I just got back from a great trip to Burlington, VT, where I touched base with Amy Kirschner of the Vermont Sustainable Exchange. She and cocreator Kyra Pinchiera have been working on creating an inquiry process to assist people in making ideas happen.

Many of us have grand visions of the future, but to be able to tranform those into a “minimum viable product” – something tangible and actionable – can be a bit of an art.

She showed me her sketches for taking idea to action, and i made them into a little graphic. Enjoy!

one of my fellow cocreators was drafting some core principles and guidance for self-organization today. i thought they were lovely and was inspired to make a picture. you can offer feedback or suggestions for improvement here.

musings on Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

As we’re building out human-centered next-gen profiles for the Collaboratory, we wanted an intimate and creative way for people to get to know each other.

Enter: the Heartsong Project.

(thanks lauren higgins for bringing up the term “heartsong” on our brainstorm call.)

The idea is pretty simple and straightforward:

Record a 1-3 minute video of you describing your heartsong.

What’s a Heartsong?

This is your personal “tune.”

Who are you?

What passion drives your actions?

What makes your heart sing?

Everyone has beautiful visions inside of themselves, and as we bring those to the surface and share them with each other, the likelihood of them becoming real amplifies.

Let’s manifest!

The above is a sample I made this morning. It took me a few hours total. I’m on an iMac. I recorded in photobooth and edited in iMovie.

I also purchased the domain “heartsongproject.cc”

I’d like this to be the 2nd project of Open Foresight.

(Open Foresight is a series of models and methodologies we’re developing for co-creative visions of the future. It combines techniques from futures studies together with design and media production. The first prototype was the Future of Facebook video series. The Heartsong Project is about developing personal foresight – understanding your own deep desires and aims and clarifying them. This is the first step to developing plans of action towards achieving them.)

I don’t have the bandwidth to develop out the website at the moment, but would be happy to do a wireframe or mockup with ideas for anyone who would like to run with it. (we can co-create it in the Collaboratory!)

We’re already creating our Heartsongs and uploading them to youtube.

All content we create for Open Foresight projects is being licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (cc by-SA 3.0), meaning we’re making it available to be reused, remixed, and built upon by others.

Can’t wait to hear your heartsongs!!!

I’ve been having a lot of fun the past few weeks fleshing out our next-gen profiles for the Collaboratory.

One of the things I think is critical for any sufficiently advanced social network is a way for us to actually express who we are as human beings – emotion, passion, intent, inherent gifts, and the like.

The problem with Facebook and LinkedIn is they predefine the scope of what it means to be human.

Either you’re this or that. This religious affiliation, this political view, this relationship status, this sex, and so forth.

And that’s all fine for those who find comfort in the rigidity of those labels.

But for those who wish to be untethered from that way of thinking, so that we can expand ourselves into expressing fuller human capacity, it’s a bit constraining.

So we’re working on allowing people to show who they are and what they’re about from a deeper, more meaningful level.

To that end, I’ve been playing with the new hive to do mockups (disclaimer – the new hive is for generally for you to “express yourself,” not do wireframes, so it’s no Illustrator – but for a dead simple tool that a child could start using within minutes, it’s perfect.). The above image is just v1 of what I’ve come up with, but I think I’m leaning towards everyone being able to make their profile however they want. We’ll provide a few fields (tribe dynamics, superpowers, strengths, projects, etc), and everyone makes it visually look however they want.

Profiles & Self-Discovery

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years experimenting with various self assessments (8 Tools for Self-Analysis), and thinking about how these assist in the process of self-discovery, clarity, and personal development. We want to provide as many options as we can to engage in this way. We’ve partnered with The Gabriel Institute to provide Role assessments (which we’re calling “tribe dynamics”). Also looking to partner with Gallup for the Strengthsfinder2.0.

Profiles & The Future of Work

And beyond the feel-good reasons of self-discovery, this is about the future of work and value creation too.

As we transition to a society and world of work where people are actually doing things that resonate with their core deeply, I think we need to go through a process of surfacing what we actually care about to help us discern what we’d like to be doing. For many people (at least that I’ve encountered), those deeper desires have been so suppressed over time that the individual isn’t even aware of the connection anymore. <desires for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, as Dan Pink would say>

Learning how to align around projects and opportunities based on our core resonance and values feels a lot more meaningful than chasing the biggest paycheck.

