Mixed Voices:
Hello and welcome to OEG Voices.
OEG Voices.
OEG Voices.
OEG Voices.
A podcast bringing you the voices and ideas of open educators from around the world. OEG Voices is produced by Open Education Global, a member-based non-profit organization supporting the development and use of open education globally. Learn more about us at oeglobal.org. There's much to take in at a global level. We hope to bring you closer to how open education is working by hearing the stories of practitioners told in their own voices. Each episode introduces you to a global open educator and we invite you to later engage in a conversation with them in our OEG Connect community.

Alan Levine:
Hello, and this is another OEG Voices podcast and I'm your host with my finger on the record button from Open Education Global. I'm Alan Levine and I'm excited here to have a conversation with two colleagues I've overlapped in for a long time. I think both Doug and Laura are people I can't even exactly pinpoint when we just seemed to always be on each other's blog post. We have some connections through Mozilla and MozFest, which was actually probably one of my Pinnacle conference experiences. I really wanted to bring to you Doug Belshaw and Laura Hilliger because they work totally in openness but in a different frame than our clients and members in higher education, but I think there's a lot of things that they have to teach us about open working and they even work in an open co-op model, which I really want to dig into to understand and share how it works, but more about the principles.
First, I want to say hello to Doug and Laura and I think because Doug talks a lot, I'm going to ask Laura to introduce herself first. You can see I am not very serious. These are good friends and they know my little sarcasm.

Laura Hilliger:
Well, Doug, does talk a lot. This is fact. I'm just kidding. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Alan for inviting us. I am Laura Hilliger and I'm about to record my own podcast intro. We also have a podcast and when I say I am Laura Hilliger and then I just want to say our tagline, too. Like Alan said, I've been working in the space between open source technology and nonprofits most of my career. Actually, open education is that in between intersect point that I started in. I was at the beginning of my career really straddling the boundary between technology and education with everything that I did. Nowadays, well, I think that education is in everything. Even though some of our clients are not directly educational projects, there's still a lot of teaching and learning that goes into what we do. Openness just underpins all of it. Really happy to be here.

Alan Levine:
Well, thank you. First of all, where exactly are you? Because we like to put people on the map.

Laura Hilliger:
I am in Dresden, Germany, which is about an hour and a half south of Berlin.

Alan Levine:
Excellent.

Doug Belshaw:
Hence the accent.
See why we get along?

Laura Hilliger:
An ex-pat.

Doug Belshaw:
I was trying to remember when we were in that tiny little pub together, Alan, and I think it was probably the first time I met you in real life, maybe at Mozfest?

Alan Levine:
I think, or it might've been I had an earlier tour through England, something that Martin Weller hooked up and I was in London for a while, so it may have been that, but it could have been at MozFest.

Doug Belshaw:
Literally like nine, 10 years ago. It's been a while. But yeah, I have worked in the higher education before, although I manage used to escape. I worked in schools before that and set up a co-op with Laura after we left Mozilla and I've been to work with Moodle. But yeah, these days work full-time through the co-op. I'm in the northeast of England, basically as far north as you can go before you get to Scotland. We get to do cool stuff with interesting people working remotely and traveling when the pandemic lets us and all that kind of stuff. I'm very pleased to be on this podcast because I think some people listening might be interested in the cooperative model. Some people might be interested in some of the stuff we talk about. Also, I would love it if someone was listening who I've had a conversation or Laura has had a conversation before at a conference and we've fallen off their radar a bit. If we could reconnect with people after this pandemic pause.

Alan Levine:
Yeah, let's hope that happens. First, tell us about, I almost said wow, but tell us about, We Are Open because I think it says it all and that's the name. It is a business, but it's run in a cooperative model. How did you come to want to set this up and how does it work?

Laura Hilliger:
Well, the way that we came to it was, it's interesting. what we felt like we needed at the time and actually something that I still need today is solidarity between independent workers. At the time when we formed the co-op, the founding members were all working on their own. Not for big organizations. It was after Mozilla time and it was in between my working with Mozilla and my working with Greenpeace. There was just this in between time where we had realized that having a little bit of solidarity between "freelancers" might be beneficial. Our colleague John is a crazy radical from back in the day and was really interested in the UK cooperative space. We worked with him also at Mozilla, so we started to explore what would it look like if we actually work together through this vehicle that is a cooperative.

