The content in this thread has been co-created during a workshop that took place back at the beginning 2020. Later became the group description of "How we work together" Talk group.

Iam a group admin and open this thread now copying that same content to enable updates and future modifications suggested by the community.

Please suggest in the comments what you think it should be modifyed or updated.

Welcome to Kiez Burn. If you want to know how Kiez Burn is organised, how you can participate, and so on, you can read this document and the associated links. Reading the whole process will take 60-90 minutes. We hope that by the end of this you will have a clear understanding of how decisions are made, how the organization is structured, and specifically, how you can contribute.

Who is this for?

This guide is an overview of how we organize Kiez Burn. If you want to get involved in organizing, we recommend reading this. If you want to bring art to Kiez Burn, you can skip ahead to the Dreams section, that's likely all you need.

Kiez Burn

Kiez Burn is organized by a community of volunteers, and supported by a legal entity called Kiez Burn e.V. You can read about what that means here.

We use a model called Consensual Doocracy to organize ourselves. You can read about what that means in more detail here.

To support this Consensual Doocracy process, we use the following tools:

• Talk - We use a software called Loomio to discuss ideas and make decisions. For a more in depth introduction click here. You're reading this on the Talk platform, so you've already mastered the most important part!

• Dreams - For our main Kiez Burn event, we use the Dreams platform to decide how much money to invest in art projects (and maybe core infrastructure). Each ticket holder can vote. Click here to learn more about how this works.

• Realities - We use the Realities software to track work that is necessary for the event to happen. This tool is quite complicated and relatively ugly. It's a work in progress! You're invited to improve this and the other tools! Click here for an intro to Realities.

Principles & values

Kiez Burn the event, and the community, are organized according to the 11 principles taken from Burning Man and extended with Consent. Click here to read them in detail.

As a community we're committed to a set of values. They're inspired in party by the principles. You can read all about the Kiez Burn values here.

Meetings

We have some advice and best practices on how we organize meetings. Please check them out here. This gives you an idea of what to expect at our in-person meetings. We post meetings on the Kiez Burn Facebook group. You can see all the upcoming (and past) events here.

Facebook

Facebook is AMAZING to spread the word. So please, always try to cross-post important Talk threads to Facebook.

However, we advise to have your discussions & decision making on talk, not Facebook, because:

• Attention manipulation: Facebook maximizes time-on-site which means it favors "contentious discussions". Facebook loves conflict over constructive decision-making discussions.

• Filter bubbles: users get to see what Facebook found keeps you engaged, not what is more important for the community or event.

• No overview: no topic aggregation, search,...

• Commodification: surveillance capitalism and the events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal: Facebook makes billions off your data

Glossary

You might hear our community using some words that you don't recognize. To support newcomers in onboarding we have a glossary here. If you see words you don't recognize, feel free to add them to the glossary. It's hard for us to know which words might not be clear to a newcomer.

Time

If you take one thing from this document, please take this. Try to be concise.

You will write something once. Hopefully it will be ready 10 or 100 times. Please write short messages. Please take a little extra time to refine and shorten your message. This single effort has the biggest impact on keeping our discussions and decision making efficient.

Quality

A word about quality. Here at Kiez Burn we're experimenting with how to organize ourselves in new and slightly non-standard ways. It might take a while to get a handle on how it works if you're used to more hierarchical, top-down, command and control structures.

As this approach is quite new, many of our tools are quite simple, or unrefined. Mostly they are built by volunteers and are continuously evolving. Please don't expect to see the level of "polish" that you might expect from very well funded startups!

As per the consensual doocracy model, if you think the tools could be better, you're invited to take action to make that happen. The technical software work of managing and improving these tools happens on the Robot Ministry group.

Make this better

We realize this post is quite long. We are a consensual doocracy, please feel free to improve this post by making it shorter and clearer. Since this is a group description, only group admins can change the above, so please suggest changes in the comments below.