Leadership in Participatory Culture

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What do we mean by leadership when we talk about it within the frame of participatory culture?

In May, Ode magazine published The Power of Many, an article about our participatory culture (rather than top down hierarchies). On the website, they also post another article about the We mentality.

Whereas leadership in hierarchical organizations, by definition, seems to be a relational position within the system, participatory culture surfaces a different filter for leadership. What is that filter? How do we know it when we see it, especially if it does not include an organizationally designated title?

Leaders within this context display, I think, the following characteristics. And I would, of course, prefer to think of them as nurturers. But to bridge from one paradigm to the new thrivable participatory one, we will use the past terminology. Leaders, then, in participatory culture, noticeably portray the following:

  • trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
  • draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
  • demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
  • act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
  • show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
  • listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
  • instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
  • defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
  • hold each participant to their greatness
  • open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
  • willing and ready for new opportunities
  • able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty

Leaders in participatory community foster a sense of tribe/community as something each individual serves, uplifts, and is in turn cared for by. They presume that people are capable of being a contribution beyond their own individual wants to act for the improvement of the collective. These leaders are not afraid to be a strong example to embody the moral code of the group.

Leaders in participatory communities do not function in a top down dictatorial method–they facilitate emergence within the collective. They do not direct: they bring forth. They distribute power to the individuals, empowering them to be their best, give their best, and be given the best. They encourage positive reinforcement to get more of what the collective needs to flourish. These leaders see their role as bringing out the best in others, as responsible for people harnessing collective expertise, wisdom, and creativity.

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Possibilities for N2Y3

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N2Y2 certainly brought together some amazing people from various domains to work for social change. Nonprofit entrepreneurs, technologists, foundation representatives, venture capitalists, and those that support and critique them converged in one space. This in itself is indisputably important and valuable. What to do within that space to best foster the emergence of good things might be a little more complicated and debatable.

21 projects voted in through popularity polls online.

What worked for me:

  • Fun, friendly, interesting attendees
  • fame factor of some of the attendees (though not of the speakers)
  • divergence of interests of attendees, panelists, and projects
  • splitting up of the awards among all
  • silly wooden nickel voting, playfulness, general energy of the event
  • location
  • warmth and friendliness of the staff, organizers, and others
  • speed-geeking the projects (I heard others suggest how this might uplift projects strong in communications while showing unfavorably groups that don’t communicate well or have ineffective speakers—to my thinking these things are important to the success of a project. It might not be ideal, but it is true.)
  • backpacks. t-shirts. I used to handle promotional stuff, so I am pretty clear how cheesy it all is. I still love coming home with good stuff. Call me a sucker.
  • The logo. I love the character wrapping her arms around the 2. It really worked for me. In fact, the graphics on everything looked swell!
  • Back-channel chatting is terrific. I love it. I want to see more of it.

What didn’t work for me:

  • Panel discussion divided by social impact (I didn’t get much sense of what the social implications of any of the projects I listened to), economic sustainability (let’s push nonprofits to become social entrepreneurs?), and technology innovation (it was already clear who knew their technology).
  • Voting process done by one round rather than winnowing (repeated rounds of narrowing down).
  • Lack of transparency about voting outcomes. With the overall winner of the event being MapLight—an organization about money and political transparency, it was pointed out to me how incredibly ironic that the event coordinators themselves weren’t showing how many tokens each group collected.
  • I never figured out which of the panelists was going to moderate which panel. So I missed seeing people like Lucy Bernholz!
  • organizations there that did not get much opportunity to be visible, I was pleased to see the Bring Light presentation. It was much more interesting that the Cisco exec talk (though Cisco were fantastic and gracious hosts!).
  • Superficial efforts to be cool—stickers we could place on our name tags to show whether we had attended which of the three area panels. It didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone I talked with. The overabundance of printed materials. Wasted paper. The “tag” boxes in the upper corner of the 21 projects in the booklet—it would have been better to have a space for me to put my own tag cloud together.
  • The elephant in the room—there is, even here, a generational gap in understanding technology and cultural innovations. It isn’t the tools, stupid. Yes, know the tools, create good tools, indeed. And people use them. There was a clear divide of people who “get” what web 2.0 is about, and people who are buzzing about it and don’t understand the cultural shift. And there are some marginal people who understand there is a change, but they can’t move from intellectually grasping it to wholeheartedly being it. I didn’t see much movement to change that.

Advice:

  • Take advantage of what is best about the projects. Clearly there is something valuable about each of these which others could learn from. For example, Genocide Intervention Network really gets the cross-portal identity management piece. YouthAssets really understood how to create a flow system. How can they share what they are already doing well or figured out as an advantage? Let the audience participate and generate a list of 1-3 core advantages and then have the org explain a little about each of them. Was a projects innovative edge about social impact (new way to impact more people better)? Was a projects innovative edge about technology (new technology or new use of technology)? Or was a project economically innovative (new model of creating monetary and resource flows)? Let the strong ones in each issue speak on that issue…and be paneled by experts that can push their edges even further.
  • Good Capital, YouthGive, Lucy, and others, in my mind, should have gotten 5 minutes too somehow…though that could be a time management issue.
  • Perhaps there could be a better equating of tokens to funds received.
  • Outlaw buzz words OR tally keeping on words like community and collaboration. (Yeah, I know, I would be in trouble pretty quickly, as I love these words too.)