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Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable

I hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.

FrictionFireFriction Friend

But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.

Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.

Share

Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.

A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.

Value Time

There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.

As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.

Adventures in New Giving

I am super excited to see Adventures in New Giving http://www.adventuresinnewgiving.com/. And perhaps a bit jealous. If I could focus the time and energy, I think Nathaniel is doing what I would do. (see his video here: http://vimeo.com/37718193 ) For years, I have lived a double life working in traditional progressive philanthropy to pay rent while working on bootstrappy social enterprise as a passion. In my consulting work within traditional philanthropy, we talked about the democratization of philanthropy. However, I did not see much of it in practice.
That seems to have come from somewhere else. Tech start-ups culture maybe? Socent pragmatism? Microfinancing brought home? Whatever the path, it has been interesting to watch the birth of efforts like kickstarter and startsomegood.

It seems aligned, naturally, somehow with the collaborative consumption “Mesh” culture.  All of which seem part of a larger movement toward network production. So I am super excited to see Nathaniel capture the stories of this practical democratization of philanthropy.

I am also curious to see how this will hybridize with traditional philanthropy. I have visions of foundations and philanthropists using crowdfunding as part of their due diligence. Something of an early market testing and reliability assessment before or as part of larger funding efforts. Picture a foundation giving a matching grant – matched via startsomegood. This could be really a good time saver for family foundations with intentions to give and little time for sorting through applications.

I can’t wait to see what Nathaniel does with Adventures in New Giving.

I can’t wait to see how we all play together in evolving new giving.

To help fund our awareness of ourselves in this evolution, pitch in at

http://startsomegood.com/Venture/adventures_in_new_giving/Campaigns/Show/adventures_in_new_giving

People-Powered Innovation: Interview with Robin Chase

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community.  She also founded and leads Meadow Networks, a consulting firm that advises city, state, and federal government agencies about wireless applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development.  Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world.  In 2009, she was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People.  Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment.

Todd Hoskins:  Robin, you’ve been looking at the possibilities of using excess capacity for quite a number of years now.  What is compelling about excess capacity?

Robin Chase:  Excess capacity lets us tap quickly and cheaply into resources that already exist.  We don’t have to pay for the asset, place it, maintain it.  I think about excess capacity very broadly: assets, physical space, temporal space, experiences, expertise, and networks.

Some obvious examples of making use of excess capacity are Wikipedia (excess mental capacity and expertise), eBay (excess junk), Flickr (other people could use your photos), LinkedIn (ditto for networks), CouchSurfing (beds).

Less common examples are Cyclovia in Bogota, Columbia, where excess road space on Sunday mornings led them to shut down 121 km of roads to car traffic and open it up for pedestrians and bikes.  From 7am to 2pm 1.3 million residents go out and play, dance, exercise, and meetup.  It has been an enormous success.  All for very little money and implemented very quickly.

Todd:  Are we cooperatively enabled to apply this excess capacity?

Robin:  Ah, technology!  I love it.  We may or may not be cooperatively programmed, but that is beside the point.  All of the examples I listed don’t require cooperation in the way we usually think of it.

With Zipcar, for example, 450,000 people are using 7,000 cars.  But it is painless.  No one is waiting for someone else or waiting their turn. Through the miracle of technology the sharing is easy and frictionless.  Of course, there are lots of examples that do require some cooperation.  My point just is that this is not required.

Todd:  You are serving on the National Advisory Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and advising on policy issues.  How can our governments possibly become more adaptive and less rigid?

Robin:  Innovation is a country’s lifeblood.  Imagine if our lives stayed exactly the same.  The 1980s forever! (or choose your decade).  On the other hand, people hate change because they can’t quite see the future so it is unnerving.

Big companies and governments (who occasionally respond to their constituents who like the status quo) are not that easy to change.

By enabling innovation — 1) creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship; 2) reducing barriers and costs to experimentation; and 3) reducing the costs of the innovation inputs — government can make it possible for people to do the changing themselves.

