Robert Paterson's Weblog

Out with the old - In with the new - Furnace #resiliency

We had this old coal converted to oil furnace removed and replaced it with this

This is an electric furnace that heats our old radiators. It is 100% efficient. Heats only on demand. It has an outside sensor also that reads the outside temperature and increases or decreases the effort depending on how cold it really is.

It is silent and tiny.

The old radiators also have huge latency and once taken to the right temperature hold the heat well after the furnace shuts off.

Of course in Quebec electricity is both secure and good value. This may not apply to you. But I am advised that even on PEI where they have the most expensive power in Canada that this type of arrangement is cheaper than oil.

I will let you know how this works out.  We will also be replacing the windows and bumping up the insulation. The intent is to get our exposure to oil prices down to the minimum.

 

Letting go - Books #Moving

We are moving. More in that later. One of the reasons for leaving is to scale right back. I mean really scale back. Scale back to be able to live in less than 1,000 square feet.

A few years ago, I went with my old room mate at Oxford to clear out his mother in law's room at the home where she had just died. It took us less than an hour and we could fit it all into his car. We start out in life as ana adult with very little and then accumulate tons of stuff. We end it with almost nothing. That is the path I am on now. And my move is the first big culling. 

As a book maniac this has meant a rethink. At my peak I had over a thousand books. I will leave with maybe 75. What goes and how and where?

I have donated hundreds over the last 3 years to the Library. 

I have given most of my business and personal growth books to the Queen St Commons. It now has about 100 books in this category for members. 

Most of my fiction and the more current of my history books, I have put into the Barn which is our guest house that will remain a rental property. I also added all our children's books and most of my DVD's . It does rain now and then and I have found that visitors like to browse and find stuff.

So what am I keeping? Mainly my collection of books on food systems, chaos and complexity, architecture, Rome and WWI. Plus a few very personal books - mainly poetry. And if I could take only 5 books, they would all be by Christopher Alexander. 

We are doing the same with everything - clothes, furniture, pictures. It's fascinating to be ruthless. What do we really need? What are we really attached to and why?

Networks and Trust - The New Evolution

Last week, prompted by pressure from my son to be more clear about networks in my upcoming book - You Don't need a Job - You need a Need a Network - some new thoughts pushed their way to the front and I wanted to share them with you in sketch book form.

Please help me get them more clear.

The Network Effect and the Trust Network Effect - There is a difference that is important. In the standard network effect, the value of the network to each member is linked to the growth of the connections. It is transactional. So the more phones that are connected to the network, the more valuable the network is in utility to each member. This is the mechanical approach to networks.  

For many people that I see using social media, this is their only goal. Many try and get as many "friends" as possible. If you are a real A lister - this works - you have influence. But for most people, having 7,000 friends on Facebook or Twitter doesn't mean a thing - IF YOU NEED SOMETHING.

I have been working a lot recently using Indiegogo and observing people who seek to raise money using crowd sourcing.

In every case that I have seen so far, the campaigns that worked had activated their core circle of trusted people who themselves had such a circle - who had such a circle and so on. It was this inner circle that did the work. The campaigns that just threw the ask out to the general network, tended to fail. There was no power to the general ask for help. 

Why is this? If I have 3,000 friends on facebook - why don't they help me - they say they are committed but they don't act?

I think of my own behaviour. I will only act if a few people that I know well and trust ask me. For the rest, the answer is always no. How small is this group? Maybe 8 and no more that 30+ depending on the context.

This is my real network. I only act on strong ties not weak.

It may extend further on occasion to people who used to be in the inner circle but for whom time has passed and they have moved further out. So an ex close colleague or friend can call out of the blue and I will be ready to act. They remain people who have been trusted, Any of you who have served in the military will know this. When a ex shipmate or buddy calls, you go back immediately to where you used to be in trust.

I am seeing that this inner circle of trust is the "leverage". You have to pay attention to your reputation and to your inner network. To get you have to give. It's all barn building. 

A high quality inner network is the goal.

This quality is all based on trust. So if I am right, then the drive for many friends is a waste of time and is based on the simple view of the network. We are not simple, we are complex humans! No Trust - No Commitment or Action.

The New Super Trust Leverage - Trust Platforms - What is new then and what I think is the Highland Park Game Changer - are platforms that create this level of trust among people who have never met!

Airbnb is a good example. Here is a platform that enables you to offer your place for rent to strangers. Etsy is another. Here is a platform that enables you to sell your crafts to strangers. Amazon is enabling a new publishing system for the "small" author. Visa is another. Visa is a platform that enables a retailer to take your money safely.

