# Open Governance week 1: Acting like baboons


I signed up for my first P2PU course this term, [Open
Governance](http://www.p2pu.org/general/open-governance), facilitated by
Philipp Schmidt (and a host of helpers). Although I've been deeply
involved with P2PU from the beginning, this is actually the first time I
am "whole-heartedly" taking a course (I have been following along on
many though).

Probably the reasons I have for taking this course, and the reasons
Philipp had for starting it, are similar - we are both thinking a lot
about how we can support the development of the P2PU community as we go
forward. A community is a very fragile thing, and it's certainly not
something you can "build" or "construct", but you can nurture it, and
provide the conditions for it to grow.

Personally, I have also created a bunch of different projects on the
web, and wondered as I saw some projects gather a lot of users, an
active committed community of people who eagerly contribute and discuss,
etc. Whereas others, which initially looked just as interesting as
attractive, slowly turn into grey corners of the web where nobody stops.
In Salman Rushdie's [Haroun and the Sea of
Stories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories),
stories slowly loose their colors and die when nobody tell them anymore.
Maybe the modern equivalent could be websites that grow cobwebs, because
nobody visit them, or online communities that decay because there isn't
a vibrant community there.

In addition to initiating a project, and gathering enough interest to
kick-start an initial community, the question is how to manage change,
and growth. If the launch is successful, you might have a close group of
people who all were there "in the early days", all share a certain
history, a "founding myth", a certain in-language, etc. But as newcomers
arrive, are they welcomed into the community, and made to learn and
absorb the culture that prevails (while still being able to make
contributions - the community should not be ossified and overly
conservative), or do they overrun the community, and do old-timers feel
like "it's not the same anymore"?

This question could be raised about many kinds of communities, whether
it's a graduate program (I was just discussing with a fellow student
today about how new doctoral students are "initiated" into the
community), a start-up company as it grows, Wikipedia or P2PU.

You also have different kinds of participants. In a doctoral program,
all participants will be doctoral students (although some may be part
time, etc), but in P2PU, you have course participants, and course
organizers. And people who are helping out with the running of P2PU. Do
people who "just" take P2PU courses feel like part of a broader
community, or are they just "students who come and go", whereas the
"staff", the people who take a deeper interest, join one of the mailing
lists, get involved in developing the project, are the real "community
members'? (This is made more acute, compared to the situation of a
traditional university, because our courses are just six weeks long -
it's different with someone who is around for a four year undergraduate
degree).

Here were the readings for this week:

-   WNYX Radiolab, The New Normal, Part 1 ["New
  Baboon"](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/02)[](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/02)
-   RM Sapolsky, [A Natural History of
  Peace](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~sok/papers/s/sapolsky-foreignaffairs-2006.pdf)[](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/%7Esok/papers/s/sapolsky-foreignaffairs-2006.pdf)
-   [Short summary of Sapolsky's thesis and
  work](http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/04/05/peace-among-primates-by-robert-sapolsky/)

In parenthesis, I really loved the [WNYX
Radiolab](http://www.radiolab.org/) show, and subscribed to their
podcast feed, very glad to have discovered this program. Much of the
readings were about the work of Sapolsky, a scientist studying baboons
in Africa. To make a long (and very well told story) short, baboons are
known to be very aggressive animals with high stress levels, the males
constantly struggling amongst themselves. In the particular case that
Sapolsky studied, the alpha-males would go to fight another tribe each
morning for access to a garbage dump outside a lodge. Through
contaminated meat, they got tuberculosis, and all the strongest males in
the flock died.

This caused a very marked behavioural change in the flock, with only the
younger males, and the females left, and a very different male-female
ratio, the behaviour became much more nurturing and supportive. Sapolsky
wrote this off as the result of a freak accident, and decided nothing
could be learnt about baboon nature by studying this tribe, so he left.
A number of years later, when he returned (on his honeymoon I believe!),
he was shocked. The key to understand his shock is that baboons leave
their flocks when they get into their teens, and join another flock. So
by now, all the males in the flock where baboons who had grown up in
other flocks, with the "traditional" aggressive baboon behaviour as a
norm. Yet, at that time (6 years later) and today (20 years later) the
tribe still has this unique nurturing culture.

This means that the baboons who came into the flock actually learnt, or
adapted these new cultural norms - that previously had seemed "contrary
to baboon nature". When asked how this happened, the biggest difference
that Sapolsky could find was how newcomers to the community were
treated. In traditional baboon society, newcomers have to struggle for
weeks before anyone will take notice of them, constantly fighting with
the big boys, and with no females willing to groom them. In the new
flock, newcomers were welcomed as equal members much more rapidly.

Of course, it is very difficult to transfer directly these lessons to
human society in all its forms, but a focus on how a community welcomes
new members, and initiates them into the community is very useful, both
for P2PU and for other communities. The question of how to create
community cohesion in an online community, where you lack a lot of the
intimacy and shared experiences that you can create in meatspace, is
also an interesting challenge.

I don't have anything very deep to say about all this yet, but I think
it was a really great and fun start to the class, warming us up to think
about these various topics, and I look forward to engaging with new
readings, and guest lecturers, to think more deeply about these
problems.

Stian