Circles in a World Made for Triangles (with Pia Mancini)

impenetrable fortress the government. And as they approached the palace of the Argentine National Congress, they told with them the symbol of their movement, a twenty foot tall wooden Trojan horse. M yeah, a Trojan horse like from Greek mythology. And if you need a little refresher on that story, it goes like this. During the Trojan War, the Greek's built this giant Trojan horse as a gift to the Trojans. Little did the Trojans know that the Greek warriors were

actually hiding inside the horse. When the coast was clear, the Greeks emerged and totally sacked the city. Now, these Argentine citizens they've got the same plan to sneak into Congress and disturb the political order from the inside. They are Partio de laded or in English, the net Party, as in the Internet. There are a new political party in Argentina tackling one of democracy's biggest problems. Our democracy has remained the same for the past two hundred years.

We're twenty century citizens interacting with nineteenth central institutions. Today we can speak for ourselves in almost every aspect of life, but we can only tell our governments what we want once every few years, and in between elections we must remain silent. Partito de laded is running for seats in Congress and they have a very different platform. They created an app called democracy Os where citizens could cast their

own votes on legislation. If elected, the Partio de Larded representative would vote according to how citizens have voted on the app. The candidates are themselves the trojan horse. If they get into Congress, they would sneak every voice on democracy Os into Congress with them. Citizens wouldn't have to wait for years to speak, they'd have a say on every piece of legislation. As the party pulls this trojan

horse through the streets. Children run alongside the procession. An excited crowd gathers when it comes to a stop at the doors of Congress. The party chance when you can network awaken who it was very powerful in the crowd is pa Mancini, one of the leaders of Partito de lad It's hard to make change happen, but we must move from protest to construction. Her word that October would be just the beginning of a lifelong pursuit to empower

citizen voices. Since then, Pia has put her imagination to work building technologies that help people organize around the causes that matter to them. And now eight years later, she isn't just trying to rewire broken systems from the inside, She's making whole new systems entirely. Pia has developed this platform called Open Collective, and with it she's putting economic power in the hands of communities all across the globe.

So how does somebody go from protesting at Congress's doorstep to building a new economic infrastructure and whatever happened to Partido de Laded. Pia Mancini tells us her story after the break. Yeah, hello, so nice to see It's so nice to see you tube A welcome. Thank you. So let's start with the basics. Can you introduce yourself and what you do. I'm PM and Chinni and I'm co founder and CEO of Open Collective and i am the mother of almost six year old who studied elementary yesterday.

So it's very exciting. Are you excited about the school? I am excited. The amount of like relief and exhaustion in your voice, I believe you are exactly what is open collective. Open Collective at the core is an open finances are transparent finances platform that lets you fundraise and spend money for your community and full transparency and repair

that with a global network of legal entities. That what they do is they hold the money for those communities and they deal with reporting and taxes and government so communities can focus on what they do and not focus on talking to accountants and lawyers. You say this is for communities. Who is Open Collective for more practically? Can you get specific? Yes? So we are mostly working with two large ecosystems, the open source ecosystem and the solidarity economy.

So we are helping both open source projects across the world to fundraise like as an open source software projects. Yeah, absolutely, So open source communities open source software projects are in general faults around the world who are coming to other using a platform like gi hub for example, to create software. Companies and users want to support these open source projects.

They want to give them funding so the maintainers can keep working on them because you know, otherwise it's volunteer time. But they don't have word to send the money. So imagine Google trying to send five thou dollars to a papal account in Ukraine that will get flagged real quick, real quick. So it's easier for Google to send funding to the open Source Collective, which is one of the

non for profits we created. We have a network of three hundred non for profits around the world and we give fiscal sponsorship and you know, an umbrella organization to the open source projects. We currently have three thousand projects, three thousand open source projects. Yeah and yeah, okay, this is a good moment for me to just established in

your definition in terms what is open source? Yeah, so open source essentialist software where you can see how being made, all the lines that constitute its code, and you can copy and using whichever way you want. You can grab a part of it, you can rehash it. It's like a mash up. This is different from what it's called proprietary software. That is software that is locked by the developer. Right, So Microsoft makes proprietary software because they don't want anyone

