- The Mesh -

Many of the Pioneers did not know one another until the Founder introduced them to one another. Now, through one-on-one conversations, stories are meshed. Connections made. Souls bared. Respect felt. Common ground found.  

Knowing that this is not at all about him, the Founder convenes the Pioneers and just moves out of the way. A circle is formed; a network weaved. Here is a crude visual representation of what happens as links are established.

Meshing

- The Groove -

'To found' has two meanings in the English language. In the metallurgical sense, founding is melting and melding material. In the human sense, it's about letting go of who you think you are, and letting your identity become fluid so it can mix in with others'.

This founding is what the Pioneers do as they assemble around the vision of the Emergent City. They engage in dialogue. A shared spirit emerges. This process is only slightly structured, and its outcome is definitely not controlled.

A common rhythm, a resonance is found - a standing wave, felt by all, but driven by no single participant. This shared bond envelops and holds the Fellowship together and allows divergence to exist and be calmly examined without breaking the circle. 

Space opens in the center; in this space the shared vision of the Emergent City will begin to come into sight.

Finding the Groove

- Play -

Pioneers become true Founders all, when they found in the second sense of the word: laying a foundation.

The process is playful, as it must when we create something genuinely new. It is spontaneous dance. It is improvisation. It is jazz. It is an experience of coliberation or group flow.

Everyone plays a different instrument, and nobody has played that song before. 

Make no mistake, though there is a unity of purpose, this is no snoozy lovefest. There is palpable tension; the occasional spark may fly. Power is involved. Assumptions are threatened. Maturity is required. In terms of psychological intensity, think less line dancing, more Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

(Okay, maybe not quite as intense.:)

- Infinite Play -

The Founders are infinite players. Their play has no fixed rules or boundaries.

The foundation they lay out is an overlay on reality. It is a lens through which one views the world. It provides language: labels, roles, relationships, structures, in the form of symbols. The basis for a fresh social operating system.

It spells out which things deserve attention, and which things are to be ignored.

Importantly, it signals what is to be valued in the Emergent City.

Upcoming pattern: 3. The Game

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Each post in the 'Blueprints for Networked Cocreation' series will describe a capability that is necessary for open, creative collaboration and give examples of tools that instantiate that capability. The blueprints are free for anyone to pick up, use or reuse. The first capability we will look at is intentcasting.

What is intentcasting?

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!"

There is a capability that is complementary to intentcasting: intentcatching. Intentcatching means connecting to an intent that has already been cast, in effect signaling, "I want this to happen too" or "We want this to happen too" and moving from a passive to an active stance towards the intent. 

At its core, intentcasting is invitation into a possible future. It is a statement of possibility and will. Although it does not have to spell out how the intent is to materialize, it contains the germ of an architecture of participation.

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.

Once enough people have caught the intent, so that it has become shared intent, things can get moving pretty swiftly.

The state of the art of intentcasting

The social web offers a vast, quickly evolving landscape of new possibilities for intentcasting. Social tools that directly support intentcasting can be classified according to the modalities of participation that are offered to intent catchers (as we'll call those who respond to the intent):

• Crowdfunding services, where catchers are invited to support the intent by donating money. Kickstarter is probably the most famous crowdfunding website right now.
• Event platforms, where catchers are invited to announce their intent to attend the event. Plancast and Facebook Events fall in this category.
• Challenge markets / prize systems, where catchers is invited to submit a solution of their own to a challenge. ChallengePost is an example of a challenge market.
• Action platforms, where catchers is invited to support the intent by joining the effort and a collaboration framework is offered. IfWeRanTheWorld, Superfluid, and epic.io fall in this category.
• Goal-centered platforms, where the focus is squarely on the intent and catchers are simply invited to show support. A grandfather example of this is 43things. Facebook pages like this one do a similar job.
• Task managers / Project trackers, where intent is usually expressed as a task or issue that needs to be taken care of. Pivotal Tracker is an example of this.

Related features

Tools that support intentcasting typically:

• Provide a description of the intent.
• Identify the intent's originator.
• Provide a call to action - a way of overtly catching the intent.
• Identify the intent's catchers, and their form of involvement.

They may also:

• Point to related intents. For instance, some intents may be stepping stones to a more ambitious intent.
• Make the intent into a shareable social object.
• Express the intent in a machine-readable form, following a standard.

The latter feature opens the way to Intent Maps.

The vision of the Intent Map

Imagine having access to a comprehensive map of intents, being able to navigate your way towards those intents that most speak to you and your skills and talents, and being offered an array of means of connecting meaningfully to them. That is the vision of the Intent Map.

