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(Superfluid is a site that enables people to collaborate and exchange favors using their virtual currency, Quids.)
Apparently they will be here in NYC on Monday, demo-ing thier product at the NY Tech Meetup, and wanted a cool idea they could bring to life in front of the crowd. So, I emailed them with my idea, something that’s been filed away in my mind as “The Resilient City Project.”
the one line description would be something like:
a tool that helps local communities share resources and reduce expenses using geolocation, interactive mapping, and visualization
To unpack that a bit, let’s start with the components of a resilient city.
I found a cool Community Resilience Toolkit that was put together for the San Francisco Bay Area, which breaks down aspects of resilience into these topic areas:
- food
- water
- energy
- transportation and housing
- jobs and economy
- civic preparedness and social services
Ok, so the idea is, how can we strengthen those things so that a community can weather tough economic times or uncertainty?
I was thinking something along the lines of Ushahidi meets sustainability. Ushahidi is an open source platform that was originally used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts in Kenya, and has since expanded to be a customizable tool for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. With just a mobile phone, you can upload info that gets transformed into a real-time visualization.
the original web mash-up
So, how could this be used to help people within a community display their resources/assets, needs, or initiatives towards resilience?
I live in Beacon, about 60 miles north of NYC, a small city of around 15,000 people. I’ve always thought it would be a perfect testbed for something like this. Basically you have a Google map, and everyone can ‘claim’ their property/residence, and make stuff visible so that it can be made more efficient/effective. (we care about the stuff we can measure). For instance:
Energy example –
How could we reduce the energy used citywide? Having dabbled in real estate here, I know that I can call Central Hudson (our utility provider) and find out the average monthly electric bill on any property. So the information is publicly available. What if we could map those numbers on every property, and have a dashboard that displays the overall energy usage in the city.
Then, what if we organized, say, a light-bulb exchange initiative, where we began getting the city switched over to energy star bulbs/CFLs. When a household/business converts, they get a “badge,” that can then be displayed on the site when you scroll over that property. (we could also make actual stickers that could be displayed in the window of storefronts and people’s homes showing they’ve gotten the energy badge…. i saw something like this in Boulder, Colorado several years ago.) The real-time city data would also reflect the change, showing some kinds of graphs or pie charts displaying the increase in efficiency.
Food example –
We had many local farms in the area and options for food co-ops. We also have a lot of people who have gardens and have excess produce in the summer that they’d be happy to swap for other goods. We have a lot of people who brew beer. We have people who would be happy to go in together to get a deal on buying a ¼ steer or some quantity of grass-fed beef from a farm, or dairy products, or whatever. What if people could make this information available, so they could more easily make arrangements to invest in local food?
Transportation & Housing example –
I’ve been inspired by all the “collaborative consumption” services I’ve seen spring up over the past few years. There’s car sharing (ZipCar), bike sharing (Bcycle), land rental for gardening (landshare), or room rental for travelers (Airbnb). How could we implement similar services, or use those existing services as plugins? (getting a car or bike sharing program going is clearly a large initiative, and trickier than just offering a plot of your backyard as common gardening ground, but you get the idea.)
Jobs and Economy example –
If economy is about the exchange of goods and services, what are the peer to peer services out there that could duplicated/implemented? For instance, there’s Freecycle for reuse of goods, Swap for trading, and Zilok for renting out any kind of thing you might have – electronics, tools, whatever. Can we hook into these services or make a simple local version? Google map + stuff that’s for offer + stuff that’s available. Same idea for exchanging services and collaborating on projects… using something like superfluid, perhaps?
We already have a great coworking space here in town, BEAHIVE, that’s been itching to be a catalyst to coordinate more real-world local initiatives and projects. It seems like we have a lot of the things necessary to be a prototype city for resilience building.
Where You Come In
Well, the guys at superfluid suggested I provide as much info & visuals as possible to reinforce the idea. And they want it within 24 hours. (eek!)
So…… what can we whip up?
If anyone has suggestions for a name for this, logo ideas, better description, etc, please pass em along. Any kind of video / graphical / text assets to communicate the vision also appreciated. My Illustrator skills are pretty amateur, but at the least I’ll take a screenshot of a google map and overlay an info bubble on top of it to convey some of the elements I’ve described above.
If this thing manifests, the intention is for it to be a free tool for any community us utilize, so I hope it’s intriguing! I’m eager to prototype it in Beacon.
Looking forward to your input, as always.
