Converted 'article' nomenclature to 'interview'

content/interviews/dorsey-the_gut.md

@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+---
+narrator: Asia Dorsey
+subject: The gut
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-03-18
+approved: 2025-03-20
+summary: "Drawing on many ancestral traditions and the experience of her own body, Asia Dorsey learns and teaches the pattern language of a healthy gut."
+location: "Denver CO"
+topics: [ancestors, food, health, indigeneity]
+headshot: "asia_dorsey.png"
+links:
+  - text: "Bugs Bones & Botany"
+    url: "https://www.bonesbugsandbotany.com"
+  - text: "Red Palm Oil: A Ghanaian Tradition"
+    url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAgXY2WWPAk"
+  - text: "Patreon"
+    url: "https://www.patreon.com/bonesbugsandbotany"
+---
+
+*How do you begin telling people about who you are and what you do?*
+
+I am a bioregional root worker raised on the lands of the Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapaho peoples. I was cultivated by a powerful, powerful group of Black women in the Five Points community, who taught me about cooperation, collaboration, and how to dream my way out of trouble. I am showing up here with my herbalist hat on, but one of the conversations that we are deeply steeped in at all times is one of sovereignty, embodied liberation, and also the forms of serenity that come from collective organizing, especially around the things that we apply our work to. So it's very good to be here with you.
+
+*How would you outline your life? You started with your cultivation. Where did you go from there? What has your path been like?*
+
+Starting off with my cultivation is so important because I am one of the people in this world who carries around a covenant of love privilege. That love privilege got me to a super prestigious university where I experienced existential depression after confronting what the world was really like.
+
+I thought I wanted to be an attorney, and I thought that I would argue justice in front of the Supreme Court. I wanted to be Erin Brockovich. Ever since I saw *Erin Brockovich*, I was like, "Yeah, that's me." I made it all the way to university and discovered that the law was not true, that the law was based on who had power, and that broke my spirit. What my broken spirit looked like was not being in my body and not being able to feel any emotions. Anyone reading this—some of you know what this is like. Some of you are experiencing this right now.
+
+There was only one thing that brought me joy. I would be watching Netflix, and then this Vandana Shiva woman would show up. She had this big beautiful bindi, and she was always saying clever little quippy things, and I was like, *who is this woman?* And I thought, *I am still alive*. So I watched everything that Vandana Shiva was in, and it got me into this world of food. I later visited her in India at Navdanya where I interned for several months. 
+
+I discovered that my university, NYU, we had one of the two food studies departments in the nation. I thought, *I'm just gonna take this little class because this is the only thing that makes me feel alive*. Everything else was just gray. But when it came to food, it was so colorful, so vibrant. So I decided to follow my joy, and I took 22 credit hours. And it was everything. It was everything.
+
+I loved everyone. If they're a foodie, they're my people. Period. I don't care about race or class. I don't come for a foodie. Y'all be hating on *Portlandia*—I love *Portlandia*. Anyone who cares about animals and the earth, they were my people.
+
+I ended up reading a book called *The Omnivore's Dilemma* by Michael Pollan, and I discovered Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm. When I was researching, I was alive because it was food. Then I realized Joel Salatin does this thing called permaculture, and I was like, *What is that?* So I ended up traveling to Australia to study with Geoff Lawton and apprenticing in permaculture. From there, I traveled around the world to understand food and agriculture, specifically with this lens of honoring the Indigenous.
+
+I felt like I was able to learn so much more than my peers because I had this permaculture training. For example, in Ghana, I was so furious in a global nutrition class. The professor was like, "Vitamin A is of nutritional significance." And then the next phrase—she goes, "We Ghanaians are so backwards. We're eating all this palm oil." And I'm like, palm oil is the highest food source of vitamin A! So how are you backwards? I was so upset that I made a whole documentary on red palm oil, reclaiming the power of the palm. That professor ended up changing her tune because I was so furious.
+
+After that, I traveled to New Zealand and worked with a woman named Kay Baxter, who owns the Koanga Institute, where I learned about what it looks like to build regenerative community and to grow food like your life depends on it. She taught me the principles of healing my gut. Kay was like, "Look, the gut and the brain are connected. You could heal your mind through healing your gut." I took it on, and I ended up resolving that depression using meat stock and fermented food. That really empowered me—I didn't know that was possible.
+
+After studying with Kay and healing my depression, I graduated from university with that degree in food studies. I returned home and started a fermented food company called the Five Points Fermentation Company. It was cooperatively organized because I felt it had to heal at all levels. I wanted it to heal the earth. We only had cabbage from a regenerative grower named Michael Kilt, and he would apply compost teas, and we'd measure the brix of the cabbage.
+
+I lived my best life, honestly, running that company because people were getting healed. I don't know if I'm legally allowed to say it or whatever, but all I know is, people were not well, and then they were well from the food that I was making—local sauerkraut that was fermented by whole communities.
+
+After that, I realized I didn't understand how much capital I needed to run a manufacturing firm. We were fermenting like 55,000 pounds of sauerkraut and distributing it to grocery stores, restaurants and direct to consumers. It was wild that I did all that with no money—what I used was my own energy, and I burnt out so bad. I had no idea how much I hurt myself to bring probiotics to the people. But they needed the probiotics. They needed the traditional food.
+
+All of my recipes were traditional. If we made kimchi, Mama CJ, a Korean woman, was in the kitchen with us. If we made cortido, a Salvadoran was there. Our curry kraut was developed by a Jain Indian chef named Milan Doshi, who ended up selling me the Five Points Fermentation Company to get my start. Shout out to the Brown Alliance!
+
+After that, I learned a lot about organizing co-ops and businesses. I was on the board of the Center for Community Wealth Building, led by Yessica Holgin. The queen! We were building infrastructure for co-ops throughout Colorado. I started to cultivate a new co-op with the learnings from the last one—the Satya Yoga Co-op, which is the nation's first BIPOC-owned and operated yoga co-op, using this theme of healing our bodies in order to heal our minds.
+
+This co-op was so much more successful than my first one. During that time, I helped organize other co-ops and did more economic justice work, always centering food. If it had to do with food then it was for me. I worked with Beverly Grant at Mo' Better Green and whoever I could work with in the food systems. That's all I wanted to do with my life.
+
+Then Adam Brock, who founded the GrowHaus in Elyria-Swansea—we had been working together teaching permaculture and social permaculture—invited me to a consulting firm called Regenerate Change. I became a co-owner of that firm. We were able to consult with food businesses across the nation, helping with strategy and conflict resolution. My life was perfect. I used the resources from that to build a new business, Bones, Bugs, and Botany, where I teach embodied liberation through food and herbal medicine education. That's where I am now—a byproduct of all these beautiful collaborations, but very much following the trail of the earth. That's how I got here.
+
+*I'd love to contrast that trail of the earth with law. You talked about law earlier as not being what you thought it was. If not law, what other orders did you turn to? What other ways of seeing the world, the gut, and everything in between seemed more real to you?*
+
+When I was a young warthog in the streets of New York City, I was engaged in anti-stop-and-frisk activism. I was trained as a Kingian nonviolence facilitator, and I was organizing around prison justice. I read a book by Michelle Alexander called *The New Jim Crow*, and that's what killed it—that was the book that made me feel like I'd wasted all my life pursuing a legal education when the law is not actually just.
+
+Understanding the law as it applies to policing, as it applies to Black bodies, as it applies to the extension of slavery—these things help us understand that whoever is governing, whoever the ruler is, they set the rules. But what I love about the earth and about food is that the goddess doesn't operate on laws. There are no laws of nature, but there are patterns.
+
+There are patterns of nature, honey. And what I love about the patterns is that there are binaries in the natural world, and at the same time there is also chaos—the possibility for a multiplicity of outcomes. By studying not the law, but the pattern language of nature, I've been able to discern right from wrong, what is true, and I've been able to locate myself outside of a hierarchy in relationship to the more-than-humans, which include the bones and the plants and the microbes. I know now where I belong, and I use those principles or patterns of nature to help organize giant food-based organizations, but also to help people reorganize their bodies.
+
+Thank goodness that I developed this perspective. The whole "law of nature" thing was just created to justify a legal regime of robbery.
+
+*What changes when you shift your frame from the laws of nature to the patterns of nature? What consequences come from that?*
+
+Laws are rigid and enforced by policing. Patterns are flexible. They resist commodification. They exist at many levels in different languages. Patterns are true.
+
+There's so much more love. What I love about a pattern is that there is a binary, but there's also chaos that makes everything work. We have genes, a gene sequence, and the way that sequence gets all mixed up when we're trying to have a baby—the chaos of that is what creates the beauty. Patterns give us access to a way of being that honors duality and honors non-duality at the same time.
+
+It allows us to connect outside of petty identity politics because we are able to connect with the broadness and beauty of the goddess, and to see that there are these principles that are self-replicating and patterns that are repeating. It's such a beautiful thing to be a part of these patterns, not because some law told us to.
+
+I think about race and racial mixing and the maroon colonies. There's a really beautiful Indigenous woman named Tiffany Lovato. She's of Pueblo descent, and she told me that when Africans were being enslaved, the ancestors on the East Coast—their shamans, their wisdom keepers—saw that in dreams. They had made preparations and a covenant. What was supposed to happen was that those Indigenous tribes were going to consume or make kin with the newly arrived Africans. A lot of that kin-making actually happened because that is the pattern of all Indigenous people. This is how we keep our genetic diversity. This is what we do.
+
+But it was laws created by men—laws of segregation—that halted those processes. The maroon colonies were European, Native American, and African. What was really beautiful when we study maroonage and what was happening in early America is you saw this class allegiance that went beyond racial or ethnic characteristics to create these futuristic societies. Those societies mix the blood—that is the pattern of nature.
+
+But these laws kept that from happening, especially implementing the one-drop rule with African Americans and blood quantums with First Nations people. It worked to shrink their identity and expand ours, expand the pool of who could be extracted. And we see the impact of those laws today. The laws were put in place to stop the natural order from happening.
+
+*How did you begin to get to know the patterns of the gut?*
+
+When I was sick and depressed in New York City, I didn't understand—I was raised by all of those wonderful women in the Five Points, and they made all my food. They relieved me from reproductive labor of all kinds. I was one of the only kids that didn't have chores. My family was really invested in me getting a college education, so they said, "No, your job is to study."
+
+Like many male-bodied folks, I experienced a lot of investment, and one of those forms was not learning to cook or clean or any of those things. So when I went to college without my family, I didn't know how to eat—my mom still makes my plate! I had no idea about the impact of polyunsaturated fatty acids or what caused inflammation. I was balling out. I said, "I get to choose what I eat. I'm going to have a waffle with mint chocolate ice cream." And I wondered, why was I like that? I didn't understand that there was a link between what I ate and how I felt.
+
+Studying with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, she amplified the teachings that Kay introduced me to, which was understanding that there is a pattern, an organization of the body. Later, when I started studying traditional Chinese medicine, I deepened that understanding of pattern and how the different organ systems work together and reflect the outer world.
+
+I learned the pattern of healing. I was so unwell that if there was sugar in the salad dressing, I could hear the sugar. If there was wheat, I could hear the sound of wheat. It helped me see what foods really resonated with me because wheat was like this high-pitched frequency sound, but corn was like a low rumble. I developed synesthesia from restricting certain foods and eating the traditional kinds of foods that I grew up with.
+
+I grew up eating liver and onions every week. I grew up eating collard greens, these really beautiful broth-rich stews. It turns out that all of those were protecting my gut. I had no idea how valuable traditional soul food was because it's so demonized—people say it's high fat, blah, blah, blah. No, that is the most nourishing food that exists on the planet. It's ingenious.
+
+I learned the pattern language of gut healing by testing it out, by seeing what different foods made me feel like, and understanding the larger pattern of what it takes to heal the gut. A lot of the information we learn about what's good to feed the gut—fiber and polyphenols—that's for a healthy body, if your gut is already well. Digesting fiber is not easy. We're not cows. We don't have a four-chambered stomach or a rumen. We're not ruminating and regurgitating—plants are not easy to eat. Our ancestors have developed so many techniques to deactivate the anti-nutrients in plants.
+
+So if you're not well, eating plants that haven't been processed in ancestral and traditional ways is going to hurt you even more. The foods we find not only in African American cuisines but cuisines around the world follow the same pattern language. Your ramen is using some of the same principles as my collard greens. We're using the bones and the meaty bones of animals to heal the meaty parts of ourselves.
+
+The way that I know it's true is that I try it in my own body, but then I look at all the cultures who are practicing the same pattern. If I see African Americans do it, and then I see Native Americans do it, and then I see Europeans do it, then I see Japanese people do it—I think, okay, there's something true here, because humans are an expression of the earth and an expression of that wisdom and organizing intelligence. If our ancestors are organizing in the exact same way, I'm going to listen to the ancestors because that wisdom that comes from generations of trial and error is so much more powerful than a lab test with rats. The best science is what we've been able to see in human populations over generations. They'll give me a two-week rat trial and tell me not to have collard greens? No, incorrect. I'm not listening.
+
+No shade—I sometimes do listen, but I only listen to those studies and trials when they are affirming the pattern languages that we see coming out of our ancestral cultures and traditions.
+
+*Do you still hear foods?*
+
+I don't have synesthesia anymore, and I've been trying to chase it. One of my mentors is like, "Leave it alone. You needed that when you were unwell to keep going. It incentivized you to continue the practice." But now that I'm well, I don't want to go back. I have so much empathy for all of us who are dealing with tummy pain.
+
+*When you talk about these different cultures and sets of patterns that you've stewarded—patterns and protocols from fermentation with sauerkraut, yoga, soul food, and so on—how do you approach being a steward, learner, and teacher of so many different practices that have their own coherence but also resonance with each other? How do you hold their differences and their commonalities together?*
+
+As an herbalist, I did not start seeing indigenous plants until I started respecting Indigenous people. When we're talking about yoga, which is an ancient Indian science, or Japanese or Chinese cuisine, or soul food—the thing that holds all of them together is that they are deep ancestral practices and lineages that are so overwhelmingly complex. One could not even begin to master them. It takes a lifetime to master how to cook fried chicken correctly, or to perfect that asana.
