How 🌙 and ☀️ people form and run groups differently, suggests Loomio’s Richard Bartlett

From Richard Bartlett’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising

Among its many upsides and downsides, Twitter sometimes seems to operate as a kind of public think-pad, with people compelled to conduct their arguments in concise, 280-character chunks that become “threads". Some writers can hit a sweet spot between logic and everyday expression.

Our friend Richard Bartlett, founder of Loomio and Enspiral, had a burst of inspiration on Twitter (thread here) about how people “do groups”, that may be (as he says) a “major distinction”. This seems to be informed by Richard’s New Zealand background, which he suggests is much more shaped by indigenous forms of knowing than UK/US/Europe.

It felt like a great post, so we’ve turned it into a block of prose (via Thread Reader). We love the emoticon (emotical?) way that Richard characterises his two styles of group-making - moon🌙 and sun ☀️ (or as an alternative, hands-on 🐾 or brain-centric 🧠). We’ve also linked some additional documentation behind Richard’s references. (More thinking from Richard here on Medium).

We’re interested in your responses, on the below (from this tweet):

😲!  Today I maybe noticed a major distinction in how people "do groups":

🌙 start with land + people + practices (behaviour, experiments, verbs)

OR

☀️ start with ideas + vision + principles (values, mission, nouns)

Having migrated from the Pacific to Europe I reckon:

🌙 is common in the South

☀️ is common in the North

🌙 is oral culture

☀️ is literate culture

(📖 read Orality & Literacy by W J Ong to understand how this changes how we think and what social structures we invent)

🌙 is more like what I've seen of Indigenous cultures

☀️ is more like how colonisers work (constitutions, contracts, deeds, ledgers)

Both 🌙 and ☀️ people are attracted to my work because I know how to do both and the translation is interesting

I'm learning to write in an "oral" way (massively inspired by Tyson Yunkaporta who is an absolute master) 
(I think this is also why I admire @BayoAkomolafe)

🌙 our sociobiological inheritance

☀️ how states work

🌙 is energising and juicy and fun

☀️ is dull and dry and clumsy

🌙 ☀️ are not obviously masculine or feminine, both of them are both and neither

Disclaimer: I DON'T HAVE INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE so don't take my word for it. I maybe have useful misconceptions from living adjacent with Indigenous people and reading Indigenous authors.

The #Agile Manifesto is 100% about putting 🌙 ahead of ☀️ agilemanifesto.org

[I regret using moon and sun instead of 🐾 and 🧠]

Correlates to John Shotter's

🌙 withness

☀️ aboutness [Shotter paper on the “withness-aboutness” distinction here]

🌙 behaviours are harder to fake than ☀️ values, so they're a much better filter for a group membrane.

For example:

🌙 "We have open books and livestream our meetings" 

☀️ "We are open and inclusive"

Also correlates to @David_Goodhart's [See reference here]

🌙 Somewheres

☀️ Anywheres

🌙 concrete

☀️ abstract

[Of course I am not anti abstraction, this thread is ultra abstract. But when it comes to group formation work, people in the North seem to be way overbalanced on the abstract over the concrete.]