Posts filed under 'Globalization 3.0 and the Small Is Good World'
Christina, this is a vital and most interesting topic. We are ruminating on your specific ideas and provocative questions and will respond accordingly.In the meantime, we’d like to bring folks’ attention to this piece,
What Tom Sawyer Knew, our recent contribution to the
MicroFinance Marketplace conversation. This piece is probably more appropriate to this conversation than the MFM project-specific conversation where it was originally posted.
In particular, consider closely this referenced article, ‘Second Life’ membership now free. The last paragraph is particularly suggestive (see sidebar, our emphasis added).
Heck, if we can’t get creative and provide an community-rich on-line experience that rivals or surpasses an imaginary virtual world, then we should hang up our social entreprenurial shoes and head for the Old Folks Home.
In other words, forget about ROI, sell experience!
This discussion fits squarely in Sohodojo’s interest in the reinvention of consumerism to what we’ve called inprosumerism, that is, the experience-based involvement of the empowered Individual to participate in the full cycle of investment, production and consumption rather than being a bottomless sucking ashcan at the end of a product-pushing supply chain.
Here’s a link to our ONet blog’s Inprosumer category page where the individual blog posts contain links back to their source ONet conversations.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
January 4th, 2006
If Tom Sawyer had put on his Banker’s Hat rather than his Entrepreneur’s Hat that fateful, fictional day in Hannibal, Aunt Polly’s fence would never have gotten painted.
(Can’t recall the details of Twain’s mythic tale, here’s a reprint.)
We’re not against developing creative instruments for micro-level lending and equity investment. They have a place in the MicroFinance Marketplace. But it is, after all, a marketplace and not a hallowed hall. A marketplace can be as exciting as a three-ring circus or as boring and constrained as a Victorian men’s club. We choose to put our creative juices into the circus side of things.
Consider that we live in a world where:
A Better World Is a Fence to be Painted
Considering these and related trends, there is no reason that we cannot create a story-rich, game-like on-line experience — NED On-line if you will — where tens of thousands of people are willing to pay, say $20/month, for the sheer joy and excitement of participation in this active, vibrant global on-line community. A place where everyday activity in this virtual world has a Matrix-like impact creating a better world in the Real World.
This membership subscription is not a loan nor an investment. It is a fee for experience, for access, for having a voice in what goes on in this ever-growing, ever-evolving on-line global community.
Once you are a member, it will be up to you to decide how to ‘invest’ your Better World Tokens. Perhaps you’ll purchase two shares of goat wool futures of a herd in Uganda. Later, you’ll lock in an hour of loom time craft futures of a New Mexico weaver.
You don’t do this with an expectation of below market return rates on repayment of a loan to the shepherd. Nor do you do it to own an equity share in Acme Weavers of New Mexico, Inc. You do this to be a stakeholder in the process that brings this wool to market, to have a voice in what the weaver makes, and to what Impact Point the sale of that wool and the weaver’s sweater will be directed. You’ll do it to get to know and care about the shepherd and the weaver as you shift your focus from the wool and sweater of a product-focused supply chain to a people-centered investment-production-consumption cycle.
Next month, you’ll increase your share in wool futures of the goat herd, and lock in 20 board-feet of lumber to be produced by a sustainable forestry co-op in Maine. Your purchases from the NED On-line marketplace over the last few weeks have been rewarded with a stack of additional Better World Tokens that you apply to a community development project to raise a wind turbine in an Aceh fishing village.
Within three months you’ve parlayed your participation tokens into a growing account such that your Impact Quotient has landed you on the Top 10 Rookies of the Month list at NED On-line. You set your sites for Hall of Impact Fame recognition within a year. Even if you miss your personal goal, you’ve had a heck of a creative, fun time helping to make a better world.
Now multiply this hypothetical NED On-line player/character community member by many thousands. With an addictive “serious play” environment and an effective reward system for impactful participation, imagine how many miles of Better World Fence we can paint if we can just learn to think like Tom Sawyer.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
December 29th, 2005
Wow, Christina!
Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition of your important and lives-changing work. We know this support is much-needed to expand the WE Center network.
Let us also wish that this is the ‘trickle’ before the flood of support that the LiA community will put to such good use.
Congratulations again,
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
December 28th, 2005
Christina (Kirabo the Gift Mom) Jordan said:
On structure:
[snip]… After many months of revisiting the issues, he suggests that a Membership Club is the simplest legal structure that can enable a group of private citizens to invest as a group in virtually any way they choose. [snip]…I love imagining that small clubs /church groups/ employee groups/ online communities would be able to connect with, build a sense of community with and invest in specific communities in other parts of the world.
I am supposing the MFM would be a club of clubs… a kind of premier membership advantage to be granted to investee group members.
MEGA-BINGO - It’s a Small World After All!
Absolutely. 200%. Christina, the vision you described above is what we call the Small Is Good World, a world of Empowered Individuals working together in a global community of self-help peer relations that gives satisfaction on many personal and community levels.
This is why the second ‘M‘ in MFM (Micro-Finance Marketplace) is so important. MFM should not become an institution or heavyweight organization. MFM needs to be a lightweight marketplace.
MFM will very likely be realized as an Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystem that is brought to life by software and enabled by the Internet. Sound familiar? What is eBay? It’s a good idea (AKA a business model), a bunch of clever software that implements that good idea, and remarkably few non-market participants (AKA back-office employees) that make the marketplace work.
By creating a dynamic marketplace for the interplay of Membership Clubs, the MFM becomes a vital engine for NED (and beyond) commerce.
We believe (although we are not accountants and lawyers), that by being an enabler/marketplace for a myriad of “Better World Hook-ups” that the MFM avoids most, if not all, of the gotchas that would kick in if the MFM were to own/control significant resources/capital moving internationally. By enabling the Small Is Good World to efficiently create person-to-person agreements/exchanges, we would do a great service by reducing the bottleneck of conventional organizations and organization-centric thinking.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
December 8th, 2005
Mark Bruns said:
[snip]…Low set-up costs/times actually make it possible to produce a much wider array of products with the same resources … of course, low set-up costs/times don’t magically appear … getting there involves a serious, diligent effort.
If we seek to manufacture [or franchise] economic opportunities, we will need to reduce the “set-up costs” or barriers to entry for a better population of small business ventures … better should mean wider diversity in terms of presentation, identity, creativity of the founder … but there is no reason why mechanics of formation and business operation can’t be standardized … clonable nano-enterprise biz-plan plus web-apps with fully debugged baseline mgmt functionality that can be gestated into microenterprises and small businesses as the nano-collaborations grow by succeeding.
Of course, we should also work at eliminating as many failure modes as necessary for these nano-ventures [snip]…
Absolutely, right on, Mark! By your references to nano- ideas (not to mention the nice note and feedback points you sent us), we can tell that you visited Sohodojo for some thought-food.
The Origin of (the Nanocorp) Species
BTW Mark, you might be interested to know that the word we coined, nanocorp, appeared in the New York Times in 1999, and was later selected as one of nineteen words that make up the vocabulary of (Dan Pink’s) Free Agent Nation (2001).
We chose the word nanocorp rather than the already established term microenterprise for some very specific reasons. First, micro-, as used in microenterprise and microfinance, had/has some widely accepted connotations with which we were not comfortable. First, microenterprises were all about very small, but traditional, mostly local business, what is often called a ‘Mom and Pop Shop’. And microfinance, so many years ago, was all about tiny loans to these microenterprises, mostly in locations of extreme poverty and especially in remote so-called developing countries.
