Tijn, you are making a significant contribution. Just saw this post today! Between 2014-2019, my technologist friend and I built a company, got some funding and built what we called One Sphera, to accomplish much of what some of the these applications are working towards. I have a whole chapter in my book about it and share some learnings. It is on the shelf at this point, so we never released it.
Couple things:
1. The tech seems to be coming down to earth, so to speak, in that it is starting to solve problems of collaboration and coordination at the grassroots.
The challenge is that technologists really don't have direct experience with the real needs of the primary players in a local community - nonprofits, mainstreet businesses, and local government. Instead, what we see today are more "regenerative" project oriented activities rather than an attempt to build a parallel society or economy with mainstream actors.
2. Since technologists generally don't have experience with overall grassroots community development (how nonprofits, businesses, and local governments operate) they are far away in terms of their "product/market" fit.
The tech we built actually emulated real-world community development so the features were all geared to serve those real-world needs.
3. You were describing inter-operability and it is a great direction. The challenge is that present the technologists are still forced by the exigencies of making a living, that they are still separate data silos. I realize that the Collaborative tech Alliance is moving in that direction.
I have spoken with multiple leaders of global networks, who also have a local focus, and their tech buildout is primarily for their internal coordination , so data silo-ing is still the primary on the ground reality.
4. Currently, there is not general agreement about what terms such as bioregional communities means. There has been no agreement on what scales the different players are operating on. So, there needs to be a coordination of all those involved to start making agreements about the scale -- ecovillage - neighborhood - local organization - network of community groups - city - region - bioregion - nation - global.
Since these terms haven't been defined it it hard to know what you are coordinating and why do one thing one way versus another.
5. Building the planetary superorganism. If we are to invert the pyramid of financial and political power globally, we need to start thinking about unifying frames and get agreement with all of the network leaders. We are far away from that because most leaders are "ahistorical"- they think their ideas are new ones and they generally don't incorporate what has worked historically.
That's one conversation I plan to have as my book release progresses.
One example of an historic idea is Mahatma Gandhi's notion of a Commonwealth of Village republics, as away to build up bottom up power down to the village level. Even Thomas Jefferson, early President of the US advocated this for the developing US.
Today is the 65th anniversary of the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. They have built a national network of 5,000 "micro" bioregional ecosystem networks. Hardly anyone is studying this. I remember last year I started a conversation with Refi, Web 3.0, and regen folks on Twitter and hardly anyone was interested.
Yet, it is a functioning model. I bring this up because I believe we need a coherent idea like that, that has been proven to work, that can add focus and coherence to the efforts by technologists.
I believe in a nutshell that's the main challenge: there is no conversation yet to have an agreement on a vision like building a Global Commonwealth of Regional Economies that we can all get behind. That's actually one of the conversations I will be bringing up, as I meet more network leaders and support them in building these on the ground whole community efforts.
Anyway, that turned out to be a long post. I hope that was okay! Keep up the amazing work you are doing Tijn.
Thanks for this excellent list - it's great that you included Murmurations, which I work on.
However, I wanted to point out that Murmurations is actually a protocol, not a platform, so does not really compare directly to most of the other projects in your list as really it sits in a different category because the protocol "enables collaboration across silos and networks", which - as you point out - is the holy grail!
We are currently working with Hylo and Catalist (via the Collaborative Technology Alliance) to help them integrate their platforms via Murmurations, so that changes to a Group's Profile on one platform show up on the other platform too...
We've also built a Wordpress plugin to enable people to create decentralised, interoperable Profiles (which can be aggregated and shown on multiple maps and directories) and a Mapping plugin which enables people to quickly and easily create custom maps from the decentralised Profile data...
But that's not all Murmurations can do! The design of the protocol, with its open field and schema library ( https://github.com/MurmurationsNetwork/MurmurationsLibrary ) enables anyone to build new schemas (collections of fields) by reusing existing fields (and adding new fields if needed) to map any other kind of data. (E.g. we already have an 'Offers & Wants' schema too ...) So whenever fields are reused the data which is shared is obviously interoperable across platforms and networks.
I hope this makes sense and is of interest?
Keep up your great work spreading info about planetary collaboration!
Unable to signup. Several issues 1) rejected my website URL 2) rejected my normal gmail 3) claimed passwords did not match but they were filled in by Safari so should have been the same.
My group has a platform specifically designed to foster collaboration across silos.
