Solving for Pattern

If we understand design broadly, to mean purposeful action. And if we attribute broad motivations, that is: purposeful action that seeks to serve the public interest or common good, an extended sphere of relation. Assuming that not all such design efforts are equally effective, one might therefore seek to distinguish among their effectiveness. And it might be possible to develop guidelines or principles for distinguishing among design efforts.

A lot of people have created lists of such guidelines or principles, and I’m going to start collecting them here.

First up: Gar Alperovitz, whose heavy rap and case for regionalism I wrote about last week.

In a recent paper coauthored with Steve Dubb (“If You Don’t Like Capitalism, and You Don’t Like Socialism, What Do You Want?” pdf), Gar makes the case for “systemic design”:

It is possible to begin to clarify the parameters of a systemic model (1) to which the various emerging trajectories of institution-building and democratization point — and (2) which are suggested by the logic of longer term challenges being created by issues of political stalemate, of scale, and of ecological, resource and climate change.

Different in its basic structure both from corporate capitalism and state socialism, the model might be called “A Pluralist Commonwealth” (to underscore its plural forms of democratized ownership) or “A Community Sustaining System” to underscore its emphasis on economically and democratically healthy local communities, anchored through wealth-democratizing strategies as a matter of principle.

Four critical axioms underlie the democratic theory of a model that builds on the evolving forms and on structural principles appropriate also to the larger emerging challenges: [1] democratization of wealth; [2] community, both locally and in general, as a guiding theme; [3] decentralization in general; [4] and substantial but not complete forms of democratic planning in support of community, and to achieve longer term economic, democracy-building and ecological goals.

This paper was presented at the 2012 American Sociological Association Real Utopias conference, hosted by Erik Olin Wright, who comments on the Pluralist Commonwealth design.

The golden rule admonishes treating others as one would like to be treated.

But which others?

We tend to draw distinctions in our identifications with others, relations with others, or concerns for others. Distinctions like family or not family, human or not human.

In this diagram, I visualize common distinctions as spheres of relation or concern, and think of the delineation — from self to ecosystem — as an identity tree.

What would your identity tree look like?

Thanks for the conversations: Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz

A fill-in-the-blank question, in the form of a syllogism, that I picked up years ago from philosopher and essayist Kathleen Dean Moore.

Premise 1: Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real.

Premise 2: {What statements might go here?}

Conclusion: Humans must take action to halt AGW.

In a strong talk on Gender Lens Investing last week at SOCAP (Social Capital Markets), Jackie VanderBrug mentioned some figures I hadn’t heard, including one she cited to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) about the potential to increase global agricultural output through investments in women farmers.

From the FAO press release to their 2011 The State of Food and Agriculture report:

Just giving women the same access as men to agricultural resources could increase production on women’s farms in developing countries by 20 to 30 percent. This could raise total agricultural production in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent, which could in turn reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent, or 100 to 150 million people. An estimated 925 million people in the world were undernourished in 2010, of which 906 million live in developing countries.

More at farmingfirst.org/women.

Here’s the video:

Listen to recent talks by political economist Gar Alperovitz and you’ll pick up his emphasis on the word project.

He uses the term to refer to good work — worker-owned companies, social enterprises, and so on — but also to a narrowing of focus that makes it easy to shrug off larger responsibilities.

From last week’s Seattle talk (~46:30):

My experience, in myself and in the people I know, is that we don’t quite want to take ourselves that seriously. ‘I’m just working on my project here.’

And from last year’s E. F. Schumacher Lecture:

So ultimately, if you are interested in systemic change rather than — and I’m going to use a loaded word — “projectism,” you must ask not only who owns capital but what it might look like if the system were democratized, were American in content, and were to give rise to the principles and nurture the principles of democracy, ownership, community, and ecological sustainability.

Systems specialist Ray Ison calls this phenomenon “living in a projectified world.”

From his 2010 book Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate Change World:

My argument put simply is that the proliferation of targets and the project as social technologies (or institutional arrangements) undermines our collective ability to engage with uncertainty and manage our own co-evolutionary dynamic with the biosphere and with each other.  …

It is possible to capture the double sense of the meaning of project if one thinks of what we do when we project our projects onto the world. I have this image of shelves upon shelves, and now electronic files galore, of projects that have been labelled ‘finished’ and thus are hardly ever engaged with again.

See also: Ray Ison on the travesty of targets.

I’ve listened to last week’s talks by political economist Gar Alperovitz several times (videos from Seattle and San Francisco), and one piece that caught my attention was his case for regionalism.

As expressed here (~1:00:40 into the Seattle talk), Gar’s main concern is the challenge of engendering political participation across vast geographic scales and growing populations:

One of the things i didn’t mention, which is built into the logic of how I think about it. …

This is a society of 318 million. The Census Bureau high projection for the rest of this century is one billion. That’s the high projection, but 500 to 600 to 700 million is well within the possibility.

This is a continental-scale system. We don’t often realize how big it is. We make comparisons with European countries — [but] you can tuck Germany into Montana. …

So you tell me how you have participatory democracy in a continental system of 700 or 800 million people. Inevitably there is going to be decentralization in the next system — and most states are too small, and the continent is too big, which probably means regional restructuring of some kind. …

What would it mean if we were serious about designing a system that took the scale issue and democracy seriously? It would have to be decentralized.

In what ways does spatial scale matter? Smaller geographic scales offer greater opportunities for legitimate political participation. Absolutely.

In the Ecotrust publication “Resilience & Transformation: A Regional Approach,” we considered the question of scale in terms of bolstering resilience. Here are the broad benefits we considered:

To describe some of the ways in which regional economies can bolster resilience, we posit the following:
• Diversity within and among regions reduces vulnerability to stresses and shocks from climate change, disease, shortages, transmission or transport failures, and so on.
• A greater diversity of production systems within and among regions offers greater opportunities for ownership, community investment, and social capital formation.
• Regional trade networks offer opportunities for more immediate and transparent feedback about the true costs of production and consumption.
• Regional trade networks offer opportunities for shared responsibility, stewardship, and community.
• Especially when national and international institutions prove rigid and inflexible, the emergence of novelty and innovation at local and regional scales can be critical to leadership on global problems such as climate change.

Resilience Regions map by Ecotrust

“Fellow revolutionaries, I am delighted to be with you,” political ecnomist Gar Alperovitz greeted his SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) audience in San Francisco last week.

A video from his Seattle Town Hall post-debate talk the following day is catching a lot of attention, but this talk with folks working at the “intersection of money and meaning” — 1600 in attendance according to the opening keynote by co-founder Kevin Doyle Jones — is shorter and tighter.

It is, as Alperovitz says in 60s lingo, a “heavy rap.”

There is a movement building that cuts across many parts of the spectrum, and it is calling itself the new economy movement, for lack of better terms.

The thing that I think is important about it, and why it could be transformative — including the direction that is represented by this cutting-edge part of the movement — is that it is asking itself: Are we up to, really, what it would take to transform an economic system? Not just doing projects isolated, but projects that build up and begin to ask that big, big question in a strategic way, not simply a tactical way. …

I don’t think we here are talking about projects alone, I don’t think we are talking only about entrepreneurship, I don’t think we are talking only about impact investing.

I think we are talking — and I sometimes wear a historian’s hat — I think we are talking about laying down the foundations. … We are establishing the pre-history in this work, step by step, of the possible great transformation.

So I’m talking to you about identity. … I’m talking to the person in your chair. … I’m a little older than some folks here — that’s what used to be called a heavy rap.

See also: all SOCAP12 videos.

Citizen deliberative councils, participatory budgeting, the Occupy movement’s consensus decision making: These are all experiments in more participatory forms of democracy.

Technologies can support these types of experiments, from the keypad and CoVision technologies used by AmericaSpeaks in deliberative dialog and polling to the geographic information systems used by the Madrona platform for participatory spatial planning.

With the rise of the German Pirate Party (see NYT and NPR reports), so-called liquid democracy platforms for proxy voting (or delegated voting) are finally getting some real-world testing and development.

Here’s how Yale’s Bryan Ford describes the concept in his 2002 paper, “Delegative Democracy” (pdf):

Delegative democracy combines the best elements of direct and representative democracy by replacing artificially imposed representation structures with an adaptive structure founded on real personal and group trust relationships.

