Sideways seeks to develop and evolve shared infrastructure for planetary governance. For this report, we interviewed “groups of groups”, including coalitions, consortia, associations, umbrella organizations, and ecosystems. We found that most groups were loosely organized, and those that weren’t had top-down decision-making about inclusion. The needs most frequently cited were better funding mechanisms, ability to identify good actors, and the ability to find partners across the network.
Networks fell into a variety of organizational structures:
- Self-declared membership associations
- Top-down membership organizations
- App-organization (defined by onboarding to an app)
- Blockchain association (defined by using a particular blockchain technology)
- Alumni organizations
- Funding association (based on grants from a common source)
- Paid membership-based groups
Findings:
- The primary need is identification of good-faith actors.
- Manual networking isn’t scaling.
- Social graph data is low fidelity.
- Reputation scores are evolving.
- Centralization of power works great!
- Loose networks and movements have worked in the past, but they may be inadequate for addressing something as complex as the polycrisis.
- Competitive budgeting creates collusion and slow decision-making.
Next steps:
Sideways is continuing to interview groups and pursuing two areas of development. One is the Ostrom5, a solution for addressing conflict dispute and mediation among organizations. The other is an Extranational Identification system for groups to identify members of values-aligned organizations.
You can see the full report (pdf) here.
