Last Saturday, we had the privilege of hosting Awakin Call with William Dyson.

William Dyson is a technology visionary based in Oakland. He is the founder of the Douglass Decentralized Operating System (DDOS), named in honor of Frederick Douglass — an African American icon who stood for the equality of all peoples. Through DDOS, Dyson seeks to create new inclusive economic and political spaces, culture change, system change and redefining computing. DDOS been developed from the ground up with the intention of bringing Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community” into reality. At the age of 5, William began a meditative practice. When his family spun into poverty 6 years later, that practice helped him to get through each day, support his family, and experience the understanding that he was not alone. William has devoted his adult life to developing technology that will disrupt computing as we know it; empowering worldwide communities in struggle to create new political and economic realities.

Below are some of the nuggets from the call that stood out for me ...

• At 5 years old there's not a lot of clutter in the way of meditation. So I began to practice.
• Through meditation I came to the understanding that I wasn't alone going hungry. There were many others who were suffering.
• My grandmother was one of the first black women in radio. When I was a kid she gathered donated clothes. I went with her to the ghettos in Norfolk, VA to give them to people who needed them. There was not a moment in my grandmother's life where she was not actively in the world trying to relieve the struggle of the other. I carried her example with me all my life, and still do.
• For a school assignment when I was 8 years old, I drew a portrait of Fredrick Douglass. And then I wanted to know, who was this person? For me, the naming of our technology for Fredrick Douglass points to a path to the struggle to overcome injustice.
• When you are focused on helping those who struggle, it's remarkable how everything takes care of itself.
• One of the bigger illusions is that we are powerless. What is powerful in the world is only as powerful as we allow it to be. Twitter is powerful only because we allow it to be powerful.
• All of the technologies that echo the corporate structures where they were created. So we have to completely change the mindset of the structures.
• We need to understand the amount of time we have available to make the change. With climate change and the accelerated destruction of the systems that sustain life on our planet, we no longer have the luxury of lots of time. We no longer have enough time to work outside our legal and financial systems and build new ones. I think we need to take the structure that we have right now, and put the Beloved Community within that. So we’ve set up Douglass Decentralized OS as a social benefit corporation.
• Capital, when it invests in a business, seeks a differentiator to commercialize it. How can you flip that so that the Beloved Community, or helping the earth, becomes the differentiator?
• “The Beloved Community is speaking to what is central to all of us and what we’ve always known. We’ve always known that the one who is hungry on the street is our sister or brother. We've always known that the woman in Haiti should not loose because we're making America great again. We've always known deep down inside that the borders are artificial. (...) The Beloved Community is about the recognition of that connection.”
• There's a visceral reaction, deep at a meta level, that people have to a free black man. It brings up the historical context to how we got here, to be in this state. There's a separation of understanding. Some people are antagonistic. Some people say wow, that's pretty cool!
• Once I started meditating as a child, I wanted to understand, where does that come from? Which leads to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.
• When my parents got caught in a financial squeeze, I sent all my money to my father to help him pay the mortgage. But I couldn't afford my own rent. So I had to give up my apartment, and after that, I came to understand that my path was the path of homelessness.
• It wasn't about weighing what was going to happen to me. It wasn't about how am I going to pay the bills or get the food. It was about -- here we go! One of the things about being homeless, it has a way of getting your ego to dissolve. The only way on the path of homelessness is to get help from others, because you can't get out of that on your own. It shatters the illusion of, I need the house, the car and the paycheck to live. It is quite revolutionary.
• Our decentralized Douglass platform has the ability to shift personal information and storage from Facebook and Amazon, to community. It has the ability to empower people to cooperate in storing and sharing each other's things.
• As one example of the components of our operating system, our Hamer Deliberative Democracy app -- named after Fanny Lou Hamer -- empowers people to communicate. This will allow prisoners to vote. And this starts to unpack who is in prison, and why are they there?

Anyone in the ServiceSpace community who is interested in learning more, and possibly getting involved in some of the community based coding, can contact William Dyson at william@douglass.io. You can also check out these pages from the Douglass web site: The Pledge, Beloved Community License, Code for the Beloved Community.

Lots of gratitude to William Dyson, Jane Murray, and to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!

Aryae