Robert Paterson's Weblog

Why there is hope that you can make a living and have a good life today

What is the economy that will give us all hope - real hope that we can have a good life? I think that it is what I call the Networked Artisan. This is a person who makes things by their own hands but uses often the new tools to do this and the network to connect and sell to a community that can be next door or across the way.

It can be a micro farmer like Amy and Verena at Heart Beet Organics on PEI who operate a 2 acre farm using large greenhouses to produce veggies 10 months of the year. 

As part of the pattern for all Networked Artisans, they sell direct to customers and create close personal relationships with them. Farmers markets grew by 17% last year. Food will be at the core of this new personal movement. Trust is at the heart of it.

In the UK there are web hubs springing up that make it easier and easier for customers to become part of this. 

This is Big Barn. Check it out and see how amazing it is. 

Are you a knitter? There are 3 million knitters in an online community called Ravelry. Here they compare projects, help each other and sell things to each other. It is a vast tribe of knitters. 

Here is the link. 

Underneath all of this is a new market. This is the market of the people who no longer trust the corporate offering. They know that they lose control and that they are often lied to. This is why food is a wedge. For as people learn how the processed diet is so bad for them AND how they have been misled as to its safety, they seek food that they can trust.

How big is this market?

2.5% of a population are the Innovators who jump in early. In America that is about 8 million people.

13.5% are the Early Adopters - that is about another 40 million. 

So nearly 50 million people are ready for this kind of offering. That is a huge market for a small artisan. A market that the Big Corporates cannot reach and compete in any more. They will be excluded over time.

Meanwhile, all the technology that is taking away the jobs in that sector, is helping the New Artisan. You have rock bottom communication costs. You have top flight tools. Want an ecommerce tool - Woo Commerce. Want CRM - Paupress. Want to publish a book - pressbooks.  Want make a prototype - 3D printers. Each year, the tools get better and cheaper.

And most importantly as we see in Ravelry and Big Barn, we see the online aggregators getting better. You have an appartment - Airbnb. You make fountain pens - Etsy. 

The next wave are going to be local aggregators like this new one for Portland.

Soon every commnity will have such a site. It will get easier and easier to become part of this.

The future is here now. The empowered person in the empowering network of people who want trust and meaning back in their lives.

So what do you do?

My first book - You Don't Need a Job - explores this shift in detail. If you want to know more abouyt what is going on and how to become part of this, then please give it a whirl. 

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Libraries - The Hacker Space - Future of the Real New Economy

Libraries could become the hub of the new local resilient community. NPR onto this here:

The Maker Station is a 50-foot trailer in the parking lot of the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Ind. It's a hackerspace where do-it-yourselfers share tools and expertise.

As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create "hackerspaces," where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise.

The Allen County Public Library, which serves the city of Fort Wayne, Ind., has a modest hackerspace inside a trailer in its parking lot. Library director Jeff Krull says hosting it is consistent with the library's mission.

"We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business," he says. "We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own."

The 50-foot trailer is known as the Maker Station and belongs to TekVenture, an educational nonprofit that had struggled to find a building it could afford before it was approached by the library. TekVenture signed an agreement with the library to operate in its parking lot for a year. TekVenture President Greg Jacobs says this partnership made sense.

"The library is a well-established, respectable institution in the area. The library is used by everybody," he says. "Regardless of your stripe in society, you're going to use library facilities."

The Allen County facility includes a CNC router, a computer-controlled power tool that cuts wood, plastic and some metals. The Maker Station also has a lathe, scroll and band saws, an electronics bench and an injection molding machine, which makes objects by heating up recycled plastic chips.

Like any hackerspace worth its salt, it has a 3-D printer, which can produce plastic objects based on a computer file. In recent years, there's been some chatter on the librarian blogs about the rise of 3-D printing. Meg Backus has a blog about "interventionist librarianship" and teaches a course at Syracuse University called "Innovations in Public Libraries."

Meg Backus and Thomas Gokey/YouTube

Meg Backus teaches a course on "Innovation in Public Libraries" with colleague Thomas Gokey. They put together this video to explain more about 3-D printing and hackerspaces.