Profiles & Mutual Improvement

And beyond self-discovery and value creation, it comes down to the tie that binds – culture and community.

We’re fostering a community of continuous learning and mutual improvement, and revealing ourselves to each other in this way helps us know how we might assist each other to learn something new (contextual and relevant, or serendipitous) or develop in some meaningful way (help overcome cognitive biases, help heal emotional wounds).

We’re real people. We have these issues, and we’re not embarrassed to acknowledge them, address them, and grow beyond them. It’s’ a step in the direction of cultivating our latent superpowers so that our work teams operate at a level of joy and efficiency that can’t be purchased with any amount of ‘corporate training programs’ or HR ju-ju.

Profiles Part 2

The second part of the user profiles will go more deeply into specific passion projects that are being worked on, whether that’s software development to change the world, or a resilience project to support the local or regional economy.

We’re working on the database that’ll make these projects all searchable so collaborative and co-creative opportunities easily bubble to the surface.

Stay tuned, we’ll be posting updates as they develop!

Q: How do the Amish raise a barn without money?

A: Community, and the social capital that weaves it together.

In my husband’s Latvian community, they have a concept similar to barnraising called “talka,” which describes collective volunteer work for the good of society and environment.

Several times a year we come together at our camp in the Catskill Mountains, and everybody chips in to maintain the property – clearing branches, building bridges, fixing roofs, painting, and whatever else needs to get done. No one gets paid for it (unless you count food, beer, and bonfires as payment), yet everyone helps.

Why?

Because we’re invested in ourselves and each other and are stakeholders in our community and believe that preserving and cultivating our culture matters.

So. How does that ethic translate to online community, and can we show that we have one?

**Let’s intentcast to bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0**

What is intentcasting?

I came across this concept on Seb Paquet’s blog, Emergent Cities. He describes it as follows:

Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done.

Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen. That something could be anything:

• “I want to have a party at my house!”

• “We want to raise $1,000 for Japan!”

• “I want this piece of software to exist!”

• “We want this work of art to exist!”

In order for intent to catch on, it has to meet a few conditions:

• It must describe a promise – a future state of affairs that could conceivably happen, explained in a way that people understand.

• It must open participation in one or more well-defined ways.

• It must be expressed in a way that enables it to travel and spread over the communications infrastructure.

• There must be other people or groups out there who resonate with the intent and can get excited enough to connect.

I really liked this framing, because it demonstrates a desired outcome and a commitment to achieve it. It’s not wishing, it’s goal setting. By making it visible and public, it’s like sending out a sonar signal and having alignments bounce back to you. The better we get at clarifying our intentions, the faster the feedback loops will accelerate.

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:::   So, here we go. :::

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An EdgeNetwork business model to bootstrap the creative economy

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I’ve wanted to do a “blog upgrade” for a while now, and of course am envisioning something deeper than adding a retweet button or SEO optimization. I believe we can create a holistic living system that activates people’s potential. I want Emergent by Design to serve as an evolutionary stepping stone towards this vision. . So here’s a breakdown of all the moving parts.

The site will feature sections that act as portals into the various facets of the EdgeNetwork. They are:

home – our story – junto – the next edge – emergence collective – collaboratory – memefusion – projects – ebd tv – emergent press – patronage

1. home

2. our story

3. junto

4. the next edge

5. emergence collective

6. collaboratory

7. memefusion

8. projects

9. ebd tv

10. emergent press

11. patronage

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1. Home:

Header:

From ‘emergent by design’ to EBD

Tagline:

‘unfolding a 21st century renaissance’

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*** intentcast: logo design
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This could be just be a custom font of the 3 letters ‘EBD’, or could be accompanied by a logo image. I like stuff that conveys evolutionary development, universal patterns, emergence, complex systems, awakening, enlightenment, liberation. Also want to retain some personal association with brand that would embody words like vulnerable, strong, feminine, sexy, playful, serious, wise, paradox.

