the first year of the Digital Life Collective

The Digital Life Collective started in 2017, a new member owned co-op aiming to develop and support Tech We Trust — technologies that prioritise our autonomy, privacy and dignity — and we just wrote up a report of what we’ve been up to.

It’s been a fascinating experience, seeing a new co-operative come to life.

Unanticipated challenge: despite tech we don’t trust being such a hot topic in so many circles in 2017, it has proved surprisingly tough to get members to join. Maybe we’re too vague on what we’ll do and how we’ll do it? Or are many of the vocally worried people still not at the tipping point where concern starts to motivate action? Or something else? Hopefully in 2018 we’ll get a lot clearer on why you’d join today, and how we’ll achieve our mission of making sure the technology we all use is tech we trust.

Unexpected emergence: some members have created the Social Ledger, a new way to coordinate and organise information and effort. Still in early stages of development, but other communities are testing it out which is exciting :)

Ongoing learning: how hard it is to bootstrap a new venture with genuinely distributed power. I’d thought we would be a co-op with some fairly conventional centralised leadership, perhaps an elected group driving things forward, but early on enough members wanted to try something more decentralised that we’ve not done that. We don’t have a clear structure for governance yet — although a lot of thought has gone into exploring options. There’s no question that radical organisational ideas are appealing and potentially necessary for the scale of organisation we aspire and hope to be, with millions of members, but it’s hard to get going whilst there’s no template to follow. I think the lack of clarity here has slowed us down, if only because active members have felt uncertain how to proceed with ideas, and it’s not obvious where to put effort (other than “what you like”, which isn’t necessarily helpful). This still feels like the biggest risk to us — but is also a huge opportunity, to pioneer a genuinely new way of working and organising which could unlock a better power dynamic for tech organisations.

We keep improving and moving forward. If you want to join a grand project to try to build a better way to make tech we can all trust, anyone can become a member. Folks with time and energy to contribute to helping us — in any way — are especially appreciated as members :)