"People in the library world have noticed that 3-D printers would be a fit for libraries or that libraries should be paying attention to this technology and how it develops, because this could be a really big deal," Backus says. "I'd be completely surprised if we don't all have 3-D printers in 20 years."

There's already a 3-D printer, donated by a local computer store, in the Fayetteville Free Library in upstate New York. Not only that, the library was recently awarded $10,000 for the creation of a hackerspace. Lauren Smedley, 29, is the librarian responsible for winning the grant and raising $3,500 in pledges for the hackerspace on the website IndieGoGo.

Smedley walks a visitor into an unoccupied wing of her library with 10-foot-high ceilings. She explains that this was once the home of the Stickley furniture factory.

"People used to make things in this very room, and we're going to offer this community the opportunity to once again make things here," she says. "And it's just a thrill. It's really exciting."

Smedley is calling the Fayetteville hackerspace the "Fabulous Laboratory." It will have about 8,000 square feet and be equipped with a number of sophisticated, computer-controlled power tools. This Fabulous Laboratory may not seem out of place in a library that has a cafe, video-gaming stations and iPads available for checkout, and regular author appearances via Skype.

"I really envision this space being a place for people to come and tinker and explore," she says. "We're really looking to have a peer-to-peer training that has proven effective in maker spaces, really, across the world, with some facilitation from the library staff. It's really whatever the community wants to use it for is how we'll support it."

The library is expecting a grant from the state of New York to renovate the wing for the hackerspace and a business incubation center.

True Health - Part 3 - The Rules of the New World#2 - The revolution of our time

This post is written in July of 2011 - The Murdoch New Empire, the Police in the UK and the Tories in the UK are being rocked.

I think that we are living through a period where the Network is destroying the Hierarchical power of the establishment.

We can see now that this revolution began in the Arab world but now, this July, we are seeing that the Network is a real threat to the most powerful in the west as well.

I think that history will show that power is shifting from the Machine Institution to the Network.

This will be a real revolution unlike 1917 that merely replaced one top down regime for another. 

This is more like 10,000 years ago when a new food system changed everything about how humans lived and their place in the world. 

I think that the forces that will take us there are now in motion. Not the least that millions of people have been cast out by the old system. That many of these millions are well educated and have the personal power to act. These are the kind of people that drove the French and the American Revolutions that in their own day also cast down the old power system.

They are likely people just like you my dear readers. We are the immigrants in the brand new world that we will make for ourselves  - not in a new place but in a new "Space" that we create ourselves.

Without knowing it, you have just left Ellis Island and you are in this strange New World.

How strange this all is. 

Fortunately the pioneers have been here for some time and this post will show you what the new rules are and how best to get around in this new place and to realize its potential. 

In essence - people here in the New New World - or New World#2 - live the lives of the Hunter Gatherers - they live lives much like all hominids and Humans have lived for millions of years. But with a difference, now we know how all of this works. We know the science and we have tools that empower us to be this old way anew.

So let's wander around NW#2 and see how they live and work. Let's see the models they use. 

And by the way - all of this exists for real today - just in a very small and scattered form. It just needs organization to come to life.

Home and Work - Home is that old fashioned Home where we all live and work.

For in NW#2 we mainly work from home for ourselves or in tribal groups - some partners are next door but some are the other side of the world. 

We don't just do one thing either - the bigger cash generating deals are like a hunter bringing home an elk and get paid in cash by the larger system. But we do a lot of gathering for no money. We trade services with each other - I do some work on your site, you give me veggies. We offer up our place for rent and move in with our sister who lives down the road and we split the money.  

We don't just sell services either. With our network of 3D printers and jigs we can make almost anything locally. Hey we even make cars using the Wiki Car Company - an open source design for cars that uses a series of chassis's that we then adapt to create unique one off cars. For less cost than a mega car plant - we don't have their fixed costs.

More than 50% of the things we need - we make locally. All are built using Open Source designs.

The result is that there is work here for all. 