–
via @yodelheck
– Community Impact Through Mapping
via @Deborah909
– A community garden as a use case for interoperable capacity mapping and resource matching tools
emergent by design 
Very interested in this idea. Totally sound concept. Any help needed Just ask. Am in London
sure, how would you like to help?
Great project! The idea of using publicly visible achievements/awards to drive desired behaviour (in just about any social context) has so much upside its scary. Good-of-the-planet meet privacy-concerns. If we want to influence the behaviour of the N-Billion people we will have soon, privacy at this level ain’t gonna win.
There will be endless crazy consequences
– ‘ethical’ employers who require certain levels of achievement at your address for you to be considered as a candidate.
– ethical employers earn awards for the number of employees with badges
– reductions in company tax for employer badges.
– council tax reductions (or increases) based on achievements.
– awards are also agents of cause and effect (earn the electricity badge and we’ll add $100 to the city’s ‘green car’ project)
The list is endless – feedback loops within feedback loops. As we learn our connective capabilities a total shift in the granularity of societal governance will emerge, and power to effect change will devolve from centralised to decentralised, and be incredibly powerful. It will be awesome to watch.
Happy to give cooperable.com if you like.
the funny thing is, this is already happening, but in the reverse. people get rewarded all the time for exploitative, dishonest behavior through all kinds of rewards – money, power, prestige, perks, etc.
why would a system that “used” us towards positive beneficial means be such an absurd proposition?
It is not absurd, but those people who have power will see you trying to take it away and distribute it freely and will brand you some form of enemy. Maybe of the state, or the economy, or whatever they can imagine. “Incandescent lightbulb terrorist!” You know those CFCs are poisonous, right? LEDs all the way!
I’m happy to be an enemy of the status quo, but many people are afraid of their government and the power it wields. You will have a hard time getting past the early adopters (the rebels) to the quiet majority, who are “comfortable” with the way things are. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’ll cheer you on, but be warned it won’t be a quick battle. 😉
The perks of corruption though are largely private. The difference with what is emerging is our ability to subvert these archaic social structures – one theme of the web is ‘cutting out the middleman’, and that, combined with transparency of reward structures, is a very powerful combination. People will get elected for designing and effectively marketing their feedback loops as agents to influence behaviour in accordance with their world-view. They’ll be easy to validate and easy to create, terminate and change – a lovely agent of social evolution! So yes, we do already have reward based feedback loops, but not like this new stuff 🙂
thanks for your response.
i see little evidence of any subversion of any “archaic” structures…. yet. Maybe we have a different view of what is archaic. We are cutting out some middlemen, but middlemen are not a strong political group (though they tug on the purse strings of those that are) and they aren’t really archaic, though they’ve been around for a while. Also, we need the middlemen on-side, if we are serious about change. When we cut out a monopoly, or a border, or a religion, then I would agree with you.
I also think you underestimate the power of corruption on “elected” officials. The most popular sentiment is a desire for safety for me and my family. Until safety is delivered via a self-empowered society rather than a police-state, the people elected will continue to be amongst the most hated of our population. Delivering what cannot be truly delivered via lies, secrets, and force.
i do agree that things are changing, and for the better, but it won’t be quick and easy. Two generations is my prediction. I would love for it to be faster, but faster is one of our biggest issues.
“effectively marketing” ~ is amongst the hardest of things, especially for communistic ideas, in an overly individualistic society. it threatens the status quo, which is perceived as “safe”. You and I probably agree that this perception is false, but we are the minority for the moment.
also while games and feedback loops have great potential for gains, they are also very susceptible to corruption. Without constant monitoring, how will the city be able to offer rewards to people who “installed” the lightbulbs and then traded them to their neighbour and on down the block. one new set of lightbulbs ~ a dozen rebates. This is obviously ridiculous, but still, many people are crafty when it comes to stiffing society and they are highly trained to resist invasions of privacy, though it be for the common good. 🙂
sorry for going a little off-topic, but I like this idea and want it to succeed, so I feel it’s important to poke holes and build up our determination to find and build lasting solutions.
V,
What an inspired idea for an initiative!
It would be wonderful to see Beacon as a proving ground for a resilience-focused social game.
Perhaps volunteers (and neighborhoods) could vie in such a game to move the ball along the directions you’ve outlined? @asaulgoodman has some intriguing ideas on social games that may relate to a Beacon initiative at http://j.mp/e712L2 and http://j.mp/iaUzxS .
Perhaps metrics and frameworks for scorekeeping in each field of resilience might be developed in cooperation with @mbauwens and the P2P community, and/or John Robb and Jeff Vail?
