The unfettered power of collective dialogues, shared ethos, amplification, and questions

Why was the Advocates COC taken on by the Governance R+D Lab?

🤝 gov·ern·ance /ˈɡəvərnəns/ systems design for making up our collective mind

📜 code /kōd/ a set of agreements governing behavior

🫀 con·duct /ˈkänˌdəkt/ how we behave

💭 How do we participate in a decision making system without a set of agreements on how we behave? How do we conduct ourselves in order to create a culture within which our voices are heard by one another but also by those we serve?

💭 How do we dismantle the centralized systems we’ve been taught, and colonized in ourselves, that have made us submissive to dominant hierarchies of decision making, even in the absence of supreme leaders?

This document is meant as a lineage of Stacks Advocates DAO Code of Conduct (COC) as it came to be through the Governance R&D Lab initiative (Gov Lab): the first cohort of novel Stacks Residents working together and within the Advocates DAO and Stacks Foundation to develop tools that align with tried and tested indigenous protocols that we would identify as systems of governance. Members of the Gov Lab include Ryeder (@aka_roro#0295), Juliet (@Juliet Ӿ LexyLab#6742), Haz (@hz#8826), and Harold (@Harold#5025).

The Advocates DAO COC began as an addendum to the Stacks COC, written and drafted by Juliet Oberding, a member of the Gov Lab and Governance Working Group. Juliet writes:

"In creating the Stack’s Code of Conduct, my first step was research into COC work by other communities. I was particularly interested in open source communities that had a similar ethos to the Stacks ecosystem. Once drafted, the document was presented to community for multiple rounds of input. The final step is a Stacks COC SIP which will provide an opportunity to come to consensus."

Key features of this process include: research, open source, ethos, and consensus. This shows the initial steps taken to ensure a data-driven process of shared value generation and collective decision-making aligned with the systems design approach that we are developing at the Gov Lab on behalf of the Stacks ecosystem.

Juliet used the open channels in the Advocates DAO server to share the Stacks COC and raise awareness about the community rep position, the only one of its kind, that posits itself at the intersection of the Stacks Board, Foundation, and Community. Ryeder writes:

"I saw the Stacks COC amplified in the Discord server shortly after my work began with the Gov lab. I saw Juliet gaining traction and involving the community in her drafting process. Shortly after that I saw the question of an Advocates-specific COC raised by Louise, who I didn't know at the time was the growth lead and member of the Stacks Foundation Team since March 2020. He also, I later came to understand, spoke on behalf of the fledgling Advocates DAO from the perspective of having fostered it alongside Haz and Harold in the summer of 2021 before the first cohort of residents came to be in November of that same year. At the time he was just a guy with a good idea that I didn't want to get lost."

Key features: open discussion, awareness, amplification, questions. The dialogues that came out of Juliet's amplification of the Stacks COC in open channels began open dialogue and room for new ideas. This is a direct result of having a channel for "open discussion" in the DAO and this is where these ideas were catalyzed.

Ryeder is who drafted the first template for the Advocates COC, embedding important pieces of the Stacks COC to signal shared lineage and foundational commitments to a shared ecosystem including but not limited to Can't Be Evil values and design. There was also made space in the emerging document for the three tiered system design that centers relationships in the protocols of bottom up governance structures [enter @Harold Davis’s relationship to research and longhouse here]. From Ryeder:

"In a world where product design reigns and centralized systems are maintained as oppressive institutions under the guise of participation, it is important to emulate bottom up systems and describe and entertain the relationships that exist from and between these three vital energies. Turtle Wolf Bear predate not only this internet DAO lineage, but colonization itself, are shared between indigenous lineages, and are at the very core emulated through nature through the corn, bean, and squash triad in life, in fruition, and unto death to fertilize and revitalize the earth for the next season or generation. It only makes sense to use them as a model for sustainable systems and growth."

TWB dialogue, research, and development into systems that work in remote environments to govern is at the heart of the Gov Lab's ongoing work. The sense-making for these protocols in the COC was a decentralized group effort. Here's how the process went:

1. Ryeder’s first template of the COC was made available by a link to the collaborative web document with permissions to be accessible by anyone
2. Using the new Discord Events Feature, that link was amplified to everyone on the server as a week-long event in the Stacks server
3. That documentation was closed for editing after 1 week and given to Juliet who in collaboration with Louise would make more edits to respond to the needs of the community expressed in the comments on the document

Some time later, Harold and Juliet and then Ryeder and Harold had a further sense-making sessions over the novel TWB language being co-created in the document over the previous weeks. Finally, Harold took a final look and made edits of his own. The Advocates COC currently lives in the Stacks Advocates github repo.

Today we’re trying to implement and develop this COC into a living document that can be accessed and peer reviewed through github, so edits can appear on documents synced with Discord channels, and so Advocates can continue to change their documentation the trajectory of our community at large. The best way to get in touch with the Gov Lab is through the Advocates DAO channels of the Stacks Discord server.