+
+For me, humbling myself is my absolute favorite practice. *Humbling* comes from *humus*, comes from dirt. I am a dirt-colored woman. I love the earth—she looks just like me, honey, especially when she's healthy! I stay humble. I put my belly on the earth like a snake, and I very much appreciate the teachings that come, knowing that I'm only getting a fractal. From that place of humility, I'm able to see how that knowledge is fractal and how it replicates itself, and what those base principles are.
+
+The first thing is respect. I have found that people are so much more willing to share with me when I'm prostrating myself, genuflecting—not flexing like I know everything, but genu-flexing like, "Please teach me more." And "Let me tell you what I've learned, what do you think about that?" And "What did your grandma say? What was that recipe you want to share with me? That sounds amazing."
+
+People aren't taught to respect their traditions. People are taught to become consumers. For capitalism to penetrate the home, you cannot have culture, because capitalism relies on novelty. We've been fractured from our traditional culture. We have science, which has been captured by capitalists to reflect values and ideas that benefit them. We have all of this confusion about what to eat and how to live.
+
+I stand as a powerful Black woman because we are *sankofa*—go back and get it. I want to wrap my arms around all of it so that I can give it back to us. I don't want people to be unwell. Because we don't have enough respect for our ancestors, especially respect for women—because food is often the domain of women. Those genius things that kept us alive, those things that built our bodies as strong as they are, have become invisibilized and discarded for veganism and all kinds of weird, non-ancestral stuff. No shade—the vegans are going to be so mad at me! Come for me, I dare you!
+
+What I'm trying to rectify by holding the pattern language is helping people begin to see the awe again. People, begin to have awe.
+
+For some of us, some of our ancestors are raggedy, and we are afraid to look back because we don't want to confront what happened. You don't have to look—it's fine. But I look back in the way that I understand Italian cuisine from a pattern language, in the way that I explore German cookbooks. I'll hold the knowledge for you to come back to when you're ready, to claim what is yours, which are these cultures that we have inherited.
+
+These are the protocols—because what is culture but a set of protocols? Protocols for how to soak your beans, protocols for how to cook your greens, protocols for how to ferment your bread. These are all protocols that create a culture. Those cultures then shape our microbiome in a way that creates our identity. Culture tells us what to eat and how to eat to live in any given environment.
+
+To figure out how best to eat in Colorado, I looked at places that had a similar altitude and grasslands. Let me look at all the grassland people. Dairy is just fine. Cows are sustainable in Colorado. Come for me because I could show you all of the steppe regions and how we're all eating the same thing—red meat. Even the Dalai Lama eats red meat, and it's because at this altitude it's so hard to breathe that we burn through our minerals like heme iron, causing our bodies to have a higher demand for heme. That demand is the same in all of our steppeways geographies.
+
+The red meat is consumed in the grasslands where the buffaloes roam. It's a pattern. But how does that pattern of eating red meat then put us in proper relationship to the more-than-humans in our environment? To be a meat eater without understanding the significance of stewarding the animals is incorrect. You need the whole thing.
+
+What I discovered about Indigenous folks of the Americas, and why there were so many bison, is that they were actively stewarding those herds. It wasn't just random that so many were able to thrive. No, honey—they were actively stewarding, and because their stewarding was sustainable, that's what grew out. That amount of herding gave them access to the highest quality protein on the planet.
+
+Wherever we go in altitudes like this, where ruminants are eating grasses, we also see stewardship culture. Some of my favorite stewardship cultures are the Maasai in Kenya. Oh my God, they're beautiful! They're twelve feet tall! They eat no vegetables except if they're sick, then they'll take an herb. I love the Maasai—they're so amazing.
+
+I love the cow-herding cultures because I'm a cowgirl. I'm in Colorado, and I better learn how to eat to live here. My health is so abundant because instead of just giving land acknowledgments to Indigenous people, I'm looking at their cookbooks. I'm learning what they ate because I see their genius, and I honor that genius, and I'm humble to that genius.
+
+*I'd love to hear more about how you learn. You talked about cookbooks and humbling yourself. What does your learning process look like, especially considering how much our educational systems have erased these legacies?*
+
+I love the process of triangulation. I pull my knowledge from multiple sources. The first source is the ancestral source—I want to know what the ancestors were doing. So, for example, when learning about a plant, I'll pull out my *Native Ethnobotany* by Daniel E. Moerman, or I'll pull out my African American herbal guides or my slave medicine book to see what enslaved people were doing. Then I may check Margaret Grieve to see what European people were using that plant for.
+
+Then I'll look at the nutritional profile of the plant. One of my favorite books is *Minerals for the Genetic Code* by Charles Walters. I love some esoteric Acres USA! Put it on my bookshelf, period. I'll start understanding the herb from a nutritional perspective to see if the nutrients in the plant correspond with the medical functions that our ancestors are reporting.
+
+Then I'll check PubMed and see the latest research coming out about the plant. I'll look for the gold standard—double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. I want to see those outcomes. But I have enough discernment to understand context. For example, people will say that in the Nurses' Health Study, which is a big study that everyone likes to cite because it was multi-year following nurses, red meat consumption is correlated with heart disease. But then I check if there's a similar study in another country that eats red meat, and you find that correlation doesn't exist. Then you realize, oh, when they eat red meat in the US, they're eating McDonald's. McDonald's, not red meat itself, is corresponding to heart disease.
+
+The most important part is that I try it on myself. I will see what the herb is like in my body. Once I trust that it's safe from all my research, I take on the herb, and I will often apprentice with the herb for several months, sometimes several years, to fully understand if it does what they say it's going to do.
+
+So there's also the embodied knowledge. I could sum it down to ancestral relevance, cultural relevance, scientific analysis, and then embodiment as the way that I go about gathering knowledge about plants or foods.
+
+*How do you take that knowledge and bring it to others? How do you introduce people to this knowledge and wisdom that you've learned from so many different teachers? What is the next step of that apprenticeship?*
+
+I teach from pattern to details. I'm a permaculturist—I've been teaching the Permaculture Design Course in Denver for several years. I'm not going to overload people with information that they don't need, with data and facts. I'm going to teach the pattern language so that they understand and are empowered to see the wholeness.
+
+For example, it's spring, and spring is an opportunity to regulate our blood sugar. It's the season of the liver organ, the wood element in Chinese medicine. Sidebar: the five elements are also in West Africa, and it's the same five! So this is a pattern of the spring. Instead of saying burdock root does this, or yellow dock root does that, or dandelion root does this, I teach the importance of the bitter flavor and how all bitters create more bile and help stimulate all the digestive juices and enzymes.
+
+I start with that broader pattern so that, regardless of which roots they're using, they get the big picture. Then I bring them into the details. Yes, dandelion works along the liver-stomach-spleen axis—let me tell you about these organs and how they work together. Yellow dock is liver-large intestines—let me tell you about the pattern language of the large intestines and the liver and how they work. My students really get it—they are great herbalists. They're so good! I think, *Wow, I really taught y'all, didn't I?*
+
+I love a citation for the girlies who are ready to go deeper—and *girlies* is a gender-neutral term, everyone is the girlies! I always like to have references so that people can follow the paper trail and importantly, refute me. I want my students to be able to say, "Actually, you misinterpreted this data," and I'll say, "Oh, okay, teach me." Because I'm humble—I don't have to be right about it. I really want to see what the pattern is, and I understand that chaos is a part of the pattern, so sometimes things are unexpected, and I love that because then we get specific data.
+
+For example, people rail against polyunsaturated fatty acids. First of all, omega-3 fatty acids are polyunsaturated fatty acids—we love omega-3s! So people don't even know the pattern of what the polyunsaturates are. People are mad because canola oil and vegetable oil are all polyunsaturated, and they cause heart disease. "They're the worst, they're poison, they're not natural, no ancestors would use them."
+
+But there is a plant—this is when we get into the details—my favorite, sesame oil. The lignins in sesame oil keep it from going rancid. Whereas all the other polys get rancid and cause inflammation, sesame oil does not—it's protected by the lignins. So we have the broader pattern of polyunsaturated fatty acids being unstable. It's true, omega-3 fatty acids are hella unstable. But when we look into the details, we start to learn the specifics.
+
+This particular oil has been used against aging. We love sesame! We see it coming up in Islamic cultures, in hummus with tahini. And then we see black sesame being really used in Asia. So for me, if many ancestors are using the plant, then I need to double-check. The pattern is still valid, but there is this nuance that queers the pattern. I love touching into that nuance, and we know that nuance must be present because the ancestors are not dumb. If they were dumb, we wouldn't be here.
+
+Sesame oil is a prized oil, and we know why it is. It is a seed oil, but unlike those raggedy seed oils, this one is anti-inflammatory.
+
+*One pattern I've come across in relationship to different protocols is capture. What are your thoughts or experiences with this? Has this word brought to mind cases where the legacies and patterns you steward have been vulnerable to capture, misused, or subverted?*
+
+We talk about the capture of nutrition research by the seed oil lobby or the capture of agricultural research by Cargill and Monsanto. The deterioration of federal funding in research has been met with increased investment by capitalists who not only shift the outcomes of that research but hold the patents of things that used to be distributed to us, the people, and are now privately owned by them and charged back at us.
+
+Capture is also happening in traditional food. We see Whole30, who just added seed oils to their products—captured. We see all of these trends. But what's fascinating is that you can't capture the pattern language, and the pattern language requires us to be in good relationship.
+
+You can't capture fermented bread—these corporations could never. You can't, because the things that are true, the things that are healthiest for us, those things take time. There are only a few examples where a company could do it better.
+
+I like to think about cultural institutions—restaurants are cultural institutions. In other countries, it's the restaurant that would take on the making of a traditional food that's very labor-intensive because they could utilize scale in a powerful way. We see that in places like Germany. The real way to make fried chicken is three whole days—it is a *process*. So we have these cultural institutions that are doing what they're supposed to do, which is taking on the labor-intensive process, and then we get to access our traditional foods through these cultural institutions.
+
+Unfortunately, in this country, we cannot trust our institutions, and I hate that because having a thriving democracy requires that we trust our institutions. There is a cost to not trusting institutions—look at the anti-vaxxers. Their distrust was legitimate, but look at the outcome on all of us. It is a dangerous thing when we can't trust our institutions, and in this country, our institutions destroy everything beautiful. Try to get sourdough from the store—it's only been fermented for like five hours! What is this? Not them adding citric acid—bitch, please! What are you doing? It's incorrect. Make the bread correctly! I will buy it from you.
+
+So yeah, there is all of this capture. But I want to talk about a crack in the edifice. A bitch loves a farmers market because you can go to the farmers market, talk to your bread girlie (which is often a dude—shout out to our bread girlies). There are these artisans, just like I was back in the day, who are sourcing the most nutrient-dense wheat and fermenting it, doing all of the things correctly.
+
+The other side of capture is renaissance. Let's look at yoga. First of all, the yogis, because they're smart, the yogic ancestors—they had visions of what they needed to do to keep their culture alive, and they said to keep it alive, we're going to share it with white people. So in the twenties, Yogananda and all of these people were coming over because they had prophetic vision and insight because they wanted to keep yoga alive.
+
+Yoga in India was laughed at. If you said you want to be a yogi, your family might disown you: "We don't do that. We're the new Indians." So what happens over fifty years of history in the United States is white people really take it on, and they find that it's supportive, that it's helping them, that it's easing their mind. And then there was a backlash—Indians were like, "That's ours. You're doing it incorrectly," and they took it back. So then we started seeing all of these Indian-run cultural institutions to teach yoga, such as mine. The Satya Yoga Co-op—Lakshmi Nair was like, "Nope, we're taking it back," creating this uber authentic, rooted, seductive, sultry, salacious, soulful practice.
+
+So we see that whenever there is capture, there's also counter-movement, and that counter-movement is a pattern. This is an impulse, a survival instinct. Indian people were like, "You ain't about to tarnish our legacy with your yoga with your Lululemons, with your Starbucks." No shade—I love all women, so you can wear whatever you want. I'm not judging you.
+
+So we have this renaissance of yoga, and then Indian yogis—or at least the modern girlies—are like, "Yeah, this is for people of color." And so then you have this proliferation of practitioners of color who descend from these beautiful Indian teachers. And now I use yoga to reconnect with my African ancestors, who also practiced asanas—even if they didn't call it asanas, it was something else. But yoga has been a pathway back home towards healing.
+
+I wanted to give that example because there are always cracks. Remember, we have the pattern, but then we have the chaos, and the chaos often looks like this counter-movement. It's a beautiful thing.
+
+*How do you know when the evolution of a tradition is correct? When we learn from other cultures or do that blood mixing you talked about earlier, how do you know when to trust the evolution we're drawn into?*
+
+As a feminist, I ask one question: does this create beauty? If this practice creates beauty within your body, and then it creates beauty in your relationships, and then it creates beauty in the community, and then it creates beauty in the earth—because the broader pattern is regeneration. We know something's on point when it's regenerative.
+
+Regenerative and sustainable are different. Regenerative means that the outcome is more than the sum of its parts. We're not keeping things level, staying stuck in one place—we're actually participating in a spiral of abundance.
+
+When I think about what it takes for me to make my einkorn sourdough, I have to source the whole grains, either from Italy, where they take really good care of their soil. I know it's not local, but neither is my red palm oil. So I source the grains from an organization that's producing the highest mineral count, because what it takes to keep soil mineralized is good tending. I'm looking at the indicator of the impact on the earth by the quality of the nutrients in the food, period.
+
+I get the grains to my house. Then I have to grind the grains. Oh, the time it takes! And I can't grind it too fast, or the volatiles are going to evaporate. So I grind these grains slow, and that slowness causes me to slow down. I have to plan three days to make my sourdough, and so now I'm in the slow phase. My mind is not running as quickly as it usually is, so now my mental health is better because I'm making sourdough.