What were hobbies become "Livings". Your weaving, your knitting, your soap making, your talent for music or knowledge of astronomy, your mechanical genius, your coding, your cooking, your green thumb, your strong back, your relationship with children - your real skills - the real you.

No one gets super rich but all can be very comfortable and secure. Secure because no outsider can take away your living. For we are so interconnected. The gap between producer and consumer has been closed. We are always both.

Our children grow up in the middle of all of this. They see what their parents do to make a Living. They participate early too - either to help the family or to play their own role. Many children have their own Living. The gap between helpless child hood and being a participant is tiny. 

For the kids too are not shunted off into a world separate from life called school or youth.

Nor are our babies and infants given away to strangers. In our physical community we help each other a lot with the little kids. We spend very little money on daycare or nannies. We have family close, we have other families in the same boat - we have a good system. The kids also have access to tremendous resources from all over the world. They have lots of mums and dads - as kids always used to have. There are lots of Eyes on the Street in our place.

Our teachers are very different too. They are not "professionals". They are largely us.

Our older kids meet in study groups and use materials from the web. If they have a question that they cannot solve themselves - they can access the local learning network for advice. This local Network extends all over the world. Our kids can talk to the best teachers in the world and they do. 

We used to pay a lot of money to educate our kids for not very good results. We now pay a fraction of this and our kids have learned to learn and they mix with really talented people. They don't need a piece of paper to show what they have learned. They have a reputation that has been earned.

Food

So where did all the teachers go? Where did all the people with non jobs go?

In the old country almost no one did any work to get or prepare food. In the NW#2 food and energy is where most of the work is done. Everybody contributes here. In 2000, less than 5% of people worked to produce food and most of them were no more than slaves.

Now 85% of us participate in one way or another in food and energy.

About 30% of the food we eat is grown locally - and we are in Montreal. There are gardens on roofs - front yards - back yards in public spaces. Small animals too - chickens are everywhere and there are goats and sheep in town.

Nearly everyone spends time on growing and preparing food - we grow a lot on our own or in local groups in the community and we also help out in the country.

The rail service to the surrounding farm land is working well again and 50% of our food comes in from the direct hinterland. Many also go out there and help work for food. We help with the cultivating and harvest - for the Community Ag Model that we use, integrates the customer into the producer. That way we we keep the costs down for all. No immigrant slaves here - we belong to farm groups as helper/consumers. CSA on steroids.

Consequently, we pay very little money for food. But food growers do well. We all benefit from the Network Effect.

Farming itself is very different too. We also work WITH nature and not against her. She does more and more of the work as a result.

Farms tend to be small - about 100 acres and worked by a family and by the neigbours.

Those growing veggies mainly use Permaculture that needs no external inputs and that has yields that rise every year and where the work also falls. In many of these mini farms, the main work of the year is harvest.

Almost no machines are required. Almost no external inputs and certainly no agri chemicals.

Those with animals use a pasture system made famous by Polyface farms where grass and woodland provide the base and we rotate animals on the grass thus building up the base year by year.

In our food system, vitality grows every year. The natural capital increases and our need for external energy reduces.

We used to have no time and so had to pay cash for everything - now we have time we don't need as much cash. THIS is the central big idea in New World#2.

Like Open Source Software we trade goods and services a lot for no money - we do have an exchange now - so the Ledger can be converted into currency of needed. This was how the old country store used to operate. 

Energy/Travel - You cannot replace oil as a convenient source of energy - but oil is very expensive in the New World#2. So how do we still have a great life? We have redesigned how we live to reduce the need for oil.

This is why the home and the local community has become the centre. We had to go far away every day to work and school and to get anything. Now most of those routine trips in the car are not essential any more. The need to drive everywhere has been designed out of the system.

Some of us do go to face to face distant meetings now and then - it is always vital to meet face to face. But these occasions tend to be rare and are often largely social - the point is to bond again.

When we travel we mainly take some time and we tend to stay with each other or rent a place from a person. Co Working places are ubiquitous. Few have offices that are exclusively theirs except at home. Why would you pay to have an office all for yourself?

The Global Co Working Network also allows you to have an office in any town, city our country. 