to compete, to use their technology and compete. So proprietary software is almost like having a patent on your technology. And open sources just free, open technology for anyone to use. Open source enabled the startup revolution. Mm hmm. So you mentioned open source projects. What's the other type of community that you're supporting. Yeah, the solidarity economy totally appurely. Look, it's mutual aid groups, land trusts, giving circles, social move

men's right, covid hit. A lot of people pulled money together to support each other. They wanted to support their neighbors by food for those who could make it. All of those mutually groups groups are coming together to support each other. Where who's going to receive the money? Are we? You know, it's a group of neighbors who's gonna put their own personal bank account. It's kind of weird, rights awkward, and it's also it might have implications for your tax reporting.

And so we give these communities the open collective platform plus a five C three kind of as a service. Yeah, so they can be up and running, receiving money without tax the actual received for their donors in like a day. So we are kind of radical administrators, right, we kind of which usually doesn't go together. Radical and administrative are

very rarely said. I know, I know. We abstract the difficulty, the awful boring bits of having to raise and manage money, because we think it's very unfair that if you want to just pull money together, or if you just want to try an idea, or if you don't know yet what you want to be in the world. Maybe you want to be a club, Maybe do you want to be a non for profit. Maybe you're just testing an idea.

Why should you pay up front the costs of having equity or having hierarchical structures that then it's very difficult to transition out of like why why are we doing this? And so the kind of metaphor that we use we say that communities are circles in a world that is made for triangles. Communities are circles in a world made for triangles. Yeah, so we kind of need to, you know, twist a little bit so we can fit into what the system understands is a legal entity. Here's the question

of why open. What's the open part all about? Everything is transparent by design, so you know at a glance who gave money to a community and how that community spending the money. Philosophically, I don't think that transparency generates trust per se, because you know, because if everything is transparent, what's there to trust? Right? You just see it, right, Like trust kind of gets generated when you accept that someone is doing something without you having to see that necessarily.

But transparency helps a lot in situations where trust takes a lot of time to build. Give me an example of a collective that has benefited from this open transparent funding, legal administrative support. One of the first collectives that really showed the quick impact that we could have was called

Meals of Gratitude. Meals of Gratitude Okay, late February or March last years, so very very early on, they realized that they needed to feed first responders in the pandemic, and so they were like scrambling to you know, figure out how to buy all of these meals for folks working around the clock in hospitals. And it went from zero to a gazillion in like three days. Suddenly we were like pushing I don't know how many thousand meals a day, and I'm like, I'm so grateful that we're

able to do this. Another one, more recent is we were able to get to families of open source developers from Afghanistan out of Afghanistan. So open source is not something that Taliban understand. You didn't see that coming. I just open source is not something to Taliban understand. I mean, that's that's beautiful. Continue so, but I mean it's very risky for developers working in open source because they're collaborating with you know, foreign powers or whatever the narrative is. Yeah,

and it could be the CIA exactly. They're just doing code on something in English. And this is terrifying. And so we needed to very quickly raise money to get these two families out and we spent up a collective and in nothing we had, you know, raise enough money to get both families off to Pakistan. Wow, it feels very disruptive. Pierre M Look, I have to say that

it is. It's it's been amazing, especially for me last year personally, to see all of these different groups just coming together, and we were able to deploy millions of dollars two communities across the United States and across the world because we were like already set up for this, and the growth last year has been surprising. Our goal right now is finding ways of moving money from the

center to the fringes. I think it's absolutely unfair that only corporations, whether for of you no nonprofit, but corporations are incorporated in a territory toy. You need to be in a territory, which is insane. They have hierarchical structures or or vertical triangles. Triangles, only triangles can receive money. That's unfair. Because the hard work that communities are doing

to improve the state of the world, it's incredible. We have more and more open source projects that are employing or contracting their maintainers filter and so we are creating jobs. This is putting the community as a new economic unit, the community as a human you know, an economic unit that is able to hire, to raise money, to spend to do everything that we give for granted that corporations can do without having to become something that they're not.