Doug Belshaw:
There's four of us in the co-op at the moment. There's Bryan Mothers whose work lots of people listening to this will be aware of. Laura, myself, and John, who's just been mentioned, and also we collaborate with different people. We had to create a co-op where there's no one in charge because can you imagine Laura being my boss? It would just be horrendous. It's been what? It'll be seven years in May and we just get to do some cool stuff. What are some of the people that we worked with before? Well, we've worked with people like Greenpeace, with tech companies, with nonprofits, and all different kinds of people doing community work, doing courses, helping them work more openly, like Sport England at the moment. They've got lots of different bodies that look after Basketball England and Hockey England and they don't work together, really. We're helping them work together and share data and share ideas and approaches and just take those first steps that lots of people listening to this will just take for granted, but actually are really needed to open up organizations.

Laura Hilliger:
Taking for granted I think is really interesting because last week I published a post that was literally a copying and pasting some stuff that Doug had somewhere and I called it Five Practical Tips to Working Openly. It was tips like take notes in meetings and it was so basic and I just threw it all into a post really quickly just to say what we had been doing with Sport England and really basic tips and I didn't think anything of it and now, it's being shared over and over and over again. I think these really basic things that open educators take for granted are things that people just don't think about. Us documenting them and sharing them in a way that is easily accessible. Important to remember those basics.

Alan Levine:
I was one who read the post and shared it with my colleagues.

Laura Hilliger:
Really?

Alan Levine:
That's how things get around. Are organizations coming to you with the interest in openness or are they coming to you because of the reputation or because you've had the success with other client or other orgs that they know about? What do they first say when they say we want to work with We Are Open?

Laura Hilliger:
It's really a mixed bag. Go ahead, Doug.

Doug Belshaw:
No, no, I was going to say exactly the same thing. I think there's three different routes in. There's yes, come and help us be more open, but then there's we know your work, Laura, and we'd like to work with you and oh, you've got a co-op as well. Great. The network kind of thing. And then we've done, especially in the pandemic and stuff, we've had funding to work with network organizations who they recognize that Sport England, for example. We worked with Catalyst, who were giving out money during the pandemic to help people like Upskill. Part of that is well, what's even possible and open source tools and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes, it's the network level that has the insight. Yes, some people definitely do come to us saying we'd like to work more openly, but equally just any kind of organization of people who have got specific talents and abilities around learning and technology and community, we get to do other stuff as well, not just all open stuff. Sorry Laura, what were you going to say?

Laura Hilliger:
No, I was just reflecting on the different avenues that clients come in from. I think one of the things that we do quite actively is we promote open working. We do get clients come in that want to be a little bit closed down and we take it upon ourselves to push our clients towards being more open. We very, very rarely take on projects where we can't be completely open. We do have some, but most of them we go into it saying, okay, but we're going to want to write about this on the internet, we're going to want to talk about it. We want to be open by default and this is really important for us because we've been involved in openness so long, it's actually hard to not be open about things.

Doug Belshaw:
There's times when you have the ability to make little changes which have profound impact. For example, a client comes towards you, gives you a standard form. It could be a non-disclosure agreement, that's quite rare, but it could be just an agreement for how you're going to work together. Instead of just saying yes, we agree to that, the bit where it usually says all rights reserved, we have all the copyright, all that kind of stuff, we just push back and say we'd like to change this bit to be, we usually work under this creative commons license, yada yada yada. No one has ever said no to that, which is really interesting. It just shows how much of it is just boiler plate text, but people use that to back up crazy claims about what you can and can't do with stuff.
If you make that very clear from the get go and being more open with the stuff that you're doing, it sets the relationship as you go along. Actually, Alan, you've been part of one of the communities that we helped set up recently. In the last year, we've been working with Participate around a project called Keep Badges Weird and you've popped up in that community, I've popped up in the OEG community, and those community of practice places are really important to us because that's how people's minds get changed around things like open working and the importance of community and just getting out of that very hierarchical, top-down command and control mindset, I think.

