Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform

 

 

In january 2011, The Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-moon, called for revolutionary thinking and action to ensure an economic model for survival. A year later, the Global Sustainability Panel he created to this effect published its recommendations report for Rio+20: Resilient people, resilient Planet, a future worth choosing. The vision of the GSP as expressed in the report revolves around choice, influence, participation and action, and calls for a political process "able to summon both the arguments and the political will necessary to act for a sustainable future."…

Whether one agrees or not with the principles of political economics put forward by the UN, "activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.

This has been my research subject during the past year which led me to draft an action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation. Inspired by Elinor Ostrom's "Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action", the objective is to turn around the tragedy of the commons by empowering individuals and communities, nurturing public wisdom and collective debate, helping push issues onto public agendas, and influencing policy and corporate behavior in a systemic and dynamic perspective. 

A group of us is now working to pull together the best elements available or in the making on the web to create a global pull platform to engage for the commons  and enable a form of evolutionary activism as part as of an emergent collective response in the context of a citizen/actor network and peer to peer commons of knowledge. 

The principles of the platform.

The platform is structured around commons, issues of social, environmental, economic nature, such as those included in this framework for reliable prosperity, treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.

People subscribe to individual issues then designate (ping, invite & follow) the actors who they think may have an influence -positive or negative-  on the status of an issue. This ‘pinging of actors’ by ‘citizen-followers’ creates a pull dynamic. Bringing together the parties susceptible of impacting progression on an issue and those to whom they are accountable will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation. The goal is to create a context favorable to collaboration, exchange of ideas and know-how. The pull dynamic is intended to stimulate political action and on-the-ground response, and ultimately advance the governance of the commons
 

The process consists in letting people/organizations:

• Select, follow, learn as a 'citizen' about the causes, issues, commons they care for and the actors involved
• Keep informed and track progress and status of these issues
• Self assign actor role and communicate/report on self-activity and impact and status of issue. Self assignment is a declaration of engagement at various possible levels (governance institution, activist, champion, observer, kow-how or knowledge resource)
• Share practical solutions, proposals for tasks and collaboration, volunteer for tasks and collaboration
• Find solutions and potential collaborators for action
• Select or refer designated actors to acknowledge or request their engagement and action at various levels (governance institution, activist, free rider, champion, observer, kow-how or knowledge resource ).
  
• As a selected or designated actor, participate in the conversation, report on activity and impact (or if not, become the object of the action...)
  
• As a citizen-follower evaluate and rate activity/impact of and trust toward actors' activity, impact and progress.
• As a citizen-follower organize for collective action
• As a an actor, garner follower participation
• Initiate and participate in conversations, debates, deliberations

The ecosystem is composed of:

• Common’s spaces: carefully curated knowledge base, space for learning, evaluating, debating, deliberating, and planning collective action, crowdsourcing solutions. This would include planetary as well as local commons or issues.
• Common’s graph: shows network of followers and stakeholders, possibilities for collaboration, critical mass, power structures and possible leverage points for grassroots action or civil participation.
• Progress & Impact or Situation Dashboard: shows activity, status, impact and progress. Informed by reporting from stakeholders and evaluations by followers, as well as real time indicators provided by independent observers.

Graph, space dashboards of various commons can be combined at various levels for bigger picture views.

The platform creates a context for the following:

• Curate the knowledge flow and increase learning about issues, and physical as well as political solutions through visibility of activity and impact
• Connect and interrelate people, stakeholders, issues, and knowledge.
• Help situate an issue in its physical, metaphysical, political and social space and its network of interdependence and navigate within.
• Define boundaries of an issue/common through its graph of followers and actors, and help define the natural levels of governance or stewardship of a common or issue.
• Help situate self and others in the multidimensionality of an issues’ space (geography, graph, stakes, interests, roles, positions, possibilities…) and navigate within.
• Identify roles and interdependence between actors and issues.
• Visualize the emergent bigger picture, and adopt systemic or transversal approaches.
• Communicate and discern expectations, communicate and evaluate outcomes, identify and act upon gaps
• Discern patterns of possibilities and leverage points, as well as who can generate best impact for specific challenges.
• Stimulate stepping up to task, collaboration between stakeholders and collective response.

 

The design map above gives an idea of the types of modules that would be integrated together. The platform requires the integration of the best existing networks, tools, process methodologies and user interfaces in terms of learning and action research, curation and issues framing, evaluation and moderation, trustnets, debate and deliberation, e-government/governance, collaboration, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, collective action planning, data collection, visualization; with a focus on wisdom and integrity stewardship...

Such an ecosystem would need to be open source and supported by legitimate institutions willing to forward civil participation.

