Runway x disorganising: Bong Ramilo — Darwin Community Arts

The twelfth Runway Journal x All Conference Conversation comes from the disorganising project, a joint program initiated by current All Conference members Liquid Architecture, West Space and Bus Projects.

I became Executive Officer in 2006, but I’ve had a relationship with the organisation since the early nineties as an artist, consultant, and board member. In 2006 I was employed permanently. Sorry, there’s nothing permanent, but I was employed regularly. I will clarify a few things. First, we are not a ‘Centre’, we are Darwin Community Arts, and although we behave like a centre with over forty years in the CBD of Darwin, I guess our orientation has been more interested in decentralisation. It is taking a while, but we have four locations, or premises or facilities. We have two in Coconut Grove, one in the rural area, and another in Bagot Community, which is an Aboriginal community in Darwin. The idea was to distribute and decentralise our work as part of a broader democratisation approach.

For example, we moved from the CBD to Malak, which is one of the more notorious suburbs in Darwin in terms of antisocial behaviour, and lower socioeconomic status families that live there. We moved to an almost derelict shopping centre. The idea was, let us try to live in a neighbourhood because people live in suburbs, not in the CBD. Why would we want people to keep going to a centre to make art? They should be able to do it at home or down the road or somewhere nearer. We became a centre in the suburbs too, so we try to not even be a hub. We want to be sweet potatoes, homes with nodes. It’s a long-term approach, which will rely on the autonomy of neighbourhoods, or community groups, who want to do things and manage what they do, each neighbourhood eventually having ways to support each other. That is the broader vision of our work to decentralise and distribute and democratise.

We’ve been trying to do that internally also, through our Holacracy system. When I started we were a traditional arts organisation, an incorporated community association. We have an AGM, and memberships. We elect a board and are bound by the incorporated associations’ act. We’ve been trying to change the way we work. I must tell you now my motivation is political. For many, many years I was a staunch Marxist-Leninist Maoist. In my old age, I’ve turned anarchist. I’m not into democratic centralism and all of those things that it took me a long time to learn about. I’m trying to unlearn that as well.

I realised that the best way to do things is to let people do things. You get the best people possible, then get out of the fucking way, so they can do things. One of the first things I did was abolish time sheets. You need to trust your colleagues, you shouldn’t think that they will cheat you, to use the clock to repress your colleagues. I’ll describe some failures. I wanted to ban Windows and use open-source software only in the workplace. Our staff didn’t like that because they love Windows and Mac OS. I was a full-time computer programmer and system operator for several years, and I used Linux. I’m a geek and I use open source because there are many resonances between open-source, free software, and community arts. They’re both community-driven, voluntary, non-commercial, not proprietary, and open. Also, I wanted to ban personal desks. If you need to sit at a desk just sit anywhere. I had a laptop and wireless dongle to work where I wanted. It wasn’t — it wasn’t unnatural for me, but my colleagues liked their desks and put family photos on them and all of that.

Those were my early attempts at changing the workplace culture. They failed because you can’t have everything. What did work was, of course, the timesheets. You work when you need to. We didn’t keep regular hours. And also you work where you need to. No one was required to be in the office. Look, we’re a community organisation, we should be in the community, not in the office, and I’m trying to do that still. I prefer working in public libraries or shopping centres, because you can observe community life when you’re in public spaces and process it, and have it affect the way you imagine what you could do rather than sitting in an office.

In the process of trying to democratise, we become more consistent with a community-based, almost communitarian, approach, culminating in adopting Holacracy in 2019. Holacracy is a system that came out of business, used mainly by for-profit organisations. It was easy to adopt. For one thing, it already came with a rule book, 41 pages, and a constitution you adopt and adapt. There was a lot of documented experience, and there were other users you could approach for support. Other models were documented in the book, like the community nursing system in the Netherlands, which was very interesting. The nurses and the community members determined how services and resources were distributed and delivered, not some health bureaucracy in Amsterdam.

It was a grass-roots approach, but different to what we were trying to do because we’re not a service organisation. People think we are, but we’re not, we’re a producing organisation, dedicated to producing performances, exhibitions, and all of that. The other thing we are not is part of an industry. We belong to civil society. The framework that the UN has been using for decades is that of state market and civil society. While a lot of our colleagues in community arts talk about the industry, I keep telling them that we’re not part of the industry, we’re part of civil society because our motivation is not profit. We are a non-profit and we are a registered charity. We make money, and we like making money, but we don’t distribute it as dividends. The nearest model for us is a social enterprise, but we are not a service delivery organisation, and we’re not part of an industry. 