Where did all this come from here? How did you come up with the idea for open Collective. So it wasn't my own idea. Probably a collective. There you go, you get it, you get it. My co founder, Savior, and both had experience where we went through this particular pain of needing to put money to do what we wanted to do and not being able to do it because of bureaucratic hurdles. We are coming from very different contexts, like my experience was in politics, his experience was in

the startup movement in Belgium, mine in Argentina. Were like, if the two of us are going through the same there must be other people going through this, and so we started thinking about how to solve this problem and Open Collective was born in two How did you get into politics in the first place? Goodness, My family was always very let's say, argumentative. I can't see that at all. How did that show work? That at the dinner table? Was that on the way to school? What does it mean? Oh?

My god? The dinner table? The dinner table and then arguments in the morning for who got to read the newspaper first, and one section of the newspaper and then

you know, arguing about what we were reading. And my dad and I. We were very similar in a lot of ways, and then we thought politically very differently, so, you know, and so I grew up in an environment where politics was very much part of our lives, and I studied political science because I was interested in power dynamics, and I was interested, like maybe because of my father. I hadn't thought about that. Having a second, it's okay, if you want to lay back on a couch, take

some deeper, we can go there. Breakthrough happening, And and then there was a bit of of a moment where something kind of clicked. I was campaign managing for a friend of mine who then became mayor of this craft quite loud, large city outside of Monte Sides. And I

don't know, this was maybe twenty ten something like that. July, which is winter in Argentina and it gets pretty cold, and so we were visiting a neighborhood talking to folks and we went into this barn and it was stuck up to the ceiling with matrices and construction materials and things like that. And don't, like, great, are we gonna build things or housing for folks in need here in the area? What's the plan? How are you doing this? I was so excited, and he looks at me like

literally like if I was from another planet. He looks at me, He's like, are you crazy, PI, elections are next year. This are staying here, And I'm like, wait, what are we keeping this until elections because that's what we used to get votes? And then it just clicked and it wasn't that my friend was corrupted. It was

just that the system is what it is. And I'm like, what am I doing here trying to get someone elected to be mayor of a city where this is going to still happen because the system is not going to change. It's just gonna eat him up and chew him out when they're done. And so at the same time, I run into this absolutely crazy bunch of people doing a different type of political party called the net Party and

Party lad. So that's how I got more into politics. Yes, and how was that approach different from everything you just described as not ideal? So alert was a hack. Essentially, we wanted to influence the way decisions are made in politics, and so we created democracys. Hold up, wait a minute, I'm walking this path with you, and I'm like, okay, first year that political system. Got it, join a new political party. Got it. So then we started democracy OS.

What is this democracy operating system? Yeah, so please explain, okay, got it. So democracy OS is a platform for citizens to read on legislation that was translated from a political and legal jargon that no one understands, you know, because that's that's the hack of the lawyers. You make a human readable version of legislation. Yes, you got it, and so um so we did that, and then it was a platform for citizens to vote how they would like

their representatives to vote. Right, And if they felt they couldn't vote themselves or something because they didn't have time, they didn't want, they didn't understand, you know, they knew someone else who might know better whatever, they could delegate

that vote on this other person. Right. So, if there's a healthcare piece of legislation, and you know folks that work in the healthcare system, but they will never access the lobby power to influence legislation because they are healthcare workers. But you trust them, you know that you would like them to vote for you, so you could delegate your vote on them. And that makes sense. I mean, there are people who I use right now informally right, you know a lot more about this, tell me how I

should vote? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there's a technology that helps citizens weigh in and even delegate their authority on certain topics based on the expertise and their networks. Yeah, that's that's that's exactly right. And so we created this and we were like, it would be great if government, you know, Congress, use this. And so we were like, hey, Congress, do you want this? And they're like, no, thank you,

go play outside. Surprise surprise exactly, and the like that's the door, you know, and we're like, okay, great, So how on earth do we become valid stakeholders in this conversation our own ears? Do we get them to pay attention? And so we're like, okay, let's do what they do. Let's build a political party. But we run for elections with this idea that if we got a seat in Congress, we would only vote according to the decision made on democracys. Ah.

