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–

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–

Economic Utility — Is that all there is?

Related to your concern, Norbert, and as expressed by others in prior posts, there is the apprehension that the efficiency of a price- and distribution-optimized market has, by definition, higher economic utility — “I just want to get my stuff and go home.”

Again, no problem. When you are in stuff acquisition mode, you will engage in shopping as it is.

But to a large degree — and it is echoed by the level of activity in this discussion and in Onet itself as in other ‘change the world’ on-line communities — a lot of us are singing Peggy Lee’s song and asking “Is that all there is?”

A Few Words About Depth of Engagement

Please understand that incorporating shopping as it can be (inprosuming) into the NED business model is not a mutually exclusive choice that banishes shopping as it is from the picture. In fact, shopping as it is is both a necessary baseline of sales volume as well as a vital engagement opportunity that feeds new recruits into the ranks of inprosumers (those doing shopping as it can be).

You will see this “A-ha” idea-moment of self-recruitment reflected in a ‘feedback loop’ in our Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystem input/output model. This transformation happens when a ‘Surface Shopper’ takes the next step into active and ongoing participation in the NED community. The inprosumer is a Deep Shopper. By his or her persistent involvement in the community, the Deep Shopper is demonstrating that he or she has found a new level of personally rewarding economic utility that cannot be achieved by continuing to simply do shallow shopping.

Note, too, that this recruitment is not a means of merely cloning producers. The last thing we need is water down the producers’ opportunity by creating a vast army of home-based candlemakers, weavers, beaders, what have you. Rather, we need to entice each Deep Shopper to bring his or her own bottle of secret sauce to the table.

We need to entice Open Source programmers to contribute code to our back-end and eCommerce platform projects. We need to engage sales and marketing people to sell and market. We need multi-linguists to help the community to communicate among its members. We need lawyers and business folk to craft the agreements, licenses, and other instruments needed to create and evolve new forms of dynamic collaborative network enterprises. We also need to engage academic and other researchers to do applied research projects that help us to invent new ways to shop, organize, market, and collaborate. In short, we need a whole range of folks to find their own unique and personal way to participate in NED’s entrepreneurial community ecosystem.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Break these Chains

To get to shopping as it can be we have to expand the context of consumption. Being a consumer is not just about being a bottomless pit that sucks more and more stuff into it. For many of us, being a consumer is about being the final link in a chain, a supply chain, that extracts materials from the earth, transforms these materials into useful products that we then buy and use.

In the Big Is Good World, where insatiable consumption is a requirement for market sustainability, the chain is a straight line from raw material extractor, through producer to consumer.

As the Industrial Age gave way to the Information Age, there was the start of a paradigm shift that is reflected by futurist Alvin Tofler’s coining the term prosumer [more at Wikipedia], a concatenation of the words producer and consumer. Tofler and others were exploring the potential for consumers to take a more active role in the form and substance of these supply chains that satisfy our needs. As recently as the Cluetrain Manifesto we’ve been told that we can expect to be more satisfied consumers to the extent that we are invited into the conversation that shapes what is produced for our consumption.

Still, there is something missing. As Peggy Lee asked, “Is that all there is?” [Lyrics to the most depressing hit song ever and about Nihilism].

Enter the Inprosumer

But a chain can link back onto itself to form a circle, the supply chain becomes a cycle. We take a step beyond prosumer to inprosumer — investor, producer, consumer.

There will be many ways that we can tap into the dynamics of stories and games to empower new forms of shopping as it can be. But here are a few ideas we’ve had along these lines… ideas that could help to shape the NED community and its associated shopping experience (both on-line and in-store).

For rich folks, exclusivity has often been a sought-after feature of a product. Exclusivity in this context is closely related to limited supply and high price. But what if product exclusivity was instead a matter of foresight, risk-sharing, and creativity!?

Under shopping as it is, you might get the thrill of owning a limited edition sweater by going to an exclusive high fashion store and paying an extraordinary amount of money for something that only a very few people can afford.

On the other hand, you might get an equally exclusive sweater by shopping as it can be at NED. Instead of needing a giant pile of cash, at NED you need foresight and creativity.

First, you’d want to invest in two or three sheep in a shepherd’s herd in southwest New Mexico or maybe West Africa. Planning ahead for your share of the Spring shearing, you’ll want to have invested in some Loom Time Futures for sale by a talented Weaver’s co-op or guild such as Tapetes de Lana.

Even after you have that one-of-a-kind sweater made from the wool of your own sheep, woven by your favorite weaver, you still have a few pounds left over. So you take your excess wool, along with your quarterly share of lumber from your investment in a sustainable forestry venture in Maine, along with any excess Craft Production Time Futures you have accumulated from other activities you are invested in, and you go searching around the story-driven, game-oriented NED marketplace.

You search finds that there are three community development fundraising campaigns going on that you’d like to support. So you negotiate the contribution of your raw materials and production capacity, and come to terms on your expected return on investment if any.

Some time passes and you’d like to add a goat to your herd-share. Rather than pay for it outright, you do some marketing work and land a nice order for the herd’s pooled surplus wool.

Over the five years that you have been a NED Inprosumer, you have racked up quite an Impact Quotient. When you log onto the NED community web site, your User Profile makes your world-changing impact very clear. You’ve had a hand in drilling dozens of wells in villages in Africa. You own a nice chunk of Loom Time Futures in a famous Weavers Co-op in New Mexico. You know the potter who made your dishes, and the chandler who makes your candles. You don’t just know who these talented people are, you know them as fellow entrepreneurial activists as you’ve shared risk and reward with them on dozens of community and personal development projects.

A Game of Inches

Does this mean the end to shopping as it is? Not at all. Shopping as it can be isn’t a replacement to traditional markets. It is a moderator of the excesses of unbridled consumption.

Imagine the total impact on the planet if we were to shift just a few percentage points of consumption from shopping as it is into shopping as it can be. This shift will get more and more of us to broaden our perspective, to see consumption in terms of the people impacted rather than the stuff produced.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–