Energy/Climate

Heat in the winter up north and cooling in the summer in the south demand significant energy. Here design has helped too.

Much of the sunbelt, short of water and boiling hot has lost much of its population. Those that remain have gone back to building design that fits this climate. Adobe is common again. Even here permaculture works and, as was tested in the desert in Israel, is able to produce food and this practice is gaining ground on the desert itself.

Here up north in Montreal, the typical co-housing of Montreal East was designed with winter in mind. With neighbours alongside and above and below, heating demand has been reduced further by insulation.

Community heat and stoves using waste fibre are common.

Large scale and long Distance Energy

The truck is no longer the centre of the system. Most things are made locally - much is recycled locally - even steel. We trade things we can't grow or make.

As back in time - water is the way that really heavy goods are carried. The seaboards and river and canal systems are the new/old highways for heavy goods. 

We have time now so we too use the trains and ships. 

Health

Big Industrial food no longer makes sense with very expensive oil. In the old country we used to spend a fortune on health. But now we eat so much better, we are so much more active, so much less stressed, we are naturally mainly very healthy and fit.

Grains depend on factory farms, serfs or slaves. Oil is too expensive and no one wants to be a slave anymore. So very little grain is grown anymore. We eat meat, that is grass fed, veggies fruit and nuts. This was and is our ideal diet.

So Big Pharma has little place here either. We are all working hard at breeding better animals and seeds that fit our local enviroment.  We share this knowledge around the world. Big Ag has no place in this vast cooperative effort - for if we fail here, we starve. The IP issue has gone away for the system that could enforce it has collapsed.

Most research now uses an Open Source Model - for we all benefit.

So what about the  Medical professionals?

Of course, if you have an accident, we use the Dr's. Specialists operate all over the world too. Even a small community hospital can have a world class surgeon operate - for she is in her community and telemedicine is the norm now.

But there are not that many doctors - and the ones we have are oustanding. But we don't need a lot of them, because so few of us are ill. 

The frontline healthcare system is now run by Health Facilitors who help us in groups work out how to get control of our health back. We pay them to keep us healthy. Health is all about matching our lives to our design.

Media

We get our news and information from each other. The old highly centralized media system was show to be what is was a shill for ther old system. They were largely made irrelevant as their role was exposed. And then their costs brought them down.

Most people have a voice now. A profound shift in human consciousness.

There is still an entertainment business but it is more of an aggregator. We don't need as much distraction as we used to. With a more full real life, we need to depend less on a fantasy life.

So how did we get here?

No social engineering brought this about. Much of the pioneer work was done in the 1990's. But it will be desparation that takes us here. Cities that can go no lower such as Detroit are along the path now. 

We will get here because the people who were cleared by the landlords will have no choice. We have to eat. We have to have work. We have to raise our kids. We have to have our health. In the old world all of these things are provided by the institutions. They are shutting us out. We either cannot afford them - such as healthcare or what they offer - such as public school - is rotten.

So we will do what we have to and create an alternative world alongside the old world.

In this new world, by using the network effect and open systems we will dramatically undercut the sunk costs and rigidities of the old world. We will drive them out of existence.

This weekend as I write this - we can see this process in action. The Bastille has been stormed. It's early days but we can feel our power and sense the weakness of the regime.

BUT they will not go quietly and the attacks we see on local food systems and the massive effort to protect IP in things such as seeds is a sign of their fear.

In my next post - The Inquisition and how to defeat it.

True Health - The Fit to our Hunter Gatherer Past - Part 1 - Introduction - Immigrating to the New New World

Is the Paleo diet just another fad diet? Is Crossfit just another fad fitness craze? 

They are not - and you should not dismiss them.

They are in fact the early signs of a new revolution in human society, economy and culture. A revolution where we return to working with nature and where we accept that we too are part of nature.

Where we accept that trying to dominate nature and so each other is an idea that is taking us and much of life on the planet to doom. 

For we can only abuse the rules of Nature so far and we can only abuse our own nature so far and Nature will push back. And when she does, we lose. The Natural world and our own Nature is not infinitely plastic. 