From a Systemic and Dynamic Perspective

In systemic terms the dynamics at play are the following:

Power Dynamics: users -citizens > pull (designate) stakeholders -actors- > seek accountability/evaluate status > push activity > visualize progress > identify gaps / form expectations : a dynamic + feedback loop >> increase learning & informed action >> building engagement culture >> engagement to participate

Action Dynamics: stakeholders -actors > entrusted & challenged to act by users -citizens> acknowledge expectations & gaps > pull & pool resources & solutions to act > report action & progress: a dynamic + feedback loop >> increase access, community & capability >> building a mindful action culture >> empowerment & enablement to act

 

From a user perspective.

A Pull Network emerging from Connecting Citizens, Issues & Stakeholders

The Citizen

• As social entities, individuals or groups, the users, 'citizens', designate the issues, topics, commons they care about and wish to follow -i.e. that they would like to learn about and where they would like to see some action engaged, some progress made, with various degrees of engagement on their part. By doing so they become a follower of this issue. Selected issues can be quite diverse, in domain or geography:  they can be very global, such as the pollution of oceans or poverty or obesity worldwide or very local such as the preservation of a river or biodiversity or traditional seeds in one particular area, or the economic insertion of a disenfranchised community in a particular suburb...

The Actor

• For each issue, the citizens also designate/refer and thereby ‘follow’ and 'ping/invite to the conversation' the actors that they believe can have an impact, whether positive or negative, on the progress of the issue or the governance of the common. By doing so, they bring the actors into their community of followers to create an Issue/citizen/actor network.
  • This designation/referral works at the level of stimulating an actor to rise to meet a challenge. It is at the very heart of the pull dynamic. Designated actors such as governments, corporations, governance institutions, NGO's, activists, social entrepreneurs, free riders, champions, independent observers are challenged and entrusted by their 'citizen-followers' to deliver outcomes and produce impact and subsequently become accountable for their actions and results.
  • Citizens have the ability to  self designate as actor to indicate their presence/activity as an actor and share resources, ideas and know-how. An expected effect of this dynamic is to unleash ‘agency’ and turn an increasing number of citizens into actors by providing them with access to possibilities and capacity in the areas that they have chosen and that they care for the most.

The Social Graph - Visualizing & Navigating the Network

• By this dual followship process, each issue/common has a network of followers and actors which can be visualized in the common's social graph. The scope and variety of the followers and actors show the reach (from the local to planetary) and depth (possible various ramifications and interdependences) of an issue. It outlines its boundaries: the natural levels of governance or stewardship of a common or issue and the possible perimeters for pooling resources. The graph shows the critical mass of followers & actors, its density and diversity. The entities who appear in the core represent key constituencies, others interact or watch, and can further be pulled in. The ‘proximity’ and interdependence between the players, the potential for synchronicity and synergies, the insights on power structures and possible leverage points create a context for action to emerge and for negative reinforcement loops to be inverted.

• The aggregation of issues produces a Global Graph that enables to visualize further interrelations and interactions, to navigate between the issues, the various players, and the various levels of intervention from the smallest local level to the planetary, see how some players are involved in several issues and can be 'activated' as such, and ultimately undertake action of a more systemic nature.

The Dashboard - Reporting, data collection and visualization

• Designated actors become entrusted or accountable of their actions toward their 'followship' of citizens. They are encouraged to work on outcomes and to report on actions engaged and the general progress of an issue.

• Informed citizens evaluate the impact of the actors they selected and their level of confidence in outcomes.

• This ‘internal’ reporting and evaluation informs a common's Progress & Impact or Situation Dashboard, and participates in the documentation of the issue.

• External indicators from independent sources also feed the dashboard.

• Visualizing data enables to:
  • show ‘evolution in the making’ how small 'local' actions add up to create large impacts, how big goals can be carried out from very small distributed initiatives.
  • acknowledge status and evolution of issues as much as possible in real time contributing to learning and informed action.
  • help actors engage into more effective political participation and on the ground solutioning.
  • highlight the gaps between expectations and outcomes and detect deceptive action
  • push things further onto political agendas

The Learning & Action Space

• The Common's Learning & Action Space is the environment where the density, diversity and synchronicity of the network can be valuably exploited, where the data, actors, resources that will have been pulled together to generate optimized outcomes can be put to work. These spaces will need to be widely and wisely moderated and curated in order to avoid oversimplification or hijacking to the benefit of special interests...
• Citizens and actors learn from each other and from the knowledge base, discuss the issue and undertake individual, collaborative and collective action. This is a space where exchange, dialogue, deliberation, facilitation takes place at the practical, social and political level; where users-citizens are able to design their discovery/learning/action journey; where actors can share know-how on solutions on-the-ground; where they are able to find parties to exchange, discuss, negotiate with; where resources can be shared; where solutions can be spread and diffused, co-created or crowd-sourced; where civil participation to policy making and governance can be garnered... informed and bootstrapped by all what is described above.