This committee is specifically looking at ways to improve K-12 and university education to change the culture and provide more opportunities to innovate, making sure that government-funded research that has the potential for commercialization is easier to get at.  We are looking at reducing the effort and time to participate in the US government small business programs and procurement programs, and changing capital incentives for investing in startups.  Lastly, we are looking at ways of celebrating innovation and entrepreneurship.

I am particularly interested in getting more value out of government technology policy and procurements so that we maximize its potential for repurposing by innovators and businesses.  The government is about to make huge investments in smart transportation, smart health, smart grids, smart education.  We can unlock the excess capacity found in government purchases by making them more open.  Open as the default.  Closed proprietary single-purpose purchases need to be argued for.  Open data, open devices, open spectrum, open radio, open networks should be the norm.

Todd:  If we cannot rely on government or big business to facilitate change quickly enough, who can we turn to?

Robin:  People! I think of it as people-powered innovation: collaboration production, collaborative consumption, collaborative infrastructure, collaborative financing.  The excess capacity of individuals (their expertise, networks, assets, time) beautifully leveraged and joined together on the internet will be the most powerful force for change in the next 20 years.

Together, we get incredible speed and scale, at a fraction of the cost, and using resources of all kinds efficiently.  Beginning examples of this — we are in our infancy of this idea right now — include Airbnb and Etsy.  Smart phone apps are an example too. Based on the excess capacity made available in these devices over the last 2.5 years, we have seen 500,000 applications built — primarily by individuals.  Yes, Apple has made out like a bandit, but Android is surging ahead with its reduced tolls.  And hopefully, some of those innovating engineers are making a living and starting some interesting new companies.

Todd:  You’re currently living in Europe.  What are you seeing and experiencing that you would like to bring home to the US?

Robin:  It is totally intriguing to experience firsthand the differences that result from very different government spending priorities. Both systems are imperfect.  France has really terrific transportation, road, rail, and airport infrastructure compared to the US. My ability to move around this city without a car and having so much choice (walk, bike, metro, bus, high speed train, etc) is a great pleasure.

On the other hand, the amount of duplicate forms to be filled out and mailed places — back and forth — is pretty amazing. The value of some of the bureaucracy around opening a bank account, getting an apartment, signing up for a transit pass eludes me. This frustrates me to no end since I’ve experienced the same transactions so easily and quickly in the US.

Todd:  Robin, thanks for making the world a more thrivable place!

Savoring Optimism: Interview with Lonny Grafman

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Lonny Grafman is an Instructor of Environmental Resources Engineering and Appropriate Technology at Humboldt State University; the co-founder and instructor in a summer abroad, full immersion, Spanish language and appropriate technology program in Parras, Mexico; and the executive editor of the International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering. In addition, he is the President of The Appropedia Foundation, sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

Academically, Lonny seeks ways to increase knowledge of the world through exposure and synthesis, highlighting that science, culture and language are inextricably linked. He seeks to demonstrate this connection through service-learning based education, working to improve existing conditions by leveraging local knowledge, materials, wealth and labor through transparency and stakeholder participation. Professionally, Lonny supports and develops tools to thrive, catalyzing and strengthening networks of positive change, to help us be better ancestors.  Lonny is also an advisor to Thrivable.

Todd:  Lonny, you are a teacher, facilitator, designer, consultant, non-profit president, international program director, and editor.  What ties all these roles together?

Lonny:  I love to see projects that make the world a better place manifest.  The way a project manifests from inception, brainstorming, researching, creating, testing, iterating, promoting, etc. always fill me with wonder and excitement.  There is no one way that it unfolds, but my favorite ways to be part of are those that are collaborative.

My different roles allow me to take part in multiple aspects of how a project unfolds . . . and they all feed back into each other to make me more effective at each.  In the end, I think that for most people “roles” are exiguous boxes that don’t justly describe their capabilities.

Todd:  As someone who is not just a sustainability advocate, but involved in the design and implementation of projects, what do you see as the difference between thrivability and sustainability?

Lonny:  As an individual I do not see a difference.  But I think that sustainability has a common connotation, especially in poor communities, that we are sustaining the status quo.  Or at the maximum trying to be zero impact – minimizing our footprint.  I see thrivability as engendering a sense that we are trying to go past minimizing our impact, instead aiming for a positive impact. Sustainability is about conserving resources and thrivability is about savoring them.

Todd:  How does “savoring” fit into thrivability?

Lonny:  Conserving is about limiting the use of our resources because it is the right thing to do.  Savoring is about really enjoying the use of our resources, because it is, well, enjoyable.  Access to dependable energy, clean water, healthy food, fun and connected transportation, etc… is incredible.  We should all be so lucky to have it.  And by lucky, I mean work hard to secure it.

Todd:  What reasons do you have to be optimistic about our future?  Why should we be positive?

Lonny:  Every day I am surrounded by people making their world better for themselves and their descendants… striving to be better neighbors and ancestors while enjoying an improved quality of life.  So it is easy for me to be optimistic because of the nature of my work.  Be what you want –  positive, negative or otherwise – but be part of a set of solutions.

Todd:  Appropedia is a project you for which you have a high level of passion.  What positive impact are you seeing from its growth?

Lonny:  So many. . . My favorite is that I am seeing people make new errors instead of the same old errors on projects.  I have visited rainwater catchment systems and asked where they learned to put on a first flush, and the response was Appropedia.  I have seen a new level of projects from students each year as they learn from the projects of the students that came before them.  Appropedia has helped provide much needed knowledge to projects all around the world. We are approaching 19 million pageviews and 150,000 edits.  Now there is a source of optimism.

Todd:  How can people on any corner of the globe be oriented more towards solutions, not just talking about best practices?

Lonny:  They already are.  A lot of the solutions are happening on small scales, by people to busy working to start documenting.  I think that we need to partner the people that have the energy to discuss, document and just be on the computer, with those people that have the energy to draw, plan and get their hands dirty.  Not that people can’t be both, but the more collaboration of those abilities the better.

Todd:  So, we need witnesses?  Storytellers?  Ambassadors?

Lonny:  Absolutely.  If you have a lot of energy, and not much experience, talking about your ideas is great… but helping other’s document their projects can have much more lasting, tested and useful impact.

To that end, Appropedia has started a travel internship program. In the program, bright ambassadors head out to document effective community projects. Recently we have had two interns in Latin America.  They have documented dozens of projects and techniques that have never been on the internet before.  The projects (natural wastewater treatment) and techniques (e.g. testing methods for improved cookstoves) are now available for others to learn from and adapt.

Todd:  Thanks, Lonny.

Flash Collaboration Process

or how Thrivability: A Collabortive Sketch happened.

People have asked: How did you get that done? So, I’ll tell you.

First and foremost, I lucked out. I worked with amazing, generous, patient, inspired, and brilliant people. 70 of them. I wish I could have included more, and yet, it is too much already.

Two of my advisors suggested the project to me in December of 2009. Mid-January, I had enough of a sense of it to put out a request to my advisors for contributions. As pieces came in, I became more bold. I joke that I am a compulsive recruiter. Really, I think it is an energy high of positive feedback loops. That drove me — even more — to want to honor what people contributed and nail our March 15 launch date at SXSW.

Here are my answers to some of the specific questions I have been asked.

What worked well with your book project?

  • Using social media to create buzz, encourage participation, and share thanks
  • Being a dictator about form, process, topics to cover, and who participates
  • Hand-holding those who get writer’s block

What challenges did you face?

  • Getting 70 people to all be on their precise task in a short time period
  • Getting people to meet their deadlines (even though it was all volunteer)
  • Scope creep – the book doubled in size from original intention for it – which I think made it too big to digest whole

How did you manage so many contributors? Deadlines/workflow/editing?

  • Used a modified personal kanban – each person/topic was a post-it note on a wall indicating (by wall placement) what they had done or needed to do
  • Put deadlines 2 weeks before I really needed them, so the slips would be okay (shhhh, keep that secret!)
  • Put everything into a google doc as it came in.
  • Didn’t let them edit each other’s pieces (although I did share samples of existing contributions to new contributors to give them a feel for what was there)
  • Note: I have been an editor for 15 years or so. I am used to the process of idea->draft->edit->revise->final->design->publish. I edited each as they came in. I brought in help for second/third pair of eyes. Only a few had major re-writes and a few went way over the 500 word limit.