Tijn, you are making a significant contribution. Just saw this post today! Between 2014-2019, my technologist friend and I built a company, got some funding and built what we called One Sphera, to accomplish much of what some of the these applications are working towards. I have a whole chapter in my book about it and share some learnings. It is on the shelf at this point, so we never released it.
Couple things:
1. The tech seems to be coming down to earth, so to speak, in that it is starting to solve problems of collaboration and coordination at the grassroots.
The challenge is that technologists really don't have direct experience with the real needs of the primary players in a local community - nonprofits, mainstreet businesses, and local government. Instead, what we see today are more "regenerative" project oriented activities rather than an attempt to build a parallel society or economy with mainstream actors.
2. Since technologists generally don't have experience with overall grassroots community development (how nonprofits, businesses, and local governments operate) they are far away in terms of their "product/market" fit.
The tech we built actually emulated real-world community development so the features were all geared to serve those real-world needs.
3. You were describing inter-operability and it is a great direction. The challenge is that present the technologists are still forced by the exigencies of making a living, that they are still separate data silos. I realize that the Collaborative tech Alliance is moving in that direction.
I have spoken with multiple leaders of global networks, who also have a local focus, and their tech buildout is primarily for their internal coordination , so data silo-ing is still the primary on the ground reality.
4. Currently, there is not general agreement about what terms such as bioregional communities means. There has been no agreement on what scales the different players are operating on. So, there needs to be a coordination of all those involved to start making agreements about the scale -- ecovillage - neighborhood - local organization - network of community groups - city - region - bioregion - nation - global.
Since these terms haven't been defined it it hard to know what you are coordinating and why do one thing one way versus another.
5. Building the planetary superorganism. If we are to invert the pyramid of financial and political power globally, we need to start thinking about unifying frames and get agreement with all of the network leaders. We are far away from that because most leaders are "ahistorical"- they think their ideas are new ones and they generally don't incorporate what has worked historically.
That's one conversation I plan to have as my book release progresses.
One example of an historic idea is Mahatma Gandhi's notion of a Commonwealth of Village republics, as away to build up bottom up power down to the village level. Even Thomas Jefferson, early President of the US advocated this for the developing US.
Today is the 65th anniversary of the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka. They have built a national network of 5,000 "micro" bioregional ecosystem networks. Hardly anyone is studying this. I remember last year I started a conversation with Refi, Web 3.0, and regen folks on Twitter and hardly anyone was interested.
Yet, it is a functioning model. I bring this up because I believe we need a coherent idea like that, that has been proven to work, that can add focus and coherence to the efforts by technologists.
I believe in a nutshell that's the main challenge: there is no conversation yet to have an agreement on a vision like building a Global Commonwealth of Regional Economies that we can all get behind. That's actually one of the conversations I will be bringing up, as I meet more network leaders and support them in building these on the ground whole community efforts.
Anyway, that turned out to be a long post. I hope that was okay! Keep up the amazing work you are doing Tijn.
Hi Tijn,
Thanks for this excellent list - it's great that you included Murmurations, which I work on.
However, I wanted to point out that Murmurations is actually a protocol, not a platform, so does not really compare directly to most of the other projects in your list as really it sits in a different category because the protocol "enables collaboration across silos and networks", which - as you point out - is the holy grail!
We are currently working with Hylo and Catalist (via the Collaborative Technology Alliance) to help them integrate their platforms via Murmurations, so that changes to a Group's Profile on one platform show up on the other platform too...
We've also built a Wordpress plugin to enable people to create decentralised, interoperable Profiles (which can be aggregated and shown on multiple maps and directories) and a Mapping plugin which enables people to quickly and easily create custom maps from the decentralised Profile data...
But that's not all Murmurations can do! The design of the protocol, with its open field and schema library ( https://github.com/MurmurationsNetwork/MurmurationsLibrary ) enables anyone to build new schemas (collections of fields) by reusing existing fields (and adding new fields if needed) to map any other kind of data. (E.g. we already have an 'Offers & Wants' schema too ...) So whenever fields are reused the data which is shared is obviously interoperable across platforms and networks.
I hope this makes sense and is of interest?
Keep up your great work spreading info about planetary collaboration!
All the best
Oli
Unable to signup. Several issues 1) rejected my website URL 2) rejected my normal gmail 3) claimed passwords did not match but they were filled in by Safari so should have been the same.
My group has a platform specifically designed to foster collaboration across silos.
Please help.
clembarrya@gmail.com