Alan Levine:
I'm glad you brought up because I wanted to ask you more about this work with Open Participate and well first of all, I love that you named it Keep Badges Weird, I want to hear that story, but also about the whole arc because Doug, you've been involved with the Open Badges from the inception at Mozilla, but now describe about what you're framing it now as open recognition, which seems to be a bit more broader and appealing to people.

Doug Belshaw:
Well, Laura has been involved in Badges since the start as well. In fact, even before me because she was in Barcelona in 2010 when the first conversation happened. Laura predates me, but Laura, what happened? We went to Participate and said we've got this idea for an email course around badges and it just through conversations must have turned into something else. But I can't remember that exact start of it, Laura, how did that happen?

Laura Hilliger:
Well, I know that Keep Badges Weird was our code name. We didn't know what we were calling this work that we were doing. We Are Open went to participate. We've worked with them before. They sponsored the spin up of Badge Wiki back in the day and they're just awesome. We had this idea to do a basic email course around Open Badges, just something free and open that people could dip their toes into the world of Open Badges in a structured way. Like Doug said, this mushroomed out, but while it was mushrooming, we had the code name Keep Badges Weird and we just ran with it. We just kept going. That's where the name came from.

Doug Belshaw:
The interesting thing is that it resonates with lots of people. There's 350 people, whatever it is in that community now. We've been looking into the data and the way that people have engaged with that. But there is a significant subset of that who have a problem for different reasons. Sometimes it's culturally, sometimes it's to do with the organization they work in or whatever. But the weird part of it, so we're just thinking about do we keep it like that? Do we pivot more towards open recognition? We want to do more stuff which is outside of just straight-up educational circles, so we started exploring stuff with the workplace. But I think that particular project, especially if you're listening to this and you work in a higher education institution or that kind of thing, it's very much a partnership between yes, Participate are paying us to do this work, but very much a partnership between the two organizations trying to make that whole space better.
I think that's where the interesting work happens. There's plenty of work for agencies who want to build websites or run this community the way that this hierarchal organization tells you to. But the work that we do is always in partnership with organizations and we turn stuff down, either because of cost issues or also because it's not really a very good fit. We would never work with a straight-up oil company, for example. We have our list of ethics and that kind of stuff, but also we just sometimes laugh if organizations who are so out of whack with our principles and the way that we work even suggest working with us, which is a nice space to be in.

Alan Levine:
That has happened? Someone has come to you not really understanding who you are or your principles?

Doug Belshaw:
Oh, for sure, yeah. An investment bank and not rude, but at the same time, we try and make sure they understand that we're not just another agency.

Alan Levine:
Right. There's a shop down the road called We Are Closed.

Doug Belshaw:
Exactly.

Alan Levine:
But I liked how you, because the community building part is fascinating to me and that you have that active community in the Keep Badges Weird. It gets me thinking a lot about when you talk about the fact that, it popped up on my radar because I read your blog and I know your work and I get Laura's email newsletters and I always wander off to the links. Yeah, no, I appreciate them. But sometimes, the syncing and it goes into the drama of Twitter and Mastodon of thinking that it's one place and really, it's all these overlapping connections because I know that one of your active community members is one of our active ones, Alex Enkerley, who's just a gem and he's so generous and he's one of those bridger people that you really need. And then you've written quite a few things that are useful about the arc of growth of communities. How much is it what you architect and how much is it what you let go and happen?

Laura Hilliger:
That is a really good question because I think a lot of people think that if you just build the space for people to show up to, then people will show up, but that's not actually how it works. There is architecture behind a successful community of practice and there are people who promote the principles and values of that community and work to network people together and try to have it be a fun, welcoming space or well, welcoming, at least, maybe not always fun, depending on how serious a particular community is. Activist communities might not necessarily be what I would call as fun, but they're organizing around a particular set of ideals and that is architected.
But if it is too strong-arm architected, if the moderation of the community or the organization who's running the community, funding the community tries to put in too much structure or doesn't pay attention to what people in the community are actually doing, then that can stifle it as well. For me, community building is definitely a balancing act between providing structure for people so that they have a place that they can engage and letting go of structure so that that engagement, regardless of what it is, is something that furthers the community.

