The Ingenesist Project » local

Do We Really Need To Fail?

Dan Robles — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Yesterday, I heard a report on NPR about the resource management department in North West Washington, in response to diminished funding – is certifying private boats for emergency duty in clean up, security, and rescue. This is logical because nobody knows and understands the waters of Northern Puget Sound and The Strait of Juan De Fuca than the local tribes and others who ply those waters daily.

Today, I heard another report on NPR about how the City of Houston has gained far more from the demise of Enron than their existence. Enron would recruit the top intellect in the country, move them to Houston and reward them for creativity and hard work. The collapse of Enron released 4000 hugely talented people to the Houston Economy where many have started new businesses with remarkable success.

Vicious Circle or Virtuous circle:

I will not pass judgment beyond what these reports stated, except that there is something very valid about the “Knowledge Inventory” that exists in a community and their specific location. The Jane Jacobs externality proposes that endowment of creative and educated people drives economic growth in a community by attracting investment and development, which attracts more smart people, etc.

Vicious Galaxies or Virtuous Galaxies

As the NPR reports suggest, the type of investment and development is dependent on the quality and quantity of knowledge assets that exist in a particular location. Now, let’s extrapolate that to include all disciplines and talents of knowledge that exist in all communities and we encounter a stark reality that there is no knowledge inventory from which to build – except in the response to a failure such as the corrosion of government spending or in the wake of corruption and associated corporate collapse.

Yes, it is often said that adversity brings out the best in people, but is that really necessary? Do we really need for the whole rig to collapse before we emerge from the ashes?

We need to build the knowledge inventory today. People need to know what people know – that is where the truth lives. We need to know what can be built from the parts that we have in the bin. We don’t want to try to build something from the wrong parts any more than we want to misallocate the right parts to build the wrong things. In any industry in the world, none of these situations would pass the stink test, yet this is the state of our communities today. We don’t even know that we don’t know what we know. Seriously, is anyone else wondering about these things?

Culture: When Engagement Is Not Optional

Dan Robles — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:31:18 +0000

Today we see Social Media duplicating many of the functions of earlier society by storing community wisdom, applying social vetting, and deploying social currencies.

It takes a Community

Here is an article is about a a person who learned through social media profiling that her fiance was active in hobbies that conflicted with her moral constitution – before the wedding instead of after. In the old days, the community would also profile each individual based on the social record of their behavior.

Social Capitalism

Here is a video article that discusses how social media is duplicating many functions of the corporation outside the construct of the corporation. Factors of production increasingly enter the org chart as a social media application. We now question whether the corporation itself is the sole vehicle of wealth creation.

Social Currency

We see social media duplicating many of the functions of the financial system where currency, credit scores, banks, land, labor, and capital are being replaced by social currency, social vetting, social capital, creative capital, and social entrepreneurs.

Macro vs. Micro

We see divisions of scale from the long-winded one-sided content of the static web presence to the micro blogging applications that more closely resemble a conversation. Time factors are accelerated to the point where real-time is not fast enough.

Local vs. Global

We see an emerging segmentation between Local Social and Global Social. At first global leverage was the awarded the small entrepreneur with something to offer to the world. Now ‘Local Social’ enjoys substantial leverage over global corporations by reorganizing the way people prioritize and experience each other and their community.

Everyone is a node

Taking an analogy from the physics of electricity, the term “potential” means the difference in energy between two nodes. The greater the difference, the bigger the spark and the greater the impact. The local energy at each node influences the direction and size of sparks between nodes. As people accumulate ‘Social Current’, their position relative to those around them changes. Likewise, their potential also changes relative to the ‘Social Current’ of others. Everyone has some potential relative to every other node.

Integration has arrived

Much like the knowledge economy integrated, but did not replace, the agrarian economy, Social Media will not replace the corporation, the financial system, dissertation, conversations, localization or globalization. Rather, everyone becomes a corporation, everyone prints their own social currency, everyone publishes their intentions, everyone has local and global leverage. That’s what Integration is all about.

A ‘culture of one’ is moot.

It is not surprising then that our culture itself is now being defined in terms of social media with effective aggregation of social norms, storage of social wisdom, and medium of exchange for community ideals. The true test of “culture status” is when engagement is no longer an optional. Without engagement, there is no culture.

A Local Currency Primer; Comfort Dollars

Dan Robles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:00:24 +0000

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting post, indirectly on how local currency can spur social capital. As more corporate and governmental institutions fail to meet the needs of society, people will need a currency that they can trade among each other. If the dollar fails, the need will be dire.

The difficulties that will ultimately limit such enterprise is the inability to capitalize and securitize a social currency. Conversational Currency solves this problem by demonstrating how social media, if organized correctly, can simulate many of the functions of corporations and government. As such, people will ultimately trade the currency they trust most.

I like Douglas Rushkoff’s work. I suppose the ultimate test of concept would be if he finds this post and contacts us to integrate The Ingenesist Project and Conversational Currency into his thought leadership. Thanks Douglas!!

By Douglas Rushkoff

“A great, tiny organic cafe in my town, Comfort, decided to expand to a second, larger location last year. The owner, John Halko, has been renovating the new space for a year, and – thanks to the credit crisis – has been unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, Halko has turned instead to his community – to us – for support.

Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort – the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip – and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown (commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and strip malls of automobile-friendly Central Avenue).

So Halko’s idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant – and since he’s paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time.

Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money. But wait, there’s more: the entire scheme refocuses a community’s energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort’s food, we’re more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else. When it gets really interesting is when other businesses begin to accept Comfort’s VIP card and dollars for their services as well. But even in its current, limited incarnation, it’s easy to see how the math of an extremely simple alternative currency works, why its existence gets cheaper money into the hands of people who need it, and how it circumvents centralized control over commerce.”