Tag: cooperation

The Threads dilemma: a lesson in cooperative decision-making

Posted on July 21, 2023July 21, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

As a member of social.coop, a cooperative social network that uses Mastodon, I’ve recently observed our community grappling with a significant decision. Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced that their new platform, Threads, would join the ‘Fediverse‘ — a collective of instances compatible with federated social network protocols like ActivityPub. This sparked a debate within social.coop about whether to block any federated instances created by Meta, a decision that had to be made democratically.

However, the way this decision was introduced was problematic. A member, who hadn’t been active in prior discussions, suddenly proposed a vote. This rushed approach led to a low turnout, with only 68 out of several thousand members voting. The result was inconclusive and not representative of the community.

What followed was a convoluted discussion with multiple threads (no pun intended!) that were hard to follow. Many comments were made without considering previous discussions. Two more ‘formal’ proposals were brought forward, but neither provided a clear path forward. The lack of structure and process was evident and concerning.

The issue escalated to the point where some members suggested splitting the co-op along the lines of those for and against defederating with Threads. This is a situation we should strive to avoid. Cooperatives work best when there are defined and well-understood processes, leading to productive discussions and timely decisions. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case in our response to Meta’s announcement about Threads.

My concern isn’t so much about the decision to defederate from Threads, but rather the process by which we arrived at this point. The discussion was exhausting and unproductive, with endless notifications about new opinions that often repeated what had already been said. This felt like an endless cycle of debate without resolution.

Cooperatives should not rely solely on consensus or voting. Instead, they should use consent-based decision making, which focuses on whether members object to a proposal rather than whether they agree with it. This approach acknowledges different perspectives and experiences and allows us to operate together towards a shared aim.

To improve our decision-making process, I suggest the following:

Proposals should follow agreed guidelines. If a member is unsure how to proceed, they should consult with a working group.
There should be separate areas for discussion and decision-making.
Proposals should be high-level and only brought to the whole membership if they aren’t covered by an existing policy.
We should use consent-based decision-making, asking whether people object (i.e. have critical concerns) rather than necessarily wholeheartedly agreeing.
Our mantra should be: is this good enough for now and safe enough to try?

By adopting these solutions, we can ensure that our cooperative remains a place for productive cooperation and informed decision-making. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by discussion and debate but the cooperative movement has solved problems in this area, and I think social.coop would benefit from adopting them.

Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash

Coworking spaces should be run by cooperatives

Posted on March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 by Doug Belshaw

This afternoon, as a result of being tagged in a LinkedIn thread, I ended up spending a couple of hours at an event local to me about rural coworking. There were some interesting people there, but only two of us who weren’t from organisations in some way affiliated with the project.

I am aware that I’m getting ever-deeper into the world of co-operatives, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the default position wasn’t that coworking spaces should be run by cooperatives?

The assumption seemed to be that to be financially viable, coworking spaces had to have a for-profit organisation behind them. While they talked about the importance of community and how crucial it is for the success of the enterprise, until I mentioned it the thought that maybe that community could own the coworking space didn’t seem to come up.

It was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, even if it did take me away from paid client work. However, I couldn’t help but leave with a slightly bitter taste in my mouth when I discovered in the last five minutes of the meeting that their project funding runs out in a couple of months. I hope I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be much in the way of tangible outputs.

Perhaps it was because I’d just finished helping facilitate a session for the newly-formed workers.coop member learning group but I couldn’t help but think that co-ops would approach this differently. Sadly, when I did a quick search for cooperatively owned and run coworking spaces I couldn’t seem to find any other than Space4 in the UK.

So this is a reminder to myself to investigate further, and a call for anyone reading this to prove me wrong. I hope there’s a flourishing scene out there, along with a guidebook on how to get started for those interested!

Image: output from the session (have a guess who was the basis for this persona!) 😉

Research supporting collaborative, enquiry-based learning.

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Doug Belshaw

One of the great things of studying in the Education Library at Durham University (instead of at home, in my study) is the books I randomly stumble across. For example, I pulled Models of Learning – Tools for Teaching off the shelf today and it fell open at Chapter 7, entitled ‘Learning through cooperative disciplined inquiry.’

