Jerry Michalski on OGM and Rel8
Author: Jerry Michalski Issue: 2022-10-19
Jerry Michalski on OGM and Rel8
BPD editor Peter Kaminski sat down with Jerry Michalski to talk about OGM and Rel8.
PETE: So Jerry, tell me about OGM (Open Global Mind).
JERRY: When people say, “What do you do,” the brand I stick on my forehead most often is that I’m the founder of OGM, which is a community of practice that has been meeting to try to figure out how to help humans make better decisions together by having some kind of collective memory.
And I’m proud to do so and happy to do so. It was really fun on this last trip to sort of use that over and over again in different contexts.
And it feels like we’re slowly chewing on that problem, in our little ways. And then every now and then we have a flurry of activity, in FJB, or Fellowship of the Link.
PETE: You said an interesting thing, “community of practice.” It’s more like there are overlapping communities…
JERRY: It’s a “communities” of practice. Which is fine, I like that. 🙂
PETE: Yeah, exactly. 🙂
Okay. Tell me about Rel8. What is Rel8 and how does it relate to OGM?
JERRY: Rel8 tries to answer the question, “What kind of organization(s) would it take to stand up a shared memory for?”
Much in the way that Wikipedia is a shared encyclopedia for humans has been translated into many languages.
Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia, so I can point to exactly which kind of software it uses, what servers it runs on, what its funding model is. All those things are really nice and and crisp and clear. And even if the Wikipedia has some complicated history and dark sides, still, the whole thing is very tangible and describable.
“The Big Fungus” is not, and hence my resorting to metaphors like “The Big Fungus.”
It’s like this shared memory has to make room for people who have very different preferences or visualization schemes or note-taking schemes or whatever, and it has to figure out how to settle them together in the middle, and doing that therefore isn’t like one big organization writing one body of code, but rather, more like herding cats and, and motivating and inspiring. But also, pointing to the things that work. And maybe also modeling good behavior and helping seed or add starter to the fungus.
And, as we’ve talked about multiple times, my Brain data file being a good “sourdough starter” for the larger social mind seems like low-hanging fruit to me.
PETE: Tell me about “the tile process.”
JERRY: The tile process is a piece of Rel8 that says, here, just as a prototype, we’re going to stand up one way of thinking about large projects being decomposed into small projects, a discussion in the community about what those projects should be, a funding mechanism to create bounties that fund those projects. And then the use and refinement of those objects in this funny, squishy fungus platform that we’re trying to develop.
It could be a DAO, and could be operated in that way. But I’m not a big fan of DAOs or of cryptocurrency voting on what priorities are.
I’m really interested in, and I think you would empathize with this, communities actually sitting down and talking through priorities and what it means to them.
Maybe the DAO way of doing that doesn’t preclude that, but it feels like it often sort of does. I’ve seldom seen dot voting or money voting lead to a good set of architectures and paths in some direction that people want to go.
And so I’m trying to compensate for that and maybe prototype and then find other things that work better and it fold them in for that.
PETE: Last question. If I’m a new person coming to OGM, where is OGM? Should I come to the Zoom calls? Which Zoom calls? Should I come to the mailing list? Should I come to the Mattermost?
JERRY: So the way I describe it is, hey, can I put you on the OGM Google Group, which is just an announcement list and sort of conversational thing, and a couple people put a lot of articles on it instead of the CSC Mattermost server.
When I put you on the OGM list, I will also send you a link to get on the Mattermost list, where we have channels that are more focused and more persistent, and you might discover that one of those channels is really helpful to you.
We have a call Thursday mornings, which is sort of the “heartbeat call.” We alternate between two formats, and then there’s a bunch of other standing calls for different sorts of things.
And Pete put up a nice page that has sort of a calendar of when those calls meet. And that’s kind of my spiel.
PETE: Thank you, Jerry. And thank you for all you do for OGM and Rel8 - I know the community really appreciates you and everything you do.
Related:
- Jerry Michalski (author)
- 2022 (year)
- Topics: Tools and Platforms, Web3, DAOs, and Distributed Governance