+
+I've got the flour. Now I'm mixing it in the right ratio, because I've researched a lot about sourdough. People have mastered this craft, and I am not going to forget what they have learned. I'm not starting over. So now I'm in sourdough culture, learning about the goddess, learning about Demeter and how she gifted us culture. Appreciating the European ancestors who really go hard on the grain—these are wheat people!
+
+So I'm researching, having fun. And then I start making the dough, and I have to fold it in a particular way, and I have to work it, and I have to pay attention to it. Oh my goodness! Now I'm paying attention to everything because I've been paying attention to this dough, and also look at my forearms getting nice and fit. Now my heart is happy because we're working the dough. Then I have to bake it, and that's going to cost me because of my energy bill. So I'm thinking about the implications—this is worth it for me. I'm going to use this energy, and I'm going to thank the ancestors who got this energy to me.
+
+But then I make the sourdough, and it's ready, and it's perfect. But if I eat all of that, I'm gonna get huge. There's nothing wrong with hugeness! But I don't need that much nutrition. So what happens? I share the sourdough with someone else. So now I'm relating, now I'm building community, now I'm building culture. I'm sharing sourdough loaves with my friends and my family. So now we're breaking bread, and in that breaking bread, someone's like, "Ouch, my knee!" And I'm like, "Oh, try this burdock." Let me spread some of the gifts from the earth, and then they're out making sure that their lawn's not getting sprayed so that their burdock is good enough to harvest.
+
+Now look—regeneration at every level. We started regenerating the earth by getting high-quality grains, and then we ended with people harvesting their burdock root and keeping it from being poisoned. So that's how I know that it's correct. My body is better as a byproduct. My community is better as a byproduct, and the earth is better as a byproduct. Now I'm more beautiful. Look at my skin! Look at all that zinc from that high-quality einkorn. I'm beautiful, my body is beautiful, my community is beautiful, the earth is beautiful. We can trust beauty.
+
+*Are there any other lessons that you would share with other pattern watchers, learners, hearers, and makers?*
+
+I like ending on beauty. I love Auntie Robin Wall Kimmerer and others who insist upon this notion of beauty. It's so feminist, isn't it?
+
+The most important thing is that we can have it—we can create it. That principle of honoring the body, honoring relationship, and honoring the planet applies to every single thing that we do.
+
+I'm thinking about how all the research came out showing that it's 28 times more resource-intensive than CAFO meat to have those fake burgers. Nasty, nasty, nasty! No, incorrect. It makes you unhealthy. You're not connecting with the land—no ancestors ever did it. And the earth is suffering because of that nasty stuff.
+
+I just want you to apply this lens to see that we can create cultures of regeneration, and that those cultures end up shaping our microbiome, shaping our moods, and then shaping how we relate to each other. That's what I really want to give to the world. All the vegans—you can come for me. You can come on our show, *The Petty Herbalist* podcast, and we can debate. Just create beauty—that's what I want to leave for y'all.

content/interviews/ehmke-contributor_covenant.md

@@ -0,0 +1,162 @@
+---
+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."
+location: "Chicago, USA"
+#headshot: "placeholder-headshot.png"
+topics: [code of conduct, conflict, mediation, gender, open source, software]
+links:
+    - text: "Personal website"
+      url: "https://where.coraline.codes"
+    - text: "Contributor Covenant"
+      url: "https://www.contributor-covenant.org"
+    - text: "Organization for Ethical Source"
+      url: "https://www.contributor-covenant.org"
+---
+
+*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/interviews/kiessel-good_market.md

@@ -0,0 +1,238 @@
+---
+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."
+location: "Sri Lanka / United States"
+#headshot: "placeholder-headshot.png"
+topics: [economics, organizations, ecology, standards]
+links:
+    - text: "Good Market"
+      url: "https://goodmarket.global"
+---
+
+*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/interviews/littauer-constructed_languages.md

@@ -0,0 +1,238 @@
+---
+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."
+location: "Wellington, NZ"
+topics: [fiction, gender, 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/interviews/mannan-diplomatic_protocols.md

@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@
+---
+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."
+location: "Dhaka, Bangladesh"
+headshot: "mosud_mannan.png"
+topics: [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/interviews/mayer-mediation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,198 @@
+---
+narrator: Bernard Mayer
+subject: Mediation
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2025-02-07
+approved: 2025-03-11
+summary: "Mediation developed as a professional field through experimentation and practice."
+headshot: "bernie_mayer.png"
+topics: [conflict, family, mediation, social work]
+---
+
+*How do you like to introduce yourself?*
+
+I'm Bernie Mayer. I'm an emeritus professor of conflict studies at Creighton University and a founding partner of CDR Associates in Boulder. I live with my wife and dog, who might join us, in Kingsville, Ontario. That's probably enough for the moment.
+
+*There's more to come, because I'd love to hear how you outline your life and career. You can begin wherever you like. How do you trace the beginnings of your interest in conflict?*
+
+A second formative fact was that my father was a director of a residential treatment center for children in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We had a house on the grounds of it, and that's where I grew up. So I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, and went to Cleveland Heights High School, but I lived in this community. It was not exactly an egalitarian community, but it was definitely a community with a purpose. It made me feel different in some ways, in a nice way---though not always nice. It had its hard moments too. A lot of hard things happened there over the years. But on the other hand, we had a much nicer house than we would have been able to afford, and I had access to baseball fields and gym and swimming pool and stuff like that that a social worker's kid normally didn't have.
+
+A third formative factor was that I was also, and you probably know the term, a "red diaper baby." I'll just leave it at that. Even though my father became somewhat conservative when he had to confront the sixties, I grew up with that consciousness. Then I was also a child of the sixties, and was very active in the civil rights movement, anti-war movements, peace movements. That was a big part of my identity. I went to Oberlin College, which was a focal point for student activism.
+
+All those things were about conflict. In a sense, conflict was a unifying factor of both the bad things that had happened and good work that could be done. In the early days of teaching and writing---particularly teaching people to be mediators and conflict interveners---I used to say that I grew up as a teenager and young adult, knowing pretty well how to raise conflict, but not what to necessarily do once I had raised it. As time went on the initial answer was: get people together to talk and see what we could work out. But as time went on I realized, no, raising conflict is really important as well. It's almost in a dialectical relationship with doing something to move it in a more constructive direction .
+
+I graduated from college in '68. I was facing the draft. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. My initial efforts to avoid the draft by applying to be a conscientious objector didn't work because they decided I really did believe in war. I thought, well, I don't know where this is going to lead me. But what would be a good thing to do during the period of time before I actually do get drafted? I was a child of social workers, and I liked working with kids. I'd done a lot of work as a childcare worker at this residential treatment center and as a camp counselor. So I went to social work school at Columbia in New York. Over the two years that I got my master's degree there, I received a very high number in the lottery, which meant I didn't get drafted.
+
+Now I had a social work degree, and I worked as a child and family therapist at a drop-in center mostly for recent immigrants to New York, that sort of thing.
+
+*At that stage, what tools were available for you for helping people through conflict? What was offered to you, what was at hand?*
+
+There was nothing specifically framed that way. I was trained to be a therapist, and I was trained in a fairly Freudian agency---a sectarian one, the Jewish Board of Guardians, now the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. I feel like I had two kinds of trainings or learnings in my life, in grand systemic theories that sought to explain the world in their own way. I'm glad I got training in both of them, even though I ended up seeing significant flaws in both of them. One was Freudianism and the other  Marxism. I guess Marxism and Freudianism are, in a way, training about conflict---class conflict and internal conflict. I reject a lot about those systems now. But it wasn't a bad intellectual discipline at that point.
+
+*Was there a transition, then, from working in the context of agencies, working with who's coming through the agency, to a point where you realized you wanted to try to create some new practices or new frameworks?*
+
+Well, I was struggling with it all along. I mean, this was a Jewish agency, and a good one, but it was running a program that was mostly for kids from the Dominican Republic but also some from Puerto Rico,  Haiti, Costa Rica---and the agency hardly had any Spanish speaking staff at that time.  They did have staff who spoke some Spanish, maybe one or two, but almost no one who came from the cultural background of the people we were working with. It didn't seem an appropriate system to me.  I felt there was an elitist tone to the agency.  The attitude toward staff seemed to be:  how "we are the best, and you should really feel really lucky to be here."  Nonetheless, I got some very good training there, and and an important side benefit for me was the staff union, in which I was very active, became a shop steward and a member of the negotiating team.  In some ways, for my later career, that may have been the most important training I received.
+
+So after working there for a year as an intern, and then for two years after I got my degree , and I received some good training and supervision, I decided I needed to leave. I also felt it was time to leave New York. That was maybe helped by breaking up with somebody who I'd been in a relationship with and being a little heartbroken about that. My brother lived in Colorado. I called him up and asked whether he knew of any ranch in the area that would like somebody to work there for the summer.   That was really naive, I have to say. But it seemed like I needed a break from the professional path I had been on, and I didn't know whether I would ever go back to doing social work.
+
+I ended up living on a collective farm with whom he put me in contact. I stayed there  working for room and board over the summer, and I met Reggie there, my first wife, and Ethan, her then-two-year-old kid. I ended up living there for a year and half during which time I drove a school bus to bring in some extra money.   I guess I was part of the "hippie" culture of those I've never really accepted that term, but my son Mark has insisted, "No, you were a hippie, Dad, just accept it." And then, after a year of being a school bus driver and a wannabe farmer, I was ready to do something else. I moved away from the farm after a year and a half. Reggie and I moved into a house in Boulder, right next to my brother's house. The two houses became the Juniper Street Collective---the place Mark and Ethan grew up in.  I got a job in a program at the Mental Health Center in Boulder called Our House, which was a drop-in center for teenagers. Interesting---there's still a Facebook group of kids who hung out at Our House all these years later that I'm part of.   Many of them are grandparents now.
+
+I also worked on the adolescent team of the Mental Health Center as a therapist, as did Reggie. But my main identification there was with Our House, which was a kind of sixties sort of place that had some really interesting things going on, but some really poor boundaries too.
+
+Then I was asked to run a methadone clinic, which I did for about a year and a half or two years, acting part of the time as head of the overall substance abuse program of the MHC (which included the Methadone Clinic, Our House, and several other program). This was part of a program funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse money.  This funding base was a problem for the Our House program because those kids weren't coming in to be treated for drug abuse, although some of them did have substance abuse problems.  They were there to hang out in a supportive environment with friends, engage in a variety of structured and unstructured group activities, and receive various kind of counseling as  and if they were ready for it. Working in the methadone clinic was  a real learning experience for me. I was way too young and inexperienced to be the director of the program or even a substance abuse counselor, as most of us were in that program, but we did okay, I think. There were some really intense things about that job in terms of the trauma people were dealing with and the conflicts they faced and staff had to deal with.
+
+After about 3 1/2 years in that job I was ready to be done with it. I didn't know what I wanted to do next. I had this ambivalent relationship to therapy and social work. I felt like I had something to offer, but it didn't feel quite like home in a way. So when Reggie finished getting her MSW in Denver,  we both quit the MHC and traveled for about four months.  We took a four-month trip through Canada and the US. Then Ethan went back and stayed with his dad, while Reggie and I went  to South America.
+
+When I came back, what was I going to do? I didn't really know, and my father was quite ill then. I spent some time with him in Cleveland. This would have been 1977, and then he died in December. Then I started looking for jobs. You can figure out the psychodynamics of this if you want---it kind of hits you over the head. I ended up getting a job as a team leader at a residential treatment center in Broomfield, Colorado, which in those days was called Wallace Village. Then I was appointed as the program director, which was like the clinical director.
+
+But then once again my ambivalence about what I was going to do arose. I ended up having not the best relationship with the director, who was a behaviorist---and even though I wasn't a Freudian, I also wasn't a Skinnerian.
+
+At the same time, I was involved organizing  demonstrations being organized at Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons facility. There I met Chris Moore, who eventually moved to Boulder, but was then living in Philadelphia.   I met him doing nonviolence training in connection with the protests and sit-ins at Rocky Flats. He and I ended up doing a lot of training in peacekeeping and nonviolent civil disobedience.  Anybody who was planning on joining the sit-ins at Rocky Flats had to go through a training that we conducted. When Chris went back to Philadelphia, I continued to  e part of the team of trainers we had recruited. Later on, Chris moved to Boulder and for a while lived in the Juniper Street Collective. My meeting with Chris was critical to my future work a mediator and conflict intervention/
+
+Chris had  become  interested in mediation, and with his encouragement so did I. When I left Wallace Village (by mutual agreement---although I think there was no way I could have stayed there any longer)---I worked part-time at a really interesting residential program called Forest Heights Lodge in Evergreen Colorado, about an hour's drive from Boulder. I also started a small private practice as a therapist and was getting training in mediation (mostly through starting to act as a mediator, but also as a mediation trainer myself). Chris and I had been offering conflict training to activists but also in a number of other settings--, for example prisons and social agencies, and Chris asked me to help him do some training for people interested in mediation.
+
+*So your first exposure to conflict and mediation was more out of the social movement experience than the therapeutic experience?*
+
+Absolutely. But there was also a movement building in mediation, and four of us ended up as partners at a place called the Center for Dispute Resolution in Denver, which became CDR Associates in Boulder, which still exists, with offices above the Spruce Cafe in North Boulder, on Yellow Pine and Broadway. That was my formal entry into doing it as work. We were trying all sorts of ways of making money, but then we got a grant from the Hewlett Foundation that allowed four of us---Chris, Susan Wildau, Mary Margaret Golten and me---to  make our work CDR a paying job.
+
+By then I was also doing a doctoral program at the DU school of social work, and I used that as a vehicle for studying conflict. I was studying conflict theory and conflict intervention. I was also doing a little bit of therapy on the side when a lawyer who I knew approached me to ask for my help. She represented a parent who was undergoing a termination of parental rights process because there had been serious abuse and neglect in the home. She needed an expert witness to testify for her client and asked if I would be that expert witness. I said, "No, I won't do that. But how about if I mediate?"