Doug Belshaw:
I think that OEG Connect is a good example of that. I see you every Monday posting stuff, the Pulse. You've got a question. It's what's your favorite color? It's relevant to that particular audience and that community and it gets people being able to share what they know and what they're interested in and stuff. A few we've been working on. One thing we haven't mentioned is that we work with other cooperatives and there's the seven international principles of cooperation, which we have in our articles of incorporation. One of those, principle six, is solidarity and cooperation amongst co-ops. The idea is that you're trying to build the cooperative economy by working with similar organizations. One of those that we worked with recently called Common Knowledge, Alex from Common Knowledge shared this book, which I'm just showing Alan and it's Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities by Richard Millington.
This book is 10 years old, but building communities online has been going around for ages. Howard Rheingold, yourself, Alan, other people. What it does a great job at, I think, even though some of the screenshots are like, oh my goodness, is that what the web was like? It talks about the ways in which people interact with each other and the kinds of things you should encourage and the things you shouldn't and the data and exactly the things that you are doing in the community, the kind of things that you probably just do naturally just from your experience. If people aren't used to that, that book, and I think there's a followup as well, is a really good place to just delve into the stuff that I'm doing just naturally, is that a good thing to do? Should I step in? Should I step back? All that kind of stuff.

Alan Levine:
I actually don't know what the heck I'm doing. It was one of the things that was asked of me when I joined OE Global was to create a community space to have a place for people to connect and collaborate between the events that we do. I've been trying everything for a while and you get a little bit of traction and we used it to run our online conferences and then adjuncts to an in-person conference and it was good, but something just clicked in the last couple weeks and I can't really say what it was, whether it was this burst of interest, anger about the Fediverse, but there's also some positive news, we share our words, but it's really hard and I've always tried to say it takes way longer than you think it will for it to get that momentum.
I don't think I'm there yet. I've been trying a lot of different things and the most important are those key people like Alex, and I could rattle off. I give out a discourse badge, I call them extraordinary. That's funny. It's not a real badge, it's just the thing that the Discord platform does. I'm surprised what it means to people, because to me, it's like a like button, but it's even those small bits of recognition that seem to matter to people. But I'm making this up as I go.

Doug Belshaw:
Because you've issued me the Fediverse pioneer badge. Laura, maybe we should talk about the badges that we've got on the Keep Badges Weird community, because you'd expect some decent badges on a community which literally talks about communities of practice and badges. What we got, Laura?

Laura Hilliger:
I think it's really interesting because a lot of the badges that we have in Keep Badges Weird just came up organically. We responded to what people were doing and said, ooh, that is a behavior that I would like to recognize. We have some quite funny ones. Everyone's favorite I think is the Hoof Meister badge, which is a little illustration from our colleague Brian Mathers of David Hasselhoff holding that rescue bubble. I don't know what those are called in swimming. I should, but I don't. The red thing they had in Baywatch. We give that badge to people when they have come into a conversation and helped that conversation take a positive turn, so like rescuing the conversation from maybe rabbit holing or from getting negative or something like that. That's one of my favorites. But we also have badges for people who keep the peace, for people who start conversations. We award a badge for people who have just taken a step at introducing themselves and we have some --].

Doug Belshaw:
First badge, yeah.

Laura Hilliger:
Yeah, that's the first badge. Exactly. I was just going to say we have badges that are really focused on community values and then we have stealth badges that are marking pro-social behaviors that we think makes the community have a nice vibe.

Alan Levine:
I think I made, sorry. One time, you know this guy Steven Downes, he wrote something once that was a little bit stingy, so I made a special badge that is only awarded to Steven Downes.

Laura Hilliger:
Oh, you're not talking about the putting Downes badge, which is... Oh, okay.

Alan Levine:
No. They're common. I've seen a few variants in other systems.

Laura Hilliger:
Yeah, there's a badge in the Keep Badges Weird community that is awarded to people who have been "put down" by Stephen Downes.