Resource: Here’s my preliminary EBD logo inspiration imagery. (I’m finding pinterest to be a cool tool for creating vision boards!)

Current wordpress theme choice: magazine by organic themes

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*** intentcast: migration from wordpress.com to wordpress.org, and all associated customizations

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2. Our Story – culture and practice

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Vision:

Enlighten, Empower, Support

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Mission:

Connective intelligence. Follow your bliss. Creative Economy 3.0.

– or more specifically –

Building culture and communities of practice in service of collaboration, continuous learning, and mutual improvement. Connecting unmet needs with unused resources. Providing creative entrepreneurs the tools and ongoing support to bootstrap their ventures from inception to maturity, so they can have a sustainable impact on systems and culture.

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Who is our community?

A global network of systems innovators, cultural bootstrappers, reality hackers, and builders of the commons. We realize our goals through self-organization, and working with innovative and generative models of learning, governance, enterprise, ownership, investment, collaboration, leadership and change.

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How the community formed?

Born of the yearning to grow together as people and build our culture through doing while learning.

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Shifts we’re observing:

• scarcity to abundance

• transactional to relational

• finite to infinite value

• possession to stewardship

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Culture we cultivate (via k kelly):

•  Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

•  Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.

•  Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

•  Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

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Some principles and values:

We are intelligent and empathic humans of high integrity, equipped with an action and growth oriented mindset.

Together we determine problems we wish to solve and form flexible organizational patterns to achieve desired solutions.

We value independent thinking, radical openness, and diverse perspectives.

We pursue our initiatives with enlightened self-interest, aware that by acting to further the interests of others, we ultimately serve ourselves.

We embody practices for continuous learning, mutual improvement and social transformation.

We seek solutions that exude simplicity, beauty, and elegance, by design.

We strive to live in harmony and balance with the physical environment that nurtures us.

We are Wave Riders.

We are Lightworkers.

We are Spirit Lovers.

We are cultural creatives.

We are Polytopians and Knowmads in hyperconnectivity.

We are Players of Infinite Games.

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Our practice:

We come together in a spirit of appreciative inquiry, and rather than focusing on problems and challenges we need to fix, we instead build a shared vision for a future we can rally around, identify the strengths we currently have that can serve that vision, and implement strategies and take actions that pull us towards it, now.

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3. Junto

“a club for mutual improvement”

This is how Ben Franklin described junto. I wrote a lot about this in ‘10, and didn’t follow through with implementing the practice I was describing. I’ve now committed to at least a once a month public online Junto as part of my 2012 goals and aspirations.

This practice stimulates my learning experience by having me engage with a curated group of people in generative dialogue, and hopefully entertains and educates the public by livestreaming the process.

Once we get the hang of this, if it proves to be valued and desired by the public, we can charge for tiered levels of engagement. Attendees can pay more to have the ability to ask questions during the session, less to just observe the conversation.

Revenue share: revenues are split among the 4 participants. (juntos will have 4 people. me as curator, and 3 diverse perspectives on a topic area)

***intentcast: participants and desired topic ideas

Add yourself or your requests on the EBD TV piratepad

We’ll use google hangouts and buzzumi, both free.

***intentcast: calendar/programming schedule

Need to show when upcoming juntos are happening, and on what topic area. There are a bunch of people in our community already engaging in this practice, so it would be excellent to have a shared database/programming schedule where everyone can submit their juntos.

Like gphangouts, but for this specific community of practice.

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4. The Next Edge

“a virtual think tank of forward-focused terrestrials monitoring the horizon and visioning beyond it”

This is an invitation-only group David Hodgson and I started early last year on Facebook to gather the change agents. Now there’s over 1,500 members! I just wanna give props to this bubbling cauldron of activity by displaying a page with links to all the distributed places where Next Edgers are curating content on the web.

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***intentcast: a custom community platform.

We’re using Atlassian Confluence for the Collaboratory. Here’s an article about Confluence as an enterprise Facebook, for a shorter term solution.

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5. Emergence Collective

“a community of collaborators: individuals, businesses, organizations in ethical alignment and coherence”

***intentcast: mentorship program

We’re creating a mentorship program where we can assist each other through a learning process around writing, research, community development, and tribal leadership.