Linking with http://www.thesuperfluid.com and @johnrobb’s new project on metacurrencies for open source ventures ( http://j.mp/hhfc2X ) might also help in launching and replicating a Beacon example.
My hunch is that offsite as well as onsite volunteers might also respond, possibly through a success-sharing game framework along the following lines — http://j.mp/9Grusq . The game framework at this link could share the upside of reawakening dormant land values in communities now under stress.
Virtual “gifts on a beach” (http://j.mp/aSKLHX ) offered by aligned donors might also help spark local action along the lines you’ve described.
What do you think?
Best,
Mark
@openworld
those are great ideas, i was thinking along the lines of games too, with the badges, having a virtual currency/coin, maybe even skinning the interface to your desire. (Narnia!!!!!!) lol
all these things already exist, as we know, it’s about making it really dead simple to use… and starting with a solid foundation/infrastructure, and letting the components kind of….. yeah…. “emerge”
anyway, we’ll see what happens monday!
I started sketching out something like this with Sofia Bustamante of London Creative. The google doc of our notes are here: https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AVQwZEP5SpUOZGNrZ3BtcHRfMzZzNW00Z3hocw&hl=en
I’d be glad to throw down some quick graphic design to clean up any presentation materials. Maybe I’ll stick around the city through Monday to meet The SuperFluid guys…..hmmmm…..
that would be awesome. i’d love your help.
Venessa, as usual you are flowing the pulse of evolution, consciously and I continue to stand in appreciation and gratitude for the wisdom and inspiration you share. Thank you.
A few comments:
First off good luck 🙂 I wish we had a Seattle Tech Meetup. We used to have Planetwork monthly meetings that I helped co-organize but somehow we lost steam….
1. Here is a link to the related and relevant project of my friend Poki Piottin (aka Hugo):
http://nodilus.org/
You’ll see that many of the same concepts you are naming plus others are included in this vision. What you are seeing and naming in terms of a resilient cities toolkit is essential. Nodilus keeps evolving and I would love to see their work integrated with what you are talking about. THey are all about collaboration and they’ve done a fair bit of design work that could be built upon. They are open source and conscious evolution driven 🙂
2. Capacity building – When I think of resilience, I also think of the internal capacities of people to cope with the transition that is upon us and coming. Maybe this is covered under ‘civic preparedness’ but probably not to the extent i’m talking about. This is often overlooked and occasionally a total blindspot when it comes to creating the proverbial toolkits. We tend to privilege the tools over the consciousness behind how we use them and continue to create and evolve them. Or using an integral map, we focus on the lower right quadrant rather than the lower and upper left (interior of individual and collective). I’d love to see the idea of “resilient people” included.
http://resilientpeople.org/
3. I think of Joanna Macy’s work around the Work That Reconnects and Dave Pollard’s article and diagram on her work is brilliant and elegant. The three concentric circles are important aspects of any long term social change endeavor.
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/09/07.html
4. Lastly I can’t help but think of meshworks and Integral Cities…activating our evolutionary intelligences for better ongoing design and connectivity in our urban landscapes. I love Marilyn Hamilton’s work. A great ally and colleague in this field.
http://www.integralcity.com/intelligences/emerging.html
“Meshworking evolutionary intelligences for the human hive and eco-regional resilience.” YES!
The project (and Superfluid) would benefit from classified Directory of Offers *and* Wants, along with a “Newspaper” covering notable events and human interest stories. I have done many such directories for LETS groups. Also a structured inspiration list helps. Many people don’t believe that they don’t have anything to contribute, when they have. The inspiration list helps to draw it out of them.
CORRECTION – Many people don’t believe that they have anything to contribute, when they have. The inspiration list helps to draw it out of them.
A couple ideas of not so mindblowing ideas:
-How about a local meta search tool that aggregates info from a variety of collaborative consumption services to show you the resources available in your area? You could search according to asset and access type: car to rent, lawn mover to buy, snow blower to share.
-One pet idea is a map that’s a sort of opposite of what you see on most Google maps – commercial stuff. This map would show only civic stuff – parks, libraries, police stations, voting places, government offices, nonprofits, etc.
The trick is to make something like this really simple and singular. Specific things work well on the net. That’s why I like the search idea, it’s singular but has wide applicability.
yeah, i was thinking… it would be cool if it was more about protocols than rebuilding already existing platforms… i.e. be able to verify your account with facebook/twitter/whatever, be able to simply display on your profile which other services you are a part of (like freecycle and airbnb), and that info can just be pulled in, instead of having to restate it over and over all over the place.
yeah, like that, I worked on a start up where a product proposal was to stream available assets and requests realtime according to individual user filters – twitter meets craigslist meets cell phone.
