implement shortcode for interview question

content/articles/zargham-ultimate_frisbee.md

@@ -8,13 +8,17 @@ summary: "As a sport often played with no referees, ultimate frisbee has develop
 tags: [frisbee, sports, organizations, dispute resolution]
 ---
 
-*How do you like to introduce yourself to people as you encounter them in the world?*
+{{< i >}}
+How do you like to introduce yourself to people as you encounter them in the world?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+How would you outline the trajectory of your life and career in ultimate frisbee?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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."
 
@@ -30,7 +34,9 @@ What I did pick up from the competitive players who were teaching me to throw wa
 
 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 >}}
+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 >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -44,11 +50,15 @@ There's a strong cultural component, but I want to be careful to note that it va
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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"?*
+{{< i >}}
+And was that by choice? Was that a sense like "we don't have referees, and we don't have coaches"?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -58,7 +68,9 @@ A lot of it was entrenched---we had everything from cheers to organizational pat
 
 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 >}}
+How did you get into league-level organization?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -84,7 +96,9 @@ I don't remember exactly how I got sucked in deeper. I know how I got on the boa
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -92,13 +106,15 @@ In practice, what I did was almost entirely dispute resolution. The organization
 
 I spent quite a lot of time on the phone, usually reflecting what I thought were steel-manned versions of other people's positions back to each other to diffuse situations. I had to do some agenda setting, but that organization was already about 30 years old, and like my experience with frisbee at Dartmouth, there was a lot of "the way things were done" already established. It had annealed, stabilized itself.
 
-I dealt with some interesting challenges, like our relationship with the cricket club. We shared physical field space with them, and as president, I also had to sit on another board---the board of cricket and ultimate. This entity existed solely to be the container of the two organizations for dealing with city contracts because we were sharing stewardship of the field site. We had a cricket and ultimate association thing where the presidents of both boards and about four other people served as officers, just as an adapter to the city. We had a historic clubhouse, this beautiful field site, and the legal interoperability required this other board.
+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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -106,7 +122,9 @@ It wasn't a big leap for me. In fact, I almost didn't think about it much becaus
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+How long were you actively involved in the sport?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -122,7 +140,9 @@ That was my last competitive season---2014---and I only made it through to June
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -136,7 +156,9 @@ The semi-pro leagues rolled in competing with the clubs for talent, but the club
 
 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 >}}
+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 >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -154,7 +176,9 @@ Actually, my COO at BlockScience---he joined later, he's not technically a co-fo
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.
 
@@ -174,7 +198,9 @@ Otherwise, the way self-officiation could escalate is you could do the normal wo
 
 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?*
+{{< i >}}
+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?
+{{< /i >}}
 
 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.