This blog has moved!!

Hi folks-

I decided it was time to get a self-hosted wordpress site, so Cultivating Resilient Culture has moved to:

www.worldbridgerdesign.com/blog

I hope you like the new design!

-Jay

Framing the topics: Collective Intelligence and Social Innovation

Much of the “sustainability conversation” has been about hardware, asking: What are the physical technologies that will allow us to continue our materially affluent lifestyles with less impact on the natural world? Images of wind turbines and solar panels dominate our view of a sustainable future. Does our vision go deep enough? Where are the people in these images? Is techno-centricity contributing to our troubles, and stalling our solutions in the same mired mindset from which the problems arose? Perhaps we are too focused on our handy tools and not enough on the actual hands that created them.

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Here we enter the realm of social innovation: I want to look at how people interact, and how social patterns and cultural lenses can be approached as mediums for intentional design.

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Instead of listing problems and sleuthing work-arounds, I’d like to audit and map assets, and learn how to connect and grow resilient, self-organizing systems. I’m curious about tactics that embrace the mystery and potential of chaos, while utilizing our capacity for designing ordered patterns. I think it is good to remain humble but courageous concerning one’s own actual level of awareness and mastery. To be successful in the long run, sustainability practitioners must dedicate attention and intention toward continuous developmental growth, embrace interdependence, and  focus less on the politics of attribution and more on the effectiveness of contributions. Enough preaching.

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What is our greatest asset? PEOPLE would be my guess. Imagine a future when the creativity, brilliance and cognitive diversity of the billions are highly activated! Overpopulation has created many problems, but is also an opportunity: we have a lot of human resources. We are the only species on earth with unemployment. What is the blind spot that creates such imbalances?

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To address these cultural blind spots, an important tool is INTELLIGENCE, a.k.a. awareness or consciousness. Humans are not grains of sand, we are self-aware, sensitive and capable of complex communication. It seems natural and strategic to cultivate these abilities toward their highest potential.
Together, these two assets combine to form the field known as COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE, defined loosely by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence as: groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent. A commonly cited example of collective intelligence is Wikipedia, because it is a simple platform charged with a goal and designed to display, aggregate and leverage the expertise of a large set of contributors.

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Hopefully my rationale for focusing on social innovation and collective intelligence will become clearer as more examples of the approach are articulated in upcoming posts. Obviously, I am keenly interested in feedback and discussion: I hope to attract and develop a cohort of peers with whom to learn and practice collaboratively.

A Pattern Language for Social Innovation– looking for an ontology

I’ll be touring Europe this summer with the intention of learning the secrets of success in social innovation from experienced practitioners.

I’ve decided to harvest the stories, wisdom and insight that I learn along the way into an attractive deck of cards, such that the key concepts are easily digestible and can be assembled into mind maps.

I’m wondering how these cards could be incorporated into art of hosting/harvesting so that as new wisdom emerges, it can be crystallized into card form and added to the body of knowledge.

Key to the success of such a deck would be the template design into which the content would be placed. There needs to be enough flexibility to allow for a wide diversity of ideas, solutions, stories, etc but also enough order such that the cards can be organized into comprehensible mind-maps.

So I’m looking for the right categorization structure. Perhaps the Chaordic Stepping Stones would work well? What other ontologies have you found to be useful for organizing thinking about social innovation?

MetaCurrency Explained

Over the last few days, I’ve been working with Alan Rosenblith to explain the MetaCurrency project in simple terms. Here is the presentation that we created to that end:

http://prezi.com/ijiokjbrolwo/metacurrency-mind-map/

Co-Working spaces and Social Innovation in Portland

Yesterday I toured around Portland looking at collaborative work spaces and programs that support social innovation with my friend Renata.

First, we met with Mark Grimes, co-founder of Ned Space, Ned.com and Ned Water. He graciously spent a few hours with us, offering his advice about starting co-working spaces, his experiences putting on Maker Faire Africa, and general musings on startup social enterprise.

Ned has two spaces in Portland and is open to creating locations worldwide. A few shots of their spaces:

Next, we had lunch at a hip art gallery/coffeeshop/event venue called Backspace. Some shot of the awesome art that was on the walls:

After downing a BBQ tempeh wrap and a bottle of kombucha, we stopped by a chic co-working space called Souk.

After Souk, we had to patronize the locally famous Voodoo Doughnuts. And yes, that is real bacon on top of a maple bar.

Then we hopped across the river and drank some hard cider with Sara and my friend Alan Rosenblith. Sara is putting together an Innovation Incubation Lab called Hatch! After a few drinks, we went to an event on social enterprise put on by Springboard Innovation, one of Hatch’s partners.

As usual, Portland is inspiring, fun and feels like home.

More art in progress

Next Stop: Sweden

Here’s an update on what’s new in my life:

Links to projects, places, and events mentioned in the video:

http://www.reworktheworld.org/

Oasis Training in Amsterdam

Learning Journey Berlin

Vipassana: 10 days of silent insight meditation

Portland Social Innovation Incubator: Springboard Innovation

Portland Co-Working: NedSpace

The MetaCurrency Project

More Art

This is probably going to get more love, but here’s the start:

Satellite Art

And the upgraded version:

New Art

Featured Ally: Geoff Jensen

Today I spent the afternoon with my friend Geoff, who I lived with last year. Geoff, also known as ioTus, is a digital visionary, yogi, and Gnostic Jedi. We had a great chat about learning to live outside of the conventional financial treadmill, and supporting each other to offer our gifts to the world. He wrote a great post about our conversation here.