7: How do I get Involved? ​

We have argued the case for the DisCOverse and gone through its existing components, as well as the strategies to get us to a feminist, decolonial and decidedly not capitalist DisCO futures in the short/medium term.

Let's not fool ourselves, this won't be easy. We have the full power of a system stacked against us, trained to oppress, control and kill its opponents. Presently, our collective acts of resistance are actively surveilled and fed into algorithms and AI to optimize our suppression.

Money, oil and guns will only go so far, though. The converging ecological and social crises have globalized a basic existential trauma for most of the world's population. You’ve seen it yourself, today’s “outlandish suggestions” are quickly becoming tomorrow’s “realistic solutions”. Perhaps you see it as we do: inaction will lead us and our future relations, human and more-than-human, into a planet unfit for survival. If you're ready to take a stand, DisCO can prepare you to transition to a better, more scientifically grounded and respectful world. You will not be alone.

If we've done our job well, maybe you’re ready to say "Yes, I want to DisCO!" If so, read on. We know that DisCO is only one solution among many in the field of alternative economics, but we've designed it to play nice with the others. Clear DisCOmplementarities exist with:

Commonify! ​

We've spoken about the Commons throughout this site. It's one of the four main strands of the DisCO DNA. Etymologically, “Commons” Commons - Commoning - Commoner comes from the Latin munus, which means both “gift” and “duty”. This conveys a very different way of relating and caring for the gifts of nature and our cultural heritage. Our responsibility as part of nature and as commoners is to take care of our gifts. What gifts do you see or sense? What do you feel are your responsibilities? These are major reflections which cannot be rushed. In short, DisCO begins with you… but always continues with others.

Once you see DisCO as a process that applies to a wide variety of places, groups and situations, you can begin applying the act of DisCOfying to some of its most natural expressions such as Carework, capacity building, community action, building and stewarding shared resources etc. No matter how it happens, we want to help.

Find the others ​

It takes two to tango, but it takes three to DisCO. That's right, you can't do DisCO alone or as part of a power couple, you need to do the hard work of creating and caring for a community. The dominant system actively trains us away from building kin and staying with the trouble, making this work feel difficult at times. Once again, the antidote is commoning:

As author and Commons scholar David Bollier tells it, “a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.” Simply put, commoning by nature is a community act, however small or large the community. We often find groups practicing the act of commoning or things similar to DisCO without being conscious of what a commons or DisCO practice implies. As a framework for explicitly Feminist and Decolonial commoning, it's important that DisCO is not superficial but integrated as lived experiences that can lead to meaningful outcomes.

Who are the others? Whether they’re just like you or quite different in some ways, the common link is that you can see that they have been measurably othered by oppressive systems. People of color, women, trans and non-binary persons, anticapitalists, migrants, stateless, enslaved, precariat, disenfranchised, sex workers, the homeless and the land and nature itself… Social sciences allow us to quite precisely measure the level of othering, whether economic or social, that hierarchical power structures exert. And that hierarchy is reinforced because everyone knows the simple truth: there's more of us than there is of the measurably non-othered. The often occluded truth that follows is: "we know how to do it better". DisCO is one of the ways to develop this.

Where can you find the others? Following the logic of DisCO Principle 4: DisCOspaRethinking Local/Global Economics we suggest that you relate to the DisCOverse both online and in your own immediate surroundings.

Online ​

DisCO online begins with DisCO.coop, our website. There you will find community spaces, the DisCOspace Loomio discussion forum and our regular calls. This is where you can meet other people who are creating DisCOs or looking to find out more. You can also contact us for more pointers or, if you want our dedicated help, contact us for DisCOnsulting.

Our website contains a comprehensive section of Partner Orgs. These include our supporters and groups working on similar issues from varied perspectives. Many of them are discussing becoming DisCO LABS or in the process of doing so. We'll say it again, DisCO is one way. No one knows what the future brings or what viable solutions will stick. Having an overview of complementarities in movements (for example, commoning, ecofeminism, degrowth, mutual aid, land back etc) is more important than the naming used. All of these organizations are doing outstanding work which directly or indirectly benefit DisCO. We have strong personal ties with all these orgs and can vouch for their work and the incredible people doing it. They include:

Beyond DisCO and our partner orgs you will find many groups which are DisCO compatible and host their own asynchronous online spaces. One good example is social.coop, our chosen federated Mastodon instance. Some of our favorite discussions take place on Loomio, the Open Source discussion and decision making platform built by Enspiral, which is one of many DisCO inspirations and precursors. Edgeryders is a long standing online community with over 7000 users that uses semantic network analysis to foster collective solutions.