So that was a hack stakes, sir high. I mean, I've heard of campaign promises, but that's a different level of commitment. Yeah. For the political establishment in the you know, Bueno scilence, it was like, wait, what you're gonna do what And did you end up getting a seat? No, we missed that seat for not a lot. It was very close. We pushed the bars so far of what was perceived as doable. You know, we almost made it.

And we're like a crazy band of folks with software saying like, we're not gonna about what we think, We're gonna about what people decided on this platform. And then it was after the campaign, I think one of the volunteers, the developers working on the Democracy OS platform centers and links, thaying like, have you faults seen this? It was democracy is translated to French used in Arabic to discuss the constitution in Tunisia, and we had no idea what was

going on. The developers, they're looked for online voting, they run into democracy s. They did their own copy of Democracy o S and they were using it themselves to discuss the Tunisian constitution. That for me was like mind blowing.

It felt like there was a emergent need because if something was being used at the same time in monoside is in Tunisia for the same purposes, the world needed this and the world was ready to use this, and I became kind of focused on using democracy or as in different contexts, or we use it for in Mexico and the City of Mexico, for the constitution in the center of Mexico, for like a piece of legislation in Sri Lanka with the candidate in Colombia for the referendum.

The tools that we're putting out there were being picked up by the same type of groups in different languages, different purposes, different places. At one point, democracy was translated into thirty different languages, and we didn't do them. And so I think that that's what really bulls me from open source and technologies. This ability of creating tools that you don't control and that you just released into the world and people use for me is it's beautiful. Yeah,

we'll be right back. Where in your path did technology become a tool you would use for all of the system's power political thinking, Well, we felt that technology was the missing piece and how citizens could have agency. We felt that technology was what made evident that the system was unbelievably closed. Because it's not that they didn't have the tools to open up, they just didn't want to do it. They chose to hold on to the status School up because they want to stay in power. Mm hmm.

What did this experience do broadly, I mean the experience of being rejected by the systems of power. You're trying to change the experience of finding power through of the people, through technology, through community organizing. What did that experience due to your understanding of how power works. I think that we are very naive and we thought that you could

change a system from within. We thought that if we could get there with the right tools and the right people and the right hacks, systems could be incrementally rewired until they worked better. And I guess what we missed was, at the end of the day, power wants to stay in power, right, the start of school is never going to devolve power because they want to remain being the start of school. So there's all of these like awful ego game that happens while they're like, Oh, you're so amazing,

you're doing great things. Participate to democracy, come with us, and there they change a little bit for everything to remain the same. And I think we hit a wall there. We were missing how conservative power is, even if they think progressive, or even if they say they're progressive, because it's just the system will do anything that the system

can to self perpetuate, and we didn't realize that. So if you cannot transform the current system, how do you build an alternative that is appealing enough that you crystallize it in a way that inspires people. You build bridges to bring faults over? Right, what tools do you have? What sund boxes to play around with? New systems can you build? Because you need to experiment and how do you live through that? Right? Like, I'm very American. It's

the country I've known the most. That's the country I've been in my whole life, and many of my ancestors going back many generations. But I sometimes get attached to this idea of a democratic experiment. It's a sandbox, you know, it's everything you just described. Um, So trying things, experimenting is absolutely ingrained in the DNA of the process, you know,

the democracy more of a process in product anyway. Yeah, you know, one of the main things when we were campaigning for the net Party that we got from people was like, what am I going to decide? This fear that we have in us that we can't really make decisions because we don't know, you know, because only those

in power, no or whatever. We've spent such a long history, thousands of you being told that we couldn't be part of this decision making process, that we've inherited this notion that we can't participate, and now we believe it right. We believe that we're not able to and so we need to live through decision making. We need to lead through building new institutions. We need to experience that to learn.