I think you need to break this down into a story the reason being is you also have to look at this in respect to Innovation. But let’s keep innovation simple by clarifying it in three terms.
Technological Jobs, Functional Jobs, and Emotional Jobs
What jobs are trying to be accomplished/done/met?
Value proposition: a tool that helps local communities share resources and reduce expenses using geolocation, interactive mapping, and visualization. In your value proposition….
1 local communites share
2 communities share resources
3 share resources and reduce
4 reduce expenses
5 geolocation
6 interactive mapping
7 visualization
The first four are emotional jobs, the last three technical.
So….local communities share resources (information about activity, what they produce, what they consume, what they know, what they have) to reduce (individual, community, environment) expenses using geolocation, interactive mapping and visualization.
You notice now it no longer is about the tool but a service. The service is function…
Technical jobs- – ->Function<- – – Emotional
So the key is to have 567 meet in the middle with 123
That's your service and that all comes together as your value proposition.
You have a working model for 567, now you need a story for 123
Senario build this into sub stories. For example Beacon is a community who share, they are sharing resources including their activity usage of energy, consumption of foods, production of foods, knowledge, and so forth, we do so to reduce our expenses, financial (give an example) as a community our health is better because we have reduced it as a community, environmentally because we live in more natural ways…
How then is another function but tends to lean on technical. What must i do each day to ensure i'm providing my resources that get the job done to reduce expenses…
How will i have to function with the technology to meet these needs I have to reduce expenses for myself, help my community and be part of something bigger…
The bottom line here is we want to reduce something and in order to reduce it we must function in a certain way. that means you build a tool around how i can function in order to reduce and then the technology is built around that function….
Vanessa, a group of us in Seattle have been working on methods to extract relational data from public media, with a focus on innovation towards sustainability. I can offer images of the extracted social networks, or even some underlying data, if that would help.
sure, you can email me at emergentbydesign at gmail dot com
Hi Venessa,
As usual you are not only bringing ideas but more importantly taking actions. You seem to be asking for “crowd wisdom” and I suspect you mean any material relevant for you to prepare some stunning foundation paper. Quickly skimming through my library, these two links may be interesting:
1) http://rmc.sierraclub.org/energy/library/sustainablecities.pdf : a great study on sustainable cities
2) http://www.betterplace.org : will help you build up the ‘shared community’ aspect of your project.
I am partly involved in a project to build ‘sustainable green roof’ in urban area with a view to install beehives following a shared ‘savings’ concept. I have some material (French and German) gathered for the last 2 years around ‘biodiversity for sustainable city’. Any interest ?
You may also have a look at “Sustainovation for Social Change”, a concept brought by some German friends. They will be presenting this year in the US a concept called “From cradle to cradle”, which might be relevant to your project.
Sustainably yours !
Phil
Excellent post, Venessa! The list from the Community Resilience Toolkit is great, but I immediately noticed a few areas that were missing, namely: art, culture, play, fun. These are the things that help glue people together and that facilitate connection and cooperation. I recently came across Ethan Zuckerman’s (@ethanz) post “Games that help us wander” and highly recommend it: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/01/03/games-that-help-us-wander/
I especially liked his discussion of the augmented reality game, SFO (beta). Here’s a snip:
Reminded me of the group, Improv Everywhere, but that’s another post :). If you’re curious about Inprov Everywhere, I list out some of my favorite IE “missions” here:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/01/03/games-that-help-us-wander/#comment-2324812
Nina Simon http://twitter.com/#!/ninaksimon (Twitter) http://www.museumtwo.blogspot.com/ (blog) is an expert in participatory design for museum exhibits and is a good mind to follow in the cultural/art social design and collaboration space. (She’s teaching a class at University of Washington right now that I’m sitting in on).
Thanks for all that you do!
Awesome, Venessa. There might be something useful in the Social Actions API, as a resource for populating an “ask map,” especially now that it’s semantic tech-friendly. Take a look at http://search.socialactions.com (glance at the advanced search page to see a list of sources), and the links to entity matches in any old search result for an idea of where this could go…
Inspiring thread, a “Beacon in the smog” to quote grist.org‘s tagline. Yup, that link searches for “resilient community”.
What we are aiming to prototype here is all about linking people having underserved needs with underused resources – nearby.
I would already appreciate a twitter location search so that I can connect people near each other who I feel would be a good match. The tools I ran into on my own did not appear helpful. Most often it is a tip from the personal network that helps me on – someone who cares. Community . I put this here not as a call for suggestions (would help, though 😉 but as an example how even people considered “tech-savvy” each have their own little unmet needs. Googling only gets us this far.
