The Peaceable Revolution: Occupy From the Inside Out

Occupy was, most agree, the most successful populist progressive movement of the past Century.  (In fact, it was probably the only populist progressive movement of the past Century."

At the time, Frank Luntz, the conservative manipulator of words, confessed to a group of Republican legisaltors: "I am scared of this anti-Wall Street effort.  They're having an impact on what people think of capitalism!"

Here's the secret sauce of capitalism.  Are you ready for it?  Most people are really good at adjusting downwards.  The most horrific examples of this are tragedies like the Holocaust, where people adapt to living in inhuman, unsustainable conditions.  That's an extreme case, but if you look at any historic period of belt-tightening, people have gotten by.  But these periods don't last, do they?

And now for capitalism's deepest failing.  There are those within society who aren't good at adjusting down.  In fact, they feel entitled to everything they have and more, and don't mind taking it away from others if necessary.  The internal justification for this generally evokes that benevolent third party, market forces; it's okay to be tough, because that's how the system is supposed to work. Everything works out in the wash, so no need to plan ahead.

These tightly-controlled regimes don't seem to stick around unchanging, either.

Lastly, here's capitalism's solution.  There are a host of folk out there who are driven by this little social convention called empathy - whatever their circumstances, they have a hard time watching others forced to live with less resources, less agency and less engagement than they feel everyone equitably deserves.

What these people have is motivation not for themselves, but for all of us.  

They aren't the 1%, the 99%, the middle class or the elites.  In fact, we're a little bit of everywhere.

Open Government.  Corporate Social Responsibility.  Crowd-sourcing, crowd-funding and train-the-trainer models.  The movement, too, is everywhere.

Occupy didn't die off; it served it's function and planted the seed of possibility.

It was a fallacy to think that capitalism would be the final iteration of society's economic paradigm.  By thinking otherwise, the Frank Luntzes of the world have been like knights of King Arthur's Court arguing with a Connecticut Yankee.

But they need't panic.  In fact, as the movement grows, they may just find out they like committing a bit of sociology.  There are gains to be had through the peaceable revolution.

And then we all win.

:o)

The Carly Rae Jepsen "Call Me Maybe" Meme: This is What Innovation Looks Like

Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.

Who takes the time to make a Star Wars clip-collection to add to the Call Me Maybe meme? 

For that matter, who takes the time to crowd-source clips recreating the Star Wars movie?

What makes a person go to those whimsical lengths?  How many internal memory files, how much cognitive capacity to connect dots do you need to devise and follow through on something like this?  More to the point, what is it that makes Star Wars a social phenomenon that people want to be a part of?  Boiled down - what's the connection between creativity and society?

There are those who will say it's profit that drives us.  Seriously, though, are there not easier ways to make money?  Are initiatives like streetpianos.com really about making individual profit, or are they about something a bit more inclusive?  We human beings are hard-wired to feel part of something larger than ourselves.  At some level, we all have an inkling there's some force that penetrates us, binds the galaxy together.  We want skin in that game; we want legacy.  We want to consciously be part of the whole. 

Live theatre builds an audience of experience out of a group of individuals.  Movie theatres, concerts, political rallies or religious and social ceremonies do the same thing.  Social media is the latest, broadest conduit, a social neural net that's connecting us and our collective lineages in ways never experienced before.  There is conflict from this clash, a hormonal reaction to challenge - but there is unparalleled neuro-synaptic creativity as well.  IDIC - the more diversity we're exposed to, the more tools we have to select from. 

The very process of wrapping our heads around the impacts of this diversity results in us connecting what we know to what we learn, bridging new gaps and expanding our cognitive puzzles a bit further.  That puzzle is what Don Tapscott would call Networked Intelligence - not the creation of a uniform culture under a one-world government, but an active harnessing of the fullness of human collective potential.  The whole, the social organism, is more than the sum of its individual parts.

We don't need to be afraid.  We don't have to get angry.  There is good in this world, and it's worth collaborating for.  When we work together, there's nothing we can't accomplish - we can even move mountains.  We just have to believe it.

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SERVICES: Built on an Open-Source Public Service Platform

“Why don’t we create a collaborative model of healthcare?” – Don Tapscott

 January 12, 2010 – a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shakes Haiti to the bone, reducing weak infrastructure to rubble, wiping out 220,000+ lives and putting the fate of a nation in question.  Worse earthquakes had hit other populated areas in recent memory, without the same degree of impact.  What led to Haiti's particular tragedy combined a lack of planning with selfish interests that saw sub-standard buildings erected in the first place.  The absence of proper maps and census data only made a potential response plan ever harder to develop.

