is norm-heavy relative to structure or rule-heavy. In the technical world, people tend to go heavy on rules because they think it's going to eliminate politics---hint: it doesn't. But we think it does, or people tend to adopt narratives that say it does. In frisbee land, the rules are pretty fixed because there's the actual rulebook, and you're working from something that has those rules, but also has a concept of "spirit of the game." I would be remiss not to bring this up---the ultimate frisbee rulebook basically has a rule that supersedes the rules in the front of it. The spirit of the game rule is really important because it essentially privileges the norms above the rules.
+
+That contributes to some of the cultural aspects, but it also creates some of the politics I mentioned before. You'll be in Summer League, and you'll have a beginner-ish player, or someone who's only acclimated to low-level pickup or certain kinds of low-level club, less competitive, whose idea of an infraction is "you touched me"---when it's impossible to play a sport without incidental contact. You get these challenges where different norms from different contexts butt up against each other.
+
+This is partly why being a leader within this community is mostly about dispute resolution---essentially mediating when the rules themselves don't mediate well enough. You get someone calling "foul" and someone else saying "that's not a foul" and then "you're being bad spirited," and it devolves quickly. Whether you're the captain of a Summer League team, a league coordinator, or the board president, your job is basically to de-escalate wherever this happens. Because the rules are so flexible, it's really easy for people to have genuine, conflicting opinions and just default to "you're bad" and "the spirit is more important, and you're being bad spirited." You can see how it enables that kind of impasse, but that puts a burden on the community leadership, regardless of whether it's competitive sport or leagues, to de-escalate because these issues are always going to happen. They can't not happen.
+
+Related to this, I mentioned observers earlier. In competitive ultimate, observers basically take on that de-escalation responsibility in competitive play. When you get to the finals at regionals, or at nationals---at least in the winners' bracket---you'll see observers. When I was there, there were only enough observers to spot-cover games at nationals, but observers had a passive role. They only had two kinds of active calls: offsides and line calls---basically in-bounds/out-of-bounds type calls. This is because it's almost impossible for anyone else who's not dedicated to that to have a good perspective on it. There are a lot of arguments about in or out, and it's almost impossible to watch your own offsides when you're pulling (that is when throwing off to the other team).
+
+Otherwise, the way self-officiation could escalate is you could do the normal workflow, but you could also escalate to the observer, at which point if either person escalated, they got to make the call. But the observer is only a failover---the primary mechanism is still "foul" or "travel", "contest" or "no-contest". This creates a second layer to reduce the risk of abuse. I view this as helpful---it adds an extra normative bit because in cases where things are going smoothly, you basically never go to the observer. But in a game where there's genuine conflict about what is and isn't appropriate---maybe you've got a West Coast team playing an East Coast team with sufficiently different cultural expectations---the observer is the de-escalation point. You can just say, "Fine, go to the observer," and they make a judgment call.
+
+There are observer training programs which are also self-organized. You built in this extra backstop, and I view it as more in common with what I was saying before---you've got the rules, you've got the norms, and then inevitably you have the natural evolution of problems that need to be de-escalated or mediated. The observer is in some ways like a mediator on standby, which is helpful as you get to these increasingly competitive levels where people have been training for nine months and they're at the semifinals of nationals. Just knowing the observers are there helps, but I think they did a good job not usurping the authority of self-officiation. This ties back to the pros where they were like, "No, we're going to do refs," and it changed everything. The observers were essentially the equivalent of seeing the problem and solving it with an ultimate native solution, instead of seeing the problem and trying to paste on something from another culture.
+
+*Finally, what lessons do you think ultimate frisbee has to offer the world? What do these protocols teach us that could be applicable in other domains?*
+
+At a basic level, sports in general can teach us a lot about how to work together and achieve collective outcomes. Given what I said about not enjoying lacrosse and then going to ultimate, obviously ultimate does that in a way that I found more culturally palatable.