The Intent Map could exist in a specific context (a group, an enterprise), but if you think about it for a minute, I believe you will agree that a global map of all intents that have been made public would be seven shades of awesome.

One way this could happen is using the federation approach, if the various tools that support intentcasting agreed on a microformat to represent intent. A crawler/aggregator could index these intents, and a filtering and visualization tool could be built on top of that to let us navigate the map.

Such a tool could catalyze self-organization on a large scale and help everyone shorten the path between wish and realization.

Acknowledgement: This blueprint was inspired by conversations with Fred Mir (who wrote "ideas for developing a semantic web for the people and by the people"), Vincent Chapdelaine, Mark Frazier, Jarno Koponen, Ishan Markandeya, Flemming Funch, George Por and Lion Kimbro.

Follow me on Twitter

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The patterns are meant to be used as templates to guide anyone who is going down the path of getting something like an emergent city up and going. Internalizing the patterns - making them yours - will enable you to see how and when they map to your particular situation, and make them manifest in your projects.

Read this while thinking of a project close to your heart, something that deserves to exist, and gently let yourself slip into the pattern. Just try it on for size... 

***

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”

 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

- Social Imagination -

Where others saw nothing but forests and streams, Founders of yore saw building materials, energy sources, and waterways.

Where others see nothing but people, and things, you, the Founder, see possibility.

Some things must be seen to be believed; but the emergent City is one of those things that must be believed to be seen.

And the great thing is that, somehow, you are able to make the Pioneer see it, too.

Together the two of you are able to believe in it. 

You see the people in it. They are many. They love the City, too. They inhabit it, and it inhabits them. The magic of the City gets you excited. You wish you could live it, too.

What you are seeing, in fact, is an imagined nation; social imagination is the instrument that lets you gaze at it. 

- Cats -

You attract, and are attracted to, independent-minded people. The Pioneers you need, and get, are Cats. 

Notice I said Cats, not copycats. You are not looking to start a cult of personality. You are a cultural innovator; you need culture creators.

You cannot, and neither do you wish to, mold the Pioneers into clones of yourself. You deeply appreciate diversity and interplay of strengths: it is the only way the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. You are completing a puzzle of which each piece is different and will have a unique place.

Now, Cats wouldn’t be caught dead in a group. Yet, you are pulling off the feat of bringing them together. How?

By giving them a worthy and meaningful challenge that none of them could accomplish on their own: bringing the City into existence.

- The Tease -

As the Founder, you are of necessity a salesperson, but you deal in ideas. He is what you are selling the Pioneer:

• A departure: an escape route from the old and tired into an open space with few constraints;
• A sense of possibility - the promise of a new freedom he has had a glimpse of, but has not yet experienced;
• Mystery, adventure, and challenge - an experience; danger, even!
• An opportunity to contribute his unique talents towards creating something meaningful that, in his eyes, deserves to exist;
• And finally, the chance to design a new 'home', a new life for himself and others.

- Connection -

You grow a personal bond with each Pioneer. You find the song in him: that deep-seated fire in his belly which is sometimes hidden, sometimes neglected, but never extinguished.

You connect to his obligation to meaning. His drive, his desire to do something.

You do so by opening up, by telling a story, by revealing your dream, bit by bit. You help the Pioneer connect his own dream to yours.

Together you find where he fits in your dream, and where you fit in his.

- Guiding Lights -

You know full well that you are not the leader. You are simply lending your voice to something that doesn't yet have a voice. The vision of that living, thriving City - something that works, something that is beautiful, something that will itself be full of possibility and draw people in - is the actual leader and guide.

The City already exists in the Pioneers’ minds; each one of you knows that all that is left to do now is to make it manifest.

Next pattern: 2. The Fellowship.

***

This post was inspired in no small part by my encounters with the one and only Vincent Olivier.

Image: Future city landscape by ~truehorror666 on deviantART

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

In the first installment of this two-part effort, I described how social systems can become ossified and maintain an inwardly-focused culture that rests upon assumptions that are no longer warranted. 

I will now describe, in turn: 

• how quality is inevitably sucked out of such a system; 
• how the system enters a competitive relationship with mounting alternatives;
• what happens when the creatives jump ship to join alternatives.

Again, it can be helpful to read this while keeping in mind your favorite obsolete institution in order to map the general to the specific. The model is purposely scale-invariant: with suitable mappings, it could be applied, say, to a modest Ponzi scheme or to society-wide phenomena.

5. Hollowing Out - "Then they laugh at you"

The emergence phase (#4) saw the free radicals made themselves known. In the hollowing out phase, a new category of people, which we will call the aesthetes, begin jumping ship.

