Building Notman House: Evolving an Architecture of Participation

En français: Maison Notman: cultiver une architecture de participation - Partie I - Partie II

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On Friday, May 21, some fifty-odd people gathered on the terrace of Hotel Opus in Montreal to witness the public birth of a very peculiar project by the name of Maison Notman - Notman House.

Instigators Philippe Telio and Daniel Drouet kicked things off by giving a short speech explaining the project. Here's the backstory, as I understood it, in super-short bullet form:

• 2007-. Telio, Drouet and others repeatedly meet with government officials, academics and businesspeople to raise awareness of the importance of supporting the grassroots Web start-up community.
• July 2009. The OSMO Foundation, a non-profit entity, is established "to fund, by way of grants, grassroots initiatives that support community building and networking."
• 2010. Funding is secured from municipal, provincial, and federal sources towards the purchase of Notman House, a heritage home sitting just off the corner of Sherbrooke and St-Laurent. The Foundation makes an offer on Notman House, which is accepted by the current owners. (Additional fundraising will, however, be required to complete the purchase.)

The main stated aim of the Notman House project is to foster technology entrepreneurship in the area of Web technology. Meaning, in a bare-bones way, that if we get this right, people will come in, and fully-formed Web startups will come out. (But lots of other good things can happen, too; more on that later.)

"By The Community, For The Community"

The first surprise for me was to witness how self-effacing the instigators were at the meeting. They made it clear that this is very explicitly a community project. To paraphrase what Philippe said, there are a few initial elements of vision, but nothing is fully formed, and pretty much everything is open for discussion by the community. The initial elements are: office space for entrepreneurs and investors, coworking spaces, a café that should act as a turbo-Laïka, and a large open space for community events, seminars and the like.

I've been into the house. It is unmistakably HUGE. Roughly speaking, the front building has 10,000 square feet and the back one, which (perhaps fittingly) used to be an asylum, has 20,000 more. (There are a few floor plans on the site.)

After the kickoff speech, the people present were invited to share their visions, and discussion subgroups were formed around issues like fundraising, governance, physical organization and projected activities. Volunteer notetakers captured ideas as they flew around. I assume we'll soon get to see what's in those reports.

Notman House is an ambitious and exciting project. In my wildest imaginings, I see it as a potential catalyst for a much-overdue renewal of Montreal's culture and business, something that could help move the whole city into the 21st century. (Yes. I remain convinced that this Interwebs is kind of a big deal.) And the vibe I got from the kickoff meeting gives me confidence that the Montreal Web community is up to the challenge.

This is the right city to get something like this started.

A Vision for the House

As a long-time researcher with a passion for the social web and as someone who resonates a lot with startup culture, when I first heard about this project my mind started racing, envisioning possibilities for the House and foreseeing all the good that could come out of it. Honestly, at this point I'm still in between belief and disbelief, but I want to believe. Throw in the fact that the House is right across from my office, and this looks too good to be true. But it could still be true!

As I pondered what my ideal Notman House looked like, I basically came up with a list of qualities I feel it should have. Here they are, in the present tense:

1. Open and Social. Outsiders feel welcome and pathways towards belonging are in sight. You can come in even if you don't know anyone; you will find actual people and make friends inside. People from outside Montreal who have a connection to web culture can drop by and feel like they're at a friend's house.

2. Connected. The House has cordial (and ideally symbiotic) relationships with fellow entities that have similar DNA, for instance:

• Tech-oriented coworking and cocreating spaces (Station C, ECTO, FouLab);
• Montreal Camps and similar events, notably ConFoo, StartupCamp, BarCamp, WordCamp, DrupalCamp, MonDev, DevLabMTL, PodCamp, WebCamp, RoCoCo/RecentChangesCamp, and doubtless many others;
• Similarly-flavored spaces in other cities (e.g. HackerSpaces, the Queen Street Commons on PEI, the Hacker Dojo in California, La Grande Maison in France, Jigsaw Renaissance in Seattle)

This hubness is extremely valuable because, much like a well-connected mutual friend, it accelerates the reciprocal awareness of various initiatives in the city and helps see the forest for the trees.

As well, the House recognizes its fellowship in the wider Creative Class by opening itself to connection and exchange with students, academics, artists, and social innovators, all of whom are also in the business of thinking up and enacting new ideas that advance culture and society. These peeps need the Web, and the Web needs them. Lots of cross-fertilization can happen in such interactions.

3. Lively, fun, thriving, messy, vibrant, ever-evolving. The place is a hotbed of innovation and original thinking. Something's always happening there. People walk out more inspired and knowledgeable than they went in. Nerf guns are never far away. There's food and drink and music - maybe not everywhere, all the time, but it's there. People go there to have a beer after work. It's a truly living space.

4. Diverse. Interests overlap, but not completely. Everyone has their own personality and goals. In true Boulevard Saint-Laurent spirit, there are French-speaking and English-speaking and multilingual peeps. WOMEN like Maj and M-C and Christine and Tara and Stephanie and Christina and Natalie and Tanya and Christine and Sandrine and Girl Geeks like to hang around. You regularly get exposed to people who will challenge your assumptions.

5. Conducive to talent discovery. When someone does awe-inspiring work, the House knows about it pretty quickly.

We get this one right and the talent will flock to the place, with all the great things that it entails.

6. A good citizen. The House makes significant contributions that serve the city and the society that supports it. These could take many forms, of which new enterprises is just one. Using the Web to help the city know itself is another one, on which I'll be happy to elaborate if enough people bug me about it. :)

Process Design: A Playbook

Sylvain Carle made an important statement on Friday: "Notman House already exists.", by which he meant that the web culture is already thriving in Montreal. In a way, we're just helping it find a body that is a bit less ethereal and that can amplify its capabilities.

So it can be said that a few cards are on the table, but the rules of the game have yet to be defined. Even before we answer the question, "What is Notman House?", we have to answer the question, "How will we build Notman House?"

The challenge at this stage, then, is to define the process, not the product. In my view, at this point there are two critical questions to ask. The way in which we answer them will make or break the project:

1. How do we make the process as inclusive as possible, so that many people have a sense of ownership?
2. How do we structure the governance so that there's as much life in Notman House as possible (by which I mean: just enough chaos)?

These two questions are intimately connected. I believe they can be encompassed as follows: "How do we evolve a good architecture of participation for the Notman House project?"

It is important to recognize from the get-go that while it's by no means completely mature, there is already a bottom-up architecture of participation in the Montreal web community - hashtags get tossed around, camps are getting organized aplenty, etc. How can we build upon this?

Basically this is a problem of institution design. There is a tension here. Make no rules and you get chaos - things go nowhere fast. Make the rules too strict or dictatorial, and potential participants feel too constrained, and you don't get that juicy emergence we're all pining for.

I'd like to make a few suggestions that I think can help things move along in a way that strikes a good compromise between chaos and structure.

1. Let's use the Web to make community needs manifest and explicit.

This one is a no-brainer. We're a community of Web buffs. A critical unknown in the project is the exact nature of the community's needs. It would only be natural, then, to use the Web to surface what people hope to get out of Notman House. A web-based idea sharing platform should be found (or cooked up) and intelligently exploited.

I have a lot of ideas about this, but I'll just give one for now: the system should enable a continuum of degrees of involvement, ranging from a simple "Like-button" modality to full-out "I Have a Dream" soapbox activity.

Now, this attention to the Web side doesn't mean that there shouldn't be face-to-face meetings - on the contrary, these will help tremendously - but things should be conducted in such a way that a fair representation of the community's visions can be found online.

2. Let's relentlessly encourage do-ocracy.

Again, this is a natural fit with the startupness of the whole thing. People who care about something that connects to the community's interests, and are prepared to do something about it, should by all means be encouraged to go ahead with their initiatives. This ensures the presence of passion in the way things are done around the House, which is nearly always a Good Thing.

3. Let's make the process as transparent as possible.

For a prospective participant, it's always a big turn-off when you don't know how the decisions are made. On what basis can you trust the process and get involved?

In order to be compelled to invest their good ideas into the wider project, people who have them should be able to plainly see that there is indeed a way for such ideas to work their way into fruition at the House. Though it is probably not sufficient in itself, transparency goes a long way towards ensuring that.

4. Let the functions of the House be organized relatively independently wherever possible.

I'm thinking further down the line here, about concrete operations. In computer science, separation of concerns helps ensure that that "failure of one function does not cause other functions to fail, and in general makes it easier to understand, design and manage complex interdependent systems".

The functions of Notman House are not set in stone at this point, but say there is a Café to run, a physical building to maintain, a technical infrastructure to evolve, a coworking space to run, offices to rent, and meeting spaces to use. Then, insofar as this separation is workable, each of these should probably be managed pretty autonomously. Of course it is best if some people are involved in at least two different functions, because communication will be needed between them.

5. For each function, let's pick a governance model based on our collective degree of competence and political maturity.

To pick an easy example, our community presumably knows less about heating system maintenance than it does about network infrastructure. Therefore it makes sense to pick a simplified governance model like outsourcing for the first, and a sophisticated one for the latter.

The same reasoning holds for each one of the functions of the House. I think management-by-community in all areas is a nice ideal to aspire to, but it likely can only happen in stages as the House progressively gets smarter in various areas (politics included). Nevertheless, individuals in charge should be ready (and perhaps relieved) to surrender power when it becomes clear that "all of us" thinks it's time to replace them with some other mode of decision.

Of course there will be cross-functional or top-level issues that will need to be resolved. A set of (hopefully) enlightened and benevolent dictators will probably be needed to cut the Gordian knots that will undoubtedly form along the way. How should we pick them? The best we can probably do as a community is to put people there in whom we have a large amount of trust, and who are interested in performing this kind of service in a way that listens to the community.

6. Let's strive to make things as simple as possible (but no simpler).

If I'm relatively new to the community and I want to, say, organize a Camp in the House, I shouldn't have to jump through many hoops in order to do so. Maybe there are very simple instructions somewhere on the site. Maybe the community finds someone to lend me a hand and help me learn the ropes.

Similarly, if I'm getting involved in the inner workings of the House, there shouldn't be a whole book of Rules of the House for me to digest before I can do anything.

Did you know that Open Space meetings get by very well on a mere four principles and one law (obviously complemented by the usual social norms)? If we could achieve this kind of simplicity it would be pretty awesome.

7. Let's assume abundance and good faith (unless there is evidence to the contrary).

If someone comes in and wants to use the big room for something, and the big room is available, then they should get it. If someone wants to launch a project and there isn't any hard reason why they can't do it, then they should be able to do it.

The idea here is (at least in the initial stages) to maintain a culture of experimentation that lets many flowers bloom and not to worry too much about "running out of space" or "spreading ourselves too thinly". In the event that these should become actual problems, the community will find ways to deal with them.

Looking ahead

I certainly hope many in our community are as tickled by the promise of Notman house as I am. At this stage in the game, everyone needs to think both about "what Notman House can do for us" and "what we can do for Notman House". Imagination and will are not optional here.

Practically speaking, my instinct tells me that getting the right Web toolkit to let individual visions emerge and become visible, so they can coalesce and we can make sense of them, is a pretty critical next step.

What do you think?