They key to all of these platforms is that they mediate and maintain high levels of trust. Thus enabling us to DO THINGS with small vendors and to be small vendors on a global scale.

They also do this at a very low cost. No Budget hotel chain can compete with Airbnb in price and value. No storefront with Etsy. No publisher can do what Amazon is doing for the small author. This trust mediation gives both sides of the transaction a deal that is impossible for the Factory model to replicate.

There is also a huge secondary impact. That is, as each of us buys from another in trust platforms, the trust that was at first mediated, becomes real. We tend to go back to the same places on Airbnb because we get to know and like each other. We get in touch with authors who use Kindle and start to have a real relationship with them.

So what I see is that the product of each successful transaction in trust platforms is the exponential increase in trust. This in turn increases the utility for all. The line between provider and consumer becomes blurred. This then is when an author can get crowd funding to help him write the new book! This is when the farmer can pre-sell his crop or meat in the spring for delivery in the fall.

The value is not confined to the connections alone but to the overall trust in the system.

This is the game changer. This is a much much better deal for all than the Highland Park system. It was Highland Park that overthrew the old local and artisan system because it was then a better deal for all. So I think Trust Platforms will overthrow the Highland Park world. 

Highland Park was the new factory that Henry Ford opened in 1910 that had all the new features of the Production Line installed. It was the DNA of the process that would be at the heart of all modern institutions. Mass Production killed the small and the local because it could offer a car for much less money than one made by hand by artisans. It also gave a large unskilled work force much more money than a day labourer job could. Both sides of the mass market were created.

This better deal meant that The small and the local got pushed to the fringe. The family farm nearly died. The local paper died. The bakery, dairy, butcher, general store, iron foundry all died. The local banker who knew everyone was no longer needed. The local doctor who had a stake in the health of his community was no longer needed. The local diner that held the community together was no longer needed. All were replaced by Highland Park. And so we ended up Bowling Alone - for as community died, so did Trust.

All became simple transactions. 

We all came to depend on a few vast organizations for all that is important for us. Vast organizations that not only do not care for us but work only for their own needs now. For the Highland Park Contract has been broken. Now most of us have the wages of day labourers, if we are lucky! Now most of the products and services are of low quality or worse, hurt us. 

We are ready for something better and something better is here. 

It's early days. It is maybe the equivalent of 1920. But I see Trust Platforms taking over the role of Highland Parks. They will do this because they are a better system. They offer more value to all. The evolutionary Tipping Point is 20%. Each time the trust platform takes 20% of the gross out of the sector, the Highland Park alternative will fall. 20 employees at Craigslist did this and look what happened to the mass production newspapers.

When 20% of kids  choose the Platform rather than school, most of the universities will fold. When 20% of us stop going to the doctor for our chronic illness, how will they and big pharma cope? Coming will be a local food system that is based on trust and real food. When 20% of us buy all our food locally, how will Big Food cope?

Highland Park is trapped by their fixed process costs. With a 20% loss of gross and a trend of lower gross as the network grows, they cannot stand.

Evolution will work quite well and has a good chance of solving what seems to be the impossible world situation in front of us.  

Why Modern Medicine is a Fail for Chronic Illness - And What will replace it

Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.

This all came from early success. 

Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.

Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity. 

That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect. 

This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.

You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse. 

Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.

Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure.  Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?

I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.

Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does. 

All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill. 

If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.

All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.

So what to do?

Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side. 

I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.

But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.

1. Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
2. Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
3. Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a  social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
4. Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed

There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum. 

There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me. 

Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals. 

We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research. 

Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society. 

Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.

Why I am Backing Inspired Farmers Urban Farming Project #localfood #resiliency

I am backing the Inspired Farmers Project - they will start the first demo for Urban Farming in Charlottetown next week. 

The project is lead by Karen Murchison of the Queen St Commons and her partners at the Murphy Community Centre (Where most of the "Farm" will be) The City of Charlottetown, Cycle PEI, Holland College and the Food bank and Soup Kitchen in Charlottetown

It's a tiny project but has huge potential to make PEI more sustainable. If you want to make a difference that please help. Your help can be a few dollars or a donation of stuff.

You can donate $ here:

Or you can  help with stuff like this:

Here is how I see this project and why I am backing them and why if you care for the future of PEI, you might help too.

It starts often like this - with a community using a barren public space to grow food as a demo. The idea is to inspire us to think differently about the urban landscape. No longer only grass, concrete and isolated trees. When we see this in downtown Charlottetown, we can imagine how different our street could be.

This is not simply a new esthetic either. In World War II 40% of the food eaten was grown by people at home - most in cities. 