These people are the seekers of quality. They gave the system a chance, but early on in its decline, usually without anybody else telling them, they recognized that something was amiss. They have a good nose for staleness, and they can't bear the stink.

These people head for the exit before the smell becomes obvious to everyone else. Such moves are typically met with puzzlement and derision from people who still adhere to the shared culture and can't see what they see.

Together, free radicals and aesthetes begin to form alternative social systems on the margins or outside of the mainstream system. I don’t mean that they necessarily go out and build cabins in the woods; this kind of activity can be pursued as a hobby of sorts. 

The alternative systems they create -- clubs, really -- effectively operate as protected spaces or proto-organizations. Each is a scenius that affords members the ability to get to work building coherent languages around new assumptions. This scaffolding will eventually provide the basis for alternative countercultures.

Jumping the shark...

The social phenomenon known as evaporative cooling is at work here; with each aesthete’s departure, the mainstream system's level of cluefulness is diminished. Its institutions become hollow: they still maintain a facade and an unchanged internal structure, but quality has left the building and vacuity has taken its place. Whether people still on the inside believe it or not, the system is running on empty.

The roles of institutions now begin to undergo a reversal: for instance, regulators are actually rewarded for not regulating; Quality assessment organizations serve to conceal quality deficits; sanctioned risk assessors are employed to hide risk, rather than ferret it out. Competent people are actively sidetracked or driven out at this stage. Perverse incentives kick in. The worst career faux pas you can make as a mainstreamer is to tell the truth.

6. Self-organization - "Then they fight you"

After a certain time, proto-organizations become undeniably visible to the mainstream. Because of their coherence and freshness, they begin to actively compete for talent with the social system to which they are a reaction. 

The point where alternative systems pick up a significant proportion of new recruits is a significant one: it is the first time actual pain is experienced in the mainstream system, because it begins to shrink, as new recruits are not numerous enough to replace the exits.

For the mainstream system, being starved of fresh blood is really bad news for two reasons. 

First, because new people are typically more creative and enthusiastic, they significantly increase a system's ability to adapt. In their absence, the system becomes even more rigid.

Second, the system has gotten used to calling upon recruits to do most of the work necessary to maintain the system; if there is no one to renew the bottom layer, the only thing it can do is to begin squeezing the existing members, something it has never had to do. This unfortunately turns them from satisfied participants into bitter losers, moving them closer to the exit.

The empire strikes back...

Now, the system won't go down so easily. It has to react, and it will react. To this end it can deploy two main weapons, namely, cooptation and propaganda. 

Cooptation is what happens to a proto-organization when the mainstream system is able to subtly assimilate it, in such a way that its facade remains but its action is largely rendered ineffectual. The proto-organization becomes a honeypot to get recruits to believe they are building alternatives while ensuring they are actually not doing anything that matters.

Because the system still has a quite powerful attraction, cooptation is actually the typical course for most proto-organizations. However, some of them turn out to be uncooptable: a fundamental incompatibility exists between their cultural DNA and the mainstream DNA. In such cases, it is not just what the proto-organization says, but how it operates at the fundamental level that challenges the mainstream system.

Propaganda also has to enter the stage if the mainstream system is to maintain itself in the face of thriving alternatives. The system has to maintain the illusion that everything is still all right at the ranch, and that the alternatives are but a flash in the pan.

The creatives are absolutely central players on the propaganda stage. Only by harnessing the creatives' power is it possible to keep inventing convincing stories that will circulate and (1) prop up confidence within the system, and (2) spread fear, uncertainty and doubt towards the alternatives.

Retaining the creatives is of paramount importance. Should they drop out of the system en masse, the veil would fall and everybody would know the game is nearly over for the original culture.

7. New Stories

The emergence of alternatives that attract talent pushes the mainstream system into a downward spiral. 

Here's a metaphor to describe the situation as the system is starved of resources and inching towards extinction. Picture a ten-floor building, with self-interested people on every floor, and with rope ladders between floors. 

Now imagine the building is steadily filling with water, with no signs of stopping. Moreover, there is no way the roof can accommodate everyone.

What do you think will happen? In the interest of self-preservation, if at all possible, people will do their best to climb up. But more importantly, people on every floor will pull out the ladder between themselves and the floor below. (Remember, this is a complicated, rigid system, with few out-of-the-box thinkers, and there is little time to react.)

A tipping point is reached when (metaphorically) the water starts flooding the creatives’ floor. Things that they deeply care about are now overtly being sacrificed. 