We’ve been discussing this with the metaphor of Apprentice / Journeyman / Master

Apprentices are budding community leaders who need to learn how to communicate clearly, build effective teams, and provide ongoing guidance and vision. They’ll work with me and others in the community, co-writing posts and receiving peer mentorship and support.

Journeymen have made it through apprenticeship and are now working on fleshing out a project in the idea incubator. When they’re ready, they’ll present it to a Master, who will help them form a development team and launch their project.

Masters are master craftsmen in their fields – hackers, scientists, philosophers, artists, makers, designers, writers, filmmakers, storytellers.

We create a scaffolded learning system based on a cascading series of mentor-protégé relationships.

(I think this is the future of education, btw)

If you’d like to be either a mentor or protégé, email me your intention and I’ll get back to you when we put together an application form. emergentbydesign at gmail dot com

***intentcast: community blog + project area + crowdfunding mechanism + intentcast + next-gen profile

I’d like a community blog for the Emergence Collective, with a curated area to showcase projects in development. I’d like to display the projects on cards, and have non-time-based donation buttons on them. The cards will also display “next-gen” superhero profiles, which show people’s heartsongs, vision boards, playlists, roles & personas, strengths, and intents for accelerating their projects.

Problem this solves:

Most projects I love have unattractive websites with poor navigation and interface, because the people behind them are busy doing the WORK, not on promoting themselves. And budgets are always an issue. This proposal would alleviate that issue. They still have their own websites of course, but the way it’s presented on this site will hopefully inspire people to support them in some capacity. This is also a learning opportunity in self-discovery, and understanding how to clarify goals and intentions and asking for what you need.

We could just use buddypress, but I am more inspired to see if folkert gorter, who designed spacecollective, would create a similar looking site with the functionality I specified. The domain would point to emergencecollective.org.

(I think spacecollective is the most aesthetically pleasing site currently on the web. I always imagined emergencecollective.org to be the action-oriented branch of the philosophical-oriented spacecollective.org)

***intentcast: editorial team. Apprentices, Journeymen, Masters

6. Collaboratory

“systems intelligence & innovation design lab + global foresight commons (a Wikipedia for Getting *Shift* Done)”

This is our backroom playspace. Think of it like the artisan’s workshop. If you become a patron of the creative process, you get access to the inner workings. Blog posts still being baked in co-creation, book drafts you can offer feedback to, and access to a weekly newsletter (“Thought Architecture”) which is essentially personal musings by me about the creative economy, leadership, innovation, and the joys and struggles of my existence.

Fascinating, i know.

This is also where the private community (the Emergence Collective) works on stuff together. You can check out the status of projects, see new projects/business ventures forming in the incubator, and see the bleeding edge tech and innovation research we’re conducting. Check out sketches and UI mockups that the design team are working on. Peruse the code projects by the Hackademy, our hacker guild.

The Global Foresight Commons is a wiki library of tools, techniques, methodologies, and practices for accelerating The Big Shift. I’ve been building this out with a group for about a month now and plan to open it to the public when it’s ready so all can benefit from the resource.

Also building out an API & IP Commons with the hacker teams in our community. They’ll be able to share code and give visibility to each others’ projects so they can accelerate their initiatives. We favor open source, but all are welcome.

The Collaboratory is essentially an engine of co-creation combined with a Commons. You bring in your community of practice, set up shop in your own ‘global space’ area, and set permissions for what is visible, shareable, or private.

The metaphor we’ve been using to conceptualize it is Storefront / Cafe / Backroom.

Storefront:

This is like the Macy’s window from the street. It’s your showcase of the “best of” what’s inside. Public-facing view of your projects and ventures.

Cafe:

This is your shop. Just like stores have rules to enter (“no shirt, no shoes, no service), there are permissions to be granted to enter the shop. (ie – referral via trust network, sign NDA, whatever terms you set. it’s your space.)

Backroom:

This is the creator’s workshop. Deepest level of access permissions. Maybe it’s just your core team and your workflow management. Maybe it’s where you invite potential collaborators or investors to check out your big picture vision. It might be a bit chaotic, but it’s where the magic happens.

