1. Organize in networks (life organises itself in networks)
2. Build for modularity, replacement and succession (life is inherently regenerative)
3. Design for creative emergence (life is inherently creative)
4. Support edge intelligences (life is inherently intelligent)
5. Notice adaptive cycle stages of your system (growth, conservation, release, reorganization)

Forest ecosystems survive through cooperation and sharing. Open, commons-oriented software survives in much the same way. People care about data security, about collective emergence, about credible exit, about the kind of things that shape the ground of our sociotechnical systems, that define the roots of possibility and power. Extractive platforms ensnare people and communities. Tools that trap us also shape how we can think together, what we can do, what's possible as we shape our way forward. So, we build.

Open technologies, governed by the people who use them, accountable to something beyond a growth metric emerge. Purpose-driven tech.

But then, slowly, tools drift.

Platforms built to decentralize power become new power centers. A governance process designed to include everyone becomes navigable only to people with unlimited free time. Maintainers who consistently showed up most become, without meaning to, benevolent dictators. Governance or coordination breaks down, or are co-opted by people with misaligned incentives. Tools optimize for the most engaged users and gradually become strangers to the community they were built for. Or, they stall or die.

The flaw isn't really anyone's fault. It's a system dynamic. Dynamics throw off the best laid plans of careful, thoughtful builders all the time. Tech system structures create information and resources flow channels. Adject living systems are fed - or bled - by those flows. But the channels of software systems too often ignore the logic of living systems. They don't just fail to help us flourish together, they drift towards interference. Maladaptive and misaligned sociotechnical systems concrete-line the river of our noosphere, killing vital functions in our cognitive lives. Watersheds, rivers, and forested landscapes can offer us a window into healthier flow dynamics. How can we sense patterns that look like dams, pollution, and spawning grounds? How can we tell when the canopy, or the understory, of our digital ecologies need care?

This session aims to explore what the core dynamics of living systems mean for software teams, and for the structures of rooted, ethical tech systems. We want to look at both why drift happens, and how to design sociotechnical systems more resilient to drift.