There's there's no teaching how to decide and fail, and so what some boxes can we build so we are able to fail in our experimentation with new forms of political institutions, new forms of democratic arrangements. So a lot of my time shifted towards thinking alternative systems right and what alternative systems need. And I kind of focus very strongly on open collective because it's an alternative path of

having economic power and building around the territory. If you're a global network of climate activists and you don't know where you need to incorporate, we got you. It's fine, don't worry. You don't need the territory, We'll do that for you. And so open Collective has that kind of ingrained in it right of like building outside nation states. I guess one of the things that I learned is like, if you can't beat them, make them absolute. If you

can't beat them, make them absolute. Yeah, you can't beat the nation state. You cannot, right, So stop trying. Build around it until it becomes obsolute, build around it until it collapses, until decades on something different. It's gonna happen, it's gonna evolve into something else, or it's going to decay into something. But the nation states weren't always here

and they're not going to be here always, right. There a social construct, and so I very tired of being forced to think of the territory and the nation state as the vector that organizes power. So a lot of the work that I do has to do with how we abstract that layer out. Mm hmm. So so here's an here's another question for you. The way we practice technology and the way we practice democracy. What is that relationship historically and where do you see it going? It's

very interesting. So technology used to be you know, main frames, a prabatory, and I guess it became open and collaborative and it doesn't have borders, and the Internet really really scaled that to a whole new level, and so democracy is being more in the open, democracy is being more on a global layer like the Internet is means that the planet becomes like a new jurisdiction. We all come

together as peers that share the commons. That is a planet, and it doesn't matter where on Earth you are born, you have agency over certain decisions that impact all of us globally. So the main example of that are the

easy one is climate change. Right, Why on earth are we letting nation states have any say on climate change when they're really the ones who should decide our citizens that are coming together as a global network because there is no such thing as a nation for climate change, it doesn't matter, right, there are no borders are meaningless, and we now have that parallel between the Internet creating this global network and the global democratic institutions that we

can create on top of that. Now, owners ship is not trivial here, right, as much as we try to forget about it and denied they are you know, the cables under water are controlled by someone the Internet infrastructure. So I think technology still needs to decentralize a heck of a lot more to be able to be the truly support system that a global democracy needs. Yeah, earlier you talked about the fear many of us have when it comes to exercising our own power. Why should I

get to decide? I don't know enough, I'm not expert enough. What do you have to say to people who hear this conversation and are not excited but are terrified. I think we've accepted this idea that we can't participate because we've never done it. And I am not saying it's gonna work well. Every time we're likely to make that decision, they can't be worse decisitions, and once the governments are making it's a low low bar. But even then, I

think we should start small. And I think that cities are very powerful, are really great grounds or sundboxes for us to learn how to citizen. I truly believe most people are descent and are good people, right, I honestly believe that I think the vast majority of humanity are just good people. We're mostly you know, living in a system that benefits are elevates. You know, they're not so

good people. But at the end of the day, most people I think are good and they will do the decent thing when it comes down to it, and I've seen it happened over and over and over, and so I think we need to start building paths to make real decisions. And participatory budgeting is a really good like tool that we can use because it's an inexpensive way to learning how to have agency and see what happens

to you. And if you know, deciding it's not your thing, will find someone else that I can decide for you and that you trust enough. But it's your choice. It's your choice. I love that you know. P You mentioned participatory budgeting, and I know some people don't know what that is. Basically this process where community members decide how to spend part of a public budget, giving them power

over actual money. And I know there's thousands of cities around the world, including my city in l A that if used this to decide budgets on all kinds of things, it's really beautiful. What other types of infrastructure do you think we need? Your obviously very invested in open collective around legal financial administratives and a radical administrative what other

pieces of the puzzle and messing. I guess what we're missing is a space where we can large number of people like in the millions, right, can come together from different countries around the world and decide on something. There was a really cool project that someone was trying to fund raise for an organized that it was gonna pull something like a billion dollars and they were going to try to get I think three hundred million young people from around the world to vote on a participatory budgeting

process for that billion dollars. And I think that the money and the participatory budgeting aspect was the least interesting one. The most interesting one was building a network of three hundred million young people that have collaborated at scale outside a nation state. I think networks changed the world. And once you have that network and it's formed, you have that global social fabric you can build things with that that is going to bring about so much change into

the world. So we need to build this global social tissue. You're you're ridiculous, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Pia, you have given me so many more reasons to be optimistic. Thank you for pushing our thoughts to new places, thinking literally outside of our borders, threatening some powers that be and uh and being fun in the process. Really appreciate you. Thank you, thank you,

