Dung Beetles: Working Groups

Early in the Dung Beetle phase, the group of seven diligent beetles rolled around some shit ball questions to figure out how to organize the work to be done. After a few divergent conversations and processes, the group settled on the following main working groups:

Myths and Metaphors Working Group

Penélope Baquero, Gayathri Ramachandran, Sofia Batalha and Aerin Dunford came together to co-create, in palimpsest style, an origin myth for ten. This iterative and collaborative project brought up many opportunities for surrendering individual ideas about wording and conceptualization and allowed for the birthing of a beautiful and strange Myth of Unfolding for ten. The two metaphors for the next iteration of The Emergence Network were mostly crafted by Gayathri Ramachandran and Marianthe Loucataris. 

Website Working Group

Sofia Batalha, Gayathri Ramachandran and Aerin Dunford worked tirelessly to look at and reflect on the current ten website, reach out to the community via the mailing list and social media platforms to find out what people thought about the ten website and newsletter; and systematize the information received back from that survey. Ultimately, it became clear that ten would benefit from a complete rebranding process and a totally new website. The purview of this group eventually expanded to include the underground community of practice, the membership platform, and thoughts about the future structure for ten (the cell metaphor). 

Money, Finance and Fundraising Working Group

Marianthe Loucataris, Alex Rodríguez and Aerin Dunford took on the task of inquiring into, discussing and making decisions and recommendations with issues related to ten’s financial and legal landscapes. They dug deep into accounting and donor tracking systems, created budgets for the Dung Beetle phase and beyond, and researched potential forms of legal constitution and fiscal sponsorship. Perhaps one of the most significant decisions made by the Dung Beetles was to move ten’s fiscal sponsorship over to Open Collective Foundation. The group engaged in more general philosophical considerations related to money, as well as some reflection on personal relationships to the topic. 

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Other working groups included creative explorations and the development of the Dung Blog, an emergent, private online website where the beetles could share work, reflections, art, writing and provocations with one another. This project was mainly stewarded by Marianthe and Penélope, but all of the Dung Beetles contributed.

Everyone worked to collectively tend to the ten inbox and track potential and current partnerships for the network. Penélope worked to create some preliminary criteria for ten partnerships in the future. There were also many explorations around the role of care in the collective, especially as related to conflict and disagreement and how to work generatively and creatively with the tensions that arose. There was also the famous Soup Group, a loose working group that meandered across themes, inspired by anarchic ways of flowing power, composed of Robert Wanalo, Gayathri and Sofia.