“Re: funding, many people around me need dollars before they can commit significant time windows because they’ve exhausted their and their family’s capacity.”
I know this situation, many people know it. It’s because we are working in isolated silos. We don’t have capital. Large corporations have capital by virtue of playing the rules of the game of capitalism. So such people are always marginalized by the mainstream system. Working within the capitalist paradigm (for want of a better word) in SILOS all but guarantees ones exhaustion. The odds are stacked against an isolated altruistic group ever able to scale. We burn through our own limited capital and exhaust our families as well. Can crowdfunding work? Sure, but it’s still driven mostly still by mainstream ME-centrism of competition. If we want to build a positive sum game where we can ALL win together, we can’t do that alone.
What we need to do is demonstrate some early wins. This hackathon has a good spread of projects…some small, some medium, some large. If we can get some early wins on the smaller projects…we can start to have confidence we are doing something different. That’s why it’s in ALL our interest to support as many projects as possible here…either by directly engaging or referring others who can. We are doing it for WE!
So of course, those people who have been burned so badly cannot fully participate. They have to work within the current paradigm and earn financial capital. But for others who do have some buffer, it’s a way to start building a system that can create a new positive sum paradigm for all, albeit in a pragmatic manner that does NOT burn you out.
@Gien I can create capacity myself, if I rearrange and realign some projects and priorities.
So what are the rules here. Can we take this idea to Gunter to invite his advice and involvement or do we need some sort of consensus from the people in this thread. How does it work?
Show your colleagues the presentation. Take them through it. Or if you want me to, host a skype session and I’ll do it, just like I did with Open Hack. People need to see why we’ve been doing it wrong and what we must do to do it right. Nobody wants to burn out, and people already have. We have to undestand WHY we burned out. To do that, we need to look at the larger systemic constraints.
We have to give your burned out colleagues renewed hope. We have to re-inspire them. So even if they are still accumulating catch up capital, at least they can unpack why their efforts did not succeed…see the limitation of the approach. I’ve been there, done that…like everyone else.
Another way of looking at this strategy is as an expansion of a community to find many other global communities like itself. In authentic, caring communities, financial capital is not nearly as important as human capital. Take the community of your family. When was the last time your partner asked you to fork up money when they cooked a meal for you? We don’t have much need in close communities because there’s social capital. So in the big ol world, this is the missing element. It’s full of strangers. But a MOOCC platform introduces like minds to each other. I can know rapidly develop trust with you and I haven’t even met you! That’s because we can ascertain the type of person by the way others communicate and their reputation currency. So I would already treat you like a close friend and extend to you the benefits of friends…even though we haven’t met.
That’s the power of a network where we can rapidly establish social capital through reputation currency and direct dialogue. That kind of TRUSTING MOOCC with very high social capital is what differentiates it.
The more we help co-design critical technologies, systems, behavioral patterns, the more designs EACH OF US have access to, which allow us to go into production locally and sell into our local market. Each innoation hub can become self-sufficient quite rapidly if we all pitch in. I’m open sourcing all the tech I’m building for our open source circular ecohome. I want to build a local Cape Town Innoation / Peer Production cooperative here and go into production and work as a cooperative to show this can be done. If we start become successful in producing a variety of solutions, then sharing those designs with you, you can go into local production in your own innovation and production cooperative. We’re trying to feed all of us innovators, but by massive collaboration leading to robust designs.
Thanks @Gien, I’m well and truly completely convinced. And greatly appreciative.
My colleagues are all committed, but I’m keen to advance co-creating a knowledge sharing hub.
I’d appreciate your guidance on what my obligations, commitments and responsibilities into this project thread are. Do I need a consensus decision from people in this thread before Kieara and I pitch to Gunter tomorrow?
I’m a PhD student at TU/e in the Netherlands. I’m an urban planner turned design researcher in Industrial Design. My PhD looks at the design of citymaking platforms that empower citizens, and specifically at the potential for platforms of various kinds to foster stronger place-identity relations.