+
+That just came out of the top of my brain, and she said, "What?" which was pretty much my own reaction to what I had just said. I suggested an attempt to mediate a voluntary relinquishment agreement between the birth parent, the foster-adopt parents, and the child protection services agency. It turns out that was a very innovative approach. So Mary Margaret and I acted as co-mediators and the parties worked out an agreement averting a formal trial and allowing the foster parents to adopt the child in question.   After that I was   referred a number of other child welfare  cases. Mary Margaret and I then started a two year long child protection mediation project, which became the basis of my doctoral dissertation. This effort turned out to a significant foundation for a whole new area of mediation services---child welfare mediation is now happening throughout the US and Canada (and elsewhere). We were one of the first two places to try it, and developed an important partnership with child welfare services in Boulder and Denver's (including lawyers who represented agencies, children, and parents).  
+
+In this and in many other ways CDR took off--growing from literally a church basement operation to a well funded and recognized conflict training and intervention service.  In order to survive in our early years, we basically had to take all comers because we needed the money, which meant we were doing a lot of work that we weren't specifically trained for. But neither was anybody else. 
+
+*Who were these clients?*
+
+We worked in many different conflict arenas.  We had a family mediation program. We did work for government agencies, teaching them conflict resolution for public processes, and we did some fairly large-scale conflict interventions. I did a bunch of organizational work---labor management, but also on conflicts within organizations. I still do that occasionaly. And we also ended up training internationally and helping set up conflict services in quite a few other countries. So things just grew that way over the years. Even though the Center for Dispute Resolution existed before the partnership formed, we really built it from a church basement bare bones operation, doing mostly landlord-tenant or neighborhood mediation. We did community mediation too and facilitated dialogues on public policy issues. For example, one of the more recent ones I did in Boulder under CDR's auspices was about the location of the homeless shelter in North Boulder.
+
+*Yeah, that was a big deal.*
+
+Still is.
+
+CDR was starting to do a lot more work that required traveling---for example, over the years I did a lot of work in Eastern Europe, and then I also did a lot of work in Australia and New Zealand and Alaska. But when Mark was born in 1984, I started trying to develop local work with city government, state government, and county government. 
+
+So that's my journey. Fast forward from 1978--79 to 2002, when my first marriage ended. I got remarried to Julie and moved to Canada. I still was doing work for CDR, but by 2006 or so, I started thinking I'm far away from there. CDR was going in some directions that weren't my favorite---I used to joke (although there is truth in this) that when I couldn't stand the words "billable hours" anymore, I realized that I needed to move in a different direction.  
+
+So then I thought, well, maybe I could go out on my own part-time, but maybe it might also be time for me to have an academic home.  In 2006, I got a nice offer from Creighton University, which had a grant to start a conflict program there--the Werner Institute. The guy who was the founding director asked me whether I would you be interested in doing some work with them.  I said, "Sure!" And he asked whether I would consider being a faculty member.  I said, "Well, I'm not moving to Omaha." So we worked out a deal where I worked half-time as a non-tenured full professor. I'd already written a couple of books by that point---I believe that's why they wanted me.
+
+They would fly me in a couple times each semester for ten days or so, and I'd do some online work with students in between. They provided accommodation and transportation as well. It was a very nice deal which worked well for all of us.  I did that for fourteen years, and then I retired from it because that program was going through changes. I was seventy-four years old by then.
+
+*As you were getting started in Boulder and developing this practice, clients were coming in with challenges that you were never trained to deal with---nobody was. How did you start building up a practice, building up tools and strategies? How did you begin to learn how to mediate conflicts?*
+
+I did eventually take some courses and go through some seminars, so I got some training, but a lot of it we were creating ourselves. It was a very creative period of time. And it wasn't just us---this was happening in the conflict field more broadly. The field had a lot of very interesting creative people, like John Paul Lederach. I went to a course he taught, and he went to a course I taught.
+
+People were making efforts all to build the peace and conflict studies field in many places. The Harvard Negotiation Project was starting. There was some funding for  community mediation centers that we were one of, but these programs took many different forms. There was the deliberative democracy movement, Partners for Democratic Change, Search for Common Ground, Accord, Resolve, the San Francisco Community Boards, and many other growing and innovative groups/  So we weren't alone in doing this. We were part of a growing literature and organizational base. There was also the National Conference for Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution, which was part of the peacemaking field that was growing too. It came out of a slightly different tradition, but we interacted a lot. The peacemaking field to a large extent  came from the Quaker and Mennonite tradition. Actually, the Mennonites played a role in our formation---when we were still a church basement office in Denver, it was in the Mennonite church, and their volunteer was our first office worker.
+
+Arbitration was also growing at that time, and there was a whole labor management side of this too. There was an organization called SPIDR---Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution---and there was also\\ the Academy of Family Mediators with which I was also very involved.
+
+A lot of creative stuff came out of what we did. If you're familiar with Chris Argyris or Donald Schön's work on reflective practice, that's kind of how we did it. We had approaches we taught, and then our actual practice (our "espoused theory" and our "theory in practice"). For me, it was a very creative process to see the tension between what I was doing and what I was teaching.  
+
+The kind of bible in the field of negotiation in those years---to some extent it still is---was a book called *Getting to Yes*. It talked about positional and interest-based negotiation, this idea that the way you resolve disputes is to get people to talk about the interests underneath their positions. There were two co-authors from the Harvard Negotiation Project: Roger Fisher and Bill Ury. Roger Fisher's been dead for many years, but Bill Ury still lives in Boulder. He's a wonderful guy. He's written quite a few books. He's a wonderful writer, one of these writers whose storytelling does the heavy lifting of presenting his ideas, and his book has been a major bestseller.  But I came to believe it was overly simplistic and prescriptive.  Position and interests are not that different in essence--it's more about how they are presented and how far we did into the reasoning and motivational basis of people in conflict.
+
+I also remember how we taught active or reflective listening n our earlier years, and I always felt there was a lot of bullshit about that. No natural conversation really is that formulaic.  These discrepancies between what we taught and how I at least really worked were at the basis of a lot of growth for me much of which ended up in books that I wrote and in the way I taught as well. 
+
+That was a way in which my own thinking developed. It was partly in response to what others were saying, and partly in response to what I had been saying that I didn't quite believe anymore. My favorite bumper sticker  says, "Don't believe everything you think." I was noticing either my practice wasn't following what I preached, or my preaching wasn't following what I practiced, and in that tension was a great deal of creative space.
+
+*Are there particular tools or patterns of conflict or techniques that you keep coming back to and keep finding truth in?*
+
+Yeah, but they tend to not be things you do as much as ways of thinking. People always want you to teach how you do it---"I want something practical. Give me something practical." That is all well in good, theory and practice need to inform each other, but real growth comes in the maturation of our understanding of what we are dealing with in conflict and how can intervene in it in a productive way.
+
+There are two things that I've really come back to over and over again. First, we do not really succeed in conflict by being neutral. In fact, the concept of neutrality is a very flawed one. That's why I wrote a book *Beyond Neutrality*, and another book, co-authored with Jackie Font-Guzmán, called *The Neutrality Trap*. Mediators often market themselves as neutral---"we're neutral, we're impartial, we're just here to help you." But we have an awful lot of values and life experiences that inform our work, and in most circumstances people want us to be authentic and transparent about that. One of the things I did not like about psychoanalysis, for example, is the expectation that we  not put our own personality into the process.
+
+People want that personality. What people don't want is for us to manipulate them. If we say we're going to help them work out stuff, they don't want us to power them into something they don't want. But they also don't want us just to sit by in the name of neutrality while people get run over.
+
+I have learned over the years that my great ideas, when I'm in a third-party role, for how to solve a conflict are usually not such great ideas---you really have to trust people that they know what's best, and it needs to come from them. Not that I never have ideas, but I'm not the type of mediator who listens to everyone, gets opening statements, and puts people in separate rooms, which is how a lot of corporate mediation goes. You beat this person up a little bit, you beat that person up, you come up with something---no. I really believe people need to be brought together as much as possible and our job is to help do the hard work in conflict that they need to do. But that doesn't mean I'm passive.
+
+The second thing is that we have to help people raise the level of conflict. If we just see ourselves as calming things down, helping people come up with some resolution, and avoid intensifying a conflict we are often papering over really important issues and contributing to often unjust or unstable status quo.  While there are often times when what people want is to calm down a conflict and paper over the deeper issues,---a lot of times that's what people want and need, but a lot of times it isn't. Particularly in very serious conflicts, people need help in raising the more difficult issues, and they need help in saying what they are thinking and feeling in a way that is authentic but  doesn't shut everything down. As conflict interveners, have to be aware of our own conflict-avoidant tendencies and so that we don't actually stand in the way of getting to the level of depth where the conflict actually "lives."
+
+In fact, I think of our field as a field of conflict *engagement* specialists. One of the things I used to ask students is, before you ever know anything about a case, what do you see your purpose as being in a conflict? People can have all sorts of different answers. My answer was: I'm here to try to help people have the conversation they need to have.
+
+*Right. You wrote about "staying with conflict."*
+
+That's right. I also wrote a book called *The Conflict Paradox*, which is in some ways I think my most interesting way of looking at things---though it's probably the least selling of my books. A lot of what we're doing in conflict is helping people get past where they see things as in opposition to each other, and instead see them in a more dialectical way, as part of the same whole, like competition-cooperation, or logic-emotions, that sort of thing.
+
+*I appreciate the way you talked about your interventions as being primarily about a way of thinking as opposed to, say, a system or a procedure or an algorithm. How do you impart to clients that way of thinking? How do you prepare them for entering into and maybe escalating a conflict in the way they need to? How do you take them from where they're first coming to you to a point where they're ready to engage in a more productive approach to conflict?*
+
+There isn't a single answer because, for one thing, some clients aren't ever going to be ready. And I don't see myself exactly in a kind of didactic relationship with clients. But I think if I listen, if I'm there to listen for what's really important to them---and in the interactional space---it's going to come out. And the question is, do I shut it down or move it forward?
+
+Sometimes you have to say, "What do you need right now in this situation? Not necessarily from me, but just what do you need? Do you feel you need to be heard better? Do you feel you need to understand better? Do you feel you need to be empowered in some way? Do you feel you need other people participating in this? Do you feel you need an advocate?"
+
+One of the ways we can help people is to get beyond their belief that we are  here to fix things is to take on other roles than third-party ones.  For example, some of the most useful work we can do in many circumstances is as  an advocate role or a coach. That's something I've talked about: the three kinds of roles we often play are system roles, third-party roles, or ally roles. Sometimes the best way you can help people is to be an ally. I remember Bill Ury saying he thinks that's true for some of the most important the work he's done in the international arena.
+
+Even as an ally, you have to remain true to yourself. Once I was working with a university as they were dealing with some pretty intense student protests. I said, "I'm not here to help you put down student protests. You know my background. But I can talk to you about how you can interact with them." That got me into dealing with facilitating---co-facilitating, really---interaction between Jewish and Muslim, and also Palestinian students on campus (this was about 25 years ago).
+
+I don't do a lot of formal mediation anymore. I live in this little town. I find myself getting into it sometimes, but I do a lot of consultations still, often in that ally role.
+
+*How much do you see patterns playing out across conflicts that repeat themselves in conflict after conflict, as opposed to having to approach each one as a really distinct challenge with very distinct sets of strategies? How much about conflict, as you experience it, repeats itself as opposed to needing to be treated as always new?*
+
+That's a very important thing to look at---the patterns of interaction, both between the parties and between you and the parties. I used to say, if I've tried something twice, and it hasn't worked, I better try something else. Even just asking the same question---I remember one time in a video somebody took of me during a demonstration, I could see myself not letting this go. I kept saying, "What do you think the other person's trying to tell you right now?" And this person kept projecting all these evil things onto the other person. I kept wanting to sah, "Bernie, will you give it up?" It was a real learning.
+
+From case to case, there's always the question of whether people can listen, and whether, when people aren't feeling heard, instead of listening, they speak louder. I started realizing that, more often than not, if you want to be heard, what you have to do is listen better. And if you want someone else to be a little more straight with you, you have to be more revealing yourself. I'm not proposing that as a rule always, but it is something you see happening over and over again---that particular kind of communication pattern.
+
+Another thing to look at over and over is what I learned in therapeutic workshops: looking at rhythms of interaction. So we've established a rhythm of interaction---you ask your question, I go on for ten minutes, then you ask another question.
+
+Is one person doing all the talking? Does somebody get halfway through a sentence and the other person breaks them off? Is it like my Jewish family's conversation at a table, where nobody ever finished a sentence?
+
+Those are patterns of interaction. Another pattern is the rhythm of emotionality. Something you also see over and over again is how quickly people rush to solutions. Sometimes that's fine---sometimes people rush to very good solutions very quickly when you think you really need to have a much longer process, and you don't.
+
+I always remember an organizational mediation where there was a dysfunctional team of people, but the real problems were between the supervisor and one of the key staff members who had a lot of power in the team. They were really going at it, so we set a day aside for a retreat. They kept arguing about how they said good morning to each other.
+
+One said, "I say good morning, and you never respond to me. You never even lift up your head." And the other person said, "Yeah, but that's because if I say good morning, you're going to feel you've communicated with me enough, and you go in your office, and I don't see you all day."
+
+They went back and forth, and I said, "Okay, this is not what this conflict is about. We're not here to spend the day talking about how you say good morning to each other. What's really going on?"
+
+When it came out---I remember it was very sensitive---but the very hard-nosed, hard-to-work-with person said, "It all started a while back when I had a seizure at work." And I thought, *Oh my God! She's prepared to be vulnerable here.* The supervisor had discovered her having a seizure, had dealt with it immediately in the break room I think, and called 911, and she got taken away, and they stabilized her, and it never happened again.
