Open branding

For liveblogged transcripts of this talk, see the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

The Awesome Foundation

The awesome

• Independently organized chapters
• Flexible definition bends to fit each locale, set of trustees, theme
• Innovative strategies for handling trustees + decision-making
• Lack of hierarchy and structure lets trustees focus on fun

The awkward

• What if chapter needs tax-exempt status to partner?
• What if a chapter or trustee goes rogue?
• What if our own TV Show tries to trademark Awesome Foundation?

• Trademark vs. T(rust)M(e)
  • Don't solve problems we don't have yet

Sunday Soup

• started in 2007 in Chicago
• charged $5 for a bowl of soup, collected emails and grant proposals, emailed out list of proposals and asked everyone to vote on who should get the money
• Switched from once a week to once a month to preserve bandwidth
• closed in 2009

Problems addressed

• Saw a lack of small scale, unrestricted funding
• Lack of funding for projects that didn't fit into existing "fundable" categories

• Presented at a exhibition in 2008, grew and spread
  • STEW, Baltimore
  • FEAST, Brooklyn
  • Philly Stake, Philadelphia
• In 2010 met people doing it in other cities, talked about how to do things
• Created a website: [sundaysoup.org]
  • collect applications
  • automate money
  • map of projects around the world
• In 2011, organized an International Day of Soup (collaborated across cities)
• Collectively created a poster on how to do it and distributed it at event
• Started it back up in Chicago in 2012

Free Software

• Defining "free software" is a huge aspect of the free software movement
  • multiple iterations of defining what this means
• "a big tent with clear boundaries"
• open source movement attempted to trademark/service mark the term (failed)

The problem

• It's not people misusing the brand
• For most people, it's that not enough people are using the brand
• We should strive to create brands that people care about enough to want to abuse them
• Attempts to block abuse will
  • limit your brand's success
  • probably fail

Civic Media

• Occupy and the AF have overlap - decentralized decision making
• (get more notes from the livebloggers)

Panel Q&A

• Reaching shared/values principles, how did each of your groups do that?
  • Bryce: Haven't formally checked, but a lot of the values are the same because they're driven by necessity. Values become articulated around needs that are common to a lot of different cities, but that's just the US.
  • Becky: Occupy tried to be decentralized, and that became a bit of a problem. For example, is the movement violent or nonviolent? Disagreement between subgroups, conflict of values. Other values had less agreement, but less of an issue.
  • Mako: Identified a set of people to target and get buy-in from, collaborated with those people. Goal has not been to get everybody involved, the goal has been to set clear boundaries.

• What role do leaders play in this process? What do leaders look like? What is the importance of shared cultural background?
  • Mako: Organization and principles should not be indistinguishable from personality of the leader.
  • Becky: In Occupy, leaders looked like traditional leaders, which is a little ironic. In order to champion an idea amongst lots of people, you need to have lots of charisma (traditional leadership skills). Cultural background makes it easier in the outset, but part of being in a really popular movement means you will run into people with lots of different backgrounds and have to deal with that.
  • Bryce: We've been really conscientious of inviting and encouraging people who aren't just our friends, get people who don't look like us. It's easy for more experienced people to fall into leadership roles, tried to fight this by deciding as a group how to divide up responsibilities.

• What is the value of the brand, and how important is that to recruiting new people to the movement?
  • Bryce: (re: Sunday Soup has inconsistent naming) We don't expect people to call it something, so that empowers people more to do what they want with it.
  • Becky: It was less a brand and more of a media event. At first that was helpful, because goal was to just get the word out. Has become more difficult to define as it's grown.
  • Mako: Brands are attractive to people, and that's the point of them. But many successful brands are open and not trademarked (ex. Republican and Democrat). That creates flexibility and power of imagination.

• How does belonging to open brands affect people and change the experience from doing the thing without putting the brand on it?
  • Mako: Prizes and association with the name matter more than just the money.
  • Becky: Re 350 climate change event - having more people in the street means more people will notice and join and the impact will be bigger and change will be more likely. Big problem today is lack of participation, and seeing people makes participation more likely.

• Have we reached Peak Occupy? What's next? Is the narrative going to continue? Is the lack of coherent leadership bringing down the movement?
  • Becky: I would love to be able to answer all of these. Everyone is asking what is going to happen next. There are groups of people who've broken off and are doing more targeted work and have gone after smaller goals. Networks were built, and those remain, so that's a way that it continues. I don't know what will happen with the 99% narrative.

• Mako, do you have examples of free software/OSS projects that petered out and were reborn?
  • Mako: There's no lack of projects that have petered out. Ones that have come back later are more complicated... Inkscape has died three times, I can't even remember the original name (name changed each time). Some of the problems were around leadership, sometimes political and social disagreements. There were lots of people who thought that a good vector drawing program was a good idea, but disagreement on parts of that and variation in the vibrancy of the community.

• In the AF, we have a gap between Kitten Voltron and this amorphous blob of rogue funders... there is a balance between stepping in to help provide guidance and support without being an official structure, and it seems like your communities have navigated that, advice on navigating that transition? And fighting burnout while doing that?
  • Bryce: Burnout is always a problem, to some extent we have mitigated that problem by being honest with ourselves and acknowledging that it's ok to not do it all the time. Everyone should be willing to work less if it means prolonging the project.
  • Becky: Burnout is a huge issue with Occupy. Taking your time will pay off.
  • Bryce: There is also a difference between internal bureaucracy and the expectations you externalize, and there are qualitative differences between ways of organizing.
  • Mako: If you've built a movement with a set of principles, you create space for evolution over time.

• I think there is value to having some sort of foundational organizational structure - what do you think about that? Social capital is great, but so is financial capital.
  • Mako: Don't get me wrong - I've created startups, been on the board of incorporated nonprofits with staff, I'm not saying there is no space for these things. Being dependent on a single organization is what worries me; I like small organizations. I'd rather have lots of small organizations that cover a broader area.
  • Becky: (examples of intergroup collaborations and organized 501c3)
  • Bryce: We avoided becoming a 501c3... we felt like we had questions, not answers. There were all sorts of legal liability and tax issues though, and we were serving food and alcohol without a license. Maybe there is some way in the future to handle that, we've been lucky that we haven't had to deal with police.