Mycopunk Community Coordination with Christina Bowen of Socialroots

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This week’s guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders. Or, in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community.

She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams, and rethink our “social” spaces so they actually work for human beings. She also introduced me to the world of “mycopunk”, an earthier and more distributed alternative to solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project.

This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. Here is how her team describes their work and principles on their own website:

Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition. We have founded Socialroots on a few key principles, summarized below, to support this shift into a more healthy future.

* Efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation.

* Data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.

* Power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work, enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches, and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems.

There you have it. I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups.

Special Announcement: Join me for the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 pm Mountain Time! Let’s foster real and lasting collaborations in a safe place for collective inquiry.

Thank you and enjoy this episode!

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