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Waves of uncertainty swell around you. They threaten to consume you with confusion as they crescendo. Where do you and your community turn?

Since its invention 15th-century Italy, tarot has been a technology of sense-making often used as a starting point for reflection, divination, and introspection. By consulting the cards and considering their relevance to the problems that face us, these technologies can help us forge answers to the existential queries that arise across a lifetime of complexity and change.

We invited practitioners from various open-source communities to use the tarot as a tool for sense-making about governance transitions they have witnessed or participated in. We consulted the tarot, pulling cards for each contributor and encouraging them to interpret these cards as they may—conjuring wisdom about community governance, especially in moments of liminality and transition.

Making open-source software is a way of collectively speaking new possibilities into existence. Programming and community-building both are forms of practical magic: the writing and implementation of codes, spells, or “magic words” that do things in the world. Governance is the stewardship or oversight of these processes. By demystifying certain aspects of it (and mystifying others!), we can help communities operate more effectively and democratically.

Our hope is that this zine will be an open-ended starting point—a forkable resource—that can help others navigate growth, transition, and all kinds of impasse, in software development and far beyond. 

Edited by Adina Glickstein, Drew Hornbein, and Nathan Schneider. Design by Ritual Point Art & Divination. A project of the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. 2217654. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Together with the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, MEDLab has just released a new resource on policy that could turn community ownership into the new normal in the economy, Regenerative Business Rising: How Policy Can Create an Economy Led by a Different Kind of Company.

This tool is for policy-makers, advocates and those who shape public policy at any level—local, provincial, national, or transnational. It is particularly for those with the ambition to foster a business world that embodies regenerative and distributive goals in its deep design.

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During the second half of 2022, MEDLab led seven communities to explore together the needs, ethics, and challenges of emerging decentralized technologies. What began as an errant search for practical tools became an exploration of ritual, relationship, and poetics. This fully illustrated, 80-page zine compiles reflections and learnings from the Sacred Stacks cohort.

The result, if we may say so, is beautiful.

The communities that participated are:

• Iraqi Journalists Rights Association (Baghdad, Iraq)
• Kibilio Community & Farm (Western MA, USA)
• Meli Bees Network (Barreirinha, Araribóia, Brazil and Berlin, Germany)
• Sans Souci Cooperative (Boulder, CO, USA)
• Survivors Know (Chicago, IL, USA)
• Unheard Voices Outreach (Nashville, TN, USA)
• Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA, USA)

The process was facilitated by MEDLab and the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at ���������� Boulder, in collaboration with:

• Hypha Worker Co-operative
• Metalabel
• Ritual Point Art & Divination
• Tech Chaplaincy Institute

Sacred Stacks was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, and Starling Lab for Data Integrity.

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MEDlab is proud to launch , an online art exhibition and discursive space, exploring the future of the Internet through the past and present of human self-governance. It has resulted from the collaboration spanning the last six months of an artist cohort exploring historical governance practices to inform the future of online community governance. Over the course of its meeting, this group across continents and disciplines met regularly, providing collective feedback for each project, exploring many aspects of governing communal spaces past, present, and future. The process has generated an interdisciplinary exhibition, which we are now happy to launch in the framework of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, taking place this week in Poland. The online exhibition itself is publicly accessible, offering several pathways into the projects, including their relationship to , as part of a larger research project MEDlab has been developing with King’s College London.

Please join us for a guided tour December 10 at 15:45-16:05 CET (7:45-8:05 MST); .

Excavations builds on earlier efforts to create a dialogue between multimedia artists and policy spaces such as the , an international exhibition on digital policy, conducted as part of IGF2017 in Geneva. As a further development of this initiative, Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet explores specific digital policy issues around human rights and access. Its aim is to actively facilitate a conversation beyond familiar models to imagine new, more inclusive Internet governance policies, centering actors coming from underrepresented fields of arts and humanities. 

By gathering a range of voices from internationally renowned artists, the exhibition brings perspectives such as intersectionality, indigenous practices, and media archaeology into conversation. The artists and researchers participating include: (Bhawna Parmar and Rubina Singh), , , , , , , , , , , and Jenny Liu Zhang, Cat Chang, and Isaac Gilles ().

to hear more and , where you can explore the projects, hear the artists guide you through them, and connect them to a long legacy of governance practices as together we rethink the future of the Internet. 

Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet is curated by Federica Carugati of (King’s College London), and Darija Medic and Nathan Schneider (Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado Boulder), with support from the Eutopia Foundation and the British Academy, in collaboration with DiploFoundation.

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Creating communities has never been easier. Online social networks enable groups to form among people who might never otherwise meet—across borders, even within neighborhoods, and around common causes that might otherwise remain isolated and underground. Getting involved in a community can be as easy as pressing “join.” But the technology can make community appear easier than it really is. Groups form, grow, and begin to thrive before they can consider how they will share power and deal with the conflicts that inevitably arise. Because many corporate social media platforms benefit from bottomless argument and conflict—it feeds more data about us to advertisers, after all—they are not designed to support problem solving and good governance.

Community Rules is a simple tool to help make great communities even better and healthier. It includes nine templates for organizational structures that communities can choose from, combine, or react against. The templates here are not meant to represent a complete set of possible arrangements. They are a provisional set to help spur much broader explorations, and to invite critique. Each of the templates includes example practitioners to illustrate how groups use that organizational structure. These templates are also available through a Web app we have created at , where you can customize them according to the needs of your group.

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What is a startup for? Who are startups for?

The usual answers begin sounding strange the more you think about them. A startup is kind of like a child, some say. Founders pour themselves and their resources and energy into the thing—but then, unlike a child, they sell it off to the highest bidders. A lot of founders would love to change the world for the better, right? But the usual endgame—the "exit"—for a successful startup is how many of their creations end up getting bought by bigger, old-world companies or going public on the grand-old establishmentarian casino, the stock market. Why do we even bother?

Exit to Community (E2C) is a strategy in the making. It's a different kind of story, one that connects the founders, workers, users, investors, activists, and friends who have been trying to feel their way toward a better kind of startup. Its endgame is to be a long-term asset for its community, co-owned and co-governed by those who give it life.

We wrote this because we want to make E2C easier, and we hope you'll join us, because we need your help. Here, we've tried to put together some ideas and examples of what E2C could mean, based on what is out there and what is in our hearts. But little of this will really work unless a whole lot of us team up to fill in the blanks.

What others are saying

• "We need new stories & potential paths and this is one I am excited about."—, Omidyar Network
• "Community ownership and governance of technology platforms is a big part of the movement towards a more humane future."—, Center for Humane Technology
• "The optimal governance structure for early-stage projects is founder dictatorship. The optimal governance structure for mature projects has large user/stakeholder involvement. 'Exit to community' continues to be underrated as a way to get both."—, Ethereum Foundation
• "a potential blueprint for how to prioritize sustainability and profitability while exploring alternative financing models for startups"—, Water and Music
• "[E2C] explores ways to help startups transition investor-owned to community ownership, which could include users, customers, workers or some combination of all stakeholders."—Megan Rose Dickey, "," TechCrunch (August 31, 2020)

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