# Surfacing Your Values **An exercise for Black queer organisations** *Part 1 of 2 — Commons Kit, BLKOUT UK* --- ## Why this exercise Most values statements are useless to a decision-maker. *"We value community, integrity, and inclusion"* can't tell you whether to adopt a tool, take a funder, or decline a partnership. It's a virtue list, not a working document. The mechanism that produces something useful is **negative space**. The questions below don't ask what you value. They ask what you've **refused**, where you've felt **friction**, and what you would **lose** before you'd compromise. Refusals reveal values that virtues hide. You'll come out with two things: 1. **A values document** — five to seven specific operational lines you can hold a decision against. 2. **An indication of what your AI strategy has to consider** — not a strategy itself, a mirror of what your own answers say it can't ignore. The values document is the input for Part 2 (the council kit). The AI-strategy indication is useful on its own, even if you never use Part 2. --- ## What you'll need - About 90 minutes - Two to four people who hold the decisions in your org (not the people who write the strategy decks — the people who say yes and no) - Honest answers about what you've actually refused. If you haven't refused anything, this exercise is the wrong starting point — work out why first. --- ## The five questions Work through them in order. Each question has a follow-up; the follow-up is where the operational content lives. **1. Name three tools, platforms, or partnerships you've said no to in the last two years. Why?** What did the refusal cost you? What did saying no protect? **2. What would a funder offer that you'd turn down — and at what amount?** Be specific about the offer and the number. If you can't name a number, the line isn't real yet. **3. Name an organisation similar to yours that you'd never want to be mistaken for. What's the difference?** Not what they do wrong — what they do that you're choosing not to do, and why. **4. Whose work are you continuing? What would they not let you compromise on?** Name the people (living or dead) whose work is the accountability you answer to. What's the specific commitment that comes from sitting in that lineage? **5. Where do you and your closest collaborator most often disagree about strategy? What's the disagreement actually about?** Beneath the surface argument is usually a values disagreement that hasn't been named. Name it. --- ## Writing it up Convert your answers into five to seven lines. Each line should be **an operational rule**, not a virtue. A virtue: *We value data sovereignty.* An operational rule: *We do not adopt platforms that aggregate member data for commercial resale, and we do not host member contact data in jurisdictions where subject-access rights are weaker than UK GDPR.* If a reader can't tell from your line whether a specific platform passes or fails, rewrite it until they can. --- ## Second output: what your answers say about AI strategy Read your five-to-seven lines through this filter. You'll find your strategy already has to address: - **Data sovereignty** — your refusals will cluster around where member data goes, who holds it, who can resell or model on it. Any tool that breaches that cluster fails before it starts. - **Stack disposition** — your yes/no patterns on hosting, open-source, walled-garden SaaS reveal a stance you may not have written down. The boundary between what you adopt and what you refuse is your stack disposition. Write it. - **Risk register** — the things you said you wouldn't trade are the test every strategy decision gets measured against. Three to five lines. - **Accountability anchors** — the people you named in question 4 are the test, not the funder. Name them in the strategy doc. - **Open questions** — the disagreement in question 5 is a tension the strategy will have to hold, not resolve prematurely. Naming it is the strategy work; pretending it's settled is the failure mode. This isn't a recommendation. It's a mirror — your answers say your strategy has to consider these. What you do with that is yours. --- ## What this exercise is not It is not a consultancy framework. It is not a way to brand your values. It is not a workshop deck for an away-day. It is uncomfortable on purpose. It asks you to name what you've refused, which most organisations don't have language for. If the discomfort isn't there, the questions aren't doing their work. --- ## Lineage and use This exercise emerged from BLKOUT's work on the digital commons for Black queer organisations in the UK. It is offered to peer organisations as part of a two-part kit. Free to use, adapt, remix, translate. Tell us what you find at commons@blkoutuk.com. The exercise carries forward methods from earlier organisers and writers who insisted that values are visible in what we refuse, not what we proclaim. Specific debts: Audre Lorde on silence as expenditure; Joseph Beam on home as a question of who is in the room; the cooperative tradition of writing down what the membership won't do. When you've completed Part 1, Part 2 is the **Dreamcatcher Council Kit** — a suite of historical judges and a meta-prompt that runs your values doc against any specific tool, partnership, or platform you're considering.