How, if at all, did you incentivise contributions (and also people working to deadlines)?

  • Seeded it for momentum. The first contribution came in 2 hours after I asked the initial group (my ring of a dozen advisors). I tweeted my thanks.
    People were motivated, I think, by:

    • Social relationships (they all know me or someone else involved)
    • Uplifting concept (mission is bigger than me or you and aspirational)
    • Peer influence (who else had or was going to contribute)
    • It is possible people thought that being in the book would help with their visibility, but I think that wasn’t a real motivator (in hindsight).
    • People were asked to speak to something they know super well and feel “alive” about, so I suspect/hope they felt it was an “opportunity” to give voice to something vital in themselves.
  • Made it easy to be involved – just get me your 500 or less words. I will do the rest.
  • Made it clear what needed to happen and by when. There were no “ifs, ands, or buts” about it. No threats. No complaints. And an open door for anyone struggling with it.

What advice would you give to anyone thinking of crowdsourcing a book about sustainability?

  • If it is an ebook – keep it SHORT
  • Be firm in your structure and allow people to be creative and alive in the container you provide
  • Ask for small contributions that seem easy to achieve
  • Stick to a short window from request – draft – response – final – design – approval to publication
  • Don’t over-explain the process. What is the least they need to know about what is happening behind the scenes?
  • Consider how you want to manage copyright (we have a copyright on the collection – with each individual holding copyright on their specific piece)
  • Think of it as curation – you are creating a larger work by placing individual works in relation to each other, just as one would with an art exhibit of many artists. There is a grace to making that work well and be cohesive as a whole. (That would be a whole other conversation here)
  • Get multiple opinions on your draft and final draft so that you can find out if that piece that doesn’t strike your fancy is super compelling to someone else (and vice versa). Be careful not to let that feedback overly homogenize things – squeezing the voice and authenticity out of it
It is easy for a collectively written piece to:
    • Get diluted by having too many editors or an unclear vision/purpose
    • Seem like a random hodge podge (be sure to create cohesion through form/argument/story or something!)
    • Have an inconsistent standard or threshold of quality (especially when people volunteer, it is easy to simply be grateful for whatever they offer – but don’t. If they want to be involved, they want it to be good. So handhold folks if you have to – until it meets a high standard.)

How will you solve those challenges?

What questions do you still have? And what answers do you have for collaborations you have worked on?

Why the optimism?

In the face of all the catastrophe thinking and story-telling, why the optimism of thrivability?

This optimism is not blind idealism or the search for some dreamy utopia. A thrivable world will exist (and has existed) in a strange balance and tension where there is more health and generativity than illness and destruction. That does not mean there is not destruction. Old orders must fall, become the compost of new life, and cycle through. Ideas get refined and transcended. A thrivable world is not static. It is not the end of suffering or the birth of a hedonistic paradise. Instead, think of a garden or better yet a meadow.

So, let’s be pragmatic. What is the basis for being optimistic about thriving given stories of catastrophe and crisis. I will merely mention these – you can find more easily by digging deeper on any of it. This is the big picture overview. Also, it is not comprehensive. I offer here only a half dozen examples of why optimism is warranted.

  • communication – never before has communication been so possible – over distances, between languages, across cultures, etc. Information can flow. There is talk of a global brain (although at times that brain may seem primitive and dumbly focused on sex, superficiality, or bad news). It still remains – never before have we had such access to each other. (nods to Deanna Zandt)
  • cognitive surplus – never before have so many had so much liesure time. Not saying we are effective with it, but the possibility of people contributing their time, wisdom, and resources has never been greater. (nods to Clay Shirky)

Yeah, you heard those before….but it is working? What about people who are dying!

