Understanding sourceship

Dec 27 - the in-between time, the day after the day-after and before later activities. Free-write, stream-of-consciousness, minimal edits.

Putting things into words, there's a fear, an anticipation of inevitable letdown, from choosing specific word strings to gesture at the beauty of the non-verbal "real" thing. The real thing is structural, spatial, visual, a connected web, textured, crisp and foggy, pulsating.

Invitations. Invitations into ownership, not just invitations to participate as a follower/consumer participant. "Contributor" is the muddled in-between, perhaps resolved by clarifying the smaller-scope ownership inside the non-ownership on larger-scale. Ownership means leadership, even more it means responsibility, it means buck-stops-here re awareness, it envelops all aspects of the thing including the interface-boundary of the thing with the environment.

I'm building - building a stack (of entry points and journey spaces) to support the onion (depth) of meaning, and/in the mesh of flourishing service/love. Everything in the evolving system connects to and reinforces every other thing, but/and every space-node needs ownership and energy embodied in the people holding source.

Building and spreading sourceship. Leadership. Ownership. Collaborative peer allies, co-workers, fellow laborers in the field.

"Sourcing" as a play on words, both Koenig-ish source and the corporate HR meaning of "to find people to hire for a role". The verb of finding ownership-energy for a thing-responsibility. (Hmm, maybe nah, as that's separate from "sourcing" also being verbified as the being-the-source action in relationship to the thing.)

Invitations into "being the source" of a thing. The seeing, naming, defining, creation of a thing is an act of sourceship. That role of sourceship can be transferred, and the current legible/shared/agreed state of the thing. (But not the unique unfolding flowing from a particular person, it will be a different unique unfolding when sourced by a different person.)

Sourceship is a flow of creation. Active-steward-ownership might be a decent short definitional phrase. Or... "founder" (founder mode?) points at the thing too, though it's conflated with the original act of creation-from-nothing. Is "steward" the closest single word? (Assuming the word "source" is too confusing, which, maybe I shouldn't.)

My invitation to developmental-relational-practice-guild folks is done in a way that doesn't require my ongoing creation-flow, I think. I think we can create the thing in a way that can be agreed upon, and then subsequently my sourceship is not uniquely valuable.

For IV by contrast it is not yet seen what that "created" state is. I am playing an ongoing role of creating/sourcing, AND I've invited (and will keep inviting) other founders to make/continue their flowing-of-creation. There's an element of "discovering the thing" that's happening here.

For IS, the community of active Sunday relators: that has been in an "active discovery" process/mode, with me in a "solo source" role. Ah, that sentence feels very clarifying - distinguishing that there's two types of source-holding (joint and solo) two phases of thing-ness (instantiation and evolution). That latter thing corresponds to something like startups in pre- or post- "product-market fit" states, where the PMF moment/transition is pivotal.

"What is mine to do? (in the grand unfolding)" can serve (me! and others) as the question guiding allocation of personal source energy. Ah, because that energy is constrained (even only in time-in-a-day) and needs allocating. Sourceship is a thing that can be shorted, neglected or even abandoned. Any intentional outcome is fine, but let's not pretend we can do more than we can. The "goodness" of the source-role-holding of a thing comes from both the capability and the capacity (used) of a person relative to the call/pull/opportunity of the thing.

I've been noticing the bits of "ownership wants to move" (from me, away from me) inside the IS community space - like the shuffle/mixer program which I created and had good reception and then I haven't wanted to be the one running it. I've been pushing various experiments in from-consumer-to-contributor movement (leaderful culture, stewardship circle, role chart, session hosting) over the past year+ and... I think there's been something unconscious resisting the whole time also.

The flowing-of-creation frame asks, has the IS community space found its PMF yet? Or, even if it hasn't in some clearcut binary way, do I still have the flow of creative energy? Those are different: to take the baby analogy, you can't hand over a baby mid-gestation, compared to the ease of adoption post-birth.

But here the "contributor" vs "owner" question comes back. What makes a boundary of a thing firm enough for the thing to be owned/held/sourced differently than its container? Hmm... can a contained thing even be owned? Or does it need to move out where it's independent (in some key way/degree) in order to be truly held? (Oh, that could be an experiment to run.)

Because there's something identifiably wonky about middle-management. (Using that corporate term because it's so obvious there.) Partial or pretend control without meaningful control, is how I'd label that bad situation - it's precisely the bad mechanics of "power over" (even with good intent all-around) there. So the key might be attaining "power with". I wonder if there's any literature I'm missing on the implementation of power-with within organizational contexts? There's self-management aplenty and Sociocratic circles (which attempts to solve this with Domains and delegation) but I've seen that not be enough to get free from the permissions-seeking-hierarchy.

Aside: There's a (by-the-book on paper but rare in actual practice?) variation on Sociocratic General Circles which has the GC own nothing (instead of everything) except the determination of which other circle owns newly-discovered things. Right in this moment I'm warming back up to that, since it might get you one layer of "true ownership" in your circles, although you'd still run into the problem recursively in any sub-circles. Meh, if sociocracy is going to work at all, it has to work at all levels and has to solve what "semi-autonomous" actually means for nested domains. Practicing "this special circle owns nothing" needn't be harmful but my "start with one" advice would remain, I think.

Organizing the power seems like the key bit. Even "startups within a company" that are pretty isolated, those fail to the degree that they don't actually have the power that their structure implies. Frames which make power-over impossible seem like a clear solution. The distinction between "can't control" versus "won't control (as long as we approve)" is enough, in a lot of cases, to fail at empowerment.

Okay time to get back to personal specifics - but this so far feels like a complete thought arc. Gonna publish and (famous last words) keep writing.