Nature can take a lot of damage but a Tipping Point will arrive when we go too far. We can only take so many fish out of the sea, clog up the atmosphere with only so much CO2, lose only so much topsoil, use more water than we have. 

The same is true for us as part of Nature. We can eat junk food, live in crazy circumstances and in crazy social and political systems - for a time. But when we do, nature will push back at us too. 

For the planet is a closed natural system with key rules. And so are we. The closer the planet is to its interacting norms, the more it can support life. And the same is true for us.

Millions of years of evolution have set up an ideal set of environments, food, social, physical in which we are designed to be at peak health and happiness. The closer we live our lives to this set of ideal environments, the healthier and happier we will be, (Thesis #2). Conversely, the further away we live our lives from these ideals, the worse our health and our happiness.

We live today at a time when most of us live as far away from Nature and our Nature that is possible. She is pushing back harder and harder. As more of us get sick and as change to climate makes life hell for millions. we see her as the enemy but in fact, she has always rewarded those that work with her. 

Our only chance as a species is to "Go Home". To go home to working with her.

The beauty of this impending revolution is that we know how to be in this new relationship with nature and each other - for we are hardwired to do this. We have just been distracted by 10,000 years of a phase of development. Maybe we have been like teens - all about me? Maybe this is our time to be young parents and be a true member of the community of life again?

Ideally we are designed for this new/old relationship with nature and our nature - the life of a Hunter Gatherer.

Does this mean we have to go home to the caves and wear skins? No - no more than at the time of the Renaissance, we went back to wearing Togas. No it's all about ideas and principles and mindset. 

Men and women in the 15th century applied ideas that had been forgotten and even prohibited to how they lived their lives and so created the modern world. A world based on observation rather than dogma.

What I think could happen now is the same. We can and should use the PRINCIPLES of the Hunter Gatherer World to design the Post Industrial and Post Agricultural Society that will have to evolve to help us get though Peak Oil and Climate Change.

This series will explore how this is taking place - without any "Plan" or leader. The new world is naturally emerging as it should be! But what I think we can do is accelerate the process of transformation by seeing it more clearly.

For to "Get There" all we have to do is to accept that we are there - all Dorothy had to do to go home was to say "I want to go home".

For "Home" is deep inside us. It waits only for us to say yes. All we need to know to do well in this New/Old World is hard wired inside us. All it has to be is remembered. 

You and I can immigrate to this New World today.

Then the "New World" was a place.

Today the New New World is a State of Mind. We don't have to get on a boat. We just have to see ourselves in a new light. The moment we do, we have arrived at the pier. Life will still be hard, it always is for immigrants. But few who got off at the pier ever wanted to go back to the old country.

So in this series I hope to paint you a picture of what this new country will be like. You might see that you are almost there. I doubt that many of you will be surprised. The ideas are not new they are older than us. But we have forgotten them. 

So I offer you not a new book but a mirror. And at the heart of it all is the heart and love and the acceptance of our true place. We will, as Paul hoped for, have grown up.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

Here then is the structure of the series:

1. In the next post "The Emergent New Hunter Gatherer Society":  we will see how the new Unemployed, the Under Employed and the Freelancers are not failures or misfits but are New Immigrants who are in engaged in a massive new project - to redesign our economy and food system using these principles. We are creating this new world for ourselves and for our children because we don't fit the existing system and worse it works against our real needs. 

2. "The Principles of HG Life as they are practised today": We will extract the principles from the emergent patterns and see how they can be used as our guide for making our own choices and how they put meaning on our lives. What can each of us do to disconnect us from the old system and connect us to the new?

3. "The Principles of Real Revolution": The full power of the old system is lined up and is already pushing back at the new. "THEY" know we have their number and they know we are death to them and they will fight tooth and nail to defeat us. So it is important for us to know how to deal with this and people like Gandhi and Havel show us the way.