Alan Levine:
Yeah, yes. I call it getting "Downsed".

Doug Belshaw:
Yeah. Because people often, especially if you work in academia, you might have been exposed to badges in the early days and anytime you are exposed to something quite early in the maturity of something, you think you know it and then it evolves and changes and then you see it again and you have to revisit your previous opinion. One of the things that we've learned over the last 10 years of Badges is that the motivation for why it is that you want to earn a badge is important. As Laura said there, there's badges that you are working towards because you can see them. There's stealth badges that you don't know that you can earn that are just given to you in a secret way. We've also learned that if you go to an event and you're literally issued the patch, the sew-on patch of a badge that you've earned, that's a really powerful thing.
Also, just as Laura said, Don Presant on one of our community calls recently used the metaphor of a seagull swooping in, making lots of edits to a wiki, and then swooping out again. One of the badges that we're working out at the moment is the seagulls swooper badge for a flurry of activity. Some of them are serious and some are fun and we're just trying to, as Laura said, get those pro-social behaviors to try and almost encourage the kinds of things that make communities great and discourage the things which don't. That might be quite a nice bridge to some of the things you just mentioned there about the Fediverse and algorithms versus people, different instances, how you can get people to act in ways which are more positive than negative, that kind of thing.

Alan Levine:
Well, we could talk about it because you've been inspirational. You've advocated, but you've created and you've shared things such as the rules of conduct that you created for an instance you developed. I'm wondering, it feels like this has some momentum. Is it going to stick? Is this going to get us to a period of change the way we go about our online whatever we call what we used to do in Twitter?

Doug Belshaw:
What do you think, Laura? As someone who had a Mastodon account, what, 2017, and then has been posting a few things then come back a bit more recently?

Laura Hilliger:
Yeah, I feel like I'm not a good case study because I have been backing away from all social media for a number of years. But yes, I have been on the Fediverse for, well, I guess 2016, 2017 joined Mastodon Social and now everybody wants me to move to a different server. I'm like, but I was here first. Although I do understand different instances and it's good to sign up to smaller servers for reasons, but as far as is it going to stick? Is it going to become mainstream? How is this going to impact the internet? I think that's what a lot of us are asking ourselves. What is it going to look like when actually, social media really is decentralize? I have some theories, but I don't really have a clear understanding or view about what mainstream, I just did air quotes for mainstream, mainstream social media users, what they're going to do.
Because one of the things about social media for years and years and years has been behavioral economics. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, those tools are designed to have people act a certain way and to have them value certain kinds of things like attention. The Fediverse doesn't work like that. Mastodon as a short-form blogging platform doesn't care about attention and doesn't reward you for having more attention. I wonder, what does it really mean for society? Does it mean that people that are going to stop caring what a rando on the internet thinks? I don't think that that's a change that's going to come very quickly because I think that the behavioral economics of social media platforms were based on capitalism anyway. But it is a ripe rabbit hole for philosophical discussion on how we as human beings behave, for sure. What do you think, Doug?