If real time synchronous communication is more your speed, you'll find good and relevant discussions in The Metagov Community. The Blockchain Socialist and Breadchain, two projects that align well with DisCO, rose from the Crypto Leftist forum in Discord. If crypto-leftism is your thing, you can also visit the OG Reddit Cryptoleftists.

More online resources for finding DisCOnauts and DisCO related projects can be found in the DisCO Ball Wiki and, in particular, the DisCOverse category. The Wiki is continually being built and added to as a practical world and lore building exercise within the DisCO Journey, so if what you're looking for isn't there yet, check back regularly, or straight up ask us for what you want.

Good FLOSS tools for your own groups or DisCOs include Mattermost, Matrix, Loomio and Hylo. A well-configured Discourse forum can be really powerful. Other groups use Signal or Telegram groups. Also: don't forget the classic email list, as they can become really powerful communication tools, and increasingly favored by those wishing to avoid big tech social media and its capricious and punitive policies. The Media Economics Design Lab has a great example setup with Matrix integrated into Nextcloud through Cloudron.

Rather than only focusing on particular tools, it is worth engaging with the concept of "governable stacks",where the focus is on the communities' self-governance and relation to the tools. Replace "are you using good tools?" with "are you using tools that help deepen community self-governance practices?". Check out the DisCO Stack, for our own spin on this.

Offline ​

Remember that both Online and Offline are Onlife! Human beings are designed for social interaction. The safe spaces and boundaries where these interactions take place will vary greatly. You need to check in with yourself and your values for a good balance of stimulating and comfortable. Whenever entering a new space, be aware of the community’s expectations around communications and consent.

Once you’ve found one or more communities, you can choose your active involvement: environmental work, open source software, reclamation of urban spaces, political coalition building, restorative agriculture… There’s no shortage of activities to get involved in which are ripe for building DisCO structures and value flows. The important factor is manifesting and applying the logic of commoning within your social processes.

A fun way to assess this is by co-creating “user stories” around acts of commoning. This method (pioneered by our friends at Platoniq) is useful for brainstorming ways of getting involved in the DisCOVerse:

Keep it safe for yourself and others. ​

An important aspect of all these spaces, online, offline, onlife is entering with respect and presence. These spaces are not necessarily mediated by mainstream societal norms where certain assumptions about who has the right to assert themselves and "feel at home" are taken for granted. These are essentially commons, where the community gathered around the gift decides how to operate as a community and how to best take care of the gifts stewarded.

What many commons, activist collectives and mutual aid groups share are explicit codes of conduct that orient people in non-violent and consented ways of relating.

The Caring Community Guidelines are DisCO.coop's code of conduct. They apply to our Wiki, the DisCOspace Loomio discussion forum and other DisCO.coop-hosted spaces (including social media, video meetings and in person events). The Caring Community Guidelines originated in P2P Left — one of the various groups where DisCO was incubated. We encourage you to read the full guidelines in the DisCO Ball Wiki, but stand outs include:

• Be nice
• Speak up
• Let compassion guide your behavior
• Harassment won’t be tolerated
• Respect boundaries and acknowledge systemic oppression
• Honor diversity
• Report issues
• Abide by the guidelines

Codes of conduct are fascinating. Many are overlapping and offer different solutions for similar problems, while others deal in more specific matters. Here is a selection of some of our favorites. Like DisCO, all of these are Open Source: you are free to copy, paste and adapt them for your own purposes — as long as you credit the source.

Keep Reading, watching, listening ​

We are blessed with abundant materials that have inspired DisCO. Our list of influences is long and continually expanding.

DisCO ​

If reading is your jam and DisCO your funk, do start with the DisCO Trilogy. To look deeper into its influences, here is the reading list for Guerrilla Translation Reloaded, a 2018 event that directly led to the creation of DisCO. The DisCO Manifesto has been described as a dangerously immersive rabbit hole of hyperlinks. Those links are all listed here for you and will take you through our thinking process at the time. Finally, here's a playlist with all the videos featured in the Manifesto, as well as the DisCO Manifesto Trailer. The Manifesto's sequel, The DisCO Elements, includes a full bibliography, as well as another playlist with all the featured videos, as well as the DisCO Elements Trailer.

