"How Can 6 Billion People Help Each Other to Help Themselves?" - Workshop in Paris Apr 27-28, 2006

[See These Notes for details about the workshop|http://upliftacademy.org/parisnotes] Rapidly evolving global network technology has opened up entirely new ways of looking at how we create value at massive scale. Our workshop April 27-28, 2006 in Paris will ask, "How can 6 billion people help each other to help themselves?" This question frames things from the perspective of massive abundance - a potential 6 billion people helping each other - in contrast to traditional approaches which begin with the notion that we have "too many problems and not enough money." We will be looking at what is happening "on the ground" in some of the poorest areas of the world, as well as what is happening in our network technologies and capabilities to connect people and ideas in new ways. We will be looking at what really is "help" beyond merely acting on good intentions, and how we systematically pay attention to what is working and how we can do more of it. Participants will be an eclectic mix, from network and technology specialists to those who have spend decades working in less developed countries far away from electricity. Although the specific discussion in this workshop will be largely about international development, it will serve as a foundation for many other patterns of uplift in other sectors. The goal of the workshop is to create a conceptual map of how we might create a network to support networks of self-organizing, self-help groups. We will also be demonstrating the initial episodes of Better World Radio, and explore the possibility of using it to support an experiment in viral propagation of [NanoFinance|http://upliftacademy.org/node/13] activities. We invite you to join us for an exciting two days in Paris. [Here is agenda information|http://www.vnclusters.com/CDG.htm] [Please register on-line|https://www.kmcluster.com/reg/CDG] or contact munnecke@gmail.com for more information. !!!Some participants [http://givingspace.org/marcia_files/image001.jpg] [Marcia Odell|http://www.givingspace.org/marcia.htm] founder of the WORTH program that was one of [Amazon.com's top 10 nonprofit innovators | http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/asin/B000A6JJ42/102-7596274-1946562] will present some of her lessons learned in savings-led microfinance groups in Nepal and Africa, what we will be calling NanoFinance in the workshop. Thomas Dichter, author of [Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed|http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558493921/qid=1140797288/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-4498317-5515224?s=books&v=glance&n=283155] will present some lessons learned about "When Less is More" from his 30 years in the development field. [http://static.flickr.com/33/65792609_7f1bf53778_m.jpg] Valdis Krebs, president of [Orgnet | http://orgnet.com] will be presenting a model of [Network Weavers | www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf] in contrast to traditional models of intermediaries. [http://static.flickr.com/34/65790744_18363223f0_m.jpg] David Ellerman, author of [Helping People Help Themselves, From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0472114654/qid=1130857913/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0179241-9396056?v=glance&s=books&n=507846] , former advisor and speechwriter to Joseph Stiglitz, Chief Economist at the World Bank. [http://givingspace.org/images/siegfried_small.JPG] [Siegfred Woldheck|http://www.nabuur.com/news/conversation.html], founder of [Nabuur|http://nabuur.com] in the Netherlands, will present his experiences with community-to-community linking. (Note: to to a death in his family, Siegfred will not be joining the workshop) [Grégoire Japiot|http://gregoire.viabloga.com/] is assisting with the local coordination for the workshop. [Tom Munnecke|http://www.munnecke.org] will speak and carry over some thoughts from previous workshops in [Washington DC|http://givingspace.org/jan2002/default.htm],[Santa Fe Institute|http://givingspace.org/images/sfigallery.htm], and [Boston|http://upliftacademy.org/node/21]. [John Maloney|http://colabria.com/] will speak on the relationship economy and knowledge management. !!!Some Background Perspective Whether it is buying and selling on eBay, finding things on Google, or communicating instantly around the world with email or Internet-based telephony, global communications networks are rapidly changing the world. Even more remote areas are getting connected to the global communications grid through mobile. For example, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is in the process of installing a [broadband network|http://purplemotes.net/2006/03/19/innovative-broadband-project-in-india/] to connect 21,000 villages to carry information at 100 million bits per second, about 100 times faster than the average US household high speed internet connection. Relatively low cost cameras, MP3 music players/recorders, and widespread mobile phone service also enhance our ability to communicate globally in text, audio, and video. This rapid (and accelerating) advance in communications “wiring” is happening as the Internet is rapidly growing the content it can transmit over it. Huge communities have formed in very short time. eBay has about 150 million members for buying and selling. Myspace connects about 30 million users, signing up 3.5 million new ones each month. Technorati now lists 31 million blogs - people publishing their own journals. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit that contains over 1 million articles, outstripping traditional encyclopedia publications. In China, hundreds of millions of people play the same video game. 60 million Skype users can use their computers to place phone calls to each other for free. There are free web sites to store photographs, videos, access email, or create blogs. A new model of web interaction, sometimes called [Web 2.0| http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html], is characterized by greater individual control and content as well as richer networks of connections. These changes mark a stunning reversal from an era of scarcity to an era of abundance. For example, an organization could create a system for 1 million users to have unlimited electronic mail, a blog (journal of activities), photo archives, video archives, wiki workspaces (openly editable storage areas) for the cost of basic internet connections. They could create audio or video “podcasts” – their own personal broadcast system. They could tag their information as they saw fit so that they could find each others’ postings. They could use a free service to translate text from one language to another (not perfectly – yet). They could carry audio or video information from an Internet café or office in town to play or record in remote villages on battery powered gadgets – or even mobile phones. The early days of broadcast networks were characterized by a central broadcasting source and N listeners. The value of the network grew directly with the number of the listeners. The Ethernet and the Internet came along, which introduced a rapidly increasing value with the number of participants, called the [Network Effect|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect]. This also introduced a notion of “smart edge” network design, putting the intelligence of the network on the edges, relegating the network to simply transmitting bits from one edge of the network to the other. This was an inversion of the “smart center” model of network that the phone company preferred. They wanted the network to intelligently handle the information (at a fee), and use “dumb” peripherals to do so (the standard telephone). The [End to End principle|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle] was a momentous shift in our network thinking, spurred partly by the vision of David P. Reed, who also extended our network vision to include group forming networks. If each node in the network were actually a group, the value of the network rises exponentially with the number of members of the network: ;:"Even [Metcalfe's Law|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_Law] understates the value created by a group-forming network as it grows. Let's say you have a GFN (Group Forming Network) with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2^n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2^n. I call that [Reed's Law|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed's_law]. And its implications are profound." One of the major constraints limiting the growth and value of Reed Networks is attention. As we have seen with the profusion of profusion of information on the Internet, the constraint is not lack of money, but rather lack of attention. Networked relationships are fundamentally different from the hierarchical relationships that have dominated much of our industrial age thinking. Here is a quote from [Siegfred Woldheck|http://www.nabuur.com/news/conversation.html], founder of [Nabuur|http://www.nabuur.com/modules/global_welcome/] : ;:"Businesses, NGOs and governments are all 'hierarchies' – organizations with management structure, controls and rank. A hierarchy is designed to carry out its own plans with its own people and its own funds. After 1000 or 1500 projects, most hierarchies are stressed to the limit. The effort needed to keep such a thing together – to manage the staff, to communicate internally and externally, to maintain proper bookkeeping procedures, etc, etc takes up nearly all the available energy. ;:All these organizations have drawers full of work that they would like to do — but they will never get it all done. This is not a matter of lack of time, lack of people or lack of funds. Working a bit harder or smarter will not be enough. The system is simply full. Now... at the same time... there is a huge reservoir of people — both in the north, in the developed world, and in the south, the less developed places... People who are eager to commit some time and energy directly to other people. This cannot be facilitated at the proper scale by hierarchical institutions. ;:In other words, there is no shortage in the knowledge, funds, manpower, contacts or other resources; what is lacking is a trusted, effective institutional format that allows many people to interact directly around local issues." In other words, the key to unlocking the value of the network is to create richer forms of linking and relationship – ways of paying attention. We have an abundance of people who want to help and participate: the scarcity is in our ability to connect them in meaningful ways. How can we use this technology to make the world a better place? The network capabilities emerging globally are happening whether individuals like it or not. The question becomes, what can we do to use them to make the world a better place? This is a tricky question. We have a large sector of the economy already trying to do this. Developed countries have spent or invested $1 trillion in loans or aid in less developed countries over the past 50 years. There are 1.4 million registered non-profit organizations in the United States alone, as well as 275,000 NGOs operating in Brazil. Workshop participant Thomas Dichter, Author of [Despite Good Intentions, Why Development Assistance to the Third World has Failed |http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155849393X/sr=8-1/qid=1143058129/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7596274-1946562?%5Fencoding=UTF8] , a 35 year veteran of the international development industry, writes: ;:“The development organization is in a constant state of anxiety and ambiguity. For here we are, with no proven product, facing, to say the least, a rather flawed sort of “demand,” committed by the very nature of our mission to seeing fewer rather than more “customers.” Meanwhile, we are seeking greater “market share.” Rather odd.” Workshop participant David Ellerman, author of [Helping People Help Themselves, From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Developmental Assistance | http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472031422/qid=1143058372/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-7596274-1946562?s=books&v=glance&n=283155] speaks of autonomy-respecting aid, echoing the smart edges/smart center debate of communications era. Referring to participants as doers and helpers (rather than recipients and donors), he notes: ;:“In a top-down or planning model, an agency offers incentives to mobilize agents of change to bring about a certain desired transformation. This may work if the transformation only concerns various stroke-of-the-pen reforms that can be implemented by external motivation. But for most structural or institutional reforms, changes in short-term behavior incentivized by the agency will be quite insufficient to induce a transformation… An external helper can at best locate, not create, the agents of change and then perhaps help them along.” [John Seeley Brown and John Hagel|http://www.vnclusters.com/Papers/hagel.pdf] discuss ways