emergent by design

9 Personal Capacities of Authentic Leaders

Venessa Miemis — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:32:20 +0000

I came across the book The Lotus: a practice guide for authentic leadership toward sustainability on blurb.com yesterday.

Research by Baan, Long and Pearlman shows that successful sustainability leaders embody these nine personal capacities:

1. Being Present

Being Present means being fully aware and awake in the present moment – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. This includes connecting to otheres, the environment around you and current reality.

2. Suspension & Letting Go

Suspension and Letting Go is the ability to actively experience and observe a thought, assumption, judgment, habitual pattern, emotion or sensation like fear, confusion, conflict or desire, and then refraining from immediately reacting or responding to the situation.

3. Intention Aligned with Higher Purpose

Intention Aligned with Higher Purpose is the alignment of one’s authentic nature with one’s internal resonance with manifested actions in the world. This alignment trickles down to all facets of life including one’s personal, professional and spiritual dimensions. “Where your deepest personal passion and the world’s greatest needs align, there is opportunity” (Peter Senge).

4. Whole System Awareness

Whole System Awareness is the capacity to quickly switch between different perspectives, scales and worldviews to see the big picture, interconnections within the system, and being able to scale down to small details. Whole System Awareness is not just cognitive – you ‘sense’ the system. It is the understanding that everything is interconnected within a system.

5. Compassion

Compassion is having unconditional acceptance and kindness toward all the dimensions of oneself and others, regardless of circumstance. Compassion involves the ability to reflect upon oneself and others without judgment, but with recognition and trust that others are doing the best they can in any given situation.

6. Whole Self-Awareness

Whole Self-Awareness is the continual, lifelong process of paying attention to knowing one’s self; it involves consciously and intentionally observing various dimensions of the self (including the physical, mental, shadow, emotional and spiritual realms). It is the capacity to observe how one is thinking, relating, feeling, sensing, and judging. Whole Self-Awareness includes perceptions beyond the rational mind, such as intuition.

7. Personal Power

Personal Power is the ability to use energy and drive to manifest wise actions in the world for the greater good, while being aware of one’s influences on a situation.

8. Dealing with Dualities & Paradox

Dealing with Dualities and Paradoxes is the capacity to sit with ambiguity in a facilitation session, manage polarities, and hold multiple perspectives.

9. Sense of Humor

A Sense of Humor, or ‘light-heartedness’, is the universal experience of simultaneous amusement, laughter and joy culminating from an experience, thought or sensation.

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originally found: Facilitating Transformational Change toward Sustainability

main site: The Lotus: Authentic Leadership for a Just, Resilient and Thriving World

Summary: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

Venessa Miemis — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:33:43 +0000

this is a book review/summary of Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
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How do we define ‘knowledge’ in a postindustrial society equipped with new media, instantaneous communication technologies and universal access to information? Who controls its transmission? How can scientific knowledge be legitimated?

These are the questions Lyotard asks in The Postmodern Condition. He believes that the method of legitimation traditionally used by science, a philosophical discourse that references a metanarrative, becomes obsolete in a postmodern society. Instead, he explores whether paralogy may be the new path to legitimation.

I. The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies

The nature of knowledge itself is shifting from being an end in itself to a commodity meant to be repackaged and redistributed. In order to be valuable, learning must be able to be reformatted into these packets of information in computer language, so that they can be sent through that channel of communication. Today, we increasingly hear the words “knowledge economy” and “information society” to describe the era we are entering. As was always the case, knowledge is power. Now, in an increasingly complex world, those with the ability to sort through the vast amounts of information and repackage it to give it meaning will be the winners. Technologies continue to solve problems that were formerly the source of power struggles between nations (i.e. the need for cheap labor is diminished by the mechanization of industry, the need for raw materials is reduced by advances in alternative energy solutions), and so control of information is most likely to become the 21st century’s definition of power.

2. The Problem: Legitimation

The definition of knowledge is determined by intertwining forces of power, authority, and government. Leotard draws a parallel between the process of legitimation in politics and of those in science: both require an authority figure or “legislator” to determine whether a statement is acceptable to enter the round of discourse for consideration. In an increasingly transparent society, this leads to new questions:

Who is authorizing the authority figure? Who is watching the watchers?
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3. The Method: Language Games

The manner in which communication unfolds is like a dance. Or a battlefield. Those patterns that define our social interactions are identified here as language games, and put us in constantly changing positions and roles based on the type of discourse.

4. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

Lyotard says that to understand the nature of knowledge in modern times, one must be able to understand how the society operates. In this case, postmodern society it is either a whole, or split in two. Is it an optimistic model that views society as a cohesive, unified whole, or a model based in dissonance, where the needs of the people and functions of the system are incompatible? Either way, society is a machine, and knowledge is a cog in the system that keeps it running.

5. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective

The social bond is itself a language game, each of us nodes on a communication net, intercepting and resending messages throughout the system. These messages affect the nodes in the language game, causing “moves,” “displacements,” and “countermoves,” all which potentially enhance and enrich the system by creating innovation and novelty. This method of communication differs greatly from the modern institutional approach at language games, which limit the kinds of ‘moves’ able to be made by creating rigid boundaries and rules.
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6. The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge

Science is not the same as knowledge. Whereas science is made up of denotative statements, and must be observable, repeatable, and verifiable by experts, knowledge casts a wider net, being composed of a competence that encompasses concepts of truth, justice, efficiency, and beauty. Knowledge is not limited to a specific class of statements; it is characterized by a fluidity and flexibility that can identify the relationships across subjects in order to make “good” utterances. Narratives then decide the criteria of the competence of knowledge – in traditional knowledge this would be “know-how,” “knowing how to speak,” and “knowing how to hear.” A narrator attains legitimation simply by being the narrator; the information is transmitted to the listener, who then attains the knowledge, and through meter and repetition pass of the criteria of competence and the acceptable rules of a culture.

7. The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge

Scientific knowledge is characterized by the ability to provide proof supporting a statement, and ability to refute opposing statements. The combination of these two conditions do not prove a statement ‘true,’ but rather as being likely to be true based on our understanding of reality. The competence needed in the formulation of scientific knowledge does not require a social bond; it is one-sided, only requiring a sender’s competence, and is composed only of the language game of the denotative utterance.

In postmodern society, we have two types of knowledge: narrative and scientific. Neither can be judged as right or true or better in comparison to the other, because their criterion of competence is difference.

8. The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge

Narrative knowledge is looked at disdainfully by advocates of scientific knowledge because it doesn’t put legitimation as its foremost priority when forming statements. Ironically, scientific knowledge must resort to narratives in order to legitimate itself, as arguments and proofs are merely dialectics. The new function of narrative knowledge is characterized by both denotative utterances concerning truth, and prescriptive utterances concerning justice. “The people” decide that what is needed to determine the legitimacy of truth or justice is simply their debate and consensus.

9. Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge

The two predominant versions of the narrative of legitimation. The first is “humanity as the hero of liberty.” Humanity becomes the validator of knowledge: laws that are created are just because the citizens who create them desire them to be just, and so it follows that they must be just. Knowledge is valuable insofar as it serves to meet the goals of the collective. The second positions science as a path to morality, ethical action, and spirituality. Legitimation then becomes the subject of the philosophical, of the spirit.
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10. Delegitimation

In the postindustrial society, the grand narrative is dead. A process of deligitimation was inherent in terms of positive science, as its version of ‘knowledge’ was legitimated by itself “by citing its own statements in a second-level discourse,” and is therefore not true knowledge at all. Instead, science can be seen as a speculative game that is defined by a certain set of rules. As the rules are being bent, fields of science are converging, and areas of inquiry are applicable to a greater range of disciplines. No one can master all the languages, and in the absence of a metalanguage,legitimation leaves the realm of being based on performativity and is accepted to be based on the social bond, consensus and communications.

11. Research and Its Legitimation through Performativity

New methods of argumentation and establishing proof are changing the pragmatics of research. It is accepted that there are a variety of methods to arguing truth, not just a universal metalanguage. New moves, new rules, and new games are all pathways of progress in scientific knowledge. Proof is increasingly established through technology, because the technical apparatus can make observations more efficiently than human senses. The problem is that technology costs money, and so truth can most often only be established by the wealthy. This interweaving of efficiency and wealth has meant that research is typically conducted not to establish truth, but to turn a profit and gain power. If those with wealth are running the game, they continue establishing proof by funding more research, which then increases efficiency or ‘performance improvement,’ which allows more ‘proof’ to be produced, which as an end in itself becomes a type of legitimation. So in the postmodern world, power is the knowledge of how to increase the efficiency of the system, which is accomplished by having, creating, and reformatting the most information and data.

12. Education and Its Legitimation through Performativity

What defines learning and education when knowledge becomes the equivalent of performativity of the social system? Education ceases to end with young people at the university level – instead members of society will need to continually absorb new information in order to be able to function in an ever-evolving system. The role of professor as transmitter of learning may decrease, as computer-based learning opportunities increase. When information becomes universally accessible and ubiquitous, learning becomes a matter of knowing how to harvest the information out of a vast pool of data, how to ‘create’ knowledge by reassembling available information in meaningful ways.
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13. Postmodern Science as the Search for Instabilities

Lyotard says that postmodern scientific knowledge cannot be based on performativity, because efficiency must be calculated based on a stable system. Nature and society are not stable systems, it is impossible to define all the variables of those systems, and so they can never be perfectly controlled. Their success and progress are based on inconsistencies and innovations, or “new moves.” As is demonstrated by tyrannical governments or authorities, control does not increase performativity, but rather stifles the system. So knowledge in the postmodern world is about change, adapting to it, and generating new ideas, not on an established rigid scientific method.