***intentcast: participants who want to play. we have 25 so far.

***intentcast: someone who can install SQL and Confluence when we go self-hosted.

***intentcast: WikiGardeners & Curators for the GetShiftDoneipedia.

***intentcast: Sherpas and Guides to be welcoming party give orientation for n00bs in the Collaboratory.

Also looking for co-creators for white papers & research about organizational transition that we can offer to companies to help them ride the edge.

We have one community member, Bernd Nurnberger, who is currently paying monthly for our hosted license for 25 user accounts. If we each just pitch in $5/month, the cost is distributed, and we essentially “co-own” our collaboration infrastructure. with scale, the price drops.

***intentcast: free Atlassian license. Much of what we’re doing qualifies as an open source project

Another thing we’re experimenting with is dynamic team formation and developing methods to evaluate and strengthen human infrastructure. This emerged from my thoughts about a strengths-based society. To that end, we’ve created a partnership with The Gabriel Institute and they are providing us with role-based assessments, which provide measures of Coherent Human Infrastructure indicators. Learn more about the roles in an innovation team.

Taking the assessment and sharing your role is a prerequisite to participating in the Collaboratory.

If you’d like to join the ‘tory, you can request access here

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7. MemeFusion

“invitation-only in person fusion events”

These are gatherings of change agents to mindmeld. We look for aligned “wise money” corporate patrons to sponsor our events. In exchange, they join us not as attendees, but as participants in this multi-day “unpacking” process. We let down our guards, go through a facilitated process of healing, personal growth, and group intelligence building, then watch ideas have sex. Our community demonstrates creativity and innovation and we infuse ourselves with new inspiration, corporate goes home with new ideas for organizational transformation with an eye on the horizon, and all learn and grow together. win-win.

***intentcast: idyllic locations where we can host these events

***intentcast: facilitators and corporate shamans who can help guide these events

**intentcast: corporate patrons

8. Projects

Stuff I’m personally working on.

Probably local initiatives here in Beacon, NY, or regionally in the eastern corridor from NY to Montreal.

**intentcast: project based, but would be great to have a few local Beaconites to team with on things.

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9. EBD TV

Weekly video show about cool stuff happening on the edge

I had this concept for “Metathink Mondays” a while back, a regularly scheduled Junto type event/show where we collectively chew on whatever is interesting at the beginning of that week. Could also evolve to include user-submitted videos, or simply be an events calendar / programming schedule of others within the network who are doing regularly scheduled content creation. (ie – Jerry Michalski with his weekly Yi Tan: Conversations About Change call he’s been doing for the past decade or so like clockwork.)

***intentcast: participants and topic suggestions

Add yourself or your requests on the EBD TV piratepad

***intentcast: production team. Apprentices, Journeymen and Masters.

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10. Emergent Press

Boutique publishing house

And what’s the fun of all this if we’re not publishing!? For $99 you can get an ISBN number, and boom, you’re a press. We can co-create ebooks, merch, card decks, reports, new methodologies, and so forth. Revenue sharing for those that want to play.

***intentcast: logo design, proposed book projects to co-create (i have a few already in the hopper)

***intentcast: communications team. Apprentices, Journeymen, Masters

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11. Patronage

At the end of the day, I’m a free agent and a creative entrepreneur. This historically does not pay well.

Hence the “unfolding of a 21st century renaissance.”

Patronage supports the creative process in 2 ways:

1. Fueling the Infrastructure

It’s relatively lightweight in terms of not needing extra overhead in meatspace, but there are costs associated with making this all work. Internet connection, cell phone, hosting, site maintenance and support, licenses, storage accounts, paying designers/illustrators/filmmakers/editors/apprentices, travel, accounting, administration, legal and advisory.

***intentcast: patrons

***intentcast: administrative team. operational help with bookkeeping, mailing lists, newsletters, site maintenance.

Also, self-care is needed. Doing The Work is an intense and exhausting process, however rewarding it may be. For me that means healthy food, yoga, meditation retreats, massage, convening with nature, and whatever else I feel I need to keep the muse with me.