Comments

[Tahpot]

Hi Helene -- I have just seen your great proposal in the Knights News Challenge. I have been prototyping a platform that does something similar at www.engagingtopics.com (you can see my KNC submission here: http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19480673706/engaging-topics).

The focus of my prototype is similar to you "Common's spaces" and aims to facilitate:
1. information gathering (facts, news, opinion, resources, solutions..)
2. crowd sourcing the best information
3. creating a structured discussion environment that keeps debate focussed and can be easily summarised

The next step in my platform and the strength in your outline is getting the appropriate stake holders involved and help organise groups of people into collective action.

Twitter: @tahpot
Web: www.engagingtopics.com

[Frank Verschueren]

Dear Helen,

I wish you lots of success.

Warm regards, Frank

Frank Verschueren STW-member

[Tom Atlee]

Dear Helene,

I haven't been able to fully grasp what this actually is or how and why various players would use it, but I get occasional glimpses, flashes of sunlight through the clouds of my incomprehension. In those momentary glimpses, a number of related ideas and initiatives pop into my mind, which I offer here:

1. Citizen deliberative councils - face to face deliberations among randomly selected citizens ("mini-publics") to draw conclusions about solutions for public issues, especially recommendations for public policy. http://www.realitysandwich.com/empowering_public_wisdom

2. Crowdsourced funding for issue-related action = e.g., http://indiegogo.com

3. IVCS - Interactive Voter Choice System - http://tom-atlee.posterous.com/are-we-changing-the-game-yet

4. Social system pattern languages like http://reliableprosperity.net

5. http://WiserEarth.org = social change individuals, groups and organizations that might want to use (and get involved in designing) the social change space you are designing

6. Deliberapedia - an envisioned online space for "framing issues for deliberation" - a wikipedia for issues - crowdsourcing the articulation of clear argumentation for and against 3-5 top approaches to each issue (details in my forthcoming book; I can send you info on it if you like). http://www.realitysandwich.com/empowered_public_wisdom_rising_grassroots

7. The power of "concerns" as a way to frame what else needs to be addressed. See consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making and Dynamic Facilitation http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html#facilitation

Finally: So much of the problem in social issues is imbalance in social power. http://co-intelligence.org/CIPol_democSocPwrAnal.html What incentives exist for power-holding self-interested stakeholders to get pulled into the issue-addressing ecosystem you are designing?

Coheartedly,
Tom

[Helene]

Thank you so much, dear Tom for your advice and valuable examples of modules or networks to integrate. This comes quite serendipitously at a moment where I was considering the fact that yes indeed, this platform and pull/push mechanism could well serve existing networks such as Wiser Earth... I am honored by your attention, especially knowing how busy you are with your new book. Keep up the good work, while I cross my fingers about the Knight grant and further unfoldings of this project!

[Helene]

Thanks Frank for your support! This is actually where the long conversations on the STW group have lead me to. I really hope this can take off.

Chris, I have posted a comment of your Knight submission. Our projects are complementary. I like the simplicity of your interface. We could collaborate at some point! For the moment I'm concentrating on the pull stakeholder engine and the engagement mechanism which is at the heart of the system and what differentiates it from the existing initiatives. Let's keep in touch.

[Helene]

Tom Atlee, I am thrilled to have you as a member of the advisory team for this project alongside Michel Bauwens, founder and lead researcher at the P2P foundation, and David Price, founder of the Debategraph. I will incorporate a few of your examples in my article to make it more documented. Thanks.

[Joe Firestone (LetsGetitDone)]

Hello Helene, I like this very much. It articulates with a number of things I've been working with over the years. Here are a few comments

First, thanks to Tom, for keeping IVCS in mind and mentioning it.

Second, I had the thought that it would help the framework if you broke out learning dynamics from power dynamics. I know they're closely connected, but it seems to me that learning, action, and power are all important enough to be separately modeled and also so interdependent that they need to be related.

Third, the relationships between action, learning, and manipulation have been a continuing concern of George Soros. So, there are connections between his long-term thinking and your view here.

Fourth, there are close connections with the fields of organizational learning and KM. Do you know about the Knowledge life Cycle (KLC) framework? It's about learning dynamics at all level of interaction. Here's a link to some frameworks developed at KMCI by some colleagues and I: http://www.kmci.org/media/Intro_to_KMCIs_Frameworks.pdf Here's another to a paper explaining some elements of the framework a bit more: http://www.kmci.org/media/Doing_KM.pdf This book goes into things a lot more deeply: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0750676558/qid%3D1054138077/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/102-6734139-9384918 And this blog series translates the KLC framework into problem solving language: http://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/?s=%22The+Problem+Solving+Pattern+Matters%22

Finally, the IVCS is envisioned as a platform creating a meta-layer that will enable a continuous bottom-up self-organization of voting blocs strengthening democracy by introducing constraints on established interest groups and political parties preventing them from falling prey to the iron law of oligarchy. I've written a lot about that sometimes with IVCS inventor Nancy Bordier and sometimes alone at correntwire.com, FireDoglake.com, DailyKos.com, and ourfuture.org. A link to the conclusion of a recent series of posts on IVCS is here: http://www.correntewire.com/enhancing_democracy_or_strengthening_the_emerging_oligarchy_which_will_it_be the primary IVCS site (a placeholder for the system in development is here:http://www.reinventdemocracy.net/ A new three-part series on the CAS, KM, and IT aspects of IVCS, co-authored with Henk Hadders, will be appearing in the next few days at the blogs listed above.

