Community Inclusion

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On one of my favorite online communities, Omidyar.net, I have seen great debates about inclusion in community. There are those who suggest that everyone should be heard and everyone has a right to say whatever they want to say within community. And those very people suggest that if what is said offends anyone, then that sense of being offended says something about that person. Sometimes I wonder if I agree. Perhaps to some degree.

But I think the whole argument stems from a blurring of the line between what a society is and how it should hold itself and what a community is and how it should hold itself. Societies can and I think should be comprised of diverse individuals within broad geographical shared space, functioning as large scale loosely connected citizens working together across differences for common good. Communities, while they can also be diverse in many regards, also are groupings of choice. One may live within a geographical perimeter of a community area, but can choose not to be part of that community. One may live far away from a community and still feel a part of it. It is a grouping of choice. And that makes all the difference.

Communities are collections of individuals (or families) that are tightly woven, usually of relatively smaller scale, bound by some commonality–often of interest or practice.

The practices that makes a society thrive, I suggest, are different from those that make a community thrive. For a community to flourish, we need to have commonly agreed practices. What is acceptable and what is not? And those things need not be, indeed must be, different than those that govern society as a whole. Who is inside the community? Who is outside? That critically determines the safety of the space for community. That determines what conversations can take place inside the boundaries of the community.

When Resource Generation brings together young affluent social justice activists, they create a safe space for conversations that could not happen elsewhere. Those conversations would be more difficult or impossible in a mixed generation community or a mixed wealth community or a community permeated by raging capitalists. And when that safe space opens up, then sharing happens. Sharing in a safe space opens people up to sharing more than their ideas. They share of themselves, forging their identity. They may share their belongings or other resources as well. Sharing follows from trust.

When community members slip into society-defending postures, justifying safe space destroying activities as free speech or other critical freedoms in society, that slippage makes false argument at the cost of community safe space. While we all may deserve the right to free speech, a community deserves to be able to construct norms around what is acceptable and unacceptable within that community. And they deserve to have the power to enforce exclusion. Within the Omidyar.net community, the cry for free speech has allowed any activity that is not completely clear spam to be allowed. And the cost of that free speech has been the safety of the community. Where raging loons rampage against multiple individuals and addressing them in words merely feeds the loon or troll with attention, then safe space and conversations of trust disappear.

For online community to evolve toward great collaboration, trolls must be addressed. Wikipedia attempts this in several ways–trolling comments are removed. Content that is contentious is marked as such. Debate over content is available while not marring the output of the site. When we see trollish or spamming behavior in other communities that fail to moderate or govern themselves, navigation of the space gets mired and difficult (Facebook, Tribe).

I look forward to discovering spaces for community online that have self-governing tools, as onet does, and community practices that foster safe spaces for conversation, collaboration, and community identity development. I suspect one way this may be possible currently is through smaller communities focused very selectively on shared interest as can be developed on tools like Ning.

As I said on omidyar.net

Goddess, please grant me an online community with conversation tracking, project management, acknowledgment, knowledge management, and high quality transpartisan collaborators trying to take action toward a better world for all of us!

Yes, and acknowledgment includes one with tools and practices that will help create effective semi-permeable boundaries for community to self-regulate effectively.

Localizing Global Change! Chicago Conference July 20-22

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You are invited to co-create the 4th Annual Chicago Conference for Good. PLEASE join us, bring friends and add spirit! Share this invitation with neighbors and colleagues, people you’d like to connect or reconnect with this July!

“…cuz people who do stuff need to know more people who do stuff.” – ted ernst

Localizing Global Change: Issues and Opportunities

July 19-22 in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago, IL USA

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us! …for More and More.

More and more people. More and more resources. More and more easy. More and more connected. More and more green. More and more power to do good things, in more and more local neighborhoods and organizations.

Three years ago, some of us convened a small but national conference on the future of philanthropy, technology and community action. Two years ago, more of us joined in to create a second and international conference which was also the first-ever omidyar.net members conference. Last year we did it again, and along the way these conversations have sparked half a dozen more conferences and action on at least four continents.

All the while, you’ve been busy doing all the things you do to try make the world a better place, and you’ve been noticing that more and more people are getting together for global community good. This year’s global gathering in Chicago is going to focus on “doing”. All good work. All kinds of local action. We welcome good people from everywhere to join with people we are actively inviting who are “doing” in Chicago neighborhoods. Bring your own local doing to share. We want to do more and more in all localities, and to do it more together.

This year’s conference will follow the same simple and active format as all the previous conferences. We’ll gather for one big opening, create a working agenda that includes all of our most important issues and questions, meet with friends and colleagues to actively address everything on the agenda, document and publish our notes online, and head back out into all the things we are doing with more energy, more clarity and more connections.