This is perfect for me. One of my Performance Management targets for this year – the one focused on my own classroom practices – is about piloting enquiry-based learning with one of my Year 7 History classes. In addition, I’ll (hopefully) be presenting with Nick Dennis at the SHP Conference in July 2010 on this very topic – including the way technology can help! :-p

It’s always good to have some scholarly research to back up one’s actions, so if you’re planning to do something similar here’s some quotations to help you!

The most stunning thing about teaching people to help kids learn cooperatively is that people don’t know how to do it as a consequence of their own schools and life in this society. And, if anything is genetically driven, it’s a social instinct. If it weren’t for each other, we wouldn’t even know who we are. (Herbert Thelen to Bruce Joyce, circa 1964) p.95

The chapter is based on case studies across the age range, but also contains this nugget on p.98-9:

The assumptions that underlie the development of cooperative learning communities are straightforward:

The synergy generated in cooperative settings generates more motivation than do individualistic, competitive environments. Integrative social groups are, in effect, more than the sume of their parts. The feelings of connectedness produce positive energy.

The members of cooperative groups learn from one another. Each learner has more helping hands than in a structure that generates isolation.

Interacting with one another produces cognitive as well as social complexity, creating more intellectual activity that increases learning when contrasted with solitary study.

Cooperation increases positive feelings towards one another, reduces alienation and loneliness, builds relationships, and provides affirmative views of other people.

Cooperation increases self-esteem not only through increased learning but through the feeling of being respected and cared for by others in the environment.

Students can respond to experience in tasks requiring cooperation by increasing their capacity to work together productively. In other words, the more children are given the opportunity to work together, the better they get at it, with benefit to their general social skills.

Students, including primary school children, can learn from training to increase their ability to work together.

The authors go on to summarise the evidence about improved learning through collaboration on p.99:

Classrooms where students work in pairs and larger groups… are characterized by greater mastery of material than the common individual-study/recitation pattern. Also, the shared responsibility and interaction produce more positive feelings toward tasks… In other words, the results generally affirm the assumptions that underlie the use of cooperative learning methods.

It’s not hard to get started with cooperative learning (p.100):

[A]n endearing feature is that it is so very easy to organize students into pairs and triads. And it gets effects immediately. The combination of social support and the increase in cognitive complexity caused by the social interaction have mild but rapid effects on the learning of content and skills.

The authors dismiss claims from some teachers that ‘gifted students prefer to work alone’ as the evidence does not back this up (Joyce 1991; Slavin 1991). They believe it may rest on a misunderstanding of the relationship between individual and cooperative study; partnership still requires individual effort. There’s no need to be concerned about students’ ability to work together (p.101):

In fact, partnership s over simple tasks are not very demanding of social skills. Most students are quite capable of cooperating when they are clear about what has been asked of them.

I’ll not go into them here, but the authors mention a number of ways in which teachers can foster ‘positive interdependence’. They also suggest the ‘division of labour’ into specializations. Instead of learning only a part of what every is supposed to be learning, they have found, ‘jigsaw’ activities and the like lead to more learning across the spectrum. Many of the activities they suggest are, in fact, featured alongside others in one of my favourite education-related books, The Teacher’s Toolkit.

The teacher’s role in cooperative learning moves from that of instructor to ‘counsellor, consultant and friendly critic.’ (p.107) The authors note that this ‘is a very difficult and sensitive’ role ‘because the essence of inquiry is student activity’. Teachers need to:

facilitate the group process

intervene in the group to channel its energy into potentially educative activities, and

supervise these educative activities so that personal meaning comes from the experience

The upshot of this is that ‘intervention by the teacher should be minimal unless the group bogs down seriously’ (p.107).

The authors suggest a 6-phase process for cooperative learning:

Phase 1 – Students encounter puzzling situation (planned or unplanned).

Phase 2 – Students explore reactions to the situation.

Phase 3 – Students formulate study task and organize for study (problem definition, role, assignments, etc.)

Phase 4 – Independent and group study.

Phase 5 – Students analyse progress and process.

Phase 6 – Recycle activity.

In conclusion, the authors note how universally cooperative group investigation can be used (p.111-2):

Group investigation is a highly versatile and comprehensive model of learning and teaching: it blends the goals of academic inquiry, social integration and social process learning. It can be used in all subject areas, and with all age levels, when the teacher desires to emphasize the formulation and problem-solving aspects of knowledge rather than the intake of preorganized, predetermined information.