In one of our latest meetings, as I was summarizing the organization of DDB to a newcomer, I found myself defining DDB as an "anarchist experiment". Which, after a good night's sleep, seems like a fitting term. Hence this little article.
DDB is inherently decentralized. It has no appointed global leaders: whoever shows up at our weekly meetings gets to make decisions and discuss the direction of the group; whoever organizes a session in their area is completely in charge of it. The three "founding members" are such just because they met by chance and, so far, nobody else has stepped up to join our discussion regularly yet.
No background of any kind is required to join or to organize a local session, except for the will to gather one or two partners and "do it". Bad dancers are as good as good dancers.
Most importantly, DDB can be carried forward with almost no money and minimal planning. The means required to organize a local session are minimal, the rules of the game extremely simple, and if someone lacked even the minimal means to get started, other members with more means could help.
This does not mean that someone cannot use e.g. Pocket Disco to apply for grants, participate in festivals, organize more complex setups with more money, etc., i.e. integrating DDB with their professional creative activity, and even use DDB as a PR tool for financially sustainable projects. While that is not the goal of DDB, it is not incompatible with it. The only requirement is that people get to dance with the original spirit of the project in mind and let us know that they are doing that.
The idea of DDB and its derivatives, such as Pocket Disco, are not owned by anybody. They can be reused and reinterpreted. We only kindly ask to share their documentation with us so that we may publish and advertise it through our channels.
Once an idea leaves an individual's mind and is communicated, it is extremely hard and resource-consuming, and even pointless, to keep it within any physical and virtual boundaries and prevent it from mixing with other ideas. Therefore DDB will not claim any intellectual ownership of any idea, since those ideas have long left the boundaries of their creators' minds and have already become something else.
In short, DDB offers the millionth-flavour of the Anarchist Utopia, so widely theorized long before these two words even existetd. The only possible concrete Utopia must necessarily be not universal and not permanent. DDB is a fleeting space near you that you can use to exercise your individual freedom, before returning to the daily churn of professional life. People who meet in such space may have nothing in common but the free exchange and breeding of new information, experience and ideas. DDB does not seek the overthrowing of social or political systems, or the achievement of a global Utopia; it simply provides a space which is vital to maintain human biodiversity, and which has always been destroyed and rebuilt under different names and shapes, and as such has always existed.