14. Legitimation by Paralogy

Postmodern thought accepts that there cannot be a fixed, static paradigm for legitimation in a system that is fluid, organic, and constantly in flux in its process of growth. It is more apparent now that at any other previous point in history that we are living in a world of accelerating technological change, and flexibility of the players to create new moves and rules will be crucial to society’s functioning. Permanence has always been an illusion, and aligning our interactions and interpretations of society and knowledge more with the notion of transience and ephemerality will only service in our favor.

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update: lynne desilva johnson: “it can be a useful exercise to remove philosophical texts from their heritage and create new ownership of concepts and language, reapplying these concepts heuristically out of context to new and different times and places. While the author wishes some accuracy in terms of the general translation of this model, she is less concerned with the original application/ontological trappings and as such the following essay should read as her extrapolated contemporary reading of this theorist as applies to this time and place”

(from the archives; 19 march 2009; media studies graduate paper)

imagery from the Imaginary Foundation

[Image]: Decision Tree for Vision Manifestion

Venessa Miemis — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:24:45 +0000

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!

[Image]: A Manifesto for Self-Organization

Venessa Miemis — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 02:02:46 +0000

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.

Reflection: The Concept of Enlightenment

Venessa Miemis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:57:10 +0000

musings on Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

When I review these passages, my mind speaks back – “the machine is using us”.

The goal of the enlightenment was to free our minds, by favoring ‘rationality’ over myth and mysticism. Nature became something that was to be controlled by us, quantified, compartmentalized, labeled, manipulated.

But, this new scientific way of looking at things changed the way we THINK… or perhaps limited our ability to think at all. Instead of looking for greater ‘Truth’ or deeper meaning in things, identifying the essence of a thing, giving it ‘value’, it becomes a mere definition. The framework of thoughts are based in a soul-deadening logic and mechanicality. Everything that can be named and described and explained away can be somehow controlled, and there’s a power in that, but at the same time, something sacred is lost.

The belief in positivism seems as irrational to me as mythology must have been for those that started the enlightenment movement. To place utmost value in what the senses can perceive, and call it Truth, is ridiculous. I think we’re finally coming around full circle, not to a return to mysticism, but at least allowing ourselves to say that there’s more to life than meets the eye. In some ways, science itself has pointed out its fallibility. The more we dive into quantum mechanics, the more incongruities and incompatibilities we find with what we think we know and what is. Perhaps there really is an unknowable universal. Is it really such a horrible thing to have a sense of awe of the world around us??

We become like slaves in invisible chains, our minds shaped into the pattern of a machine: efficient, mechanical, repetitive, causal, our thoughts on the conveyor belt of an assembly line – there are no alternative paths for them to take.

This machine-like way of thinking is tied directly to the division of labor – the mechanized process of thinking is merely a function of material production and the “all-encompassing economic apparatus”. By abandoning the cumbersomeness of formulating actual thoughts in favor of following a predetermined reified path, the greater machine/system of society can operate smoothly. At the same time, the smooth operation leads to a distillation of society, a loss of culture.

By treating nature as something outside of oneself, something that needs to be manipulated and controlled verse something with which to be in harmony, humans become isolated and estranged. Both the lowly worker and the ones in charge are victims – the dominated are resigned sheep, and the dominators are equally immobilized by their distance from the experience, the self imposed detachment and repression of novelty in favor of utility in order to ‘better’ perform their role of power.

(from the archives; friday february 6, 2009; media studies graduate paper)

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image via wisdom quarterly

Launching: Heartsong Project: Who I Am, My Passion, My Vision & Intentions

Venessa Miemis — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:27:05 +0000

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!!!

Developing Next-Gen Profiles: Collaboratory Mockup

Venessa Miemis — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:19:17 +0000

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. 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!

Intentcasting an Epic Vision: How to Bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0

Venessa Miemis — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:29:37 +0000

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.

::: So, here we go. :::

An EdgeNetwork business model to bootstrap the creative economy

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

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

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

2. Our Story – culture and practice

Vision:

Enlighten, Empower, Support

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.

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.

How the community formed?

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

Shifts we’re observing:

scarcity to abundance
transactional to relational
finite to infinite value
possession to stewardship

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

***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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

After all….

We’re all in this together.

—

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

How Do We Harness the Innovation Potential of our Networks?

Venessa Miemis — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:03:14 +0000

Only in the past few months have I heard this term “asset mapping” as a needed tool to surface hidden but available value, bootstrap communities, and get shit done.

As I’ve gone back through my own blog and thinking/writing, I see that i also have been talking about this since 2009, though I was calling it “Human Capital Metrics.”