But what we were and remain interested in — what we generally refer to in a Big Picture sense as Small Is Good World — is both smaller and larger than traditional microenterprise. The nanocorp idea is ’smaller’ in the sense that the smallest possible business is the solo entrepreneur, the solo free agent, the ‘business of me’ or the ‘business of us’ being the working family (as in bonds that go deeper and persist longer than business relations). The nanocorp idea is ‘larger’ in the sense that we are working on decentralized and distributed networks of these elementary building blocks, networks of nanocorps. Today, we call these networks entrepreneurial community ecosystems.
Ecosystem Patterns
For those who might be interested in digging deeper into the insights that Mark has raised in his excellent post, we encourage you to read an installment of The Nanocorp Primer first published in May of 2000: Role/Actor Scenario Patterns: The A-Team and the Sandbox, subtitled A Pattern to Enable Nanocorp Replication (AKA New Economy Job Creation). (That ‘New Economy’ phrase sure dates this piece doesn’t it!)
What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Strong
A few final comments, Mark, on the value and impact of failure. First, you are absolutely correct that standardized infrastructure and an effective peer community can help reduce the number and severity of failures.
Another failure mitigating factor is that a nanocorp (the networked solo or family-based entrepreneur) is very likely to be a concurrent rather than a serial entrepreneur, that is, to live what Charles Handy calls a Portfolio Life. In this way, the Portfolio Life nanocorp avoids the catastrophic meltdown of having ‘all your eggs in one basket’ or business.
There is also an 80/20 Rule that comes into play when there is a standardized infrastructure (AKA Internet-based software platform) among the growing marketplace of decentralized and distributed small business networks. Once you know how to participate in one, you know most (80%) of what you need to know to cross-train for participation in another such business network. You either bring certifiable general skills to the new business. What you don’t know you learn by negotiating an apprentice relationship within the new network thereby expanding the skills in your entrepreneurial toolkit as well as expanding the network of your portfolio of socioeconomic interpersonal relations.
Great post, Mark, and welcome to the NEDversation! 
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
December 8th, 2005
Hey Cristina!
At the risk of redundancy (the following is also posted here), we want to encourage you folks to give serious consideration to spawning your Internet platform as an extension of the MicroAid platform. The fine-grained opportunity identification, micro-funding, and detailed results tracking is a non-trivial software development challenge. Not only does MicroAid already have much of what you are looking for, they also have valuable experience with the management and legal challenges of making such an idea work.
Here is our note from the Tiered Investments discussion…
Mark Grimes said:
[snip]… but could not find anyplace where a normal consumer (ala myself) can put small funds in an invesment instrument, and make the world a better place thru microfinance (and educate consumers at the same time).
|
Small Is Good World Working Group
at the Skoll World Forum |
|
 |
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(l. to r.) Michael Chertok, Timlynn Babitsky, Toby Beresford, Christina Kirabo Jordan, Jim Salmons, and Pam McLean |
Hi Mark,
We have a post under development that ties this topic and the Big Picture NED discussion together. We will post a cross-link to that here soon. In the meantime in response to your comment above, we encourage you to explore partnering with our good buddies, Toby and Richard Beresford and their U.K.-based social enterprise, MicroAid.net. The Beresfords, along with us and Christina, are founding members of the Small Is Good World Working Group which has been pursuing a change insurgency agenda over at Social Edge.
Father Richard is located in Indonesia and has decades of U.N.-based international development experience. Technogeek son Toby is in the U.K. where he is evolving the MicroAid platform as well as working on MicroAid’s a social change strategy by developing community self-support tools for marginalized communities in the U.K.
You can get an idea of what we think about the Beresfords and MicroAid in this article, MicroAid - International Aid In the Small Is Good World.
The main MicroAid web site currently focuses on the self-support tools for community organizing. However, MicroAid started as a person-to-person international aid service which is most evident on the example, Pusat Studi Pengembangan Masyarakat - PUSPEM Foundation. Here is an example fundable micro-project, Business Development for Small Canteen in Pasar Manggis. And here is a list of the micro-projects currently under development and seeking support.
Our upcoming post will dig more into the connection between microfinance and NED-style consumerism. As these ideas converge, we’ll invite Toby and Richard into the conversation as they are wonderful people with much to contribute to these topics and to the NED agenda.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
December 3rd, 2005
Mark Grimes said:
[snip]… but could not find anyplace where a normal consumer (ala myself) can put small funds in an invesment instrument, and make the world a better place thru microfinance (and educate consumers at the same time).
|
Small Is Good World Working Group
at the Skoll World Forum |
|
|
|
(l. to r.) Michael Chertok, Timlynn Babitsky, Toby Beresford, Christina Kirabo Jordan, Jim Salmons, and Pam McLean |
Hi Mark,
We have a post under development that ties this topic and the Big Picture NED discussion together. We will post a cross-link to that here soon. In the meantime in response to your comment above, we encourage you to explore partnering with our good buddies, Toby and Richard Beresford and their U.K.-based social enterprise, MicroAid.net. The Beresfords, along with us and Christina, are founding members of the Small Is Good World Working Group which has been pursuing a change insurgency agenda over at Social Edge.
Father Richard is located in Indonesia and has decades of U.N.-based international development experience. Technogeek son Toby is in the U.K. where he is evolving the MicroAid platform as well as working on MicroAid’s a social change strategy by developing community self-support tools for marginalized communities in the U.K.
You can get an idea of what we think about the Beresfords and MicroAid in this article, MicroAid - International Aid In the Small Is Good World.
The main MicroAid web site currently focuses on the self-support tools for community organizing. However, MicroAid started as a person-to-person international aid service which is most evident on the example, Pusat Studi Pengembangan Masyarakat - PUSPEM Foundation. Here is an example fundable micro-project, Business Development for Small Canteen in Pasar Manggis. And here is a list of the micro-projects currently under development and seeking support.
Our upcoming post will dig more into the connection between microfinance and NED-style consumerism. As these ideas converge, we’ll invite Toby and Richard into the conversation as they are wonderful people with much to contribute to these topics and to the NED agenda.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
December 3rd, 2005
Paul O’Hara said:
Jim and Timlynn said: * “The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioural motivators that contribute to health and happiness”
Thanks Jim and Timlynn for bringing the price debate so far forward. Couldn’t agree more.
You are welcome, Paul. And thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and “spot on” reply.
â??The heart has its reasons that reason does not knowâ? Pascal
He’s so right. Pop forward a few centuries and you’ll find this same sentiment reflected in Danish futurist Rolf Jensen’s insightful book, The Dream Society, where he describes how we are becoming more Hunter-Gatherers of the Heart than Cultivators of the Mind. Jensen goes on to make a strong case for the emerging importance of story and emotion in marketing and organization ‘visioning’. We explore Jensen’s ideas further in Nanocorps in the Dream Society: How ‘Small is Good’ Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century
“Happiness is when what one thinks, what one says, and what one does are in harmony” Ghandi
Again spot on, Paul. Notice what Gandhi doesn’t say… It isn’t about what you have, your stuff, that is important to a fulfilled, happy life. Madison Avenue would obviously consider Gandhi a dangerous person to be silenced if he was still around shaking things up.
If the three key purchasing drivers are price, quality and service and lowest price is not an option for an ethical retailer or the Small is Good market, then we must add equivalent or greater value back into the offer elsewhere.
Those three dimensions are adequate when you limit yourself to consumer purchase dynamics in the Big Is Good World. But we believe that Pascal, Ghandi, Jensen, and others are suggesting that there is much more to life that stuff consumption. Sure, price is important to a lot of folks. And, yes, they will pay more for appreciable quality. And service is worth paying for. But this still leaves a whole spectrum of Maslow-ian human needs to bring to the shopping experience. Paul, you go on to say…
Please consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs … the human motivations which in turn drive our needs and eventually influence our behaviours. As we evolve up the hierarchy, I would hope that we will move away from todays ignorant and selfish pre-occupation with lowest price.
We’re on the same wavelength. Once we break the tight-coupling of price and product we can begin to transform the act of shopping into a diverse, interactive, impactful community- and world-changing experience that fulfills many human needs beyond our basic need for more stuff. When we start to realize this transformation, we will be on the road to Nedville which will be found somewhere in the emerging Small Is Good World.
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 29th, 2005
- Mark Grimes said:
- [snip] In other words, it needs to work on the $100 windup computer, so tech like Second Life is way out of the question for a few years. I’d love it if it could be done in Flash.
Both Christina and nmw hit the nail on the head… Flash simply does not meet your LCD criteria. The biggest issue being accessibility (not just disability-wise but cross-culturally) and bandwidth.
There are really two different LCDs to be met:
- Participant platform - minimum for a microenterprise supplier, community marketers, etc.
- On-line Shopper platform - minimum for a compelling story-driven, game-oriented shopping experience
As we discussed on our phone call, the LCD computer-based Participant platform should be the Nicholas Negroponte $100 laptop. (There also needs to be a ‘last mile’ participant platform that is not computer-based, but that is an issue for another conversation.)
The On-line Shopper platform is another issue entirely. While it is getting easier and easier to support multiple DDCs (device delivery channels), there still needs to be an LCD minimally acceptable platform. To our mind that means “modern” (but not cutting edge) HTML with CSS (cascading style sheets).
As we look at our various web site logs, the truly ancient browsers are disappearing. It used to be a significant challenge to write a static (or template-based dynamic) HTML page that could be rendered the same (or nearly so) in all the generation 3, 4, 5, etc. browsers. Even modest use of cascading stylesheets was problematic when there were so many browsers of so many evolutionary standards around.
Thankfully, we are moving beyond that Babel-onian era. There are a number of free, modern, full-featured, small-to-download web browsers that can handle a modern web page with CSS positioning and styles, etc. Add in optional Javascript and you would be amazed at how interactive your browsing experience can be.
So while exotic channels, such as SecondLife and Flash, may find a role to play in NED on-line commerce, we believe these channels must be optional supplements rather than a minimum entry requirement.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
November 29th, 2005
Christina (Kirabo the Gift Mom) Jordan said:
OK, you have my arms, legs and mind… What is our next concrete step?
Hi Christina!
As you may know, we had an extended ‘mind-meld’ telephone conversation with Mark on Saturday. The ‘tyranny’ post above is a direct result of that conversation. We want to start getting some NED Design Prepositions on the table that can drive our next concrete collaborative steps.
Although we haven’t firmed up plans specifically yet with Mark, we have an inkling that one immediate step we might take. We’d like to get directly involved with Mark in the design and development of the NED On-line prototype eCommerce web site he is working on to offer LiA crafts purchased from your WE Center folks not too long ago.
To back-fill the story of our readiness for this adventure, over the last several months we have had a contract development project that gave us an opportunity to dig deeply into Drupal, an Open Source content management platform. that has a unique and flexible eCommerce framework add-on. It is ideal for actively prototyping the story-driven and game-oriented ideas we have for Small Is Good World markets.
If we can work with Mark on this ‘front end’ aspect of the marketplace, then perhaps we can engage Toby Beresford of MicroAid.net to provide an opportunity identification, investment, and payment system that would tie Mark’s web store to your WE Center microenterprises.
If we were to ‘divide and conquer’ this agenda along the lines described here, we would be taking some Giant Steps toward birthing NED’s Small Is Good World entrepreneurial community ecosystem. Cool, eh! Just like we were talking about over beers in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum last March.
So bottom line, next steps look like some simple collaborative agreements to work together, and we have to put together a short and specific work and funding plan to make it fly.
Onward! The game’s afoot…
–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–
November 21st, 2005
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