  • hearts break as we read of children dying, but what is the trajectory? UNICEF says:
  1. “Research and experience show that six million of the almost 11 million children who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices.”
  2. “While global immunization rates have risen from less than 20 per cent in the 1970s to about 74 per cent in 2002, millions of children must still be reached.”
  3. “In its sixty years of existence, UNICEF has seen a fifty per cent reduction in under-five mortality between 1960 and 2002.”
  • Peace on the rise. I know it seems like the opposite. But let’s look at some charts to see what the numbers tell.
    via systemicpeace.org

    via systemicpeace.org

    We can see from figure 8 that the conflicts that do exist produce more refugees and exist in poorer states and thus require more humanitarian relief. However, note, “The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had an equally dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system.” A couple key points:

  1. “Separate research indicates that the increasing level of societal war results from the protractedness of societal wars during this period and not from a substantial increase in the numbers of new wars.”
  2. “At the peak in 1992, nearly thirty percent of the countries in the world were experiencing some form of major political violence. This percentage of the world’s independent states (with total population greater than 500,000 in 2008) has dropped by nearly one-half since the peak, registering at slightly more than 15% with major episodes of political violence in 2008.”
  3. “There has been substantial improvement in general resilience in the global system since 1995.”
  4. “Global gains are observed for seven of the eight fragility indicators; only “economic legitimacy” shows no improvement, indicating that there has been no substantive shift away from primary commodities production toward manufactured goods in the world’s more fragile states.”

There are a few counter-trends to be wary of (see end of page)

Okay, so kids are more likely to live (but we can keep improving that) and there is a downward trend in warfare/armed conflict. We can communicate better and have more time to make the world better (or be entertained or both). But what about the environment?

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:[48]

  • carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
  • nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
  • sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
  • particulate emissions fell by 80%
  • lead emissions fell by more than 98%

Please don’t take this to mean that we are done. We are not. AND, when was the last time you heard that we had made progress?

So we have been making some progress, and actually there are some positive trends. Now let’s add in a few juicy additions:

  • Purposeful or meaningful life pursuits are on the rise, in fact there is a convergence. Millenials – in general – prefer purposeful work and play, GenX is interested too, and the Boomers who made money so they could have a meaningful life later – well, that later is arriving. What happens when you have multiple-generations with a growing interest in living on purpose, with intention, and therefore being conscious about doing more good in the world?
  • Social entrepreneurship (probably in part as a result of the previous) is on the rise – a very hot trend with many subsets and variations in making money by or for doing good. Let’s call corporate social responsibility one of those variations.
  • A paradigm shift in leadership and collaboration is underway. Beginning a few decades ago with the birth of servant leadership, and reinforced by books like “Outliers” (which shows the supporting factors that go into supposedly independent genius)… now we have open source, crowdsourcing, and so much more. How we think about working together is changing. And that change makes more successful collaboration possible.
  • Green technology. Some of us find it so incredibly sexy. And sometimes it really is. Sometimes it is wishful thinking or innovation many years from implementation. However, I can count 4 wind farms on my 120 mile journey to see my family. I sense some potential black swan like shifts if some clean green energy or technology comes to market… whether that algae that eats pollution or cars run on the biofuel made by your food waste… I have hope that something out of the bright green movement is going to come to fruition in a way that changes the world dramatically.
  • I’ll close my brief list with metrics… we have been improving our metrics (and our intelligence in how those metrics can be used to tell different stories). The better our metrics – and the better we are at realizing what to measure, the tighter and more useful our feedback loops become. From using social network analysis to map out which congresspeople are being lobbied by what organizations (and who is paying them)… to stats on child mortality, the environment, and energy consumption and creation – we know more about our world than ever before. And that empowers us to do more about it.

These are just a few of the things that make me optimistic in the face of catastrophe stories. What are yours?

On twitter–

@jhagel: More cause for optimism – we are having fewer children and living much longer – great visualization of global trends http://bit.ly/c93ven

Collaboration Mixing Board

This morning I read a RT from @jhagel:

Open source trumps crowdsource – by @cdgramshttp://bit.ly/bIn1at

And an idea that has been bubbling in the back of my head came to the surface begging to be set free. Collaboration and Cooperation are complex processes. Setting up them as rivals diminishes the value each provide us. One is not better than another as much as one may be more or less appropriate for a particular issue. And there are a bunch of knobs and dials to adjust based on what we have to put into the system and what we would like to have as output.

My initial “Mixing Board” points to several of these knobs and dials and some of the measures we might watch. I hope you will consider these and contribute to a revised version that holds greater rigor and collective wisdom. 🙂 Collaborate with me!