This is why I am here: easy natural communication, shared goals, overcoming obstacles, achievements, fun, play, celebration. I appears we can realize awesome value if we broaden the community exchange and make it easy for people to join in, contribute and receive. Trust grows better where our garden is open (this means primitive ubiquitous technology) and has safeguards to reduce perverse incentives, gaming and exploitation. But no need for perfection. Diversity as a prerequisite for resilience.
An emergent community sharing resource is Appropedia.
As an engineer who tracks his home energy usage and calculates payback time for switching to LED lighting and other appliances I can contribute a first order of usefulness assessment for technologies.
Now the art becomes how to make access to and interaction with all this multithreading information easier. Thank you Venessa and co-creators here for the focus.
This site seems right up your alley: nodilus.org.
Very inspiring comments from many different horizons, “techies” or “non-techies”. Standing back and listening to what people really want is very important to make your initiative a success. I remember the early 2000, during the E-Gov frenzy in Europe, especially in Germany. Projects were aiming at offering platforms to achieve two goals: cost-reduction in administration and better services to citizens. Recently, I heard very senior civil servants from Bavaria telling me that business organizations were the only interesting clients for such platforms ! Many citizen’s services have failed, whilst e-services to business are begining to achieve their objectives.
Your “Resilient City” project might be a very good opportunity to re-focus the actions towards bringing more common wealth to citizen (not solely business) whilst achieving at the same time some cost reductions through sharing. The major issue I have been observing during the last 10 years is about ‘value’ (market versus non-market values) and ‘moral values’ (what people really value when sharing). Turner et al. wrote an excellent book about defining value for non-market goods and services, they talk about actual use value, option value and more importantly bequest value as well as existence value.
Additionally, you may get some ideas by looking at some diagrams I have drafted two years ago for supporting workshop discussions. Here is the link: http://bit.ly/edFUu9 (2 posts – 3 diagrams). There is a supporting ‘story’ document to be found here: http://bit.ly/bJG2B6; though this is more for ‘business’ .
About the technology (bearing in mind that your project is about a tech startup), there is the nodilus.org , betterplace.org and I heard of a similar project backed by Intellicorp Inc. using their semantic inference engine in collaboration with FourSquare. Geolocation is obviously key but a simple mean to a more valuable end.
Vanessa – Excellent initiative. Happy to help and connect. Actually we are on a similar journey here in Dresden, bringing education about the emerging accelerating and technology driven times into public. Engage and learn using the complementary money KayGroschen, “buy” at the MindShop, or invest in startups like LockSchuppen. More under http://mindbroker.de/wiki/NooPolis.
Venessa,
Brilliant idea. I think if this gets up and running, I see endless possibilities – beyond food, energy, transportation. In fact, the way I see it the power of this initiative is not as much in the categories we might define early on but the possibilities of folks adding in new ones — the more the system becomes information rich, the more it will serve the community better.
Here are my quick thoughts on some pathways.
Information that can be auto-fed through a regular feed: This could be your information from the utility companies etc. where the information refresh is more structured in nature.
Information that can be auto-fed but on an adhoc manner: This is (possible) information from agencies like police, hospitals, paramedic, or any agency that has restrictions on what filter is applied before the info can be made public.
Information that is ‘manual’-fed by user(s): This is the by far (I think) the most value generating. Into this would fall your households (food/produce), jobs, traffic issues, games, opportunities etc. In fact, this category can be used for both “push” and “pull” – meaning, folks can pose a query for what they want and barter something in return.
Great stuff
Best,
Ned
Hi Venessa,
I especially like the crowdsourced component for self-refreshing your content. If the nonprofit tools and templates that have been shared (and sold) on IdeaEncore Network ( https://www.ideaencore.com/ ) could be useful to your vision, please let me know. Our goal is to encourage re-use … so nonprofits and those who serve them can avoid reinventing wheels and put their time/resources into furthering their mission.
We provide a variety of associations and alliances with the ability to very easily configure and display their own custom online resource library.
We use a variety of reward mechanisms to encourage people to take the time to share including recognition and creating earned income. I’m intrigued by the non-cash mechanisms mentioned in your post and others’ comments.
All the best,
Scott
There is a cool website called sharedearth.com which matches people with land with people who want to garden.
When people get together in a circle they can share their needs and help each other with their needs. We started a project that does this called gift circles. These circles have now replicated over the US. What would be cool would be to have some kind of online instant meetup process where people all over a city could have these flash mob gift circles. The internet could help guide people who are near each other to meet up. So a bunch of people at busstop, a cafe, at a sports stadium, on a campus, on a train could get together to share their needs and help each other.
