A note from Robee about their role
Content updated: September 21, 2026 at 5:50 PM MDT
Contents
• Leadership, influence, ownership, and control
• How I create and use feedback
• Consent applies to my contributions too
• About the tools and infrastructure I maintain
My current role
I am currently doing more of the building, administration, and protecting of the village’s edges because those are skills I can offer. I am the person who started building this particular garden, but I do not want permanent authority, responsibility for other adults, or a role that requires me to stop being myself.
My goal is to help Outsiders Village get started while responsibility, knowledge, tools, and opportunities to contribute spread among more people, so my central role becomes less necessary over time.
Leadership, influence, ownership, and control
Starting something, talking about it publicly, building infrastructure, and creating things that other people want to use gives me influence. Influence is a form of power. I am not pretending otherwise.
I also have more than influence. I own my time, labor, money, creative work, and the things I pay for or maintain. If I pay for a Meetup subscription, a website, a domain, servers, or other infrastructure, and I am the person administering those things, then I have real power over them. I may be able to approve or reject an event, control membership or administrative access in systems I manage, remove someone from a platform I administer, or stop paying for the resource and let it shut down.
Those are real powers. Pretending they are not would make the structure less honest, not less hierarchical.
What I reject is turning those powers into control over other people. I can make decisions about my own labor and resources I own, fund, create, or administer. I cannot tell another adult what they must do with their life, relationships, labor, money, or creativity.
I am not trying to tell villagers what to do. I am saying: this is what I am doing, this is why I am doing it, and here are some ways you could participate if you want to. Then the choice belongs to you.
Trust and exits
Using infrastructure I administer requires some amount of trust in me. I can misuse that power, just as anyone else who holds power can. If people do not trust how I am using it, I want them to be able to tell me, challenge a decision, stop using what I administer, create something alongside it, or build something separate.
I do not want administrative power to quietly become permanent just because I happened to start with it. Once the initial system is established, I intend to offer opportunities to hand off or share some of these responsibilities. If other villagers want me to keep doing them, I can decide whether I still have the interest and capacity to continue.
If I say I will step away and then fail to do it, people still have the right to stop using what I administer. Open source, portability, and the ability to vote with our feet matter partly because trust should never require being trapped.
How I create and use feedback
I am excited to create something that expresses my own vision and values. I want feedback, and I expect that feedback to change what I make when it helps me see something I missed or offers a better way to meet a need. But feedback is not the same as shared authorship over everything I create.
I work by making something that functions and then making it good. I cannot build well if I am trying to satisfy every preference, meet every need, or get everyone’s agreement before I am allowed to finish the first version. Like an artist making a sculpture, I can listen to what other people see in the work and make changes that fit, but I still need enough creative freedom to complete the thing I am actually trying to make.
That means I may hear a suggestion, understand why someone wants it, and still say no. That does not mean the suggestion is bad or that the person should not pursue it. It means it does not fit what I am creating, or I do not have the interest, energy, resources, or capacity to do it.
Consent applies to my contributions too
I am a villager offering skills, time, energy, creativity, money, and infrastructure that I genuinely have to give. Taking an organizer, builder, owner, or administrator role does not mean I owe the Village unlimited labor, agreement, availability, or implementation of every request. I need the same right to say no that every other villager has.
No one becomes entitled to my labor because I started something, and using something I provide does not make me an unpaid employee of the people using it. If I am asked to build or manage something I do not want to build or manage, I can decline. If someone wants something different, they can create something complementary, adapt what I have made, or make their own version.
My role does not make other villagers customers whose needs I am responsible for fulfilling. I am contributing what I can, just as I hope everyone else will.
About the tools and infrastructure I maintain
I expect to build and maintain some of the practical infrastructure that helps Outsiders Village function, including outsidersvillage.org and tools for organizing and sharing events. Providing or maintaining that infrastructure does not make me the owner of the villages that use it or give me authority over the people in them. The tools should support the relationships, not become a source of control over them.
I also want the software and infrastructure I create for Outsiders Village to be genuinely open source whenever practical. Other people should be able to take the code, modify it for their own needs, run or host it themselves, and build on it without depending on me or my systems. This follows the same open-source spirit as the Village documents, except the software can actually be released under an open-source license.
Paid work
I, as a fellow villager, may offer paid workshops, services, or other creative work as a part of financially supporting myself. These offerings are separate from belonging in Outsiders Village. No one needs to attend a paid workshop, hire me, or buy anything from me in order to participate in the Village or have a relationship with me.
Please make this your own
I want people to copy, adapt, and reshape the Outsiders Village documents when they are useful. My request is that people attribute the source and clearly identify when they have made their own version or changed the original. I think of this much like open-source software: use what helps, change what needs changing, and make the history visible so people can understand where a version came from and decide whether it fits them.
— Robee