This is the critical juncture where the creatives stop spinning the old story and start telling new, and vastly more convincing stories. As these stories circulate and gain traction, the erroneous foundational assumption in the mainstream system is finally revealed to all to be unwarranted. The whole system experiences a Wile E. Coyote moment: it stops running, and realizes there is no longer any ground beneath it. 

And then everyone else jumps ship. 

8. Renaissance - "then you win"

Nature abhors a vacuum, but culture does just as well, so it doesn't take long before people grasp onto new assumptions that are hopefully more in tune with contemporary reality. 

Between the existing proto-organizations, common ground is found: new, deep, shared principles that people can believe in and upon which it is possible to build. As agreements spread out, they can then serve as a basis for growing the next mainstream culture.

This phase is obviously very rich, but I've said enough for today; I will go into this in future posts.

Acknowledgement: this post was written under the influence of Xianhang Zhang's writings.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

There are, for instance: 

• Max Marmer, Bjoern Lasse Herrman and their circle talking about emergent ventures; 
• The outstanding Gregory Rader and the eminently lucid Guillaume Lebleu who are hard at work expressing new currency principles; 
• Alan Rosenblith and Jay Standish thinking out loud about Symbionomics; 
• Dan Robles with his mind-opening videos; 
• John Robb on networked tribes; 
• Michel Bauwens and friends on the political economy of peer production; 
• And of course a number of people orbiting the Junto cloud like Venessa Miemis (Future of Money Project), Bernd Nurnberger, Mark Frazier and George Por. 

Ideas — big ideas — are flying fast and furious, and I'm starting to get the sense that they're set to begin to gel together over the coming year.

Most of these people are now aware of one another and adeptly making use of microblogging — talking AND listening — to become acquainted with one another and building mutual trust and knowledge. They are first-rate knowledge network weavers.

Network weaving is critical, I believe, because if something groundbreaking is to emerge of all these interactions, it will first have been nurtured within the protected environment of community - just like innovations start out as fragile prototypes in the lab before getting robust and making it big in the real world.

So what might that groundbreaking thing be? I'll tell you what it looks like from where I stand.

I think we're about to see the emergence of a new way of conducting innovation that operates quasi-independently of the current money system.

In other words, where conventional thinking tells us that investing money in research and development is the way to get innovation, we're putting together a means of innovating whose chief requirements are things like time, imagination, knowledge, initiative and trust, with money moving from primary to secondary concern.

What I see emerging is a set of tools and customs -- cognitive infrastructure, when you think about it -- that will give us the necessary scaffolding to grow a multitude of virtual "cities". These cities will bring together people with shared values and orientations towards the future, and who are in a position to collaborate to bring something new into the world. They are part and parcel of the burgeoning Relationship Economy.

No current-day structure really corresponds to this kind of "city". Is it a school? Is it a business? Is it a bank? A venture capital fund? An economy? Is it a lab? An incubator? Is it a creative space? Is it a living space? A community? A network?

It is all of those at the same time.

Joining the right emergent city provides a creative person with affordances to:

• Share her ideas and goals;
• Get oriented in the network of members;
• Enter relationships with people who need what she wants to create;
• Become known (gain "currency") and build reputation and trust relationships;
• Get support in the form of knowledge and perhaps time;
• Find partners who share her intent;
• Develop the skills she needs;
• Mentor others who are on a similar path;
• Feel a sense of belonging;
• Disengage, if she's not getting what she needs. 

Every emergent city is different from the others. Some are hidden and closed, some are visible and wide open, others are somewhere in the middle. When you scratch the surface, each is ultimately defined by some kind of organizing principle: its "social DNA" - a set of agreements, perhaps an ethic or even an aesthetic that you have to abide by to be a participant.

Some of them even have reprogrammable DNA, which lets them adapt to changing circumstances.

Although some emergent cities may be physical, most of them are virtual and not tied to a particular location. This lends them a very important property that physical cities don't have - you can easily inhabit several at the same time.

Just like individual people, cities have reputations; emergent cities too. There's a fractality to it. There are roads, bridges between cities; they interact with one another. Currency/reputation in one might help get you somewhere in another.

Some offer such a favorable environment for creatives that they act as 'strange attractors' for talent, driving a virtuous circle of growth and innovation.

If this all sounds abstract and metaphorical, it's because it is. But I know a few of you have been down this path in your imagination and I hope these jottings resonate with your own visions. I want to use this new blog to keep track of the most promising ideas and real-world examples that I encounter relating to these new (and at the same time, very old!) pieces of social infrastructure.

Wanna see what I see? The subscribe link is to the left!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »