At NLab: Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience on 18
June 2009 we broke into small groups to discuss the three key elements
of Andrea Saveri's presentation. The resulting notes are
summarised below, with the verbatim post-it note comments at the end of this post.
But first, think about this: when
we diagnosed our levels of amplification the group was most confident
about its skills in Multi-capitalism (Fluency in working with different kinds of capital: natural, intellectual, social, and financial) and Longbroading (The ability to think in terms of higher level systems and cycles. The vision to see the big picture).
The question now is: how can we now get practical and put those skills to work on the following issues?
Much of the conversation around Community-Based Maker Economies
seems to have been less around actually making goods and more about
what happens afterwards - i.e. selling them, especially with regard to
the best kinds of outlets and how to combat foreign competition. There
was also a recognition that skills that are dying out should be
recaptured if possible, although there is nothing in the notes about
why. Is the reason for preservation to store them in a museum? Or so
that new generations and learn and adapt them? Might this be an
opportunity for some kind of audit?
There was a lot of interest in Regenerative Commerce but
uncertainty as to how it might be achieved, along with an awareness of
the complexities of introducing barter and gift cultures into an urban
society which has long forgotten how to use them. Of course sites like
Freecycle are helping to return this kind of ethos into popular culture
but the social structure of the city still has difficulties in working
with it. There was much talk in this group about the differences
between city and village cultures, but it wasn't clear how much of that
was evidence-based. It would be interesting to peel away some of the
sentimental thinking around traditional village economic structures and find out
which elements might realistically be applicable to urban commerce
today.
The User-Centred Governance group were cautious about exclusion
and about the difficulty of obtaining a fully representative range of
views via social media. They discussed the different roles involved -
those who create information, those who use it, and those who moderate
and manage the resulting relationships. Could lessons be learned from
the user-group focus of commercial sites like Amazon, and how might
they be applied in a governance situation? There was an awareness that
the quality and focus of online discussion can be excellent, but at the
same time access to it remains limited. It would be useful to see a resource which aggregates examples of UCG from around the
world to show how these issues are being addressed.
Post-it Notes Verbatim >
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