Ironically, it was an altruistic, coordinated effort by the international community that stepped in to address the crisis.  The resources of UN agencies, USAID, individual donors from Japan, school groups in Europe and countless other sources in Canada and around the world was largely coordinated through open-source, online maps and crowdsourcing. 

An Ushahidi-based open source platform became the hub around which government and Not-For-Profit agencies were able to interact in a planned, coordinated way to connect the people of Haiti with the services and resources they needed.  A person stuck in a collapsed building could send a text to a friend, who could pass it on to an appropriate official, which would then be coordinated through a central point in the States to get the right people and resources on the ground in Port-au-Prince to go where they were needed.  Someone moved to make a donation after watching footage of the devastation on the evening news could access the system in the same way, learning the best opportunities to contribute and putting their offering into the mix.

The Haiti experience gives a great example of how an online, Open-Source Public Service Platform can provide an opportunity to transform the existing social service model into something adapted to the realities of the 21^st Century.

Think about it – there is broad concern that social services cost too much and that much of that cost is lost to inefficiencies.  It’s like using an old light bulb – little of the energy used actually gets translated into illumination.  Services aren’t always provided where they are needed, or aren’t as accessible as they should be, or people simply don’t know the right entry point to reach those services.  Countless paid hours are spent by government employees trying to help frustrated clients find the specific service they need – and that’s before you add barriers like transportation access, language/cultural barriers, wheelchair/stroller accessibility, etc.

Inefficiencies, cost, access challenges.  You can add to this increased wait times as people struggle to find appropriate services, or end up needing advanced services because they were unable or un-empowered to connect with the right front-end services before an issue emerged.  Also worth mentioning is the recent federal contraction on census data collected and the broad social concerns around accountability and customer service within the public sector.

All these can be problems of the past, thanks to crowdsourcing – and the solution can be realized in a way that doesn’t add to the tax burden.  Again, that solution is an Open-Source Public Service Platform.

A quick example of what the benefit of an integrated, open-source online social service platform would look like: a First Generation Canadian living wherever, trying to find out how to diagnose and treat an ailment in her non-English speaking, wheelchair-bound mother -- could use an App on her phone to narrow down her search and tailor results to include the language and transportation need components.  The search results would include phone numbers for the service providers and a broader coordinating entity, for example a LHIN.  The lady would be able to find and connect her mom with the specific help she needs and how to get to it with a few clicks on a blackberry.

How would you begin to build something of such complexity and magnitude?  Wouldn’t the cost be preventative?  Nope – that’s the advantage of crowdsourcing.  If one central entity – ideally, government – were to provide the basic digital infrastructure (the Ushahidi model is already established and is freely available, and RIM is probably looking for work that could include adapting it for this purpose), the various players involved would organically populate the rest.  A detailed map would be a great, free tool for gaining statistical data, developing broad understandings of service distribution and need (facilitating planning and reducing duplication, gaps and overlaps) and provide opportunities for oversight that would find the right balance through sheer volume.

Service providers inputting their data into the map could use a template form to know which pieces to populate their corner with.  This would include things like address, broad service category, specific service category, accessibility, languages spoken, contact information, etc.  Each entry would have a comments section with an aggregated customer service satisfaction indicator.  When public transit, doctor’s offices, social service offices, etc. plug their information into the map, it would be an easy matter of using an App on a phone or a computer to connect with the right search terms and cross-reference them for proximity, availability and so on.  A secured level of use could record all the data that helps government plan funding allocation and public need in a way only dreamed of now.

We’re already starting to do this by recording wait times in hospitals or results in schools; a public service platform is simply the next logical step.  The Government of Ontario has taken a huge leap forward through a Social Innovation Summit hosted by SiG@MaRS and by launching a wiki allowing Ontarians to participate in the world’s first crowd-sourced policy paper.  The Ontario Liberal Party learned from Facebook and created FRed, creating an online community for members and those interested in learning more.

This same principle can take advantage of the growing connectivity in our society in countless other ways; you could use an open source map to plan your next vacation, if tourist-service providers sign up, or to find new employees/help transition ones that don’t fit without needing to fire them.

Here’s an example of what such a map could look like, using fair trade as an example.

The challenges of today are steering us in one clear direction – collaboration.  The only way to face our current economic, health and quality-of-life woes is to find efficiencies in service – not by cutting the offerings themselves, but by ensuring they are properly coordinated.  An Open-Source Public Service Platform is the perfect tool to make this happen.