Resilient Business

One of the most important lessons I've learned while living in Santa Fe and studying its long history is the importance of building communities with resilience. Many communities here strive to protect themselves, what they inherit, and what they produce, from those who seek to extract and exploit those communal resources.

Writers like Cory Doctorow, Douglass Rushkoff, and others document the repeating cycles where ragtag groups of creators come together to cook up something for their community, only for a "hamburger falcon" (a coinage by a former coworker of mine) to swoop into the picnic and snatch the work right out of the community hands, taking it away it to feed their flocks of private equity. Add on the modern problem of AI and the private surveillance state, now the methods of extraction the most power hungry have always practiced are reaching a fever pitch of hyperscaled efficiency, making it nearly impossible for communities everywhere to keep up in the economic arms race.

Never again do I wish to work in an organization that lacks the tools to protect itself from these raptors.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned how, as we build up this news and media organization, it's vital that we begin with building on a foundation that has protections and "inoculations against bad actors who will inevitably try to extract the value of what we’re building here for their own gain.”

Three pillars guide our approach at 505OMATIC, Good Governance, Ownership & Stewardship, and Mutual Aid.

Good Governance

Meeting. Consensus. Accountability.

Broadly speaking, our local communities have lost the ability and tools to effectively convene and govern ourselves. Civics, debate, Robert's Rules of Order (it has its time and place), or designing a gathering is not as easily learned through lived experience as it used to be. We move less through our neighborhood social networks such as union halls, churches, bars and bowling leagues, and more with online affinity groups curated by some algorithm designed to monetize your time and attention at the expense of your humanity and sanity.

Our IRL social networks easily passed down the traditions and formats for convening a group and coming to consensus within the allotted meeting time. Many of the "traditional organizations" I reference do have problematic pasts when considering the content and characters of those groups. But, the structures by which those groups with problematic ideologies governed themselves effectively put their communities in positions where they could move together with a shared purpose to affect change in their favor.

Those opportunities to find a consensus with our community have been replaced by the modern hierarchical structures imposed by the Neo-Feudal Zoomed Out Corporate Age. It's nearly impossible for us to hold accountable those who abuse their power over people in your community, because they're not also your neighbor, they are hundreds or thousands of miles away from those whose labor they depend on, making it much easier to exploit that labor without real world repercussions.

So to address these flaws in our modern governance structures, we looked for organizations dedicated to solving these problems. We relied heavily on resources from The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives to discuss and draft our operating agreement. The USFWC are experts at teaching organizations how to share their internal power so they can collectively survive external pressures.

We chose our decision making frameworks, and the structure for members to hold other members (especially managers and executives) accountable for their decisions. We democratically discussed, shaped, and enshrined into our Operational Agreement our shared purpose. We created paths to membership, and ways members can build equity within our startup organization (more on this in my next point).

We have an outline for our practice, but we must also move with praxis. It's not enough to have a solid guiding document. Facilitation of a good meeting is paramount to our success. Earlier I hinted at The Art of Gathering, a key text in my approach to designing a convening. It greatly helped me understand how to guide and wield the social energy in a room, driving the right balance between maintaining meeting structure and allowing for chaos to create beautiful serendipities.

Facilitation is a skill, one that can be learned only through experience. My personal journey goes through a college fraternity, an independent housing cooperative, numerous art collectives, an art collective gone corporate (do not recommend), and forming and managing a labor union. All of that experience informs how I help us get through an entire agenda in 90 minutes on a weekly basis so we can bring you 505OMATIC.

Ownership & Stewardship

Fair Startup Equity Calculation

Before Santa Fe, I lived in Austin, TX, "The Live Music Capital of the World." Anyone who's run live events knows its difficult work that can bring in a lot of revenue. I witnessed first hand how that revenue is not distributed to those in direct service of the event and its patrons, often workers without basic labor protections or volunteers.

In response to this exploitation of folks’ labor, intentional or not, my Austin community of creators and event producers devised a fair and transparent profit sharing model we called "Overt Operations." Last year I made a video about it for my YouTube channel. Briefly speaking, Overt Ops is a fancy spreadsheet for easily tracking the work individual contributors participated in to make an event successful, and calculating how to distribute the collective revenue to each according to their labor. This approach works very well for ticketed event productions with defined start and stop times. But even then I wondered about ways I could apply this approach to an ongoing project, with a defined start but no defined end. At the end of my video I asked the world to show me a method.

Several months after that video’s debut, due to the USFWC resources, I discovered The Slicing Pie Handbook. It is the exact toolkit I was looking for. It's a relatively simple and affordable online calculation app that we can use to track what every member of 505OMATIC has contributed. In acknowledgement of the economy that we must participate in to live, we assign fair market values to our labor. We closely track our cash and non-cash contributions by members to our startup business. If ever we generate profit or proceeds, then the members who helped get us there are fairly compensated.

Mutual Aid

Supporting, Mobilizing, and Building Community Infrastructures

We started 505OMATIC because we weren't seeing ways we could help and be active in our local community through the information sources most easy to access. Unless you can afford to pay $30 a month for a newspaper subscription, free news about New Mexico largely focuses on celebrity drama and crime (“if it bleeds, it leads”). While free alt weekly papers are also great sources for local information, its not nearly at the levels they were capable of producing during the heyday of print journalism funded by printed advertisements.

From our perspective, most of our community gets their news from social media videos. So that's where we put our little videos, with a focus on the little guy in our community. This past year, we've built ourselves a workflow for using any platforms we can register a profile on to mobilize support for the projects, causes, and concerns we care about. Issues around housing, healthcare, the environment, and more, are issues that directly affect our neighbors, classmates, and coworkers. In as many stories as we can, we add a call to action for you, our audience, to channel your ideas, anger, joy, and energy into places where you can make a difference.

Additionally, 505OMATIC also produces The Living Room, a monthly IRL community gathering where our neighbors can talk to community leaders, experts, and each other about our collective causes.

We encourage you to find even more ways you can actively participate in improving your community. Let us know what you find because we'd love to do a story about it.

For us to save ourselves, we need to have a plan for working together fairly and mutually in order to save our collective future.

Fortunately, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, we just need to rediscover it.

For more on 505OMATIC, check out this latest post about us from Tiny News Collective.