+
+The supervisor had this narrative of "I was a hero. I rescued her." Her story, though, was, "I came back, and everybody knew about it." And the supervisor said, "Oh wow. I was really shaken. I guess I told some people because I needed to process it, and I am really, really sorry." The person looked at her and said, "Apology accepted."
+
+I didn't do much other than to say, "What the hell is this really about?" And it only could have gone that well because they really were ready for something to change. But it does show, I think, the importance of sometimes saying, "I don't buy it. I don't buy the stories you tell." One of the things you do is listen to every person's narrative. In conflict, they don't seem to overlap. What you're trying to do is expand each person's story enough---the Venn diagram, if you will, of the story---to overlap, and then begin to have a different kind of conversation. Those are some patterns, I guess.
+
+*One thing that stuck with me earlier is what you said about  the systems that expect people to speak in particular kinds of ways, and how you want people to speak in their own way. That resonated with an experience I had with trying Nonviolent Communication in a relationship, and I found myself just policing the other person's speech the whole time, and it made everything worse. I'm curious how you are able to push people into a different way of hearing or speaking, while at the same time ensuring the process is really theirs---it's not pushing them into an artificial box.*
+
+Yeah, as my kids have said from time to time, "Don't do that social work shit with me" or "that mediator shit with me." And I would feel that too. That's a problem. I think Nonviolent Communication has a lot going for it, and I think active listening has a lot going for it, but it's prescriptive.
+
+In fact, for every person we interact with, we negotiate a communication pattern in a subliminal way, and there's power in that negotiation. You have to be aware of your own power, or you could very well bully people into doing something. That's another thing you always have to look at---power dynamics.
+
+I don't ever think you should push people or pull people, unless you're really going to power over them and they're okay with that, and if their natural communication isn't so far away from your style. There are significant gender issues here, and there are significant cultural issues here. I spent a lot of my life having to work across different cultural lines. You can do it---I don't think you can ever work cross-cultural conflict with sort of the perfect match of the two cultures. You have to be aware of your own power.
+
+One approach is to give people the communication problem to solve. You can't solve the problem yourself---it has to be a joint effort. And if it's a three-person thing, it has to be a joint thing. In most circumstances you can start out by being a good listener, but not always. Sometimes people have to say, "You've got to make yourself vulnerable. I've got to understand who you are better before I'm willing to engage."
+
+Let me tell you another story. I did some work once, Mary Margaret and I, with a large Native American group and a large Fortune 500 company. It's written up in some book or other. The company had a big energy-producing facility on the reservation, and they had a lot of conflicts around it. We got called in because of questions about who got to control the complaints around workplace stuff---was it the state or was it the tribe? There were a lot of sub-conflicts.
+
+We got called in to work with them, and it was very interesting because you had these suits from the Fortune 500 company and these very sophisticated negotiators from the tribe. We started out with a smudge ceremony and prayers, and you could sort of see that the suits were really used to having to do this, but they were eye-rolling---there was a lot of eye-rolling going on, even if their eyes didn't really roll. The tribe negotiators were very identity-based, value-based in their approach---what gives meaning to them, their dignity, and the dignity of their culture. And the language of the suits was all business-like: "Well, how are we going to work this out so we can each have predictability in our relationship? We can know how to plan." Whenever they spoke like that, the Native American group felt disrespected, and the people from the company, who were good people, were saying, "Yeah, yeah, we're trying to do all of that respectful stuff. We've got to talk about business, though."
+
+I basically looked at them and said, "All right, here's what I think is going on," and I just described to them what I described to you. I said, "Is that right?" And I said, "I'm not here to tell you what to do about it, but I think that's what's going on. What do you think we should do about it?" And I did it with enough humor that they could laugh a bit about it.
+
+*You helped them develop a shared meta-story about what was going on between them.*
+
+That's exactly it. And it worked. I'm sure to this day it still is a striggpe, because I think it's a long-term relationship--- and they're probably completely different players, but the structure is still there. They probably still struggle with that.
+
+*Have you had experiences where ideas or practices that you've developed have been used in a way that you were not comfortable with?*
+
+I have, of course, seen people who I've taught or tried to mentor---I don't like sometimes how they're quoting me. But I used to say that the thing that really scares me as a supervisor or mentor is somebody who will do exactly what I tell them to, because that's not them, that's me. "What would Bernie do?" No, no, no! What would you do if you were really being your best self?
+
+*Do you see lessons from your experience that you just wish you could share more widely, particularly as political conflicts intensify in the United States?*
+
+I don't feel there's equal validity right now to all sides. I don't think that's the answer. I think that's a very liberal answer, actually---"you just have to listen better." And we're seeing that in the response to this election, which is, "Well, the Democrats just need to really listen." We heard that when Trump was elected in 2016. We're hearing some of that now, but it takes a little bit more of the flavor of "let's listen to the working class."
+
+I do think the Democrats have abandoned the working class. But if you go up to a bunch of working-class people and say, "We just want to listen to you better," then you're being another elitist, white liberal. I think oftentimes the mistake we make in response to this is to think, "What can the Democrats do better?" In the face of really hard reactionary movements in the past---McCarthyism, or just racist movements all over---changes occurred not through parties but through building movements. I think that the most important question for me right now is, how can I help with that?
+
+*Is it because movements sometimes take us deeper into conflict, because they escalate conflict?*
+
+I have to think about whether I'd say it like that. I mean, I think that's more a tactic that movements have to decide. The subtitle of my last book, *The Neutrality Trap* with Jackie, is *Disrupting and Connecting for Social Change*. And I think that's more how I think about it now. Change happens---you have to disrupt the systems that need disrupting, but you also have to make connections. And the strategic question is, how do you do both? Or how do you do it in an effective way?
+
+If you look at movements that have been successful like the civil rights movement, there was very calculated disruption that raised conflict. But there were also efforts to build coalitions and reach out to people who were ready to be reached out to.
+
+If you look at the movements I've been part of in my life that have been somewhat successful,  party politics was in the background. You voted---you voted for the people you thought would most move your agenda forward, but you didn't put all your energy there, and you didn't put all your analysis there. So the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, the peace movement, the working people's movements---all put their energy into supporting candidates, but that was not  their central focus. And I think that's a lesson I feel for this time.
+
+I mean, I hope the Democrats do think about what they've done to lose their base so badly---although you can argue how badly it really is. And I hope they listen, and I hope that we work very hard to press ahead. But I think the one thing Trump really got right was that it's a systems problem, and that people don't feel the system's working. He got that, and he said it over and over again in different ways, and he's trying to disrupt the system now. He's doing it in a totally chaotic, counterproductive way, I think. But he got the problem right.
+
+I mean, you can say, "Oh, look! Our economy is better than others in the world, look at employment." But people your age and younger have a hard time buying a house. The living standards of your generation are lower than my generation's was---first time that's happened in a long time. Something's not working. And we're not solving climate change. And we're not solving income disparity. Systems change means disrupting and connecting and building movements, and seizing opportunities and learning lessons, and licking your wounds when you have to.
+
+*Is there anything else you'd like to share before we finish? I mean, I think that's actually a good, full-circle way to end---we started with social movements and end with them.*
+
+The only thing I feel like when I talk like this---it sounds like I've got it all figured out, and I sure as hell don't. I'm sharing with you how I try to think about things now. It's way beyond me in terms of how we're gonna get out of the mess we're in. One of the chapters in one of my books is called "Optimism and Realism." And I think genuine optimism or even hopefulness doesn't work if you don't have any realistic basis for it. And we're facing that crisis right now.
+
+If you don't maintain some optimism or hope for change, then you may as well just pack it in, and I refuse to do that. That's a lesson I've also learned in my personal life---my wife has struggled with cancer for fifteen years. So I guess I feel like this, too, shall pass.
+
+I don't know how. I want to stay hopeful for change, and do my very best to do whatever I can to be a good player in that from where I sit now. But it has to be tempered by realism, by just how hard it is and how bad a situation we're in right now.

content/interviews/osorio_ayurvedic-medicine.md

@@ -0,0 +1,148 @@
+---
+narrator: "Edson Osorio"
+subject: "Ayurvedic medicine"
+facilitator: "Júlia Martins Rodrigues"
+date: 2025-03-11
+approved: 2025-03-26 
+summary: "Educating thousands of Brazilians online on Ayurvedic teachings through social media, Edson Osorio has embraced the mission of emancipating people's healing journeys through accessible information."
+location: "São Paulo, Brazil"
+topics: [health, food, social media]
+headshot: "edson_osorio.png"
+links:
+  - text: "Instagram"
+    url: "https://www.instagram.com/edson_ayurveda/"
+  - text: "YouTube"
+    url: "https://www.youtube.com/@portalayurveda"
+---
+
+*Thank you, Edson, for participating in our project about protocols. First, I'd like you to tell us about your life story and career, how you like to present yourself, and how you would describe your life and career trajectory. Where did you start, and where are you now?*
+
+I believe there's a norm in society where you need to earn money, be in a relationship, and have a job. I was on that path. I was a stock market operator, but I had other professions before. I was young, around twenty-two, twenty-three years old, and I was irritated with the fact that I had to undergo a treatment for attention deficit disorder that would last my entire life.
+
+The search for health was something natural to me. My psychiatrist told me I would have to treat my disorder for my entire life. In my irritation, believing I wasn't a sick individual, that I must just have some imbalance, I found Ayurvedic Medicine.
+
+I think all people have a norm to follow, and encountering yourself is the challenge to that norm. I'm just a person who challenged it and was lucky enough to find something very good. I believe Ayurveda is an excellent structure for physiological life, mental life, for understanding emotional life, and for those who aspire to understand spiritual life.
+
+When I was young, I had a certain desire to know about the mysteries of the world. I thought about studying physics, history, astronomy. I think I found myself and all the proposals I wanted in Ayurveda, following this path that has now made me a teacher of a super cool subject.
+
+*So you present yourself as a teacher?*
+
+Yes, yes. Today I'm an Ayurveda teacher. I started as a masseur, an Ayurvedic medical therapist, until I organically found myself as a teacher. Because, in wanting not to see a person two or three times, but just once, I had this idea: "I need to teach enough so you don't depend on me anymore." I found this solution. The end product is to teach the person, not to pass on a magic formula, but to teach them. So I became a teacher out of necessity.
+
+*And what are your channels for transmitting these teachings today?*
+
+Today, I work a lot on Instagram, a lot on YouTube, and I do online and in-person consultations. Ayurveda has a thought structure that's easy to understand. I usually say that children should learn this because knowing that your friend's body can't handle raw food, another can't handle spicy food, and another can't handle heavy food—these are simple ideas that a child can learn about others. But we're not learning this.
+
+*You've also become the architect of a very large network.*
+
+It's something that caught me by surprise because I teach people to think according to Ayurveda. My desire to teach someone and my angry nature when things go wrong—some people get scared, some get anxious, I get angry when things go wrong—that anger, the need to do things right, gave me a certain teaching technique.
+
+Everyone should learn a little of this. People talk about the term "sangha"—a group of people in favor of the same knowledge, the same action. This formed organically. So I was transforming into a person who insistently heard people saying, "You teach Ayurveda in a unique way." I must teach Ayurveda in a unique way, but not because it was taught to me in a unique way. I think Ayurveda is a way for you to experience the world knowing what you're looking at.
+
+When you feel the difference in the air—our air is clearer, the air is colder, warmer, more humid, drier—you know this effect defines the four seasons of the year and their effects according to the characteristics of the physical body, according to the characteristics of each person. So you create a system that's everyday. Imagine, like what I used to do when I was a stock operator. Every day I had to watch the market opening, all day, and the market closing. But when the market opens, you look at the dollar exchange rate, you look at the future index, and then you create an idea of what will happen. You do this every day.
+
+So with Ayurveda, I do the same thing. I look every day, see how my tongue is, how the color of my lip is, what the property of my waste is. Did my waste get very soft or very hard, or did I have no waste at all? And then I analyze my hunger. And I kind of give myself a grade every day. This is for everyone because it's our body, our mind. It's an incredible thing to know. I'm turning forty in less than a month, and I feel more vitality than all the other years, all the other periods of my life. The longer I practice Ayurveda, the better my memory gets, and the more stable and balanced I become. My body is in a better version of myself.
+
+*And today, this community that formed organically mobilizes how many people?*
+
+I have fifty-five thousand followers on Instagram today. I have 1,700 students who have enrolled in paid courses, throughout Brazil and around the world. And on YouTube, where we have a more fixed crowd, I have twelve thousand people who follow me, but I have a metric that's roughly like this: when I offer a class, within a week, 1,200 people watch that class. So it takes more work, you have to click on the link, it's a class that's like an hour and a half on YouTube. But people stay for at least forty minutes. Seventy percent of the audience watches at least forty minutes. It's a very good metric. You see that people are really interested in the subject. They want to learn it for their lives. They want to help others with it.
+
+So I don't give a magic pill, for example. What I mean is that there are different teacher profiles. I'm a teacher who has a certain profile, and I've been attracting people who have the same scope of thinking. They want freedom of thought. And they attached themselves to me because I give them freedom of thought.
+
+*And a large part of your work, despite having private patients and private classes, much of what is transmitted is done for free and widely, without any monetization. Why do this?*
+
+Let me give you two answers. My first response: I remember when I was thirteen, a lady came to our house, Dona Ivone. As far as I knew, she had seven children, and of the seven children, five were disabled. And she asked my mother for money. And I had asked for money to go to the movies. And my mother didn't give me money to go to the movies, but she gave Dona Ivone a hundred and fifty *reais* \[Brazilian currency\].
+
+I was furious that day. I said, "My God, how can you give money to a person and not to your son?" I grew older and felt like an idiot later, right? And I said, "How beautiful, you have to learn to give without wanting much in return." So I think this runs a bit in my family. We are privileged. We're here on the internet. You're in one part of the world, I'm in another. So we have a great privilege. We need to pay the world back.