Doug Belshaw:
Well, so all of us three were on Twitter in the early days, like 2007. What has been amazing to me has been seeing how people, so I blocked the word Twitter on the Fediverse and Mastodon because I can't deal with people being giddy about not having an algorithm anymore. It was fun at first, but what I saw when people were reflecting on their experience and comparing the two was that people who maybe didn't sign up to Twitter until 2013, 2015, 2017, being amazed that clicking a like button or favorite button had no impact on what they saw. Literally it was just I'll unpost something, I favorite it, I get to press the button, I get  unpress the button. That's it. Which it was in the early days of Twitter. For me, that's not amazing, but for the people it's like, oh my goodness, this is fantastic.
I think there's lots of handwringing going on. I think there's lots of people making grand pronouncements about what it means for society and this and that and whatever. I don't particularly want Mastodon to go mainstream, and that's for two reasons. Firstly, because it would mean I have to go get out of there quickly. I remember seeing a bumper sticker years ago saying, if you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much room or something like that. That stuck with me in terms of my career and innovation and stuff. Chase the weird stuff. But secondly, Mastodon, as people are probably sick of me saying, Mastodon is not the Fediverse. It's like saying, oh, are you on Gmail when actually you mean email? It's one part of it. I'm experimenting with Pixel Fed, which is a bit like Instagram.
I'm admin of exercise.cafe where there's, I don't know, 40 people who are sharing updates about excise and fitness and that kind of thing. And then we've got a test instance of something called Misskey, which is Japanese with all of its difference. I haven't been to Japan. I think you two both have. It's supposed to be a massive culture shock when you do. It's a little bit like that with the software as well. It's quite different from Western software. It's still a micro blogging platform, but it has loads of different additional features you could turn on off. It's got a little anime girl for the 404 message, all this stuff going on. I'm testing out that.
I guess I want to keep everything weird. I want to push things a little bit so that we know what's coming next and what shouldn't come next and give the critique of that. Because as we know, there's a vanguard of people who get to set the norms for who comes next. We had that with Twitter, unfortunately that got corrupted when they had their IPO and they then had shareholders. But if we can create spaces for people to come into which have got space for pro-social behaviors, got appropriate technologies, I guess that's what we're trying to do, which sounds a bit ambitious, but hey, you've got to have goals in life.

Laura Hilliger:
But I don't. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Alan.

Alan Levine:
No, no. I was going to say, go ahead, Laura.

Laura Hilliger:
I was just going to respond with, I think it's interesting because those of us who have been involved in open education for years and years or open source or technology, there was always a particular kind of ambition with decentralizing and democratizing technology and our spaces. I feel like we've a little bit lost in terms of the internet because the internet is built on open standards. The idea was that it would be decentralized and that it would be democratized. And then some of these big, corporate tech firms came along and they've managed to piece by piece close it down. Those of us who are riding the edge of innovation, or however you frame that, I think it has more to do with curiosity and boredom than wanting to be cutting edge or something. We've always seen that the more we can use technology to actually interact with our communities, with other people and on the individual basis, on community basis, communities of practice, this kind of stuff, personally, the happier I am, I'm a lot happier interacting with real people in real communities than I am interacting with the algorithm.

Alan Levine:
I completely lost my point and it was pointless. But I think wondering, too, it seems like when you're in the middle or at least listening to some of these discussions, you forget that the majority of people don't even know about it and probably don't care too much. But that also means it's an opportunity for them to start anew without all this baggage of what happened before. We want to create the avenues for people who don't even understand this stuff to get that sense of excitement. At least that's what I'm optimistic for. I also want to say like we mentioned, I'm envious that you get to work with Bryan Mathers.
He did a little bit. We used his remixer for a couple of our things and obviously, as soon as you see someone's project and you know that they're using Bryan's work, that's a real cranny achievement. Say hello to Bryan for me. I can't respect him enough. I thought maybe to circle a little bit back about important differences or similarities to working with the range of clients that you do. What can people in education learn about the way that organizations and charities and interest groups who are outside this institutional box? What lessons are there to learn or what's the same?

Doug Belshaw:
Yeah. I've worked in, if you think about how hierarchical schools are both for kids and for the staff there and universities, to some extent, although you get a bit more academic freedom. I worked for JISC in the UK, which some people will be aware of. You should mention at this point we've got a site called learnwith.weareopen.com, and on that site, we have got some email courses. This is what we were planning to build with Open Badges for participate. The most recent one is feminism is for everybody, especially educators as well as am I allowed to swear on the radio on this?

Alan Levine:
Of course, yeah.

