McFilter

Community, Leadership and Power

Terence Eden recently reposted a link to an old blogpost of his: I don't have a community.

I don't believe that he isn't a member of a number of communities, but maybe he means in some sort of officially-recognised capacity. He might be right in that. However, he seems to then extrapolate that into him not listening to any "community leaders". No-one's telling him what to do, right?!

I agree that "community leaders" is a pretty ham-fisted term but let's cut the media some slack on that; what else would they use? Influencer?

I'm also on-board with rejecting the sort of top-down communities in favour of the bottom-up grassroots sort of groups that he hints at.

But.

I'm not on-board with the atomised, individualistic disassociation with society. Maybe that's not intended, but it reminds me of the disdain for management and the let's-keep-politics-out-of-tech culture in tech.

I understand (and share) the appeal, but the problem with that is that it surrenders our power (however little that is) to others who aren't necessarily as benevolent as we are. Maybe the problem is that we know how much work it would be to manage projects properly, or to fairly use that collected power, and it's not the type of work we enjoy and there's already too much to do.

The risk with that is that the folk who do it instead are those who don't care that the projects are managed properly or that the power they wield is used equitably. And we're reaping the "rewards" of our avoiding that work over the past couple of decades now, with fascist techbros looting the US.

I am some sort of community leader. As a co-founder and director of DoES Liverpool I have more explicit and implicit power and influence than other members of that community. Similarly, within the #FolkRidingBikes group—despite my attempts not to be—I'm one of the people folk look to for choosing routes or making decisions.

I think it's important we realise and recognise when we do have power; and aim to use it responsibly and to encourage others to develop theirs and to share it with those less privileged.