[Helene]

Dear Joe, than you for your comment.

You are right I need to distinguish the learning dynamic from the power one in the diagram, and the knowledge component is a critical one too.

Actually, there is a learning dynamic at the commons scale expressed in the central loops of my dynamics diagram, emerging from the action/reporting/evaluation/challenge cycle. I need to express the individual learning cycle or discovery journey. Such as what I have represented in an earlier work: http://bit.ly/wDMN4t. The whole document is available here: http://menemania.typepad.com/helene_finidori/2012/02/my-entry.html

Thank you for the documents on KM and learning. There is a whole wealth there from the first reading I made. I will take the time it needs to go through everything thoroughly and see how it complements my own framework. I will keep you posted.

And reading the reinvent democracy description of IVCS, it seems the platform is an ideal place to run the steps that are described. This could constitute a good user case. Let's examine further somewhere along the line how this can work together.

[Joe Firestone (LetsGetitDone)]

Dear Helene, Thank you for the link to your earlier graphic and document. I really like your graphics very much. They're very suggestive of system dynamics models or mixed models using system dynamics. Thanks also for the link to your We Move presentation. It's beautifully done. I'll look forward to keeping up and collaborating on transformations. Since making my comment I've posted the first two parts of my latest series on IVCS at Correntewire, FireDoglake, DailyKos, and ourfuture.org. Here are the Correntewire links:

http://www.correntewire.com/a_meta_layer_for_restoring_democracy_and_open_society_part_one_conceptual_foundations#comment-207234

http://www.correntewire.com/a_meta_layer_for_restoring_democracy_and_open_society_part_two_meta_layer_requirements

[Helene]

Thanks a lot Joe for those two links. Apologies for taking some time to respond.

Our pull platform is a human political CAS indeed.

It seems these conceptual foundations and requirements have been written for our Pull Platform. I take it as such and thank you for this timely contribution as we will be designing a concept and prototype for our platform.

I am looking forward to keeping in touch and collaborating with you in the process. I will reach out in the coming days.

[Joe Firestone (LetsGetitDone)]

Thanks Helene, I'll look forward to it!

[IvanV]

I'm so glad I'm a part of this beautiful humanity. Thanx Helene :)

[IvanV]

Oh, I almost forgot, silly me :} I hope U accept propositions and ideas for Ur great app.

Don't know about others, but I'd like to see this kind of search of knowledge base:
https://sites.google.com/site/synthprogramminglanguage/_/rsrc/1339023122155/home/ZOL%20Tree.png
Silly example used, but I'd like U to apply it on social uses databases and projects. Notice mutability of left-side tree reference. It can be reordered by "use" first, then by "scape type" instead of current setup. This way each record can be indexed by several categories, according to current search of database. I also wish to host our projects on Ur future app, so I am gladly looking towards future, whatever approach U choose.

Tx for Ur patience.

[Helene]

Hi Ivan, I'm glad you like it :). I need to get this project moving! I am yet to understand your idea, how it works and where it fits (as I am not a geek, I may be a bit slow, so your patience is required too!). Let's keep in touch. It seems we are connecting on another platform as well.

[IvanV]

Maybe a wrong place to post such technical stuff, hope to not to polluting area. But what a heck, maybe U'r colleagues could find this tech stuff inspirative.

Tech stuff:
I propose for resources, at least, not to have them branched by plain folders uniformly. I propose each resource to have possibility to fit in several folders parallely, so users when searching for the right stuff can make query such is:
I need a book that belongs to "Genre: Adventure" and "Language: Indian"
To have this kind of folders, they have to be categorized like category "Genre" can have folders "Adventure", "Kids", ... Even with this kind of organization, even mutable eye candy trees could be built, so U can compete with i.e. Google Drive classic folder view.

More tech stuff:
The best part is that each folder can have its own specific set of categories, so users aren't tied up to initial category set. A little bit more complicated than classic uniform tree of folders approach, but more searchable to users. I have updated original image from previous post to make it more readable, but basically it contains the same stuff as original one.

I hope not to wasting U'r time, but it's an idea, right. "There is no such a thing as a stupid question", someone once said. At least when we are not in hurry.