“Open Socialism (OS) is a rethink of how to manage a society. It starts with an optimistic base concept that focuses on broad scale cooperation, but then layers on processes and ideas to keep people motivated and prevent corruption. It looks at human nature through the lens of our evolution and attempts to recapture the good parts of a tribal society, but in a way that can work on a grand scale. It borrows heavily from modern team and culture management, in particular the open source model.”

I saw no discussion regarding this political ideology, so I thought it might be best to ask here.

Open Socialism website: https://opensocialism.com/
Open Socialism Github: https://github.com/open-socialism/open-socialism-site

  • ryan@the.coolest.zone
    4·
    1 year ago

    Ok I’ve been clicking through that site and, besides requiring knowledge of docker to contribute (which will cut out a lot of people) I had to dig a few pages in to figure out what they want to do differently from any other socialism.

    Society in OS is managed by small autonomous teams known as circles. There is a hierarchy of circles from the top of society all the way to the bottom. eg. Main Leadership -> Health -> Disease Prevention And Treatment -> Cancer Research. Circles define the purpose and charter of sub-circles, however they do not control them. Business has shown us that top-down orchestration is highly ineffective.

    Not wrong, but god this is so tech bro-y. And hey, we have a word for your circles, they’re committees.

    Circles are focused on leadership and do not perform actual work. Instead a circle will create a project and assign members to enact a specific piece of work. A clear separation of leadership (circle) and producing value through work (project) helps each of these concerns be better and more explicitly addressed.

    oh my god do you not see already the clear separation between the circles, the elite who get elected and re-elected to their positions, and the workers?

    Circles use ideas like consensus seeking decision making, openness, sub-circle and project creation to do their job. However, society is large with many different areas. Agile software development practices has shown that there is no one size fits all practices and flexibility is required.

    Jesus fucking christ I do not want my government to be run on a sprint model. I do not. We can’t run a government like “whoopsie looks like what we released accidentally stops food stamps to pregnant women we’ll log that as a bug and put in our backlog teehee”

    As someone who works in tech, agile and a lot of what they have mentioned here is great for tech, and I don’t fucking trust in the slightest that it could be applied to a government.