+
+I felt this. But today I also believe that I will really die and be born again. So the better I can leave the world... I also wanted to teach Ayurveda in English so I could see my videos being viewed in another country, so I could still see my videos a hundred, two hundred years from now, in another language. So that's my first answer.
+
+The second thing is that, in practice, people unfortunately hold onto knowledge too much. My teachers held onto knowledge. I don't like to cite them much because all my teachers disappointed me. So, for many years, I “set off fireworks” for my teachers. I even wrote love letters to my teacher, to my master. And over time, these people closed their doors to me.
+
+When I started with Ayurveda, I said, "Well, I came from the stock market field, but before that, I was a Brazilian champion of a strategy game. I've always been a good strategist. I said, 'Look, I just need to do this. I need to do this well. I will provide knowledge, that knowledge that doesn't have that high price, that is important for the person's formation.'" But there's a thing between what's important for the person and what they think is important.
+
+If I release a video for weight loss, I'll have more views than all the other videos I've made. But that video won't give freedom to the person. I need to teach them that they are a spirit. We are all a spirit. This spirit has a will. This will is what is making this person read the transcript of this interview or see this live. It's the will to do good. If you don't have the will to do good to others, it's because you're not well yet. When you get well, the will to do good is natural in all people. The more I did good to people, the more I wanted to do good.
+
+When I started teaching Ayurveda in face-to-face courses, I was already giving consultations for some time. I got a little tired of saying the same thing several times to my patient. I said, "Well, I'm going to create an internet channel and I'm going to publicize this. And I'm going to give access to knowledge that I didn't have, to knowledge that they didn't give me, to knowledge that I only found after reading five books."
+
+But everything is Ayurveda. Ayurveda has a base with logical science. People know, in a way, from popular knowledge that the greatest physicists in the world went through studies in India. The ancient books of Ayurveda define what an atom is, what time is, what a second is, where time comes from. A second is defined by the time it takes light to travel a number X of hydrogen atoms. It's a very beautiful reading. The base, the nectar of knowledge of the earth, seems to be there for you to structure your mind, your senses. And I was enchanted by that.
+
+*And in this process of translating this ancient knowledge of Ayurveda to the Brazilian context, mainly for a Brazilian audience, would you describe your process as protocol-based? What does protocol mean to you? What associations do you make with this word, and what was your motivation to develop or adopt a protocol in this sense?*
+
+I think protocol, the organization of what to do from beginning to end and why to do it this way, came organically. The first thing you find is a problem. You have a problem. You want to teach something that you can't. You taught, the person didn't learn? So you first start to see that you experience a problem. I experienced the problem of not knowing where to start, even though my teacher taught me. Starting with items one, two, and three, it was only about four years after my first training that I began to realize what I had studied. I studied, but I didn't learn. I needed to experience that for a few years. Put it to the test.
+
+And a very important thing that Ayurveda says is this: you can't trust what I told you. You'll have this as a guide. But all the time you'll doubt what I'm saying because the only real way for you to learn is to put it to the test. If you don't test it, it's something you talk about, but you don't understand because you haven't experienced it. So, from the moment I experienced and lived through a set of things, I discarded another set of things, I added and strengthened, and began to have my own stories of why it works, why it doesn't work. I stopped telling the stories of my teachers and started having my own experiences.
+
+And then, when I was getting into a repetitive cycle with my client, because I used to do Ayurvedic massage, over time I did consultations, they became my patients. When I was getting into a cycle where my patient always came back, always came back, I saw that the reason was because I was using a technique that didn't match what I had learned in Ayurveda.
+
+In Ayurveda, we learn that a person has to eat what is close to their life, that they have to do what is simple, what is not to invent a lot of fashion. And I was using a lot of manipulated herbs. I was doing a lot of things, focusing a lot on the problem. When I started to realize that I was wrong, even though the person came to me, I was wrong. I didn't want her to come back three, four times. I started to identify that if I didn't teach her, if she didn't look at herself and really know, it's not for me to drink hot water in the morning. It's to remove yesterday's toxins, however they may be. So you have to understand this body mechanics.
+
+*Why did you choose exactly the adoption of this protocol to transmit this knowledge?*
+
+I used to do this in a more mystical way before. You can just measure a person's pulse and tell everything about them. I like to do this because you can say, "You have hypothyroidism." People say, "Wow, I do." I'm not asking you, I'm measuring. I'm saying: "You have. You're constipated?" You say what the person has. It requires training, it requires time and such. But you see, the person hasn't learned. I haven't walked a path with them.
+
+The other way of teaching, which is “slapping the person in the face”? I think that's a lot of arrogance, because I'm going to tell you what you have instantly, all the products, all the solutions. But I didn't give you a path to walk. Your body will improve in three months, you will improve. But then what will you do afterward? You'll come back, and I'll see you again. And it was precisely this that I wanted to escape from.
+
+If I hadn't escaped from this, today I would have a fuller schedule. I would charge more for my consultation. I'd just be measuring pulses, just doing that. I would earn more money. I wouldn't be making free videos, then answering two hundred questions per video. But if I really believe it, I'm thirty-nine years old. If I really believe that I'm going to die, I'm going to be born again, one of the things I wanted to do was leave knowledge good enough because people talk about the Final Judgment in the Bible. Ayurveda says that there is a moment of disembodiment, a millisecond that you will experience your life. And you will say to yourself. And that's what the Ayahuasca folks call DMT, divine pinterview, that kind of thing. Ayurveda explains this in a very cool way.
+
+A few years ago, I got into the idea that I couldn't die because I hadn't recorded my diagnostic course yet. So I think you get the desire to communicate in a way... that's what happened in my life. I want to be well with myself. That's it. And I also became a person who had to learn the division between right and wrong in the sense of going beyond just being nice. So I can't just be the nice guy on the Live. I also have to be harsh sometimes. I also have to scold sometimes. And it's part of this path that I've adopted. I used to get angry when people called me master. Because all my masters disappointed me. Today, if you want to call me Master, call me, but I'm an Ayurveda teacher. I'm here to pass on what I've studied, as incomplete as it may be.
+
+*Do you perceive your work with protocols as a continuity of previous legacies and traditions, or as a rupture with them?*
+
+It's a rupture, for sure. I found myself thinking about this yesterday. In India, since we're talking about something mystical, there's a myth that if you go to learn Ayurveda with a cave voyager—which is what? A guy who lives in a cave and learned Ayurveda from his master, who lived in a cave, who learned Ayurveda from his master who lived in a cave—they've been doing this for seven to fifteen generations. If you go to learn Ayurveda with this guy, you'll learn more than all the others.
+
+And then there's the other crowd that says, "You have to do your life in college because you're going to learn the Ayurvedic thought structure with the classical texts, the way the ancient gurus who wrote the texts would like you to learn." There are these two strands. I didn't study in the cave. I don't know about classical texts. And I know Ayurveda a lot. So I found myself thinking yesterday, "Where do I fit in?" Because I studied the basics. Then I studied the basics again. Then I studied the basics again.
+
+So if you teach a person to write... I like to talk in numbers. Ayurveda is like doing math. I'm good at doing math. But before doing math, a person needs to learn the difference between zero and one, and one and two. If you take one plus one, it equals two. Add one more, it's three. You teach someone to count to ten. They need to understand what zero is. Then they'll understand addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Soon enough, they're doing calculations.
+
+So I learned to do calculations in Ayurveda. Sometimes I encounter traditionalists who say, "This guy doesn't even reference classical texts." I think, why focus on classical texts? Why keep doing calculations? I've already solved the most complex physics equations from college.
+
+I find it offensive when someone challenges knowledge that a person has acquired, regardless of whether they learned it in a cave, at university, or from an old man in the south who has since passed away and no one's heard of.
+
+If we study something divine, are we saying it's not available to me when I want it? Are we saying I can't achieve enlightenment if I desire it, pray for it, fast for it, and meditate on it? What if I've already done all that? What if I've meditated across many lives? What if I've meditated for many days while fasting, praying, applying the teachings, giving myself massages, receiving massages, and eating properly? If I've done this for many years, wouldn't I receive better downloads than someone who spent six years listening to eighteen different professors, then working at various clinics in different countries?
+
+This knowledge is available to everyone. It's not formatted at an inaccessible level like many undergraduate courses where you need to attend university to learn it. It's a simple thought structure. I believe what made me successful in this field was that nobody told me it was difficult.
+
+To be honest, my first teacher wasn't excellent, but he didn't intimidate me. He told me legends when he saw I was enthusiastic about everything in the first class. He said, "You're reacting positively to everything I say," and I said, "Yes, this is great\!" He responded, "It seems like you've seen this before." I agreed, and he said, "They say those who show this kind of learning pattern on the first day have studied Ayurveda for three lives. Perhaps you've come in this life to be a teacher."
+
+I said, "Yeah, right." Later, I would get rides home from my training course with an older man who was retired from the Federal Police. He was a practicing psychoanalyst with many stories. After three or four months of courses, he said, "You realize you're already very good at this, right?" I said, "No, Cláudio, I had no idea."
+
+About four years after my first training course in 2013, I went to Canada for a four-month extension course. I thought, "Now I'm going to learn Ayurveda." When I arrived in Canada, I discovered something incredible: in Brazil, Ayurveda isn't regulated, meaning you can teach anything without oversight. In Canada, it's regulated—you can't discuss diagnosis or nutrition.
+
+So when I arrived talking about diagnosis and nutrition, my teachers scolded me. Over those four months, I became friends with them and understood they were concerned about me doing something illegal, but they also appreciated that I knew more than they did and more than those who taught them. I met some Indian Ayurvedic doctors and worked as a consultation translator. I found their consultations trivial and outdated for the people receiving them.
+
+That's when I thought, "My God, I think I know this subject." I started taking patients from others because I challenged myself. I would say, "They did it wrong for you. Let me do it right." I was confrontational and took other practitioners' patients because I saw they were making mistakes.
+
+So there was both an aptitude and a great desire to solve my own problems and the world's problems. People have no idea who they are. There's a tarot card today that says, "A master is one who knows who he is and knows who you are—because you don't know who you are and don't know who the master is. The master knows who he is, knows who you are, and is there to tell you this." I think I adopted that posture.
+
+*Have you had any experiences of appropriation or improper use of your protocol?*
+
+No, I'm precisely the kind of teacher who says, "Take everything I'm doing and make it better." I like that. I'll give you a simple answer: all the great people in the world were examples. So I'm here to be an example. I'm not worried about people imitating what I'm doing. I want you to follow my example and challenge everything I teach. If a person doesn't challenge it, they're missing the point—they haven't learned anything.
+
+*Through all of this, what was the most important decision in building your protocol?*
+
+I think it was not having a problem challenging consensus. There's consensus that Ayurveda should be cited by classical text. There's consensus that it's somewhat complex and it's from India. People think, "Indians know so much about life\!"
+
+So I think bringing this knowledge in a simple way, demystifying it, made the difference. I remember a story about a Vedic astrologer who did a chart for a woman and told her that to succeed at work, she needed to feed a black cow by throwing corn from a bridge in the direction of the river flow. She had to be above the bridge so the corn would pass below for the cow to eat.
+
+This woman came to me with this story, and I thought, "Good heavens\!" The world is such a practical place. Let's drink a glass of hot water to remove yesterday's toxins. You're not getting a job because you lack vitality or you're too anxious in job interviews. So let's take some things to calm that anxiety, ground your thoughts, and not talk too much like I'm doing now in your interview.
+
+These are paths that people adopt. I think that's my difference. Today we have many practitioners, but there was no one when I started. So I had no problem saying, "This is all wrong. We're doing it wrong." I had no problem saying, "People are tripping." And I had no problem showing that I also trip sometimes. Like, I enjoy beer, I eat meat, I have an active social life on weekends.
+
+As a transmitter of liberating knowledge, I can't imprison myself in the idea of being a monk, because I'm not a monk and I'm not selling that image. So I think the big decision was not having a persona.
+
+I'm still ashamed of who I am. I think everyone has their problems. I'm ashamed of a mixture of many things. I don't even have an undergraduate degree, Julia. I'll soon graduate in Naturology, but I've studied a ton of things. I debate with healthcare professionals—I'll talk with an oncologist about cancer treatments, they'll question me, and then they'll say, "Well, what you're saying makes sense."
+
+So I needed to learn to challenge others, and I don't like that much. The big watershed moment is whether I accept my function in the world or not. I think that's it.
+
+*What lessons would you share with people who are beginning to build or maintain protocols?*
+
+If you weren't just starting, it wouldn't be difficult. There's no one to teach you what you're doing. I think that's it—no one is there to teach you. You have to discover it. You'll discover because you need to solve a problem. As ethereal as problem-solving may be, it exists. If a pipe is leaking, you fix the pipe. If it's not leaking, that's logical.
+
+Protocol is about solving problems in your area. So you have to believe in it because you won't see the pipe leaking, and you won't see that the pipe has been fixed. Often, it's only the result—sometimes years later—that will show you it really works that way.
+
+So I think developing these things is connected to an internal feeling of blessedness. It's like the old story—I was talking with a friend about diving from a springboard, climbing, diving into the sea, crossing. All these things are scary. People don't do them because they have no fear; they do them despite having fear.
+
+So you're afraid? You'll do it with fear anyway. Today, I'm no longer afraid to appear on a livestream talking about a subject I know well. But if you look at my video from fifteen years ago where I talk about Ayurvedic massage, I stutter and spit because I'm embarrassed to open my mouth.
+
+So everything comes from confronting challenges. You have to face obstacles to create something new. No dam holds water without causing some destruction in the environment. You have to challenge the environment.

content/interviews/prodromou-distributed_social_networks.md

@@ -0,0 +1,212 @@
+---
+narrator: Evan Prodromou
+subject: Distributed social networks
+facilitator: Nathan Schneider
+date: 2024-12-06
+approved: 2025-04-01
+summary: "A career-long journey to build online social networks that cannot be controlled by a single company, culminating with the ActivityPub standard."