For more on the gift circle project see http://www.opencollaboration.wordpress.com
Another concept that seems to fit in with superfluidication
Jay Cousin’s
System Upcycling: Using the infrastructure of a broken system to build a better world.
Aaand, synapsing with Fixing the future – Get Involved on pbs.org
update: thinking to frame it like this:
Resilient City Project
“mapping the road to resilience”
The Resilient City Project combines interactive mapping, real-time data and community input to track a city’s resources and capacities. Anyone with an address can “claim” their home or residence, and make information visible that will be aggregated into the City Dashboard.
This allows a community to express their assets and resources (goods, services, skills, expertise), as well as create measurable ways to reduce expenses.
For instance, one initiative might be reduce electric bills and overall energy expenditure citywide. Residents could choose to link their utility bill information to the city dashboard, so that the average usage for the city could be known. Then a program like a light bulb exchange could be implemented, with residents earning a badge when they’d switched to high efficiency bulbs.
Members of the community could also list the topics they’d be willing to answer questions about, making it easier to share knowledge. They could also list their participation or interest in sustainable activities (i.e. “have a garden,” “interested in joining a food co-op”, “have power tools for rent”).
All of this community-driven data would be fed into the City Dashboard, making it easier for people in a local area to connect, exchange information, share resources, and save money.
One thing to consider is some of the more nefarious aspects of this lack of privacy. We’ve all heard of the problem of people having their houses broken into because they publish their location online (although I wonder how prevalent this problem actually is) – similar issues may arise. E.g. if you publish, on your actual house on google maps, that you are selling something valuable, you can imagine people browsing google maps for expensive stuff nearby and checking location based services to see if you are out. It is almost like you can answer the question – ‘Where are all the unguarded diamond necklaces in my area?’. It might not be goods – if you publish that your are a doctor, or a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager, the likely existence of valuable goods can be derived.
It might not be such a big problem, but one to consider.
i thought about that too…. so it would be totally opt-in; people could either state that they are residents of a particular neighborhood or city, or be more specific and claim their home; it could also have privacy settings so that the location-dependent info is only visible to people you trust within your own social networks; or, like it works now on craigslist, for example, you could list that you had a high ticket item for rent/sale/borrow, but it wouldn’t necessarily have to be tied to your residence at all… just that it was available within the city, or within x miles of ‘zipcode’ or something like that.
That definitely sounds workable – I think with a lot of this new stuff we need to have a fairly high threshold for spanner-in-the-works type comebacks. The scale and complexity of the systems we are talking about is so great that it is incredibly hard to imagine the consequences or design the perfect solution up front. It is a great candidate for an iterative approach to development – take a best guess, see what problems fall out and refactor the implementation to cater for them.
Another element of project management that I think often gets lost is risks and issues management. Especially from a large-scale social/crowsdsourcing perspective, publishing in an open and honest way what the perceived risks and issues are, and what mitigations (if any) are in place is key. From a buy-in perspective it lets people see what they should consider, contribute possible solutions, and (somewhat recursively) mitigate the risk that if something undesirable happens everybody revolts in horror against a really valuable endeavour that just needs some refactoring.
Adam Greenfield’s recent post on the Rockefeller Foundation’s “the future of the crowdsourced city” might prove useful for you to take a look at.
http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/the-rockefeller-foundation-on-the-future-of-crowdsourced-cities/
Adam just started an urban informatics company in NYC called Urbanscale,
http://urbanscale.org/
Take a look.
Venessa,
A friend in Pennsylvania recently contacted me about opportunities to promote resilience in his community, especially relating to education.
His contact prompted me to jot down some ideas for a sustainable, self-organize learning initiatives. Hope some aspects of the approach may be useful to Beacon as well.
The approach involves mixing established ingredients – including alternative currencies – in new ways.
The key elements are:
1) (Re-)Introduce the founding idea of European universities ( http://j.mp/ijB7Wa )– whereby students themselves were the ones to hire teachers – to accelerate mastery of middle and high school skills;
2) Identify a network of well regarded offsite and onsite tutors, Internet-savvy homeschools, virtual charter schools, etc. that are willing to offer high quality courses; and
3) As outlined in Douglas Rushkoff’s “Radical Abundance” keynote at the 2009 O’Reilly Conference (http://j.mp/4nvDf7 – video & comment #1), set up a system of auctionable personal currencies (hour–denominated personal “gift certificates” of time).
