They are exactly the people that have always been advocating for this stuff all along. They are doing their thing. Nothing to be surprised of

You should start the union

For that, I’m already collaborating on activisthandbook.org and I curate my own lists of content. What I see social bookmarking is good for is circulation of less structured knowledge, short-lived information (i.e. about events or courses), news like publication of relevant books and so on. Wikis take a lot of effort to curate and are the last step of a process of information discovery and processing from certain environments that starts somewhere else. Lemmy or other social media can work at an intermediate level between personal knowledge and structured, consolidated knowledge shared in the commons.

What are your goals, how will you achieve them, and how will you maintain cohesion?

My goal is to build more effective political organizations. I abandoned my career to do this as a consultant, I do this as a volunteer for the orgs that cannot afford me, and I do it in the orgs in which I’m politically active first-hand. Building communities of experts and people interested in improving, on a global scale, is part of the process.

To me, it seems you have an idea and a lot of resistance to joining anything that has existing problems.

There are effective orgs with problems and there are orgs with no chance of having a positive impact because they spend all their resources reproducing themselves. No problem joining the first kind, but I don’t believe there’s a point beating a dead horse with the second.

One of the biggest obstacles facing this idea in the long term is how organizing is usually very specific to local problems, so most information that would be shared is only relevant to a single campaign at a specific point in time.

I’m not American, so campaign organization is not really the frame I’m immersed in. I do a lot of organizing with Americans, so I understand the context, but if you want to build a political org that can last a century and it’s able to evolve and fit changing needs, that kind of know-how is generic and reusable. There are intrinsic dynamics of how humans behave within organizations and how organizations grow, and anything pertaining to those aspects is knowledge that is transferable and can live a long time. If you build for the short-term, you are subject to the ebbs and flows of the current moment and your impact will be short-lived. I’m not against this way of doing things, but I just don’t find it interesting or ambitious enough.

Conversation about democratization jumps from the 1920s IWW to 2000s Ver Di

A suspicious amount of my peers are past-IWW members who are now part of VerDi, lol.

I think you’re a bit confused here, Democratic Centralism and the Mass Line are organizational principles. They are primarily for party structure, not only mass societal structure, and Liu Shaoqi’s work is on behavior within orgs. Any union, political party, etc. can and would benefit from learning these and discussing them.

Fair enough, but I don’t believe mass parties can be built anymore without a mass society, so it’s stuff I don’t really read about because again, it’s not really actual or usable.

Is there something specific you are asking about? Like, how to file for specific legal status or something?

In other spaces like the ones I would like to find on lemmy, the areas that get discussed are stuff like organization design, process design, software and software practices, facilitation, mediation, consensus building, effective communication and so on and so forth. You know, the stuff you need to build an organization that is effective in the world.

Indeed context matters and a lot of knowledge cannot be transferred across domains, legal frameworks, or even outside an org. Nonetheless a lot of this knowledge is indeed transferable. How to effectively facilitate a meeting can have culture-specific details, but most of the know-how is transferable. To discover which software is best to adopt to build a CRM is a discussion that can be had before knowing any specifics of your org, and when you know the specifics, you can apply what you know about CRMs to pick the best one. Organizational models can and must be discussed across orgs and countries, to understand if some problem is just an accident or a model is fundamentally unfit for a specific goal.

I was thinking more about practical knowledge to employ today, rather than political speculation on hypothetical societal/political structure. I need people to get better at facilitating meetings, tracking tasks, and writing notes. Until then, discussing democratic centralism is sterile escapism.

Indeed, but these seem to be mostly focused on political topics, rather than organizing per se. I’ve rarely seen content about organization design, facilitation, effective communication, process design or other similar topics. It’s usually sociology/economy/political theory stuff for what I’ve found.

The lemmy users have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.

I’m not talking about organizing on social media platforms. I’m talking about learning, sharing expertise, and interesting material on how to build organizations.

I’m part of many local orgs and I’m not talking about “organizing over social media”, but rather to discuss the topics surrounding the practice and theory of organization building with other people interested in the topic and practicing it.

I’m one of the people organizing such activities, not within a union but through a similar dynamic. While that’s a great way to build capacity and know-how, it’s very narrow and slow to evolve. There’s plenty of research and discussion on how to build democratic organizations more effectively, and this kind of discussion doesn’t happen within a single org. When it does, it’s often very disconnected from reality and uninteresting. This kind of know-how can totally be circulated through social networks (not necessarily social media, but also) when the exchange is on topics of interest on a global scale.

Actual org work is handled in orgs.

I fundamentally disagree. This mindset is why so many leftist orgs still operate through processes, governance structures, and methodologies invented when the horse was the main vector to transfer information. There are plenty of spaces to become better at organizing, and digital spaces to exchange expertise and grow are important.

because the techniques, practices, assets, learning material and so on should circulate and the format of social bookmarking platforms like lemmy is good for that.

I have several telegram groups, discords, facebook groups, and slacks, together with traditional forums hat collect people from all over the world interested in organization building, facilitation, strategy development, tooling, and so on and so forth. On lemmy though, there’s very little and it’s a pity.

My partner is a chef and fermenter, so it’s really hard to keep a food routine because she endlessly chases novelty. That said, when the need for novelty is low, we split evenly between rice, pasta and potatoes for carbs (she’s Chinese, I’m Italian, we live in Germany so…). Proteins are eggs and tofu as staple. White beans and chickpeas are less common. A rotation of different cuts of meat on top. Fish here is expensive and bad, but we always have a can of sardines or tuna. Often we buy a whole chicken for the week to do a roast, a fried rice and a pot of stock for the week. Vegetables and fruit are the things we rotate the most because they are all equally bad.

if it happens, or simply if you get more involved into Romanian unions, reach out to me. I organize events to connect tech workers organizing interionationally, so we might do something.

Go for it. If you want to look for a very good example of union communication, look up “More Perfect Union”. Very American, but it shows a way to bring union news to people in a cool way.

Pretty much anywhere outside the USA, the communication of tech workers unionizing is pretty much absent and expecially news about it. This is a big deal, but it doesn’t say much about the actual penetration of unions in a given sector. It’s a complex topic, but I explain it with the fact that the topic is pretty much uninteresting, unless it’s a well-known brand is unionizing. Since most famous tech companies are American, there’s enough mass of news there to actually push media outlets to cover news.

In Italy, where there are very few “well-known” IT companies, the topic is completely absent, to the point where IT union organizers from a city don’t know about big wins by other IT unions organizers from another city. Nonetheless the narrative is not the thing, and there can be big impacts that become visible to the general public only after sociological studies.

So, long-story short, the fact you never heard about SITT doesn’t say much about its effectiveness, just about their ability to communicate.

Are you aware that Romanian IT sector has the highest rate of unionization of any IT sector in the world? SITT is a case study studied all over the world. https://transform-network.net/blog/interview/the-romanian-it-workers-labour-union-showed-that-everyone-can/

It might not be the sexiest, most modern radical union, but it is a case of success with numbers to show. Maybe you can start from there.

most cursed take of the day. This is a terrible system that turns workers in self-entrepreneurs, where most struggle and a few get a lot of money.

where do you live? The tech workers movement is reaching pretty much everywhere there’s tech production.