4. "The Heart of the Matter - Food": There are several factors that shape human culture. Our primary energy source, climate, our primary communication tools. So Peak Oil, Climate Change and the Web will rock the old system and make the birth of the new essential. For the old system cannot cope with these changes. But the real deal is the food system. How we get our food is THE most powerful factor is shaping human society, culture and so power. What will it be about the new food model that is the Game CHanger? Why will it set you free? Why will it change everything - where and how you live and who has power and who does not. 

You and I can go home - all we have to do is to change our mind about who we are and where we are.

Here is a piece that make me cry every time I read it out loud - it says it all for me. 

There will come a time when humanity will choose to go against nature, to exploit her bounteous gifts, causing a sickness across the planet. People will forget the ecstasies of communion, and life will become drab and colorless.

In these coming dark ages, though, a deep sense of loss will cause the beginnings of a Great Return. They will look at the landscape and the old temples, built to withstand the cataclysms of millennia and understand once again the sacred laws of Existence.

When this day comes, humanity will have come of age. It will consciously acknowledge its role in the creative impulse that comes from the Sun, fertilizes the Earth, and calls forth the flame in the hearts of men and women to worship Life and the miraculous forces behind Creation. 

Miller, Hamish & Broadhurst, Paul. The Sun and the Serpent: An Investigation into Earth Energie

 

 

What happened in Media will happen for Food - A New World Returns!

When we think agriculture today we think dependence on BIG Machines that can only be made in Big Factories by Big Companies - that we cannot control or these days afford. This leads to Big Fields - Big Farms and Big Banks.

This is the core of the old model. A few BIG men control a few Big Institutions that control us. 

But this model is under real attack.

You had to be BIG to have a Newspaper.

You had to be BIG to have a TV station

But these BIG things have been taken on by small distributed tools that are cheap and can be used in a new way to make BIG things happen. The Power of Big Media is crumbling.

To be BIG you had to control lots of financial capital. To be BIG you have to be centralized.

The New Powerful is based on SMALL that is Connected into a BIG Network. Small cheap blogging tools - small cameras - small editing suites that ALL can afford - connect and combine into the New BIG.

Now this process of small and smart and distributed is about to be applied to Food!

This is an epochal event because Food is always the centre of our main culture. For how we get our Food determines where and how we live and who has power and not.

Food sets our culture.

It was our Hunter gatherer Food Model that shaped us until 10,000 years ago. We are naturally best fitted in small groups tied by purpose. Social Capital was our natural wealth.

It was early farming that settled us and set up the idea of "property" and so a social hierarchy based on a small class that owned the land.

It was mechanized farming that created the modern world - took us off the land and centralized an urban proletariat in mega cities ruled by a small social hierarchy that controlled money.

This video shows us how all this can change again and allow a more distributed system to evolve where the capital that is held most dear is social capital. This is in effect a modern return to a way of being that is more fitted to who we really are as humans.

GVCS in 2 Minutes - High Resolution from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

 

HT to Ton Zijlstra for this.

We have seen the power of this force in media - we are seeing the old institutions of education trembling. I will introduce you soon to a similar process for health. Many bastions of the old model are creaking or even in their death throes. 

The DNA of the New Big is when key tools become small and affordable for most people. They then do small things that aggregate into BIG. All this at a cost that undercuts the old BIG by 100 of times. The Old Big cannot compete. This is a Darwinian process of how humans use their culture to get ahead.

The pieces for the whole new Food Set are coming together as they did a few years back with Media.

Already the ideas of urban agriculture are established. So is the new technology of using natures' rules - Permaculture. We know how to create a new distribution system.

But what we have been missing is the machinery to aid us so that we can do small scale but with leverage.

What happens with Food will then move into industry. For it was the Agricultural Revolution that lead to the Industrial Revolution. If we can apply small scale leverage to Food, we can do the same in manufacturing. Fab Labs offer a hint here. 

The last shoe to drop will be energy - we too have to find a worthwhile, local low cost, distributed approach that relies less on financial capital than social capital.

On PEI I think that Biomass may be a step in the right direction.

In the darkness - light!

Raj on the Value of Nothing - Brilliance in 3 Minutes

 HT Charles Frith

This is the pathway to our future - we go this way or we go nowhere - and you only have to invest 3 minutes to hear the ultimate in coherence - a masterpiece of compression and story telling - I am aghast at how thoughtful he is.