Thank you for having me and for listening. One thing I admire so much about Pia is her courage to just try. Partido de laded didn't win the election, and that's okay. The goal was just to try. They wanted to see how far they could go, how far they could push our perception of what's even possible, and in that attempt they succeeded. Other folks around the world took democracy os and they ran with it, mashing it up for their own democratic experiments, pushing the bar even further.

And they were able to do that because Pia and her friends took the first step. Even though it may not always seem like it, there's no lack of beautiful, imaginative good intention people in this world. Some might want to help their neighbors, Some might want to challenge the political establishment with their own trojan horses, literal and metaphorical. Whatever it is that matters to you, it's worth trying. Pia is a powerful reminder that we can use tech

to unlock more than money. We can use it to do all the things we believe. Citizening means to show up and participate, to invest in relationships. I mean, that's happening beyond the boundaries of the nation state thanks to technology to understand power. That's what creating a new economic model is all about, and all to support the collective and open collective. It's not too late to make a difference. We can try from within the current system. But if

that fails, we can build something new. As Pia said, if you can't beat them, make them obsolete. Next week we go to Taiwan where a group of civic hackers succeeded in infiltrating the government and they change the system entirely from the inside out. We have this digital public infrastructure that functions the same as the town hall so that they're not forced to deliberate about important civic topics in the digital equivalent of Nike ups like Facebook. Next time,

Audrey toime H. Pia got me so fired up. I hope she did the same for you, because it's time for some action. Let's start nice and easy with something you can all do by yourself, no special equipment necessary. I want you to think about when you feel most positive or optimistic in your week, what are you doing, Who are you around, what media are you consuming? Now work backwards from that, do more of those things that make you feel good. I promise. I'm not trying to

be a life coach here. I just think the world needs more optimists for us to reach our collective potential. And it's hard to citizen when you're only cynical, you're something else. I want you to try visit open collective dot com just understand it more. I think of it as a combination of Patreon meets Kickstarter meets easy to use accounting software watch ps ted talk is called how to Upgrade Democracy for the Internet Era and learn more

about her beliefs and journey. Then think about a local project or informal group, maybe a mutual aid society that could benefit from Open Collective and tell them about it. Finally, and then we're getting real warmed up here. I want you to consider supporting an open source project of your own while moving away from private mega malls like Facebook. Now that doesn't mean you have to go start a software company. It just means start using something like the

Signal app instead of Facebook. That's an open source, encrypted, nonprofit messaging platform which was initially launched by the Forward Foundation. And if you use open source to build your produc up that's making you money, then give back to the open source community. Just because this open source doesn't mean it's free. It was paid for by somebody's time. You know where you can find some great open source projects to support over at open Collective, dot com, Boom Full Circle.

Speaking of dot com, We've got our own with links to all these actions and more at how do citizen dot com? Follow us on Instagram? At how do Citizen tag us in your post about supporting a collective? Be a circle in a world dominated by triumphs? How do Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and dust Light Productions. Our executive producers are Me,

barrettun Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Yusaf. Our senior producer is Tamika Adams, Our producer is Ali Kilts, and our assistant producer is Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cohne is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Laie as our apprentice. Original music by Andrew Eapen, with additional music for season three by Andrew Clawson. Original composition for the

Trojan Horse story by Sam Paulson. This episode was produced and sound designed by Sam Paulson, with additional production help from Darwin Knicks. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at dust Light Productions. Okay, now for the real question for you, which which crypto should I be getting into