Doug Belshaw:
How to Unf*ck your organization. And then we've got what we talk about when we talk about open and the seven habits of highly successful online meetings.
That just takes you through what it is to actually work openly. Because a lot of the time when we talk to people, when we've been brought in, people think that they work openly. We're not saying that we have the last word on it, but really, it doesn't take much of a push for people to realize, oh yeah, we really don't work very openly. The feminism stuff has really opened eyes as a straight, white, middle-aged male. That kind of work. I guess if you work in a hierarchical organization, which is most people, the ability to have the agency that we have in an organization that we serve ourselves and we co-own.
You are never going to be able to get that level of agency in a hierarchical organization, but I think sometimes people hide their light under a bushel a little bit and they need to think about their job descriptions not as a box to be contained within, but a box to stand up on top of, not in the sense of doing more work, but more like you've been hired to do a role and be the biggest version of that you can possibly be and try and make as much change as you can in the world. Sometimes that means blowing up processes which are entirely fine and average and okay and replacing them with something which is awesome, but also takes a while to get there.
One thing that I like showing some of our clients is something called the sigmoid curve. I remember doing this earlier this year with one of our clients. The sigmoid curve, I came across at Cramlington Learning Village, which is just up the road from me, and Cramlington Learning Village had this amazing approach to pedagogy and everything like that. I wish I could have sent my kids there. They just basically said, you have to start off doing innovation before things start to decline. Everything has an arc to it, like a tennis ball being served over a net and you have to push onto the next thing before you start your decline.
When you start that next thing, there's going to be a little bit of awkwardness and pushback. Actually things will get a little bit weird, not as productive for a while, but so you can move onto the next level. It's like an S-shaped curve. That's always stuck with me even since I saw it about 15 years ago, because that's a hard thing to do with clients in any organization, trying to say there's going to be a little bit of awkwardness and weirdness while we do this innovation work, but then you're going to open up these massive opportunities to do some amazing, amazing things.

Laura Hilliger:
Yeah, that's interesting. There's an advocacy model that's based on the same curve called the two loops model from the Burkana Institute, which is something that we've looked at through the lens of Open Badges just this year. Looking at how do you actually create system change? As Doug was just saying there, when you begin to innovate a new system, you can actually impact an old system. Creating change doesn't mean destroying the old system, but rather providing an alternative that people can see themselves inside. Because if you don't have the alternative, then it's really hard to imagine how can the world possibly exist without system X?
We've been looking a bit into how a system change actually works. That model is really interesting because it uses a language of putting an old system in hospice, which is quite compassionate and kind and really just understanding that people inside of a system need a place to be. They need a system to be inside of. Instead of just saying, we're going to dismantle everything and smash it all to the ground, actually being prepared to say, and this is where you can go when that starts to happen. It just makes people feel safe and it helps you actually create real change in the world because people don't hold on to the old system because they have nothing else to grab onto.

Doug Belshaw:
I think what you just said there is extremely important because when you just stand for opposing the current system without standing for something else, then exactly what Laura said. How am I supposed to act in the world if I'm just being negative about the current system? You have to stand for something, which is why I think the communities like OEG Connect and Keep Badges Weird and all these places, they're giving a new space for people to say, well, these are my tribe and these are the things which we stand for and these are the kind of behaviors I want to engage in. I think you should question everything. Laura and I were talking about the fact that I do about 25 hours' paid work a week. I do loads of other stuff. Where does the 40-hour week come from?
Who decided that? Because 40 hours, if you went back a hundred, 150 years, wouldn't even seem like very much, yet today we see it as quite a lot. I think you should question everything and try and design your life and the way that you work in the organization that you are in without the constraints that you've currently got, and just think about what it is you want to do. It might be that actually, the work that you need to do, it can't be done in the organization that you are in just because of the current constraints that you've got. You need to move out somewhere else. That's a scary thing, especially if you decide that actually, I need to have my own organization to do this. That's quite a big step.

Laura Hilliger:
I was just going to try to loop back to your question that kicked off this bit of conversation and thinking about what people can do inside of higher education institutions or other organizations. I think what Doug just said there about questioning constraints. I think one of the things that we don't tend to question is some of the social norms that we're brought up to understand. The idea of having a boss, which is something that at the co-op, we make fun of this idea of having a boss. Somebody is going to boss you, a full-grown adult, around and tell you what to do. We know that that's not what good leadership looks like or a good manager.
You've heard the phrase that people don't quit jobs, they quit managers. We know what good leadership looks like and good leadership looks like the boss treating their subordinates, which is also a language that we shouldn't be using, in a way that respects their self-autonomy and their what they can actually bring to the table. People have different skills and competencies, they have different talents. Questioning those social norms around hierarchy inside of higher education institutions is really important because we are not perfect. Our societies aren't perfect and there's always room for improvement.