Student–issued time vouchers could specify the number of hours of that the student committed to provide indicated services (eg research, keyboarding, digital photo captioning, raking leaves, etc) they deemed to be of value.
As an example, a self-organizing group of students seeking to gain competence in a given skill – say Spanish language, animation, or Google Sketchup – would go online to a web site set up by resiliency supporters in the community.
At the site, the students and their parents could review a network of onsite and offsite learning providers, their quality/proficiency guarantees (including validation of student skills via independent tests such as Brainbench.com), and their compensation terms.
Students, again in consultation with their parents, would shortlist the most promising of the candidate providers. In turn, shortlisted learning providers could review the aims and the existing skills of the interested student(s).
Responses by the shortlisted learning providers to the students likely would hinge upon the anticipated value of what the learners proposed to offer in exchange in boosting their skills.
For example, students could offer a bundle of their personal currencies, specifying a certain number of “service hours” – redeemable in specific telework or onsite community services – for the benefit of the learning provider or mutually agreed third parties.
Once an agreement had been reached by the students and the learning providers, the learning could get underway.
As soon as independent tests confirmed the new skills gains, the learning provider could opt to directly receive the services, assign them to agreed third parties, or put up for online auction by for conversion into cash by organizations in good standing with the community.
A benefit of this approach is that it could result in students obtaining valued skills without adding to local tax burdens, and help each student build a track record of service delivery, with feedback-based reputations and project references. The new skills and credentials would help them find jobs in the future – and add value to any time-based personal currencies they chose to issue individually or on a group basis in the future.
I’d love to see something like this take hold in Beacon and other communities on a proof of concept basis. As fiscal strains grow and public school systems falter in communities across the country, seeds from initial demonstrations may take hold and spread.
Down the road, such a system might tie in with challenge offers by philanthropies to encourage new land grant endowments for education in communities. Scenarios for this – and for awakening the value of the sites through targeted policy reforms – are described in “New Catalysts for Sustainability” at http://j.mp/ec8LOK ).
Stakeholdings in such community land grants might grow for students whose skills improved under the new system. This could provide them with assets in proportion to their success.
What do you think?
Best,
Mark
@openworld @peerlearning
Spot on Mark, if 1000 thumbs-up existed, you’d get it from me !
And thanks to Venessa for tentatively bringing alltogether (now) on her blog the three elements required to reach the tipping point (little things making a difference) as explained by Malcolm Gladwell in his book. At the risk of being a pedant, here is a reminder. The three alements are ‘the maven’, ‘the connector ‘ and ‘the salesman’ (would love another word for the last one …) – I usually talk about it in workshops where I call that the “T3 : Tip-Top Team” (had once and idea of a tech company to support this concept – nobody was interested …)
Resiliency for education is exactly the way you define it because it allows for freedom of both sides : teachers and students. That’s key to avoid on the one hand the tyranny of the teachers and on the other side the anarchy of the students. God bless Thoreau or Jefferson, albeit I really believe that a resilient education is the best way to prevent a community from falling into the need to enter ‘civil disobedience’ or ‘revolutionary activism’.
I would simply add two things:
1) The ‘participatory’ element should be reviewed – it works very well in European Universities (one of my daughters, as a fourth year University student, is talking every week with the Dean about the best way to set up optimal educative conditions). I am aware there has been some tentatives in the US after the late 60’s unrest. Your suggestions would help improve the ‘participatory’ mechanism.
2) There is always a need for control or regulation – resiliency is also about enabling a community to set up better mechanism than the ‘absurd’ decisions taken recently in Virginia to rule out contacts between students and teachers over the Internet.
Let’s build a better world through better eduction. Have a look at some ideas from R. Schank (the father of ‘conceptual information processing’).
A blessing day to all,
Phil
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Jean-Paul de Vooght (http://posterous.com/people/4aGlS3f43nnH) has done quite a bit of thinking in this area and has the tech knowledge (I believe).
See Sustainability Ops Room http://citizensensing.posterous.com/?page=8
and http://citizensensing.posterous.com/?page=2
This is a big interest area for me. I am particularly interested in how a committed group of people can quickly share interesting ideas, prioritise, create pilots and learn from failures/promote success. Think there has to be an online platform to do that but none I have found seem to match.
Hello Hugh,
Have you been looking @ http://www.mindomo.com/?lang=en
Am not a great fan of Mindmapping though I use it on my iPhone.
Seems to meet your requirements ?
Phil
Thanks Phil. Looks interesting and will have a go. I guess i am thinking more of a combination between what Venessa is talking about (e.g. mapping resources, people etc), Digg, http://www.kluster.com & Kickstarter.