I found this post in my backlog – The Future of Collaboration Begins with Visualizing Human Capital, and had made a simple mockup of how Facebook profiles could be expanded to actually show information that was useful for people trying to collaborate or get involved in a creative enterprise together.

Then I found this little video I had done for Nokia’s Ideas Project, where I posited the web was evolving into a massive “Idea Exchange.”

I noticed I also spent 20 minutes talking about this in my first public speaking event, which was at Stowe Boyd’s Social Business Edge conference in NYC. My talk was titled “Designing a Culture of Collaboration.”

So apparently I’ve been yammering on and on about needing an assetgraph for over two years, and it shockingly STILL doesn’t exist.

So, I’ve been exploring what we need to do to make a super simple application that could be plugged into Facebook (or really any social network) so that we can make value visible more easily.

Asset Mapping Process

For starters, what types of assets do we want to see?

I read through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Neighborhood Netowrks Asset Mapping Guide PDF, and they break down assets into three levels:

Level 1 – Gifts, skills, and capacities of the individuals living in the community
Level 2 – Citizens’ organizations/networks through which local people pursue common goals
Level 3 – Institutions present in the community, such as local government, hospitals, education, and human service agences

They further break down these three levels into six types: individual, institutional, organizational, governmental, physical/land, and cultural.

So, my thoughts are that these same techniques for self-mobilization and organizing for change at the local level would work for Creative Economy 3.0.

What principles does it build on? (via Synergos Knowledge Resources)

Appreciative inquiry which identifies and analyses the community’s past successess. This strengthens people’s confidecne in their own capacities and inspires them to take action

The recognition of social capital and its important as an asset. This is why ABCD focuses on the power of associations and informal linkages within the community, and the relationships built over time between community associations and external institutions

Participatory approaches to development, which are based on principles of empowerment and ownership of the development process

Community economic development models that place priority on collaborative efforts for economic development that makes best use of its own resource base

Efforts to strengthen civil society. These efforts have focused on how to engage people as citizens (rather than clients) in development, and how to make local governance more effective and responsive.

.
What’s the facilitation process?

1. Collecting stories
2. Organizing a group
3. Mapping the capacities and assets of individuals, associations and local institutions
4. Building a community vision and plan
5. Mobilizing and linking assets for economic development
6. Leveraging activities, investments and resources from outside the community

Head / Heart / Hands Framework

Donnie MacLurcan of the Post Growth Institute has assembled a nice guideline for how to facilitate an asset mapping exericse, using a “head / heart / hands” framing.

When done in meatspace, participants would list three assets for each category on post-it notes, which then get put up on a poster, answering these questions:

Head: “I have some knowledge around…”

Hands: “I know how to…”

Heart: “I am passionate about…”

I installed the free Pomodoro Daisuki app for Chrome, and have been messing with that to demonstrate this exercise online.

While this is nice in terms of visualizing your own assets and capacities, there would need to be collaborative functionality and some kind of meta-tagging system so that this information would be pooled into a database and then presented back to you as a location-based data visualization, so you can see who in your community has what and where. There also needs to be a trust network/reputation layer, because you’re not going to offer all your assets to everyone all the time.

The big issue I’m finding with individual asset/capacity mapping so far is that many of us (myself included) aren’t completely clear on what ours are or how to best identify/surface/recognize them. So no amount of technology is going to solve that problem.

There still needs to be a human component to this, which is about facilitating a mental process, and I am seeing that it’s most effective when co-created. What I mean by this is that many of our inherent assets are only as useful as they can be done with others. Otherwise they’re not “social capital.” So an individual can’t really surface their value alone, they need feedback about how others’ perceive their strengths and where others have recognized their best implementations of their superpowers. (I will describe how I’m experimenting with this in a small group in my next post.)

Now, the next level up is assets at the organizational, then institutional levels.

As a specific use case for a nascent “Resilient City Project,” I’m in talks with people from my area here in the Hudson Valley, NY, people in Detroit, in Vermont, and in Montreal. The idea is to map out social enterprises, farms, and their supply chains, so we would have a transparent Eastern Corridor assetgraph, and could begin building business-to-business exchange networks up and down the East Coast.

I just discovered localwiki (ht @ryandeussing), an open-source wiki tool for mapping. It may be useful as a first step to this mapping project. I also found sourcemap last year, which is open supply chain mapping. So you can imagine how mashing up these tools can quickly help us map our regional resources, in addition to surfacing our individual ones.

After all this is mapped, we then need to bind that with the needs of the community….. and what do we have?

Matching unmet needs with unused resources = Creative Economy 3.0 Marketplace.

teehee.

–

references:

Asset-Based Community Development – An Overview

Neighborhood Asset Mapping Guide

Asset Mapping For The Long Haul: A Strategy For Occupy Movements

Future of Facebook Project: Society Video

Venessa Miemis — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:24:13 +0000

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.