The platform used by the Pirate Party is called Liquid Feedback, but similar platforms have been around for a while. One early effort was Smartocracy, described here in a 2007 paper:

Smartocracy is a social software system for collective decision making. The system is composed of a social network that links individuals to those they trust to make good decisions and a decision network that links individuals to their voted-on solutions.

An introduction to the German platform appears in a May 2012 TechPresident report, “How the German Pirate Party’s “Liquid Democracy” Works”:

Liquid Feedback is about competition and decision-making. Any of the 6,000 members that use it can propose a policy. If the proposal picks up a 10 percent quorum within a set period, such as a week, it becomes the focus of an almost ‘gamified’ revision period. Any member can also set up an alternative proposal, and over the ensuing few weeks these rival versions battle it out, with members voting their favorites up or down. …

Each member has one vote, but most are not interested in marking up endless reams of policy papers. So the system allows every vote to be entrusted to another member – for everything, or for certain topics or specific proposals, or not at all. What’s more, the person who has been delegated the votes of others can then re-delegate all those votes, plus their own, to someone else. … Every delegated vote can be reclaimed at any time, so no high-flying Pirate can operate without a continuous mandate.

Author Steven Johnson picks up the liquid meme in his new book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age:

The interesting thing about liquid democracies is that we already use this proxy strategy in our more casual lifestyle decisions. When you’re trying to decide where to have dinner, you call up your foodie friend for advice, but there’s another friend whose taste in music has never failed you, and yet another who is always coming up with great new novels to read. There’s a natural division of labor that emerges in networks of friends or acquaintances; not all recommendations are created equal in the world of culture, because individual people vary in their tastes and expertise. When we make cultural decisions, we often offload those choices to the local experts in our network. Liquid democracies simply apply the same principle to political decisions.

Perhaps the most critical advantage of liquid democracies and participatory budgets lies in the way they expand the space of civic participation. The local experts who “club together” votes from their friends and neighbors occupy a new zone of engagement, somewhere between citizen and politician. They don’t have to become full-time legislators for their particular expertise or passion to be useful to the community.

Sure enough and as Johnson describes, one “local expert,” a non-politician from Bamberg, Germany, has played a significant role among the Pirates, according to a March 2012 profile in SPIEGEL ONLINE, “Web Platform Makes Professor Most Powerful Pirate”:

Martin Haase doesn’t have to give any hard-hitting speeches at party conferences, nor does he spend time at board meetings or in back rooms to hone his power. When the 49-year-old professor wants to engage in politics, he just opens his laptop and logs in to Liquid Feedback, the Pirate Party’s online platform for discussing and voting on political proposals.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

John Seely Brown presents a fascinating stream of ideas in this compressed, animated version of a talk he gave at the 2012 DML Conference, posted by the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Brown is former director of Xerox PARC and co-author most recently of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. His full talk, Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century, is also available on video.

I don’t agree with everything here — don’t agree that “most skills we pick up” will have a half-life of five years, many are enduring. (Check out, as counterpoint, the skills depicted on the “jobs of the future” illustration, which includes a mix of old and new.) Still, there is no denying that change is in the air.

Brown’s broad definition of “play” reminds me of Charles Sanders Peirce’s abductive reasoning, which we experience as “leaps of logic” or a “sense of wonder,” and is cited as the basis for design thinking.

Brown’s vision of a global one-room schoolhouse combines digitally enabled networks with an apprenticeship model of learning.

Some of the greatest learning environments were actually the one-room schoolhouse. Why were they so effective? It’s because the teacher wasn’t transferring knowledge. But the teacher was acting as a coach, a coordinator, a mentor — getting older kids to spend some time helping younger kids, so that the older kids were teaching the younger kids. And then the younger kids would turn around and also teach the even younger kids.

There was an amazing social dynamic in that classroom. And the teacher was responsible for orchestrating that amazing ability to learn and to teach simultaneously by each student in that class.

Let us ask: Is it possible that we’re getting in the position to take the one-room schoolhouse and make it global one-room schoolhouse through these networks of imagination and new forms of mentorship?