User:Nthmost/On Thinking Out Loud

When i want to understand something -- really understand it, not just know what it is -- i do it in public.

I post questions. I share half-formed ideas. I think out loud in a channel or a thread or a meeting, and i see what comes back. It's method. It's how the thinking actually gets done.

Noisebridge has always worked this way.

A little history

The noisebridge-discuss mailing list ran for fifteen years as the primary venue for community deliberation. Most of what got decided at Tuesday meetings got pre-chewed on the list first -- not through formal proposals, just through people saying "hey, what if" and "has anyone thought about" and "i'm not sure this is right, but."

The Reboot of 2014 emerged from exactly this kind of extended public conversation. People posted long emails. People disagreed. People changed their minds, sometimes. Nobody was required to have their position fully formed before they were allowed to speak.

I know because i was there. The pattern goes back to 2010: in a mailing list thread that kept reaching for policy, i kept redirecting it back: "what's happening in this discussion is a fleshing out of our culture, not a movement towards mandates." Three years later, door "security": culture, not policy (March 2013) -- a question about what we valued, not a proposal about what rule to write. And a year after that, still the same thing.

The same approach in Discourse (2018–2022): Executive Functioning under an Anarchist Flag opened with a question, not a proposal. Differences Between a Guild and a Working Group defined terms publicly, with other people, in real time. Towards an Anarchist Hackerspace was weeks of people thinking together about what the space could be.

What i mean by "thinking out loud"

Thinking out loud looks like: questions, observations, half-formed frameworks, "i've been reading about X and wondering if it applies here." It has no fixed endpoint. It may not lead anywhere in particular. That's okay -- that's the point of it.

Making a proposal looks like: a specific ask, a concrete change, a request for consensus. It has a clear endpoint. It should have a clear endpoint. That's what makes it a proposal.

These are both legitimate activities. They usually happen in sequence -- the first kind of thinking leads to the second, eventually, when it leads anywhere. But treating them as the same thing, or demanding the second before the first has run its course, short-circuits the process. You end up with proposals that haven't been stress-tested, because nobody was allowed to poke at the ideas before they hardened.

it happens all the time: someone thinks the way to get something done is via Consensus Proposal, so they go write the proposal and bring it to the meeting, and people say, "this is weird thinking for X, Y, and Z reasons." Proposals are what happen after consensus has generally been established... which in turn is established through exploratory conversation.

The anarchist angle

When there's no legible structure, informal power fills the gap. The prescription is to make structure visible.

Building legible structure requires the freedom to propose, discuss, discard, and reformulate -- in public, with other people, without each iteration being treated as a binding commitment. Proposals emerge from conversation. Consensus requires proposals. The conversation has to come first.

If the only acceptable form of public speech is the finished proposal, then the people who get to shape proposals are the people who already have the social relationships to do the pre-work in private.

Thinking out loud is community-building strategy. It's how you find the people who care about the same things you care about, before you've committed to any particular solution. It's how you discover that your half-formed idea was also someone else's half-formed idea, and together you have something worth proposing.

What this page is for

I wanted a place to point when someone asks why i operate the way i do, or suggests i should operate differently.

I know some people find long public threads stressful. i know not everyone has the energy to follow a thread that hasn't arrived anywhere yet. but those are not imperatives for broad cultural imposition: those are personal limitations that we can and should mitigate through other strategies.

Keeping exploratory thinking private until it's polished enough to be a formal proposal has costs too. It makes the formative stage of ideas invisible. It keeps new voices out of the part of the process where things are still actually malleable.

And mostly, it makes Noisebridge smaller and less weird, which is the opposite of what i'm going for.

I've been thinking out loud at Noisebridge since before i became a Member here (2009). I expect i'll keep doing it.

If you're the kind of person who thinks out loud too: you belong here. Come find me.