So, in this hack, what I’m really interested in, is looking at how we can use play and games, as particularly interactive and appropriative media, for generating empathy and spatial relatedness amongst players. In other words, how can we design playful platforms that facilitate meaningfulness and caring, and connect people to urban issues that they’re geographically removed from.
@sigmundpetersen it might sound a bit pedantic but being in the same ecosystem means - errrr um - you are in the same ecosystem!
If you feel any disconnect perhaps that’s because the connections have yet to be made visible but they are there for sure.
Would anyone here mind if my friend Kieara broaches this project with her friend, Cape Town based, global sustainability legend, Gunter Pauli of www.zeri.org and www.theblueeconomy.org ?
We’re wondering if there is any chance he might be interested in supporting us in some way.
Thanks heaps. Apologies that I’m not fully across how all this works yet
@William yes of course you are correct! I indeed hope for synergies to emerge in the future, but for the time being our interfaces are too distant to connect.
If you scroll down to keynotes, you’ll see Gunter there.
Why don’t you invite people here to see what their thoughts are. I can call Olivier and ask him. Can you write down in a few sentences what your pitch would be?
Thanks @Gien , your guidance is very appreciated. This is wonderful that Gunter is already connected. I’m nearly finished the one page, I’ll post it onto here soon.
Olivier hasn’t expressed interest in this knowledge sharing hub project yet. How did things end up with the land and water restoration project he and John proposed?
let’s see if we can find shared/common or related syntactic elements?
I spent a while in Applied Linguistics which had some (perhaps not so) surprising parallels with my previous work of finding the correlations and commonalities between the many global credit control systems - I know, not obvious on the face of it but the similarities (and the differences) were there - just as they will be there between the various actors around the globe working in eco-logic (AKA common sense)
It’s just a matter telling the wood from the trees and the bushes from the plants, shrubs and other flora.
One of the elephants in the room is - wait for it - money.
I and a like-minded group of coders, developers, writers, film makers, designers, translators, thinkers and doers are forming a collective to offer our services to any existing organisation that might give us work (and whose ethos we can and want to support) so that we can carry on our main mission of making the world one we want. Whilst surviving without being drawn back into the “apparatus”. The pro-bono work will continue but hopefully more securely.
It’s a tough one - but with support I think we can build something awesome.
@William I don’t think we’re allowed to have this conversation. Gien very kindly enlightened me to the full extent of the incredible vision for these projects. But seeing as how you raise it, the film producers from Kiss the Ground, who are currently in Cape Town, are very interested in fund raising for this knowledge sharing hub idea. But I’m pretty sure that we’re not allowed to bring money into the process of these projects though, even if they were started prior to the hackathon. Is this absolutely how it must be @Gien?
I’m also just waiting to hear what emerges! I’m just bringing people together. The dynamics of individuals, organizations and organizational values and methodologies and how everything aligns…this will be the tricky part to navigate but it’s necessary if we are going to achieve the next level of collaboration. We are all used to working in organizational silos. How do we break out of those in a way that makes sense for everyone? How do we make the WEconomy a reality, and not just a pipe dream? This is the challenge…retaining our uniqueness but coming together.
That’s fair comment
This is, as you say, probably not the place for a “pitch” but the issue is a common one. Volunteers and pro-bono will only get us so far - at some point we have to connect to the real economy. Collectivity we need to rebuild on a more equitable and sustainable footing. That will require some way for the actors to stay afloat - whilst still going forwards and hopefully breaking down the silos of our own various “businesses”. In a way, a commons of commons minder workers, organisation ans businesses. Whilst being acutely aware of the impact of what we do and how we do it.
If we are to build a platform coop as @sigmundpetersen suggest - it needs to be sustainable to survive. It needs to be replicable to scale. It needs to work for the many actors who have opted out or been forced out of the existing system and it needs to find ways to avoid falling into the many traps.
@William@Gien I wonder if we could experiment with a hybrid model. Some of us volunteering, some of us being funded. As long as it was all agreeable with all?