+location: "Montreal, Canada"
+#headshot: "placeholder-headshot.png"
+links:
+  - text: Website
+    url: https://evanp.me/
+  - text: "ActivityPub: Programming the Social Web"
+    url: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/activitypub/9781098162733/
+topics: [decentralization, open source, organizations, social media, software, standards]
+---
+
+*How do you introduce yourself?*
+
+My name is Evan Prodromou, and I'm a software developer, entrepreneur, and architect from Montreal, Canada. I'm best known for my work on distributed social networks, and in other circles for wikis and AI. I have a lot of different hats.
+
+*Let's get to know some of those hats. How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career? Where did you start and where are you now?*
+
+I did well in school and ended up going to UC Berkeley as a physics student in the eighties. The University of California was an incredibly exciting time to be in physics---I had more Nobel laureates in my department than there were in all of the Soviet Union at the time. These were all the people who came out of the Manhattan project and were still producing great work from Lawrence Berkeley Labs and Lawrence Livermore Labs.
+
+One of my great opportunities was working as a research assistant for Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. A lot of my work as a young physics student was doing software development because these older generation professors had computer-driven experimental equipment but not a lot of programming skills. I did a lot of writing code in Fortran and C to control telescopes and various material sciences machines.
+
+When I got out of university, I started working in software development while I decided which graduate student program I would go to. It turned out that I really liked writing software and I really liked making money, and those were two things that I wasn't going to get to do as a PhD student. So I stayed in the software business.
+
+I worked at Microsoft for about three years and then moved on to a company called Securant, which did security software. They were bought by RSA. At that point, with a little money under my mattress, I decided I would start my own business and start working on my own projects instead of working on someone else's projects.
+
+I started a service called WikiTravel in 2003 with my wife. We were partners on that project---my wife is an information scientist who does data organization and taxonomy, so her input was really valuable on WikiTravel. It was like Wikipedia meets Lonely Planet, a worldwide travel guide built by travelers themselves sharing information with each other. By 2007 we had sold it to Internet Brands.
+
+I was looking for my next thing to do and wondering where my life was going to go when I was invited to an event in Boston at the Free Software Foundation, the older open source organization run by Richard Stallman. They invited me and a number of other people who had been involved in Creative Commons---WikiTravel was all Free Software, all Creative Commons content---and other people who had built big network services using open standards and open-source software. They asked us to come do a big workshop and think about what we were going to do about network standards.
+
+That was me, Aaron Swartz was there, Mike Links, Lewis Villa, and Benjamin Mako Hill. It was a really great group of people who were very enthusiastic about taking this movement around open source software, which had been about programming editors and compilers, and bringing it to network services that people use over the Internet. This was in 2007, so definitely ten years late, but still a very interesting set of people.
+
+We put together the Franklin Street Statement---Franklin Street is where the FSF headquarters were---about how people should use network services. Use open source software, use open data, use systems that you can set up yourself and can control on your own servers. Don't use stuff that you have to be dependent on. It was a really exciting time. I came out of the meeting thinking, "Boy, I can't wait to start a new service."
+
+This was 2008. Twitter had just launched at South by Southwest in 2007. They had been running in stealth mode among Web 2.0 digerati, and in March of 2007 they opened up to the public. I was there, and I tried it, and I was like, "Oh, I get this." About six months later, I started writing the software that would become StatusNet and started writing the code that would become Identi.ca.
+
+This was mid-2000s, and there was this open-source inevitabilism---this sense that if you've got a word processor, we're going to make an open-source word processor that's going to be as good or better, and we're going to wipe out your business. If you've got a server operating system, we're going to make an open-source server operating system. No matter what commercial corporate organizations could make, we would undercut the value by making an open-source alternative.
+
+*Some worked better than others.*
+
+Yes, exactly. So I was like, "Oh boy, I'm going to be the one that makes the open-source Twitter." I started building it and shared it with this group of people who had been at this Franklin Street meeting. They were excited about it. They were working on Identi.ca, they were sharing and having conversations there.
+
+Then we had a moment where people were starting to use the source code on their own servers, and they were like, "Well, now we're cut off from the conversation. We took the software, we're exercising this control that you say we should have, but if we move to our own servers, we're locked out."
+
+Within about a week, I wrote the first distributed social networking protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, and it was dead simple. You could follow someone and anything they posted would get posted into your timeline. I don't think it had replies, it didn't have likes, it didn't have any rich interaction, but it was enough to make someone remote into part of your network, and that felt like it would work well enough.
+
+There was a lot of excitement at the time in these social systems and in the software that I wrote because Twitter was having a lot of technical problems as it grew. There was real interest from the wider social networking community saying, "Hey, this open source software---anybody can install it, it can be distributed. Why are we trying to do all our work on this one server rather than using this distributed system?"
+
+I raised venture capital in this company. The original name of the software was Laconica---like *laconic*, meaning "short text"---but we changed it to StatusNet, and that's what it was known as for most of the time period. I raised venture capital, which was first time I had done that. That was very interesting.
+
+At the same time we were doing this, there was a lot of activity going on in other parts of what was loosely called the "open web stack." OAuth had started, based on work from teams at Flickr and Twitter. Then Google jumped in, and some of the bigger companies jumped in. That little circle of people became the Open Web Foundation, and they developed a few really interesting protocols.
+
+Brad Fitzpatrick, who had founded LiveJournal and then was at Google at the time, created this protocol called PubSubHubbub---worst name ever. But it built on the push process that I had done with OpenMicroBlogging. He made it scalable, at Google scale, and it really got picked up. There was a point at which all the Google blogs and WordPress blogs and Tumblr had this push mechanism built in.
+
+There was also the development of a data structure system based on RSS and Atom called ActivityStreams. It basically took the flat blog post structure of RSS, where it's a title and some text and maybe an image embedded, and they were like, "What if we added rich semantic meaning to this content?" So this item in this feed doesn't represent a blog post---it represents a like, or it represents a comment or reply. They built in this structure on top of Atom.
+
+It also became quite popular. Facebook had an ActivityStreams feed, WordPress had it, and I think Google had it in some of their systems. The Open Web Foundation that was putting out interesting systems. WebFinger came out at this time too---having an email address identifier that you could use for different services.
+
+StatusNet was doing well. We launched a SaaS service so you could sign up and get your own StatusNet system for like $5 a month---your own social network that would connect to all the other StatusNet social networks and Identi.ca. But we were running into some problems with OpenMicroBlogging barely working.
+
+StatusNet included me, Brooke Vibber (who had been CTO at Wikipedia and had joined StatusNet to help us build this system), James Walker (who had been one of the core Drupal developers), and Zack Copley (who had been at StatusNet since the beginning). We were lucky to have a lot of really great open-source software developers. We put together a standard called OStatus. It was basically taking PubSubHubbub, ActivityStreams, this other comment system called Salmon, and WebFinger, and putting the glue together to make them work together as a standard.
+
+When I say *standard* here---this is an interesting time period because there was a lot of "Hey, we made a protocol, we're sharing it with everyone, if you want to implement this, you can" without a lot of the overhead that was happening in bigger standards organizations. It was really refreshing but also turned out to be a problem for adoption because bigger corporations were like, "Hey, we have no idea who has any intellectual property in these projects, who's got patents, have you done a patent search?" It was just a bunch of engineers throwing things together.
+
+We had two ways that our software was used. One was in enterprises---Target, Motorola, Deutsche Bank, and a number of big companies had installed our software on their internal networks for their employees. We were doing pretty well in this area, but this other company Yammer had done way better. They had a really aggressive customer acquisition strategy and they basically cleaned our clocks. They were acquired by Microsoft, and that was it for my investors. They were like, "All right, you're done. We're not going to invest more in you for this enterprise social networking stuff because clearly you've been beat."
+
+Then, on the public side, around 2011 and 2012 is really when we saw the consolidation of social networks. I call it the big squeeze. There had been a lot of interesting social networks in the late 2000s---Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, and different regional ones in different countries. Gradually, with a huge amount of venture capital and a lot of work, the few big networks had pushed out these other ones. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn---they had done really good work, but they had pretty much taken over these markets.
+
+One thing that was interesting at this time was that the success of Facebook or Twitter in these early five or six years was partly due to the fact that they were open platforms. Facebook had launched Facebook Platform in 2007, which was their API system. You could actually build software that would run in the browser on the Facebook web page---put a little widget on someone's profile that was active and would do things like show a movie or something. It was a very open platform for developers.
+
+Similarly, Twitter's API was kind of a mistake---they used Ruby on Rails, which comes with an API built in, and they didn't turn that off. It became a huge success. People loved developing for it. They built alternative UIs, data scrapers, and all kinds of things using the APIs. That's one of the ways you can be successful in business---make a lot of other people successful. If you can make someone who built a Twitter API client dependent on that service, they're going to be advocates for your service. They're not really going to be open to other services---they're on the Twitter train.
+
+Because of that, we had a hard time talking to people about how there could be other platforms, how you could set up your own platform and still stay connected to others. As we were getting into the early 2010s, it was like, "Why would you have another social network? There is one social network: Facebook. Or there is one microblogging network: Twitter. What's the point of having multiple ones? Why would you connect multiple ones?"
+
+I think we kind of hit a high point in those early 2010s with Google Buzz. Google had hired a lot of the people I was talking about who were involved in the process building lightweight standards---Brad Fitzpatrick, Chris Messina, John Panzer, Joseph Smart. They had brought together a lot of people who had done interesting work in this area, and they wanted to put out the most open, open-standards, distributed system.
+
+The way Google Buzz worked was that you could pull all your different social network presences together and then rebroadcast them through open standards. They used the same stack that we did---they were using ActivityStreams and PubSubHubbub and Salmon. We thought it was awesome. Around 2011 or 2012, engineers at the Google I/O conference did demo a three-way interaction between Google Buzz, Cliqset, and StatusNet using OStatus. They had this whole conversation happen live on stage. It was this great moment, like "Wow, this is really taking off!"
+
+*I don't remember that---it's the dream we're still chasing, right?*
+
+But Google Buzz had a fatal flaw. The way that they kickstarted your social graph---the number of people that you're connected to---was using your Gmail contact list. Almost immediately there started being stories about people who were like, "Wait a minute, my abusive ex-boyfriend now has access to all my social networking stuff because I had his email address in my contact list." It was just a bad example of "Hey, we're going to use this data that we've collected for you as part of this one system to kickstart this other system."
+
+They got sued and had a multi-million-dollar settlement. It was really bad---it had nothing to do with how the software worked, it was all about this contact list integration. But at this point at Google, they're associating open standards with catastrophic failure, terrible press, and bad privacy situations.
+
+For me, it was a bad time because we had run out of money and had no additional investors. We had a small amount of revenue coming in from the SaaS service that we were running, but it couldn't support the big free networks we were running like Identi.ca. So I had to shut down the company. I had to let go all the engineers, and I also had this huge social network, Identi.ca, that was costing like $5,000 a month---it was a very expensive process for me to keep all the servers running.
+
+So I wrote a new software package called pump.io that was written in Node.js. The previous version had been in PHP. It basically took everything that we had learned from five years of running a social network and applied it to the new structures. So instead of using Atom, which is an XML standard, we used JSON. This was almost entirely me solo, working by myself, because I'd lost all my employees.
+
+*Because you were paying the server costs, you wanted to enable other people to migrate off it and run their own servers?*
+
+Partly. But also because it meant I could run my servers much more cheaply.
+
+*It reduced the load.*
+
+Exactly. I converted from StatusNet to pump.io and transferred StatusNet---which became GNU social---to some enthusiasts at the Free Software Foundation who were like, "We want to keep running with this." I was like, "Great, take it, go with it." Then I built this pump.io project. It turned out great---Identi.ca is still running and still uses pump.io software. It is nowhere near its peak though. It was about 5 million users; now it's probably like 500 users, maybe. It's a very small number of people.
+
+I did this pump.io software, released it, and moved Identi.ca to it, and then kind of walked away. I had done what I intended to do, and I was like, "Hey, that dream of a distributed social network is gone. These big social networks like Twitter and Facebook are no longer one among many---they are essential infrastructure, they're part of the way that the Internet works."
+
+*Just as they were shutting down their open APIs.*
+
+Absolutely. At this time, Twitter had a big event called the Chirp Developer Conference, which they had been organizing for like six months---"Come to the Chirp conference, exciting stuff!" Then, just before the conference, they had a big blog post---I think it was from Ev Williams---that was like, "Hey, we're shutting down the API for all but a few uses." We were at the conference. Our software actually had a Twitter-compatible API, so we were encouraging developers to take their tools and port them to use StatusNet instead. We had some interest there, but it was mostly these folks who had become dependent on these big networks and who had been part of making them successful---they were kind of out in the cold.
+
+That was an interesting lesson. Same thing with Facebook Platform, although it was less dramatic. They did it gradually over time, just turning off a few API endpoints at a time. They converted to this format called Open Graph, which was not as featureful as their previous API, and then they turned off the old API.
+
+At this time, Diaspora started. Diaspora was four young men at NYU, and they decided they were going to do a distributed version of Facebook. They dropped out of school, did a Kickstarter, and raised more than $200,000, which was the second biggest Kickstarter ever at that point. And they moved to California for some reason---that was probably how they spent most of their $200,000.
+
+They built this great service, but it wasn't compatible with our distributed social networking. Me and my team were like, "Wow, this seems like a real opportunity that went to waste---they just did a brand new protocol and didn't even work with us to have some interoperability." So we started a project called the Federated Social Web Summit, where we tried to gather everyone who was working in social web software. We put out invitations to, I think, like a hundred projects. We got like 50 projects in. Almost none of them had compatible protocols---all of them were writing their own software and writing their own protocols.
+
+We set up the summit process so it wasn't open to the public, it was only for the developers, and you had to have working code to come and be able to demo it. It was a super success. So first of all, the Diaspora guys were like, "Oh yeah, we should probably support your protocol too," so they supported OStatus, which was awesome---just wonderful folks.