Boingo - The Power of Strong Ties

What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Bruno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Fab Labs - The Highland Park of our time - Markets for 1 - Employment for all?

In 1908 Henry Ford began a 10 year journey to perfect the Assembly Line. In so doing he created the Mass Market for complex goods and the new reality that all of what we buy is made using vast processes backed by vast sums of capital. An idea that has spread beyond business to everything. Schools are ever bigger, so is healthcare, government, food production. All are geared toward a mass market and use immense centralized processes that demand ever more financial capital. All are geared to taking the skilled worker out of the process.

I will make the case today that all this is going to unwind. We have seen the early aspects of this in media. Where all the tools to both get, process and distribute ideas have broken free from their Henry Ford model. Where the capital has been stripped out of the equation. Where we can write for a market of 1 or millions. Where little old me in my pj's can have nearly 2 million folks drop by my stuff in 8 years.

We are seeing this happening in the Open Source software world. Where more folks in their pj's can create enormous platforms that work better than their Top Down alternatives for a fraction of the cost.

But what if this could happen in the "Real World"? What if we could reverse Highland Park? What if it were possible to equip us with the tools that would make it possible to have a market for 1 in things. Especially for complex things? What if it were possible to for us to return to the normal human definition of an Economy? Being the Management of a Household? For you may have forgotten that until the late 19th century, the Economy was just that - the aggregation of millions of households.

A fantasy you say. Well no. The 1908 version of Highland Park is here right now. It is called a Fab Lab. What is a Fab Lab? Well best you hear Neil Gershenfeld describe them at TED.

In essence a Fab Lab is a tool kit - like an early personal computer that has the power, like an early computer to empower a person or a community to have the ability to build things in the same way that the computer enables us to create media or software.

On their own they are great. But imagine a global network of Fab Labs? Imagine the Network Effect on all of us?

It's coming folks. Want to know more?

My friend Ton Zijlstra is a Fab Lab leader in the Netherlands - he offers up these resources if you wish to know more:

FabLab origin

FabLab is a concept by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. A good source on the background of the FabLab concept is Neil's book 'Fab' , as well as this FAQ by MIT: (it among other things points to Neil's TED talk which I think is good to watch: 

FabLab, impact and social aspects

FabLabs are all about empowerment. It does for production what web2.0/social media did for publishing and sharing: pushing the tools into the hands of individuals. FabLab does this by letting individuals work with all machines themselves, and giving access to everybody to do this. And providing that access for free.

It goes beyond that however (and this is something not yet clearly understood by MIT I think as they are looking more at the empowerment of the technology itself).

One additional key thing is that FabLab flips our attitude to abundance and scarcity. In general our economic system seems to treat material resources as abundant (oil, environment, etc.) and ideas and creativity as scarce (inventors / innovation are rare, all other people are just consumers). FabLab does the opposite: it treats ideas and personal creativity as abundant (anyone can have a go, and is encouraged to do so, anyone can make something that is valuable, if only to themselves), and materials as scarce (so you work with whatever materials are at hand locally in your FabLab's environment).

The second additional key things is that there is a network effect in play. Every new FabLab is not a competitor to the others but increases the value of the entire network of FabLabs. This is only true however if a FabLab is firmly rooted in local community, answers to local needs, and creates an ecosystem locally. The network effect then comes into play as all FabLabs, due to their local rooting, are slightly different, and form a network with very diverse nodes. They then enhance each other's capabilities. When the abundance of ideas is shared through that network, they lead to diverse versions of products adapted to local conditions and available materials.

To strengthen this network effect, community building across labs, and users of labs is important (and this is the role I try to take)

Other aspects

There is a FabAcademy, which are academic courses offered by different FabLabs in the network (e.g. MIT, Amsterdam, Norway, Iceland and Barcelona all contribute modules to FabAcademy. Students can take place in any lab. Paying students get academic credits)

There is the yearly FabLab conference, which is turning into the global community meet-up. It runs for a week, with one day for an academic conference on nano-tech/fablab related topics.