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us!
…for more and more global good on the ground where you live.

WHEN? July 19-22, 2007 …music and barbecue on Thursday night, conference all day Friday and Saturday, finishing by noon on Sunday, with airport drop-offs or excursions for out-of-towners on Sunday afternoon.

WHERE? General Robert E. Wood Boys & Girls Club, 2950 W. 25th Street, Chicago IL 60623

WHO SHOULD COME? Anyone who wants to get more and more into community, technology, environment, and other social justice kinds of work and practice. Anyone who wants to make more and more connections between all these sorts of things. And anyone who wants to have more and more fun and friends in the process of community leadership.

WHAT TO BRING? Food to eat/share, materials to show/share, ideas and questions, issues and projects that you care about and want to inform and be informed by others AND a total of $40 (scholarships may be available) to pay for basic costs of site and materials for all three days of meetings.

NOW WHAT? Send an email to nurturegirl@gmail.com, make a payment at paypal, forward this invitation to friends and colleagues, people you work with — and people you want to work with. we’ll send you details about places and times and be glad to answer any other questions. Stay tuned to www.GlobalChicago.net for more information.

CO-CONVENERS? Ted Ernst, Hermilo Hinojosa, Kachina Katrina Zavalney, Michael Herman, Michael Maranda, Jean Russell, Dave Chakrabarti, Pierre Clark, and You…

Discussion

What kind of stuff
have we been doing?

* hosting and attending green dinners,
* community gardening,
* blogging,
* digital excellence & inclusion,
* chicago conservation corps training,
* growing food,
* organizing block clubs and parties,
* depaving your yard and inviting neighbors,
* restoring a riverbank,
* planting native prairie in your local park
* organizing your neighbors to work with the alderman or CAPS to get a camera,
* or get one taken out,
* recruiting volunteers,
* organizing safe routes to school,
* buying organic foods,
* experimenting with new tech ways to connect people,
* and living with less tech
* driving less,
* recycling more,
* ensuring all differently brained people are seen as human beings,
* seeing to it that the ADA laws are followed,
* making social activists are supported and nurtured,
* urban chicken egg farming
* block clubs
* traffic calming
* peace parks
* “doing.”… ,

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.

Technorati!

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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.)

Foundation and Capital Voices

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I have found foundation representatives here at netsquared. However, I have not heard from them publicly. I think foundation representatives have a lot to offer to emerging nonprofits and technologists as they are trying to gain clarity and grow. Similarly VC folks have wisdom and questions that can help prime projects for receiving funding and building viable business models.

Also, I would like to see more nonprofits and technologists putting pressure on foundations to consider expanding program support beyond granting to blended offerings of loans and other investment tools that support emerging social purpose organizations and projects.

We need to be surfacing the resources we each have, acknowledging our own needs, and sharing together to make more and more good things happen.

Resources Lost

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Still here at netsquared. Looking around at the audience in this economic sustainability session…and I think we are not capturing the resources that are in the room. When someone is sitting not far from me that is with pledgebank, and yet we aren’t talking about pledging…or Bring Light, who sponsored the event, doesn’t get to share how they work…these 21 projects need to hear about tools in the room that they don’t know about.

Here is a project–what can each person in the room bring to it to move it forward? And what collectively do we as a group think would be most valuable from that.

Interesting question from the moderator: he asserts that some nonprofits simply suck. One of the panelists retorted that the trick about that subjective judgment is WHO gets to make that call. I wonder how valuable even figuring that out is! When talking about services that cost a certain amount to be able to do–and that cost is fairly unrelated to number served. Grassroots.org for example has a certain cost that doesn’t. I imagine, increase significantly whether they serve 5000 or 7500. It isn’t worth the sorting process which becomes a trade-off–the value of being an open provider gets compromised by being some judgment making organization.

This is one of the values I really appreciate about Catalytic Communities. They share projects from any community leaders who have innovative solutions. Those leaders get to decide what is innovative. I think that can really resonate for people who are skeptical of the power aspect of subjectively choosing who gets in and who gets out.

Netsquared N2Y2

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San Jose at Cisco for the Netsquared N2Y2 event thanks to Omidyar Network and the Omidyar Network Community.

We had speed geeking mixed with a Yahoo and Cisco talk the first part of the day. The speek geeking was appreciated by some as making it easier to get a sense of projects (as opposed to reading about them online). However others felt like the presentation might impact voting bubbling up personalities rather than worthy projects. I didn’t feel strongly either way. There is clearly a very broad spectrum of people here in their understanding of what Web 2.0 is about and how to use it.

Collaboration is a buzz word that half the people speaking it don’t understand.