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2. Pay it Forward Fund

Another idea I thought about back in ‘10. Basically choosing people we want to support in their own personal evolutionary development process and gifting them a portion of revenues so they can bootstrap and empower themselves. Maybe this means helping a writer friend afford that poetry workshop she’s been wanting to do, or helping a craftsman friend afford that piece of equipment he needs to launch his custom-built furniture from reclaimed wood business, or helping the new Korean restaurant in town develop a decent logo and web presence to help them gain visibility and not go out of business. (all real use cases).

Bring it all together, and we have an integrated, holistic living systems organization that generates and distributes value for all.

So that’s the big picture.

An EdgeNetwork business model to bootstrap a co-creative economy.

There are lots of us out there who are community hubs. We have overlapping edges, but also independent networks. For instance:

- Jerry Michalski has a REXpedition EdgeNetwork

- Jean Russell has a Thrivable EdgeNetwork

- David Hodgson has a We are Connective EdgeNetwork

- Flemming Funch has a Ming EdgeNetwork

- Seb Paquet has an Emergent Cities EdgeNetwork

- John Hagel has an Edge Perspectives EdgeNetwork

- Andrea Kuszewski has A Rougue Neuron EdgeNetwork

- Stowe Boyd’s got a Liquid City EdgeNetwork

- David Hood has a Doing Something Good EdgeNetwork

- Drew Little has a Producia EdgeNetwork

- Alex Bogusky has a COMMON EdgeNetwork

- Seth Godin has a Triiibes EdgeNetwork

And so on.

I think this model can work for many of us, allowing us to nurture our communities, while also sharing resources and collaborating on things when in alignment and coherence.

If we all build out functional living systems organizations, then overlay them with a connective intelligence communications and awareness infrastructure, we can be a force for positive good and transform the world.

What do we have to lose?

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After all….

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We’re all in this together.

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v

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references:

intentcasting

Blueprints for Networked CoCreation: 1. Intentcasting

Intention Broadcasting

How to open up personal future horizon?

inspirational manifestos & visions:

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web
Holstee Manifesto
The Done Manifesto
Social Architecture (a manifesto)
Dreamfish Humanifesto
Chaordic Commons
Addapt
The Evolutionary Manifesto
Internet Values Drive Org Design
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Manifesto Prospectus Omniscious Commodum
The Manifesto of the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn
Principles of Cumbre Yah
Occupy’s Vision Statement
The Balsamiq Mockups Manifesto
The Earth Charter Initiative
The Multitude Manifesto
A Life Manifesto
Rules of a Creator’s Life

other references:

we are connective
Polytopia Project
producia
Everything is a service – DachisGroup
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design
A Proposal for a New Internet-Drive, Free-Enterprise System
How the Next Generation Diaspora* Should Be Built to Help High-Risk Activists
We’re Hiring – Here’s How We Do It
Ecosystems Collaborate using Shared Language – NSTIC
The Colleague Letter of Understanding: Replacing Jobs with Commitments
The Blueprint of We
iDea Framework, a practical guide to revolute Innovation
Getting There from Here: A Flight to Simplicity (slideshare)
How the Founder Institute has Launched 415 #Startups in just 2.5 Years [#Infographic] The maker movement’s potential for education, jobs and innovation is growing
Presencing Institute
solidarity economy (image)
From social intranets to collaboration ecosystems
Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection
Designing a Culture of Collaboration
Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow
The strategy of Constant Change
The Pattern Language
Corporation2020
connect.me
Institute for Collective Intelligence
enlightened structure
Free Network Foundation
ThinkState
Shell Gamechangers
Innotribe
Darwin’s Marketing Evolution

Hot off the presses!

Here’s our latest installment of the Future of Facebook Project, with collaborators Alvis Brigis, Shane Valcich, and the Open Foresight FOFB team.

Facebook is a social phenomenon that’s sweeping the globe, enabling people to connect across geographic and cultural boundaries, share information, and build meaning and value together in new ways.

What are the implications of a technology relentessly embedding itself into our everyday social fabric?