+
+We did three iterations of that---one in Portland, one in San Francisco, and one in Berlin over three different years. So this is like 2010, 2011, and 2012, and it was a great process. We had a super valuable process. I think we got a lot of cross-pollination.
+
+One of the things that happened is that some of the projects had been involved in the World Wide Web Consortium, and the W3C got interested in supporting this kind of work. So I joined a group at W3C---they invited me to join to do what they call an interest group, where you're thinking far ahead and exploring a new space. At the time, I had started another company called Breather, so I wasn't working on social software at all. Breather was room rental.
+
+Let me rewind a second and talk about OpenSocial. About the time that Facebook Platform started, there were all these other social networks---again, Hi5, Bebo, Orkut. It sounds like glossolalia when I say them out loud! If you look at the Wikipedia list of social networking platforms, there are so many, and they all have silly names.
+
+But all these other ones were like, "Hey, we have to build our own platform." The solution that they came up with was, "We can't compete with Facebook by all having our own different ways for building applications." So they built a single way for building widgets on a homepage called OpenSocial, and it covered one part of the problem. They didn't have any federation involved. The idea was if I build a zombie bite app and put it in Orkut, it should also work in Hi5.
+
+*So it enabled developers to simultaneously develop for all these smaller networks.*
+
+Yes---you could just build something once and then register it on all these different services.
+
+OpenSocial was announced with great fanfare. Google led it. They had a bunch of developers doing it. Then by early 2010s, all these companies had gone out of business. What had actually happened was that enterprise social networks---at big companies like IBM and Boeing---had invested in building applications on top of this framework for their employees. When the OpenSocial organization peaked and then dropped off---I was on the board at the time---we thought, "How about we hand off all our IP, like all our standards, all our domains, off to W3C?" The W3C took it. I think partly because they had a lot of the same corporate members---IBM and Boeing were OpenSocial members, and they were W3C members, and the W3C members wanted to keep control.
+
+Then W3C had to decide what to do with it. They asked this very active W3C employee named Harry Halpin. He was like, "I've got an idea. Let's pull together these OpenSocial folks, all these Federated Social Web folks, and Tim Berners-Lee." Tim Berners-Lee, founder of W3C, the father of the Web, was starting to get interested in social networking too, and he wanted to use his favorite technology, the Resource Description Framework or RDF, to solve social networking.
+
+So Harry was like, "Let's bring these three groups together and make a working group at W3C," which is how you make standards. They asked Tantek Çelik---who has been doing browser standards at Microsoft, then at Mozilla, for the last twenty years---to be a co-chair. Then there was Art Barstow, who was working at IBM and had done a lot of RDF stuff. And me. So they asked the three of us to co-chair this group.
+
+It was really interesting. The way that a group gets created at W3C is that they have to put together a charter---what is this group going to do, what's its outputs---and then they put it up for approval by the membership. And it got shot down. First of all, there were a number of big commercial social networks that were members of this group of W3C because they cared about HTML and stuff, and they were like, "No, we don't want you commodifying our business." Google at the time had been really burnt by Google Buzz, and they were like, "No way, no how---open standards toxic, do not want."
+
+So we had to adjust this charter until these folks would sign on. I think when it came down to it, none of them said yes---they all just abstained from the vote. I think their expectation was that we were just going to face-plant, which was probably a good bet at the time.
+
+So we started with literally zero. I was an open-source guy who had been doing open standards at this point for like six-seven years---I was probably the most experienced social network developer in that group. There was no one from Twitter, no one from Facebook, no one from Google. We had James Snell, who had worked at IBM and had done a lot of the ActivityStreams work there, but almost nobody involved were professional social networking folks.
+
+We had a couple of people who had done open standards stuff from the Federated Social Web Summit group, and we had Tantek, who is the kind of standards guy who wants to get lots more people involved in standards. He was like, "Anybody who comes and says they're interested in being in this group, we just let them in." W3C has this whole thing where you have to be a member of a member organization or get invited by the chairs. And Tantek was like, "Let's just invite everybody." So we invited all these folks, and we had this super mixed bag of people.
+
+We had probably three main tracks of folks involved. The first was from the track that I had been part of using ActivityStreams, using PubSubHubbub, using this OStatus stack, and then also OpenSocial, which also used a lot of the same technologies. They used ActivityStreams, they had a RESTful interface---it was at least very compatible.
+
+We had Tantek who had been doing IndieWeb work for like a decade, which was about grassroots, amateur software developers---no standards, just a very open process. That group was like, "What is the minimal amount that we can do to support social standards?"
+
+And then we had a third group that was led by Tim Berners-Lee, who gets a lot of weight at the W3C, as you can imagine. By this time he was *Sir* Tim Berners-Lee, and he was also participating with this whole semantic web group around him. They were like, "The only thing you need is RDF, and it'll all work, and it works perfectly. And why are we even here? We already have RDF."
+
+I doubt any of them had ever used a social networking platform in their entire life. We were explaining things like a feed of activity, or liking something, having any kind of feedback to someone like commenting or liking or sharing, and they just couldn't handle it. They just had a very RDF-centric view of the world.
+
+None of these folks knew what they wanted to do, so we put together this huge set of user stories---I think like 200 user stories, all these different things that you could do with social networks. Then we narrowed it down to something like 20 or 25---these are the ones that we're going to work on. And that was a fight.
+
+Then we were opening up for potential standards, and we had these three groups who put together three different sets of standards. The IndieWeb folks put together a very light set of standards---Micropub, WebMention, a couple of other things---and they were like, "This is all we need. This is the lightest way you could possibly do social networking." And it was fine, it just wasn't as full-featured as some of the other stuff.
+
+The people around Tim Berners-Lee put together this thing where you could publish a profile and declare like five friends or something, and they were like, "There you go, social networking." And we were like, "It doesn't do anything---what are you talking about?" And they got really upset, and they left. All of a sudden there were stories in all the major newspapers like "Tim Berners-Lee is going to solve social networking!" He started the Solid project at that time, took it out of the standards process, and got venture capital and went and built---what it's called---Inrupt. So he was off on his own.
+
+That left the group around OStatus, and one of the people who had been a developer for pump.io, and had built some of the clients and software that worked with pump.io, was like, "Hey, I think pump.io has a great API, great federation, super nice architecture." This is Erin Shepherd. She wrote up a submission. Basically, she took the pump.io API, added some things, took out the word "pump.io," and changed how it worked just a small bit. Then she submitted it.
+
+So we had these submissions---the RDF people had gone, so we had these two sets of submissions. One was from the IndieWeb group and then the one Erin did, which became called ActivityPump. That was the name because it took pump.io plus activities. The idea is you were pumping it out. It wasn't a great name.
+
+*But it was also a kind of tribute to what had come before.*
+
+We couldn't agree on any one of the models. Finally, Tantek and I sat down, and Tantek was like, "Hey, look, we can just publish all of these. Let's just go ahead and do it. That way we don't have to argue about which one's right and which one's wrong. Let's just get them out, and they'll be official W3C standards, and they're out there."
+
+James Snell had taken the earlier versions of ActivityStreams and made a new one that was JSON-based---ActivityStreams 2.0. He had built most of it already, so we were in an editorial stage by then. It's the data structures defining what is a note, what is an interview, what is an image. What does it mean to like something, to follow someone? He set up that architecture of the data structures. ActivityPump was the protocol for getting those data structures moved around.
+
+But Erin, who submitted this proposal, was not interested in taking it any further. We had two people who had joined the group from an open-source project called MediaGoblin. It was kind of a distributed social network with a focus on images and video and things like that. They wanted to support OStatus, and I had been like, "Hey, you should come be part of this W3C thing. We're doing the next protocol after OStatus, so come help build that."
+
+That was Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon, and they stepped up to edit the ActivityPump document, which was amazing. But it was their first time ever in standards world. At this point our star Tim Berners-Lee had left. We had a year and a half to two years to finish this project, and we had these two groups---the IndieWeb group and this ActivityPump group---that were not really working on the same stuff at all, with some hostility.
+
+I know that for Christine and Jessica it was really tough. When you're doing standards, you get all these comments from folks who had nothing to do with social networking, and they had to manage it and edit this project. James Snell left about this time, so I took over ActivityStreams to get it over the finish line.
+
+In 2016, this new project called Mastodon started. I don't know who it was---I definitely tried to point it out to them, but it may have been Christine who was like, "Look, don't use that old standard. It's got a lot of problems with it. You should use the new standard that we're almost done with."
+
+And they did. So Eugen Rochko and a couple of other friends and collaborators built Mastodon on top of ActivityPub. We hit the end of our time period, and we had published a lot of documents, but we hadn't finished what was still called ActivityPump at the time. The W3C gave us an extension on our time to finish because Mastodon was doing so well.
+
+I think we finished the actual spec in January 2019. We were done, and we had this popular open-source project using it. A bunch of other open-source projects started using the protocol---PeerTube for video, then Funkwhale for audio. It had a nice, lively little community happening with hundreds of thousands of people on the network. One of the last things we did with the standard was change the name from Activity Pump to ActivityPub. ActivityPump was a terrible name.
+
+*I think both names have their virtues.*
+
+Well, the social media space had almost a tradition of ridiculous names for a while.
+
+Once ActivityPub was done, I set it as my goal to make Identi.ca compatible with this new standard. I had handed pump.io off to a maintainer named AJ, and they were working on it. I kind of drifted off. I worked at Wikipedia for two years and then worked for a couple of startups, and I really was not working on distributed social networking, which was such a relief, to be honest.
+
+*Everything you've just described sounds so exhausting.*
+
+Social networks are really hard when they're not popular, and they're hard for other reasons when they become popular. The scaling problems with social networks go up exponentially. Your resource demands grow as your number of users grow because they have more conversations, more connections. Your needs as the systems grow are way bigger, which is why so many social networks collapse.
+
+It's a lot of time, a lot of effort. After 2013, this was no longer my full-time job. I was working at different places, I had two different startups, and I was doing this work as my second work. That's still the case to this day---I don't work professionally on ActivityPub.
+
+Christine and, to some extent, Jessica continued at the W3C. We had this group called the Social Web Community Group, or Social CG, and it kind of picked up where the working group left off and worked on extensions and documentation and things like that, helping developers work together. But one of the things that happens when you publish a standard that takes years to get create is it becomes very fossilized, very ossified. You can add on to it, but you can't really go back and say, "Oh, it would have been better if we had done this." We had a working network of thousands of servers. If you change how it works fundamentally, half of those servers or three-quarters of those servers are going to be cut off. So you have to just do backwards-compatible changes, iterative changes rather than really big changes.
+
+*Do you have any regrets about what is in that ossified standard?*
+
+I don't have huge regrets. If I have any, it's that I did not help get us to a working reference implementation before I stepped back. There are some parts of the stack that were never built out. Mastodon had to define how servers authenticate each other. There was a lot of work that went into filling in the gaps in this structure that could have been done with a reference implementation instead.
+
+Christine was co-leading the Community Group, but she had a lot of other things on her plate. And there was some really toxic behaviour in the Group. She stepped away from the W3C entirely, so by 2022, there's not really anybody with their hand on the tiller, and that's exactly the time when Elon Musk buys Twitter and people start thinking about going to other social networks. There was this flood of people onto Mastodon, and I was like, "Oh, this is great! Hey, wait a minute---what's going on? Nobody's running the store over here."
+
+So in late 2022, early 2023, I was like, "Okay, my name is on these documents. I've access to all these GitHub repos. There are GitHub issue repositories that have like 200 un-triaged issues." And I was like, "Somebody's got to get in here. I think I'm the last person standing." So I started maintaining the spec again.
+
+That happened about the same time that we started having meetings again. So it has really reinvigorated this organization. Now some of that stuff that was undocumented---like how you use WebFinger with ActivityPub, or how you use HTTP signatures, which is the authentication between servers---that's documented now in official documents. We're working on new kinds of social activities like geosocial---doing check-ins, saying where you are, putting things on maps---and doing groups, like having a distributed group that you can post to privately. We've done work on end-to-end encryption.
+
+Over the last year, I wrote a book for O'Reilly, *ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web.* I also started a nonprofit called the Social Web Foundation for encouraging use of ActivityPub. We lucked out that there has been commercial uptake with ActivityPub---Threads from Meta, as well as Flipboard, WordPress, and Ghost. The intent is to keep that rolling.
+
+I started a cooperative Mastodon service at cosocial.ca. It's become a bigger part of my life over the last couple years than it had been for the years before.
+
+I'm kind of a universalist---I think everyone should have access to this kind of technology and be able to make choices, stay connected to people even if they're on other social platforms. I think that one way that happens is by connecting more platforms to the network. I would love to see Snap and LinkedIn and TikTok all be connected over this space.
+
+However, there's also this cultural underground that has built up. It's people with a mix of privacy concerns, maybe some anarcho-libertarian structures, folks who are very on that side of the political spectrum. And I don't know if it's entirely because of Christine and Jessica, who's also trans, or Erin, who's also trans---so like three of the five authors of this spec are trans women. That kernel of techie trans people became a really big, important part of the network as it exists now. They're like, "Why are you trying to bring people from outside to our Fediverse, which should be just for us?"
+
+Being able to keep the flavor of that culture alive while still making the technology available to more people worldwide is tough, and I don't think---I have some people who get really angry at me about it. It's hard to figure out how to make sure that you can have this place that is safe and exciting and enjoyable, but at the same time make this technology available to everyone.
+
+I don't know if I have an answer to that, or if I'm even the person who needs to have that answer. I'd like to at least make it technically possible---I'm not sure if I can be the person who preserves that culture. That might be something that others have to do.

content/interviews/zargham-ultimate_frisbee.md

@@ -0,0 +1,199 @@
+---
+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."
+location: "East Greenbush, NY USA"
+headshot: "michael_zargham.png"
+topics: [mediation, sports, organizations]
+---
+
+*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 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.