At the heart of this is the food and the health crisis. By making urban farming - which uses very small spaces and high intensity - important we all learn how to grow our own food. This Saturday there is a workshop on this. We meet our neigbours in a new way. We are more active and we have better nutrition.

We start to escape the trap of being dependent on Factory Food.  The Food Bank becomes a hub of a network of people who help each other grow food and cook food.  Growing food and making meals return as skills that most of us have lost.

This is big - isn't it? And you only have to make a small step to help. 

We start this weekend! 

Local Food - It's war

 

Stand up for real food! Food grown in a safe and authentic way. Eat real food. Be healthy and prosper!

Day 1 Startup Canada's visit to PEI - The Sleeper must Awaken - #StartupPEI #StartUpCanada

What a day we had yesterday as a group of PEI Entrepreneurs met. What I saw happen was this. As we met and talked, we could feel the power. We could see that we were not alone. We could see that there is a critical mass of people who want to create some thing. People who would not wait for "Them" but take action.

Something started to awaken. The understanding that the future of PEI was in our hands. That we could regain our historic self reliance. 

Over the next 3 weeks I will share many stories from these people and I hope then that you will see what I saw yesterday. The Sleeper Must Awaken - and it will.

 

StartUp Canada's Visit to PEI - Why it is important #Work #Jobs #Population

Starting tomorrow, May 7th, a team from StartUp Canada will travel across PEI helping us showcase who PEI's Entrepreneurs are and helping us bring this community together.

What might happen as a result?

We might put PEI on track to be the resilient and full economy that we were 100 + years ago. Where every service, every product we used was offered locally. Where we had our own export markets all over the world. Where we used the network of the time, the rails, to connect us to each other and to markets far away.

Why StartUps?

StartUps are THE engine for growth and for jobs. Our only chance of pulling this off lies in us making StartUps the new normal. 

What do I hope will happen?

The StartUp Community itself will see itself and its power - Most of the nodes of the StartUp community just have their heads down and cannot see that they are part of something larger.

That the rest of us on PEI will see the opportunity that is here already. An opportunity that we have not seen clearly before.

We will see that this opportunity has three elements. A Company element. An Artisanal element and a Nurturing/Network element. 

Keep your eyes open for them - here is how they will emerge. 

The Company Track - This is the kind of business that we are all familiar with. The founder intends to start a company with employees and to grow it to as large as possible. Hard to do in Atlantic Canada as we are far away from the centre of this kind of world. But easier if you find a niche such as Bio Science where clusters of expertise can be created.

There are 30 companies in the Bio Science cluster now with 800 + employees who in turn buy cars, food and houses and employ other Islanders. All this growth has taken place in 10 years.

The Network Nurturer for this group is the PEI BioAlliance. Their role is to connect this group to each other, to resources and to markets - so that the network can add to the nodes. 

This cluster could not have come together in such a short time without the BioA. 

As a result of the visit of StartUp, I see the BioA expanding their reach to include all who are on the Company Track. For they have reached out now to all StartUps who use this model. 

The Artisan Track - We all know the craft side of Island Life, but now with the web there is a new gobal market for real things that can only be made in small operations. Real toys, real pottery, real food. The assurance of real and trust comes from the small and the personal. Toys made by hand by a person with a name. Food made on tiny plots by hand by a person with a name.

Millions of people are rejecting mass produced products and want access to the real. So while each artisan is small, collectively this is a big opportunity. It is in the reach of the hard working and the skilled - PROVIDED  they are networked. 

Again my hope will be that this track is seen for what it is - a large future part of our economy and a major attractor for immigrants who want to be part of this personal movement. 

The emerging Network Nurturer for this group is the Queen Street Commons. We started as a co working space but now we too, like the BioA are helping all in the personal sector to get connected and to find out how they can help each other. We too can do more.

StartUp Canada is the Uber Network Nurturer for all of this.  

They help connect our local networks to the regional and then to the national and finally to the global. Their visit alone has galvanized the BioA and the Queen St Commons to prepare. Now we will all see what has been hidden to all of us. 

If we can see the potential and power of this networked approach - then we can start to alter how we see jobs and work on PEI. For it is the network that is our future. We are not an isolated Island in the network world.

This should be the focus on development and on immigration. We have to look for the mismatches and the barriers too. Such as credit. Then we can start to see more clearly the mismatch in our school system . 

Then we can focus on calling to those that want to work and live in more authentic community and improve the support we give to the supporting networks.

Please join me next week as I tell you our stories and show you the many wonderful people that are working to make PEI a prosperous place again

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.

The Plenitude Economy

Much of this is already emerging - especially the DIY Economy and Sharing.