CollaborationSThis is the basic mixer. We have 3 areas: the Dials – things that feel measurable and adjustable, the Knobs – things that feel like a spectrum, and the Lights – things that we can sense but probably not directly adjust.

The Dials:

  • # of contributors (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • # of beneficiaries (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • degree of facilitation/quality control (none, light-handed, moderated, tight, regulated)
    1. none – for example – the ability to co-create the internet approaches NO facilitation and NO quality control.
    2. light-handed – co-creating youtube is light-handed (as is most major social media space) with very simple rules.. and very little quality control
    3. moderated – wikipedia has a process for including content, a system for elevating reputation, and a fairly advanced peer produced quality control system and standards
    4. tight – most blogs (from harvard business blogs to Daily Kos) where several people have permission to add posts (the comment option might be handled lightly to not at all however) and the quality control is high (even if the quality is not high – the control of it is)
    5. regulated – let’s talk wall street stats or sports numbers collecting on websites – there is regulation about the information to control the quality and the facilitation is more in the realm of bureaucracy
  • feedback loops – do stakeholders/creators have ways of getting feedback on the collaborations? For example, couchsurfing ratings. I presume that collaborations in which people know they are successful via tight feedback loops encourage more collaboration. This is simply my assumption. 🙂

Then we have The Knobs or Spectrums:

  • cooperation – from collective to collaborative (to what degree are people creating/generating through interaction with each other? Is it the number who show up or the output of their engagement with each other? CarrotMobs are about the number (collective) and team sports are about the combined output and interaction (collaborative).
  • granularity – from single output to many outputs that can be added together. A single output could be a logo design or a designed t-shirt… where an additive output is something like Linux – composed of hundreds or even thousands of pieces where individual authorship of the granule still allows for collective production of a larger work.
  • governance – from benevolent dictator to consensus, who manages the collaboration? An individual, a leadership circle, a revolving/evolving group, or full consensus of all involved, etc.
  • field – from commons to market – what does the output create in total? Does it create a market for individuals to succeed (or fail) within or a commons for all to share?

Finally we have The Lights – given the settings of the Knobs and Dials, what can we sense?

  • emergent – does the collaboration create the conditions for emergence? To what degree?
  • creative – does the collaboration enable creative effort or stifle it?
  • quality – does the collaboration produce high quality results/outputs? (by whose definition?)
  • resourceful – does it optimally engage the resources of those collaborating?
  • beneficial – does it create benefits? (one could ask for who?)
  • speed – how long does the collaboration take?
  • adaptable – how able is the collaboration to make adjustments in response to the environtment
  • scalable – can the collaboration expand? to what degree? (not that scaling is always ideal! it isn’t!)

Flash Collaboration Discussion

Announcement

The HUB Berkeley, Friday April 9th at noon
Berkeley, CA

Brown Bag lunch with Jean Russell, curator of Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch. Jean will present and discuss flash collaboration. She used this process to involve 70 collaborators from across the world in producing an ebook in less than 90 days. The ebook was repeatedly a top “twittered” and “facebooked” item on Slideshare. It is approaching 5000 views in less than 3 weeks. It is cash positive on a generosity model. She will point to successful ways of using social media to both develop and launch a project, as well as project management for flash collaborations. Take away ideas on how to collaborate with your network for tangible and visible results.

Designing Thrivable Creation Spaces

Thrivability, at its core, is all about creating environments that are generative of adaptive diverse abundance, both in the sense of nature, and in the sense of the potential for innovation present in an organization. If people come together with a sense of purposive play, then innovation emerges from the dynamic richness of the interactions.

It is all about fostering an environment in which upward spirals are most likely to emerge.

So it is great to see folks over at HBR talking about factors to take into account when intentionally designing creation spaces, such as the Hub coworking space for social entrepreneurs that will soon be opening in San Francisco.

Emergent behavior from participants is, of course, essential. But it rarely takes hold unless it’s organized and supported within carefully designed (and tended) “creation spaces.

As with gardens, it’s best to design creation spaces minimally at the outset and then let them create a life of their own, layering in additional design elements over time.