On top of that, we have plenty of articles, interviews and videos which you can find in DisCO.coop's Stories section. If you want more explicit DisCO recommendations skip to skip to DisCO Basics Chapter 9, which has an updated curated list of materials.

Books, publications,videos and podcasts ​

Here are some more recommendations that touch on the DisCO DNA (Commons and P2P, Open Cooperativism, Feminist Economics and Radical Distributed Tech), as well as our Anticapitalist, Decolonial and Intersectional Feminist positions. All of these categories overlap to some degree, but the following sections will provide you with a solid overview of these foundational perspectives for a better world.

Note that these recommendations are rich in content. If you want to skip to the rest of the article, click here

Take the DisCO Journey ​

Earlier, we told you all about the DisCO Journey, our immersive DisCOverse learning, building and co-developing experience. While you can become a DisCO by simply going through the DisCO Challenge, taking the full Journey will be a much more enriching experience. The materials being developed are designed to be accessible at any time, but if your goal is ‘finding the others’, our recommendation is that you join the DisCO Journey cohort.

In the cohort you'll meet some other up and coming DisCOs and jam with them, along with the DisCO.coop team. The best way of learning is by doing, and this experience becomes much richer in good company. The Journey also prioritizes mutuality and P2P learning, breaking down the distinction between teachers and students. We strongly believe we can all learn from each other. Please join us on the Journey!

Strengthening the DisCOverse means that we need to…

Build Knowledge Commons ​

Wikis and mapping are excellent tools for committed changemakers to find each other, work together, provide mutual support and build common-pool resources. For wiki work, contact us if you want to contribute to the DisCO Ball Wiki so we can show you the ropes and take you through the documentation.

Other useful wikis include Appropedia, Wikihouse, RepRap and Farm Hack. Our engagement with the P2P Foundation Wiki was formative, and still contains a great deal of very useful information. However, since 2018 the organization and the politics of its founder and only visible figure have become increasingly incompatible with DisCO, so proceed at your own discretion, with caution.

For mapping, have a look at Transformap. If you want to do something more local, Shareable has a great guide on hosting a MapJam in your city.

In reality, we encourage all who build and maintain Commons to document and open-source their processes online — good and bad! Whether as part of your website, or in Github or our wiki, we can all benefit from the knowledge. As a complement to the better known Creative Commons Licenses, we urge you to have a look at thePeer Production License and our upcoming work on DisCO licensing.

Build Material Commons ​

When making contact with people in your community, see if there are any existing community workshops in your area, or see if there’s an interest in creating one. Mutualizing productive infrastructures and face to face collaborations are (highly) rewarding ways of commoning. From shared or community kitchens, to self-managed spaces and hackerspaces and fab LABS, it’s worth getting involved in creating tangible stuff through commons-based peer production processes. To get started, check out Shareable's excellent collection of How-to guides — which also cover immaterial commons and the other recommendations in this chapter.

Makerspaces, hackerspaces and fab LABS are in flux and rather undefinable as a whole. A simple, inclusive description could be “community-run physical places where people can utilize local manufacturing technologies”.

As of writing, 2,471 makerspaces are listed in the hackerspaces.org wiki. Among these, 851 are marked as active, 355 as planned, while the rest appear to be inactive or closed. Although the majority of makerspaces are situated in the North-Western world with a recent expansion to the East and South, the phenomenon has achieved a global spread (see below).

Not all Fab LABS are created equal, though, and too many invisibilize or minimize the need for the decolonial and intersectional feminist actions we are comitted to. DisCO Principle 4: Rethinking Global/Local Economics is all about distributed manufacturing, but suffused with DisCO values. Our governance suggestions and educational materials can be really easily adapted to Makerspaces, Fab LABS and other community spaces. Let’s go!

Do we really want to, for example, make our own toothbrushes every few months? Maybe yes, maybe no, but there are many environmental and social benefits to localizing production of certain things. Production-on-demand according to community needs offers convivial alternatives to overconsumption, consumerism and planned obsolescence. Nourishing and caring for material commons will result in collective knowledge, building on local resources and a lived understanding of material circularity according to planetary boundaries.