Contributors include Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants, founder Wired), David Kirkpatrick (author The Facebook Effect), Howard Rheingold (author Smart Mobs), Nova Spivack (web innovator, co-founder Bottlenose), futurist Jamais Cascio, Doug Rushkoff (author Program or Be Programmed), Doc Searls (Berkman Center, author The Cluetrain Manifesto), social network research pioneer Valdis Krebs, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, web anthropologist Stowe Boyd, innovation strategist Chris Arkenberg, Suzanne Fischer (curator Henry Ford Museum).

Watch! Share! Check out interview clips on the Future of Facebook youtube channel, Contribute at futureoffacebook.com or Future of This Social Network on Facebook!

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Big thanks for support from our Corporate Patron, Innotribe, Zev at Averbach Transcription, Executive Producer Sean Park, and Producers Dr. William J. Ward, Debra Farber, Bill Lefurgy, Guido Stevens, and Nicky Smyth. Image design by the fabulous Erica Glasier.

Yesterday Stowe Boyd wrote a commentary (Getting to Trust: Better Swift than Deep) in response to my post about trust and collaboration, saying that the way of the future is connectives, not collectives; cooperation, not collaboration.

He goes on to recommend assembling ourselves with swift trust, align professionally around a common goal/vision/alignment, get short-term projects done, and then disband and move on, verse trying to establish deep trust, which is a much stickier, longer and more political process.

I just want to clarify what it is we’re experimenting with, as Stowe hasn’t been the only person lately who misinterpreted it as attempting to form some kind of unified hivemind.

What it’s not:

A cult.

A sacrifice of self-interest.

A borg.

What it is:

A collaboratory. (a “center without walls”)

A choice.

A surrender of attachment to ego. (healthy ego = good. being full of yourself = not so productive)

A scenius.

(I brought this Brian Eno quote up a few posts ago, but I’ll reiterate):

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

Individuals immersed in a productive scenes will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenes, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.

The geography of a scenes is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.

• Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success. (Collective Epic Wins!)

• Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

So, this is really about culture building.

Just like on this blog, where I attempt to host a creative learning environment, where it’s ‘safe’ to be vulnerable and express your opinion and engage in generative dialogue, the idea of the collaboratory is a creative learn/make/do environment as well. (I want to make this happen in an online environment, which we’re doing now using enterprise collaboration software, Confluence Atlassian.)

Its mission statement might be something like:

To provide creative entrepreneurs and business owners the tools and ongoing support to bootstrap their ventures from inception to maturity, so they can have a continuous positive impact on systems and culture.

I also want to make this happen in my local physical environment, via the Beacon Collaboratory.)

And there are two principles I think are really important to put out there that so that the environment continues to be flexible, fluid, and adaptive, instead of rigid, homogenized, or prone to ‘groupthink,’ and these are human agency & enlightened self-interest.

Human Agency

Somehow I never came across the word “agency” until grad school a few years ago, but I think it’s a critical concept for contextualizing growth, empowerment and manifesting your intentions.

“Agency is the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity) to act in a world. Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.”

My interpretation is simply that human beings each have the capacity to make choices and decisions. I’m tempted to go so far as to say we have a responsibility to do so, but then my spiritual training would tell me that we are each on our own path and it’s not my place to determine the moral obligations of others.

A lot of what I discovered in my social theory education enlightened me about the degree to which we are programmed by our environments, culture, and institutions, and especially by the media. I believe we are generally trained to do what we’re told and to not do too much thinking for ourselves. That would be the suppression of agency. I find it dangerous to mindlessly take actions without deeply questioning one’s internal navigation system, and asking oneself if it makes sense or contributes to happiness or well-being.

So becoming consciously aware of oneself and one’s deep values and beliefs help to provide an internal compass towards agency, verse following an externally mandated one. Having the capacity to make your own decisions and choices.

Enlightened Self-Interest

Whereas agency frames the capacity to act, enlightened self-interest frames the rationale of its implementation.

“Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serve their own self-interest.

Another way to say this is “do well by doing good.”

Another way to say it is “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

And yet another way to say it could be “helping each other help ourselves.”

My interpretation of this phrase is that we still retain our individual expression, we still build our own “brands” and communities, we still create our own customized versions of products and services.

BUT, we do so in a way that is mindful and pie-expanding, not exploitative or creating false scarcity.  The idea is that we can create value and wealth for the world, which ultimately serves ourselves, because we live in the world.