+
+Let me break this into two parts---first, what I learned personally, and second, what I think the world can learn, because I need this bridge. For me, I learned very much how to deal with other humans. I'm extremely on the spectrum in ways that I think are good but also make it really hard for me to deal with people in general. I do not think I would be able to have healthy social relationships if I had not gone through this experience. I haven't encountered another environment that inculturated me to dealing with other humans in a way that works for me.
+
+What I mean is that it has rules, protocols, reliability, expectations, outcomes, delegation of authority, accountability for your actions---all that kind of rigorous structure you need to perform---but then allowed you to pursue performance in an environment that wasn't toxic. So many environments I've encountered that are performance-oriented achieve their goals through toxicity or through things that feel toxic to me. Since I am extremely drawn to performance, effectiveness, capability, reliability---things that require structure to create reliable outcomes out of unreliable parts---this was crucial. You cannot do it without structure. But because so many regimes for imposing structure are culturally toxic or have toxic side effects, it would have been an issue.
+
+I feel like I'm in the place I am today in part because of experiences I had in ultimate. Being trusted and then being accountable for what you take on, whether it's taking a throw that's a little too hard that you maybe shouldn't have thrown, or making calls as a coach. Actually, maybe this is an important story---one I tell the most about my experience coaching ultimate.
+
+When I was the defensive coordinator of that club team, I had no official authority as the coach. The players and captains could override anything I said. We were at the semifinals of regionals where only the top two teams would qualify for nationals. There was a backdoor bracket, and the team that was best in the country at the time was out of DC. We were in Philly, pretty evenly matched with the team from Pittsburgh, playing them in the semifinals.
+
+In a close match, I played open rotation, not subbing to win. I got questioned repeatedly throughout the game. It was like 11-11, 12-12, and we lost that game 15-13. They were pissed---"Why did you do that?" I said, "Trust me---you gave me this job. You want to go to nationals. You don't want to win this game, you want to go to nationals."
+
+We lost. We went to the backdoor bracket while Pittsburgh went and played DC. They got destroyed---DC was very good. We went through the backdoor bracket, played back up to face Pittsburgh again, and we stomped them because they were exhausted. They had played to win against us, played to win against DC, then showed up to play us again. We had played open rotation, gone through our backdoor bracket with open rotation, and when we finally got to the team that was actually our peer, we hadn't gotten anyone injured or worn out. We had our entire roster ready to go in the game that mattered, and we just dominated them.
+
+That period between games---it was a day apart, from the end of one day to the end of the next---was a little icy. People were not happy. I remember just saying, "We put together the strategy, you asked me to call it, I held the line. This was the strategy, we followed it, it's going to pay off." And it did. Obviously it could have gone the other way, but the fact is---and this is almost more important than that it worked out---they stuck to it. Nobody was happy about it when I wasn't calling the tight lines. There was nothing stopping them---it wouldn't have even been a mutiny because it wasn't actually up to me, really. But they did it anyway, even though they didn't want to.
+
+Everyone was thrilled when we won the game and went to nationals that year. But there's something about this difference between authority and trust that I can't quite put my finger on. That's been another important anecdote for me because it affects the way I approach leadership in any other context. Leadership isn't telling you what you have to do---leadership is getting you to do what you need to do, even when you don't want to, even when I don't have the authority to make you do it.
+
+The final answer---what I think the world has to learn---is broadly that you can do more with culture and norms than I think a lot of people give credit for. I know that a lot of people know those things are valuable, but if they're coming back to me as an engineer and leader, I think a lot of people put too much emphasis on rules and tools and not enough on norms and practices. If there's anything that ultimate frisbee can teach people, especially high performers who want to achieve things, it's that having a healthy set of cultures and norms and practices and rituals isn't just helpful for achieving success---it's necessary. It's not sufficient, but it's necessary. No amount of tools and rules can compensate for healthy cultural practices.