So you could come up with an idea or see something great from another community. post it. The group would vote it up or down. If it reached a threshold people could coalesce around the idea and use threshold funding to get it started and then work on making it real. Could also use geo-locative mapping to see what resources and people/skills you have in the area to make it happen.
i had that very same idea! once the resources needed for a project/initiative are ‘pledged’, it triggers the start of the project.
Do you know http://groundcrew.us/
Almost there I think?
I am currently exploring citizen science projects and trying to extract useful learnings for applying crowdsourcing to sustainable development initiatives. I pursue this idea that citizens can contribute with hard and soft sensing to instrument a specific aspect of sustainable development of the area they live in. Soft sensing is like saying “there’s uncollected waste at the corner of X and Y” and hard sensing would be like picking up CO2 levels every 5 minutes from and Arduino board located in one’s garden. Amongst other setup aspects, I find the structuring of the relevant issues for a community as critical. They require methodology. Patrick Meier just posted on this – tech is only 10% – the remaining 90% are where we can build value on top of the great work already delivered by the Ushahidi folks…
Cities being on territories, it may be interesting to think about the future of a ‘territory’. Xavier Comtesse wrote a little book about it 3 years ago and it’s been translated end of 2008.
The book goes through a series of X versus Y topics:
Sovreignty versus Subsidiarity; Representativity versus Direct participation; “hard laws” versus “soft laws”; merging versus cooperating; suburban versus local communities; centralization versus mobility; endogeneous versus exogeneous; cluster versus network; local versus global; intermediary versus direct client contact; consumerism versus creativity; real time versus chosen time; specialization versus co-assembly; work versus creative craft; media versus blog; fordism verus grid; fixed versus moved; etc…
If any of these topics is of interest to you, read out here : http://bit.ly/eF0cgz (Direct Territories) – I really feel that X. Comtesse was a visionnary.
Moreover, French ‘explorers’ are having a ‘Jelly’ this week to think about the future of ‘Territories for growing Collective Intelligence’ (twitter #autrans11). I will endeavour to translate some stuff. Here is the most interesting link as of today, it’s a French slideshare but easily understandable: http://slidesha.re/hKWvE7
Philippe
Philippe!
Thanks for the pointer. I saw Xavier Comtesse speak at TEDxGeneva a few weeks ago on co-creation. Didn’t know him before that. Pretty out there as well. I will look into his publications.
Is there a link for #autrans11?
Thanks!
For Autrans 2011, here is the link I was given by ARTESI:
http://www.autrans.net/spip/Lancement-du-guide-CReATIF-Les.html
It’s a bit “chasse gardée” (private bakyard) of some politicians, so I am more interested in the input of some participants rather than the result.
Saw your blog, really interesting and very close to some of my own thinking. The ‘sensing’ is really important, albeit I never forget the (in)famous sentence: “The world is an illusion created by a conspiracy of our sense”. How would tou translate that into the Digital Age ?
About Resilient Cities, a key document IMHO is also the following (dating back to 2005, would you believe it …) about ‘Emergent Collectives’: http://bit.ly/e9ZMEG
Humbly,
Philippe
Correction for the link, here is the one: http://bit.ly/ejG2eX
Juggling with too many balls …
Philippe
Hello,
As for the name of the tool, suggested ‘Serendipolis’ (because of the serendipity) and ‘Emencity’ (poetry of the immense capability homo-numericus can create). So, looking for existing tools around serendipity, the following product got my attention:
http://thecleversense.com/tech.html ; they seem to be Microsoft-oriented.
It’s about sensing, could be interesting for Jean-Paul Vooght?
Good day,
Do you know about Transition Town (or now Transition Culture/Network)? http://transitionculture.org/
sounds like powerful synergies possible… Rob Hobkins would be the man to connect to in Totnes, UK.
this is the project site of last years KaosPilot outpost: http://urbanrecipes.ning.com/ my team might continue on that plattform when we go to Bogota, Columbia this spring. sounds in line somehow.
and then i think on a social level of resilient cities/communities this looks like a fantastic ressource:
http://berkana.org/berkana/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=12&id=347&Itemid=459
thanks for the resources, benjamin
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Please see our work on the Global Village Construction Set. One application of creating a resilient infrastructure toolkit is the creation of an economy, which is the substance of a new currency.
2 minute video on the Global Village Construction Set – http://vimeo.com/16106427
nice. are you guys teamed up with the open source hardware folks yet? http://www.sparkfun.com/news/550
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