I have been most impressed by Genocide Intervention Network. The young energetic man speaking about the organization, radiates 2.0 behavior and thinking. He talks about tools and practices that build identity for their participants/members. I would love to see more of the projects here learning from the GI net model.

The event itself could be much more collaborative. I would love to see more collaborative practices and exercises. What about rewarding those who identify an area for improvement AND suggest what to do OR offer the necessary resources to move forward. Maybe we should be acknowledging attendees with collaboration stars or something. What does each person here have as a resource to contribute? Where can we post to each project what we think would help them? How do we incentivize the flow of resources in ways that could not happen any other way than through THIS event? How do we reward those who are modeling what we collectively perceive to be the leading edge?

How do we amplify the good things?

Attending Barcamp Portland

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Barcamp Portland. We started Friday night with networking and the creation of our sessions. I met some great people including Kara from White Lotus Design. Kara and I have similar haircuts and had on similar shirts. We decided to find out what else we had in common. Definitely a lot more than these superficial things. We posted sessions on User Interface and on Mapping/Visualization of Information. I hope we get to work together more.

I also met the owners of Cubespace and realized that they were the folks in Portland that my friend Lisa Tracy had wanted me to talk with about the Collaborative Building project for Chicago. We touched base and committed to reconnecting at a less hectic time. I took every brochure and pamphlet I could find of theirs.

It was great to see “old” friends as Habib Rose, Aaron Nelson (Meyer Foundation) and Ray King (AboutUs). It was also great to make new friends like ms James Keller and Dawn Foster. Despite there being a heavy imbalance of men to women, I still found myself yammering with the ladies more often (and yes, James is a gal with great style!).

Saturday, I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions on graphics as well as Habib’s session on Network Weaving and the Network Weavers Network. However, my favorite sessions were probably Community Collaboration with Dawn Foster and Web 3.0 with Peter Mui. The Web 3.0 conversation ended up being a follow on to the community discussion. We talked mostly about currencies–as an option for how we might compensate people who make contributions but are not working “within” organizations that give them pay or health benefits. It was a great opportunity to present the material Eric Harris Braun has been working on from Open Money.

I also look forward to connecting to LaVonne Reimer. I spoke with her only briefly. She also has much wisdom and experience to share on creating the Collaborative Building, at least as it may relate to her Open Technology Development Center.

I forgot to mention, of course, that I attended with onetters Lewis Hoffman and Ethan McCutchen of Grass Commons.

Thriving with Complexity

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From simplistic thinking to embracing complexity…writes Dave Pollard.

He states:

There are ten things to remember about complex adaptive systems (which include all social and ecological systems):

  • It is impossible to know ‘enough’ about such systems to prescribe blanket ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ in such systems: There are too many variables. A one size answer never fits all in such systems.
  • The wisdom of crowds is essential to even a basic understanding of such systems: The more people involved in understanding, thinking about, and making decisions about such systems, the more likely those decisions are to be effective….
  • Such systems are unpredictable: Because there are so many variables, many of them unknown, it is folly to even attempt to predict what will happen, even in the short term….
  • Many of the variables in such systems are uncontrollable…
  • In such systems, prevention is difficult but better than a cure after the fact…Prevention requires imagination, and unfortunately we live in a world (especially true in large organizations, where imagination is actively discouraged) of terrible imaginative poverty….
  • In such systems there are no ‘best practices’ or ‘best policies’: Every situation in complex adaptive systems is unique. Trust the people closest to that situation to know what to do, don’t try to impose some practice that worked well in some completely different context (though telling a story about that practice might help those closest to the situation decide whether it could be adapted to their situation)….
  • In such systems, great models can spread but they usually can’t be scaled… If you don’t understand why this almost always fails, re-read Small is Beautiful.
  • There is a tendency for those working in such systems to presume ‘learned helplessness’ of customers and employees: …And failure to engage customers and employees in co-producing the product is a tragic waste of great opportunity. The key is knowing how to engage them: Not through passive questionnaires or surveys, but through conversations, stories, and presenting the ‘problem’ to them so they can help you appreciate it better and then address it….
  • In such systems, genuine decentralization is almost always a good idea: That means pushing out real authority along with responsibility….
  • In such systems, networks outperform hierarchies: This is a corollary of the other nine tenets of complex adaptive systems. Information, ideas and working models spread faster and more effectively peer-to-peer than up and down hierarchies.

Networks. Adaptive Systems.

Listen. Learn network theory. Go read Valdis Krebs white papers, and understand how power works in networks, and how smart communities work. Then grab Linked. And wait, there is more. On top of that add some understanding of incentives and acknowledgment. Now you have basic tools for creating healthy flowing adaptive systems. It isn’t enough. It is a great start.

Let us weave these networks to deal with the complexity around us, moving, flowing, growing. Let us thrive together.

Listen. Trust. Flourish.