Live, work and consume differently ​

Some people might get into hand-on, local production in their spare time; others may simply not have the time or the social conditions to do so. DisCO is a way to create more available time to do the things we value and prioritize; to change conditions, where possible, and stop being complicit in the profit-accumulation scheme of peak hierarchy. This isn’t a simple or rapid process. It will largely depend on the networks you build through the previous steps. Think about this and make sure that whatever changes you make feel true to your own life circumstances and values.

The first way to withdraw power from market-accumulation is by depriving it of your labor power. The capitalist market requires wage labor as a commodity: you are forced to sell your labor in order to keep the accumulation and destruction machine going for the benefit of the few. Look for ways to refuse, not just by “dropping out” (although that’s also a respectable and increasingly popular option) but perhaps by pro-actively building alternatives to create sustenance for yourself and your community. The key is finding your passions and framing them within the patterns offered by DisCO. In reality, most generative forms of market organizations can be reimagined as such. What will be given up? Profit and hierarchy —but the returns will be infinitely more rewarding, and safer in the long run.

Another way to disrupt is to remove your cooperation as a consumer. Follow the trend of decommodification and mutualize your consumption. Some examples include community-supported agriculture, solar energy coops, and platform and open coops, along with simply living the commoner lifestyle - cheaper, and more fun.

Without our contributions as workers and consumers, capital cannot reproduce itself, but we have to ensure our own social reproduction through solidarity mechanisms, such as DisCO or other Meta-Economic Networks (check out Mutual Aid Network and their resources section for information on how to start one), transvestment strategies and DisCO Licensing, as explained in the previous sections.

Get Political ​

Back in Chapter 5: DisCO Futures, we argued that for DisCO to be a successful Open Source Conspiracy, DisCOnauts must build economic and political power. By “political”, here we refer not only to political representation but also to exercising the actionable rights of everyone affected by political decisions. So, big question time:how do we increase the credibility and influence of the DisCOverse in the political sphere?

In truth, any act of commoning is political, as it challenges established power structures and their associated systems of oppression. Some of our pre-DisCO arguments can be read in the Commons Transition articles “What are P2P Politics” and “Commons in the Time of Monsters”. In summary, it is not enough to hope that change will come about exclusively through prefigurative strategies. We need both approaches. Individual DisCOs will need to decide whether and how to engage with existing political structures, and reimagine them in commons-oriented ways. This could include striving to transcend them, or to help them "wither away".

Maybe your individual calling drives you more towards the prefigurative aspects, like building extitutions. Whether you express your politics outside the system or critically engage within it, the keys are to communicate transparently, build bridges and foster mutual support. If you choose not to engage with State politics, your actions are still relevant. One of the DisCO Values is Politically Alive and just by being a DisCO, you're effectively "building the new in the shell of the old". Whatever approaches you choose, the end goals are the same.We need to support each other in our diversities.

If you do decide to engage with the currently existing political system, it’s useful to imagine a DisCO political strategy under the logic of transvestment. If, in economics, transvestment means leeching power from extractive production towards the Commons, in politics it implies the “commonification” of municipal, regional, state or transnational institutions. The goal is to enable our autonomy as citizens, individuals, and groups to create and steward common resources, quite different from being a passive consumer of state services.

There are many ways of doing this, depending on where you reside and the local political options. An obvious starting place would be building bridges between parties (eg. Pirate, New Left and Green) through the logic of the Commons. A particularly inspiring example is that of the citizen-driven municipal coalitions in Spain which, while being inclusive of existing parties, opened the field of politics to a much larger public. One of the best resources on this new wave of municipalism include Barcelona en Comú’s guide to taking back the City. You can read stories about municipalism on Commons Transition and in the archives of the P2P Foundation Blog. Why not invent ways of replicating such initiatives in your town?

Map by Fearless Cities

If there's no group in your area, maybe it's time to think about creating your own, which brings us back to…

Find the others (again) ​

We’ve shared plenty of recommendations to get you started. We highly encourage you to follow our lead and create your own, and share them with others.

Giving and sharing are at the heart of commoning. Treating our relationships and the environment as gifts and responsibilities in the context of commoning leads to new behaviors, values and thoughts. Create new commons, find the others, put care at the core and help drive the Open Source Conspiracy forward!