Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office(less) politics | TechCrunch

Remote Teams

I was recently tagged into a conversation on Twitter. The thread started with this summary of findings about open plan offices:

Binding Chaos: Mass Collaboration on a Global Scale

The world is long overdue for a completely new system of governance. If there was ever a need for political representation or a paternalistic and opaque authority, it has been removed by technology. Every political system we have tried has proven incapable of protecting human rights and dignity. Every political system we have tried has devolved into oligarchy. To effect the change we require immediately, to give individuals control and responsibility, to bring regional systems under regional governance, allow global collaboration and protect the heritage of future generations, we need a new political model.

Roomy and community organizing for system change

Roomy is a group messaging app that gives online communities tools for autonomous collaboration — designable spaces not just for chat, but for cultivating a web of shared understanding together. We show how cheap, user-controlled, interoperable data on ATProto can enable online communities to channel impassioned mobilizing into sustained organizing in the shadow of Big Tech's empire.

Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power

[This document serves as a memo for investors]

Consensus Democracy | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Redundancy Protects Human Collaborations from Failure

In the name of efficiency, organizations and governments around the world are increasingly trimming redundancy---personnel or overlapping capabilities beyond what routine operations require. Drawing on distributed computing and cognitive science, we challenge this view. Using queueing simulations and a preregistered multiplayer experiment (N = 832 in 187 teams of 3–6), we show that redundancy improves performance through two distinct routes. Adding collaborators to a team improves resilience, with larger teams completing more tasks when members became temporarily unable to contribute. Giving team members overlapping capabilities also improved efficiency, with teams in which collaborators could perform multiple roles completing substantially more work. These findings suggest that efforts to improve short-term efficiency by reducing redundancy may come at a cost, quietly eroding a team’s capacity to withstand unexpected failures.

TeamTopologies/Team-Topologies-Community-Materials

A list of materials relating to Team Topologies (articles, tools, canvases, etc.) generated by the community.

What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)

Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.

Network of shared purpose · Issue #369 · muni-town/roomy

Excerpted from Weird Web Pages. The Network is effectively a global jobs board, but for mutual collaborations rather than work-for-hire. Easiest way to prototype this might be with GitHub issues/di...

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

Roomy & Designing for Communities | Fish | Offprint

My personal experiences working with the team at Roomy, and how I feel after the last 5 months helping with the project.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power - The Algo Rhythm by Blacksky

[This document serves as a memo for investors]