Doug Belshaw:
I think that's why communities of practice are particularly interesting because where's the hierarchy in the community of practice? Yes, there's people who step up like yourself, Alan, and we do and feed the community. It's almost, I don't want to use servant leadership because Laura has critiqued that recently and I don't want to say those words anymore, but it's doing things on behalf of the community. It's helping one another. Yes, there are always in a group of people, people sort themselves out into some kind of order, but then I try and explain cooperativism to people. It's like, well, Laura leads on some things. I lead on some other things. John leads on, like there is no fixed hierarchy. We're flexible in the way that we resource stuff and we're part of that cooperative technologist network of 40, 50 co-ops who we can pull on.
We don't have to hire someone. Yes, we have collaborators and whatever, but we can just get in touch with our friends. They come in, help us on a very specific thing, whatever. We don't have to expand. It's a bit like when you work in teaching, you get to a certain level and you have to go into administration or be a manager or whatever. Oh, you're really good at teaching? Well, let me give you a completely different job to do. It's a bit like that when you run an organization that isn't like us. If you're trying to just build a business, build a business, build a business, you end up just being a business person and running a business and not doing the work, whereas we want to do the work. I think that's the difference there. But the hierarchy thing is particularly important to us because it's all about agency and trying to make sure that we collaborate together on the same level with one another, recognizing each other as human beings rather than one person as their boss, which is a bit weird.

Alan Levine:
Possibly people can somehow, even if they are in a hierarchy, they can perhaps informally operate like this under the giant arc, because it's certainly possible to make those connections. What you're describing made me think of instead of leadership being this role or this actual thing of power is that in the community space, people earn it through reputation and doing the positive work and not always being the loud person in the community space. That's really hard to get people to think about other ways they can contribute.

Doug Belshaw:
Taking two of our themes together so far, social media and what we've just been talking about there, I always think that thought leadership is neither thought nor leadership, it's just content with people who often, and I'll try not to generalize too much, but often people who wish they could be leaders and don't have much leadership ability at the moment or whatever, I think anyone can become a leader, desperately hoping that they could as they type from their parents' basement. I think that leadership is something that you can learn. I think the thought bit of it really needs in-depth research, practitioners doing stuff, sharing their work, working openly rather than someone just retyping a Forbes magazine article for status or kudos on LinkedIn. That would be a nice thing to do.

Alan Levine:
We Are Open is just this big, happy collaborative where you sit around and smile and you never have arguments, right?

Doug Belshaw:
That's right. Yeah.

Laura Hilliger:
Yeah, no. Doug and I definitely do not fight like brother and sister sometimes.

Alan Levine:
I can't see that. Well, I really want to thank you both for being able to jump into my unstructured format. It's been a pleasure. Mostly what rings somebody is there's communities, we think about ones that are identified and then there's the ones that are developed over time between communities. I don't know if there's even a name for that, but to me, that's what's been the most valuable part of this work and it happens over such a long stretch that you don't even realize it. That's what enabled me to reach out to you and say, hey, do you mind giving me an hour of your time to share your wisdom for some podcast for some organization?

Doug Belshaw:
Yeah, we want to get you on our podcast as well. What you've just described there with the different communities of practice, what Participate have been talking about recently is landscapes of practice and different communities of practice joining together within a wider landscape of practice, which is basically what I think we have all been part of over the last 15, 20 years.

Alan Levine:
I just want to say thank you for listening to yet another episode of OEG Voices and this is a podcast that I help produce at Open Education Global and there's going to be some featured open licensed music. I always pick something from the free music archive and I found a track called Together by Au fond do car. I was like, I know them, I'm just kidding. It's licensed Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial share-alike. I love making use of the free music archive. You'll find this episode at our site, voicesoeglobal.org, and if you want, follow us up in conversation with Doug and Laura in that OEG Connect community space that we mentioned. I'd be happy to continue this conversation in your podcast. I'd like to do that. Thank you both Doug and Laura for coming on to the show today.

Laura Hilliger:
Thanks so much for having us.

Doug Belshaw:
Thanks.