If a business is created that links a local food supply chain from farm to table, everybody wins – the farms, the food co-ops and grocery stores, and the people who are able to purchase locally grown organic food.

If a business incubation and mentorship project is launched, everybody wins – the businesses owners who are sharing their wisdom, the budding entrepreneurs who are going to grow the economy, the community/customers that are going to have new ways of being served, and the city that can be proud of the ways they are demonstrating resilience.

The examples can go on and on, but this is essentially the vision I am actively working towards.

I believe in a social and economic future that is convivial, vibrant, thriving, and life-enhancing for all. We live with passion, manifest our dreams, and don’t cause suffering to others in the process. We engage in a process of continuous learning and mutual improvement. We have fun playing infinite games while still getting shit done. We are alive.

The future is now.

So giddyup.

–

responses from the noosphere:

Deep Trust, Shallow Trust, and Phyles – via @KevinCarson1

A few years ago, I had a big snowcrash moment about the power of networks and the web, envisioning the amazing potential that could be unleashed if we could just build our networks and weave them all together.

Fast forward 18 months or so, and I find myself embedded within overlapping networks of networks…. and yet I still don’t see the magic happening that had appeared so clearly in my mind.

What’s the deal?

I chuckle now looking back at my own starry-eyed naivete, as if it were enough to just be connected. I’m reminded of something Stowe Boyd said when I interviewed him for the Future of Facebook Project:

There’s no natural reason that we’re all gonna come together and sing kumbaya just because we’re using the same social tools.

So, yeah. It’s not the technology, it’s about us.

We’ve been through the binding phase over the past few years, which was all about getting linked. We delighted in relatively low risk interaction and sharing, finding our tribes, forming communities of mutual interest and learning. And it’s been wonderful. The connection phase was great. It has transformed me.

But now we’re moving into the collaboration phase, and there are some different requirements.

The next few years are going to be defined by a culture of learning and interactivity that involves more trust, and so naturally, more risk. If we’re going to go beyond just sharing links with each other to actually *helping* each other, working together, experimenting, prototyping, and adapting to changing circumstances, *we* have to first change in order to make that possible.

I’m in the process of experimenting with this firsthand, bringing people togther into an online collaboratory space, and I’ll admit – it’s not easy. We’ve got a group of ‘change agents’ who want to do things together, to form ad-hoc teams around short-term projects, make something cool happen and improve our world and our lives — but how to begin?

Each of us is a free agent, delicately riding the edge of chaos and uncertainty as we try to pave our own path. Each of us likes the sound of a peer-to-peer culture, a transition from scarcity to abundance, a move from a transactional economy to a relational economy (ht jerry michalski), and a redefinition of value and wealth. Each of us sees the promise of a new way of working, living, and Being.

And yet there is still fear.

Are you gonna steal my idea? Are you gonna follow through with your commitments? Are you gonna take the credit? Am I gonna get screwed — yet again?

My question to you is: How do we transcend this, surrender, and take the next leap of faith?

(ponder it)

Assuming you are curious enough about the possibility to find out how it could work, what is the critical component that’ll inspire you to jump?

For me, it all comes down to trust.

Not just blind trust in everyone else, but trust in myself and a commitment to move past fear and into action. Lead by example and see who wants to come with me. Become aware of who I’m connected to and choosing carefully with whom I want to build things. Take small risks together so we can gain momentum. Start having some Collective Epic Wins.

It’s not a process I think can be done “safely.” Meaning, you can’t really half-ass it with one foot outside the door. Like Yoda said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

I’ve been doing it. It’s scary. I’ve been let down and disappointed several times. I know I’ve let down and disappointed others as well.

But I’m learning, I’m growing and unfolding as a human being, and I’m building a depth in my relationships that is simply not possible when in a fear-based mentality. Without going too “woo” on you, I can say that there is a heart-opening that happens, a vulnerability that paradoxically unlocks tremendous power, and an energetic field that expands, calibrates, amplifies, and makes seemingly impossible things manifest.

It’s a process that’s filling my life with more richness, meaning, and happiness.

Have you experienced something similar?

And if not, what’s holding you back from the next leveling up?