For a (growing and therefore incomplete) map of the FabLab network see this link

An impression of recent postings in English at FabLab.nl 

An impression of activity from around the world:

A nice little video of different people describing what FabLab is to them: 

There is a 24/7 video conferencing system in use, allowing FabLabs to literally have a window into other labs.

David & Goliath - Making the Very Small Organization Powerful - A Series at the QSC

It is now clear that the many parts of what can be described as Social Media are not merely the fantasies of an elite group of nerds but are a set of excellent tools can help the very small organization - business or NGO or artist etc - to do so much more for less.

An artist of musician can break out more easily - she/he can attract a core of supporters who can act as both an amplifier for their work and also as a sense maker for the scene keeping the artist in context.

A small business can have the marketing and power of a very large one - it can use video online to show what it does, who are the people involved, answer questions - it can use Twitter to follow trends, pick up problems and opportunities - to have the kind of research that a major corporation would die to get. It can use powerful tools to write, present, handle numbers, keep the group in touch that the larger organizations would envy. It can attach it self to a wide range of resources and help.

A small NGO can get its message out, build a powerful support group - it can tell stories that help stimulate change - be more effective for much less money. 

The very small can use these tools to have the power of the very large - for almost no extra cost.

But there is a catch.

Where do you learn this? There are no courses run by the usual institutions.

How also do you get over the fear of the really new?

The place could be the Queen Street Commons and we can get over our fears of the new by helping each other as well as having some experts.

Here is a link to the Queen Street Commons Blog where you can see what kind of place this is.

We will host a series of lunchtime meetings where we will have conversations about how to do many of the things that will enable you to become good at using these tools. Each meeting will have a few people who know a lot but the meeting will also be designed as a conversation. You too will have a lot to offer.

Outside the meeting we will set up a supporting online community where you can try stuff and seek help from the people that you have met face to face.

Our intent is to have not only "teachers" but also people like you who have already put their toe in the water -  fellow explorers who have not got it all solved - people like you who don't have all the answers yet.

With luck you will find an ongoing resource in this group - "go to" experts that can answer a question or solve a problem - confidants - suppliers - new customers - friends.

Some of the topics that we are thinking about might be:

• How to make and use video online
• Leading to how to tell a good story
• How to use Twitter to listen and to influence
• How to use the web - community building - blogging etc
• How to use a wide range of free or close to free tools on the web - from Word Processing to Blogging
• How to create your own "Place" on the web - your TV/radio station - Your Community etc
• Setting up and running networks

We plan to offer these during the lunch hour. The price will be affordable by any individual or small organization.

I have not talked about the details yet because I still have some work to do in staffing and scheduling.

What do you think? Will this help you? Would you like to help.

Going Home - More thought

I posted a first draft of my essay Going Home in February. This week I was talking to a friend, Kashmir Birk about the similarities between the Gutenberg Bible and Social Software and how Social Software may have the same explosive impact on human society and on who has power.

We had what we thought was a huge AHA!

In my draft essay, I had remarked how , as many others have, it was the cheapness and availability of the printed page that made the difference in giving the people the power.

But as we talked this week, a new thought emerged. I had been in a meeting offering a client a web site based on the new technology. A critical part of the new type of site is the use of powerful search rather than a book-like taxonomy. Wikipedia versus say a Government of Canada site - all tabs and navigation.

The client was stunned to understand that the search engine was not only very powerful but free. 5 years ago the search engine would have cost $30,000 and would have been peripheral to the site architecture.

Later the AHA hit me. As importantly as reducing the cost per page, the really huge idea behind Gutenberg was the use of the local language.

Until then not only were books produced by a high cost production system but they were written in this strange code called Greek or Latin that only a Priest understood! Has not technology been written in a language known only to priests? Called Fortran, Cobol or Flash, only the initiated could use it. Now not only are the new tools cheap but they can be understood by the layman.

As with the rise of Protestantism - we no longer need a priest between us and God. The tools will not only do away with much of the IT world/Priesthood but will of course take down their dependents - the monarchs/ large organizations.