Holacracy, although it came out of business, is very adaptable to community operations. We engaged a consultant based in Sydney, which was very useful. One thing he did say that disturbed me is that the system is distributed autocracy. I agreed with distribution, the autocracy maybe not so much. But he had a point because with Holacracy every partner in the organisation has a role or several roles. A role can be shared by partners, but each has accountabilities and a domain that is exclusive to that partner.

So, for example, a partner might be allocated a project that comes with a budget and accountabilities they are exclusively responsible for. No one can tell anyone else what to do. If you have issues with anything happening, these are called ‘tensions’ in Holacracy. Tensions are anything that prohibits or inhibits a partner from fulfilling their role or purpose. Anything impacting the purpose negatively is raised at regular meetings.

There are two kinds of meetings: tactical and governance. Tactical is about strategy, governance is about roles and purpose. If you want to challenge someone or see tension with a partner doing something detrimental to the purpose, you raise it and have discussions. If there is a resolution, for example, our website needs to be updated more frequently, the meeting might agree. But when the webmaster will do it and how is up to them, no one can tell the webmaster, you must do this twice a week and at 9:00am, et cetera, et cetera. The basis of the system is self-management; there is no management.

The structure is circular. We only have one because we are a small organisation, but in bigger organisations they have subcircles. Each circle has a lead link. I am the lead link for the whole organisation. It’s scary because the lead link determines the priorities as well as the allocation of resources and the assignment of roles.

So, in a way, it’s like my old function as an executive or boss in terms of accountabilities, assigning roles, deciding strategic priorities and resourcing money. But once I have done those things anything can be challenged at tactical and governance meetings. After I assign roles to partners, I cannot tell them what to do, and anyone can tell me to fuck off if I’m doing something contrary to the purpose.

Parts of the role are still scary to me because there’s still authority there, but as the consultant said, that authority is distributed, and there’s a limit to what I can do. I like not being able to tell anyone what to do. The other thing that keeps us level-headed and democratic is that we are paid at a uniform rate. Every partner is paid the same hourly rate.

Consultants and contractors have different pay rates, and technicians and electricians have different rates, but once you’re a partner at Darwin Community Arts you get paid $36 an hour, whether the cleaner or executive officer. We have four executive officers of equal authority and of course, equal pay. Our concession to structure is the executive committee, which I chair. I have some equivalent functions of a CEO, but none of the traditional ones.

I don’t manage compliance. I don’t sign contracts. I don’t make employment appointments. I have a strange setup that freaks some people out because there is no structure, but I am proud to say that I’ve been attacking structure since I started. It’s based on trust, you have to trust each other, but it’s also about ensuring when you have a problem, it is with the role or the accountability. You shouldn’t have a problem with a person. Fixing the problem, not the blame, is the approach here. When we talk about tensions, we talk about the role. Part of my accountability as the lead link is to say, well, maybe that role has too many things in it, let’s split up the accountabilities. We need partners to share accountability.

It’s been working well so far. We started in early 2020 and got hit by COVID-19, which I think Holacracy prepared us for. We were already used to decentralised and autonomous operations. We didn’t rely on one person to tell us what to do. Part of my role was to say, I’m worried, let’s shut down. Two weeks before the government closed down public gatherings, we were working from home. We were already doing it because we had consultations. We had Zoom meetings quite early in the piece; before Zoom fatigue was identified as a problem, we used it for tactical and governance meetings.

We were like Nike, just do it. I liked that, the system suits me and most of our colleagues because we don’t like telling people what to do. And don’t like being told what to do. I was diagnosed by a psychologist many years ago with demonstrating an unhealthy disregard for authority.

A lot of us at Darwin Community Arts have that, we’re happy not to have managerial, top-down, authoritarian systems. It doesn’t suit everyone. Some people prefer more structure and want to be told what to do. We’ve had colleagues who were that way and they didn’t last. One of them said I need more structure. I said I’m not going to fucking give you structure. So he left and found structure elsewhere. I think theatre is a similar setup. Theatre companies operate similarly in the sense that yes, you have directors, production designers, actors and musicians, but there’s a collaborative and collective process. Theatre is almost a good analogy, although Holacracy is more democratic, and less egotistical than most theatre.