of using strengthening the edges of the network to “pull” rather than a center that “pushes”: ;:”Pull models are emerging as a response to growing uncertainty. Instead of dealing with uncertainty through tighter control, pull models do the opposite. They seek to expand the opportunity for creativity by local participants dealing with immediate needs. To exploit the opportunities created by uncertainty, pull models help people to come together and innovate in response to unanticipated events, drawing upon a growing array of highly specialized and distributed resources. Rather than seeking to constrain the resources available to people, pull models strive to continually expand the choices available while at the same time helping people to find the resources that are most relevant to them. Rather than seeking to dictate the actions that people must take, pull models seek to provide people on the periphery with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise. Push models treat people as passive consumers (even when they are producers like workers on an assembly line) whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers. Pull models treat people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of learning that are tailored to their specific needs.” Networks introduce an entirely different model for connecting people and ideas. For example, a [village in Mali writes on the web|http://www.nabuur.com/modules/villages_issues/index.php?villageid=125]: ;:“A group of Dogon youth has settled in the city of Bamako. They try to support their families by guiding tourists around their home villages. Unfortunately the pay they receive from tour operators is very low. Therefore they want to set up their own web site to offer their services directly to tourists.” A group called [MyTown|http://www.mytowninc.org/] in Boston has been doing something that may be relevant to the group in Mali: ;:“Since 1995, MyTown has trained and employed over 200 low and moderate-income Boston teens in our youth development program where they have learned about the history of their families, neighborhoods, and city and developed skills to create and lead historical walking tours and presentations for more than 8,000 Boston residents and visitors…MyTown believes that young people and communities can realize the power local history has in increasing youth activism and decreasing the stereotypes that stigmatize urban neighborhoods.” Is there a pattern here? Can these groups share ideas, try it out in other places, and each learn from the other? Is there some way to create a direct “end to end” connection that would allow the exchange of information between folks in Mali and Boston, and elsewhere? Workshop participants June Holley and Valdis Krebs call this [network weaving|http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf ]: ;:“What does a vibrant, effective community network look like? Research has been done to discover the qualities of vibrant networks. Sociologists, physicists, mathematicians, and management consultants have all discovered similar answers about effective networks. The amazing discovery is that people in organizations, routers on the internet, cells in a nervous system, molecules in protein interactions, animals in an ecosystem, and pages on the WWW are all organized in efficient network structures that have similar properties… As the weaver connects to many groups, information is soon flowing into the weaver about each group’s skills, goals, successes and failures. An astute weaver can now start to introduce clusters that have common goals/interests or complementary skills/experiences to each other. As clusters connect, their spokes to the hub can weaken, freeing up the weaver to attach to new groups.” Communications between the branches of a hierarchy (or multiple hierarchies) is difficult. A network approach, however, allows much greater connectivity and relationship. If a network’s growth is limited by attention, then a model in which people pay attention to each other creates a supply for attention at the same time demand for attention increases. This opens up the possibility of a viral model – a network in which nodes create other nodes spontaneously. [David Reed|http://www.upliftacademy.org/reed] writes: ;:“We use the term viral architecture to mean a system that is adopted “virally” as that term has come to be used in the marketing industry. Viral adoption refers to a system architecture that can be adopted incrementally, and gains momentum as it scales. The growth behavior of such a system can be called viral growth.” Workshop participant [Marcia Odell|http://givingspace.org/marcia.htm] developed the [WORTH|http://www.pactworld.com/initiatives/worth/] program in Nepal, teaching women literacy and savings-led microfinance. In this model, women save their own money, increasing their self-control and eliminating debt-based obligations to others. She also noted that the idea was viral. After a presentation in Kenya, someone had taken her ideas and [implemented them on their own|http://www.pactworld.org/initiatives/worth/marcias_corner.htm]. ;:“In Migori, Kenya, while Erica and I enjoyed a cup of tea following a WORTH orientation meeting in the community, thirteen groups of women set about developing by-laws for new WORTH groups that they formed on the spot, even though there was no specific program start-up in sight.” Jeffrey Ashe of Oxfam International has implemented similar savings-led microfinance programs and noted that about 25% of the groups of [Saving for Change|http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/where_we_work/east_asia/news_publications/feature_story.2005-09-20.6945872013 ] groups spontaneously create additional groups, confirming again a viral spread of the idea. ;:“Oxfam America is working with local partners in Cambodia, Mali, and Senegal to develop a community finance approach that trains poor people to save what they can and distribute it within their villages—for an investment of about $20 per savings group member. Oxfam and its partners use this methodology to combat poverty on a large scale with low costs, local control, and an easy-to-replicate format, said Jeffrey Ashe, the manager of the Community Finance program. "What you want to do is drop that pebble in the water and see the ripples spread," he said.” We can think of savings-led microfinance as a pattern of uplift, which seems to be working as a simple but viral model. We will be calling this NanoFinance. Is there some way that we can use the network capabilities that we have today to spread this pattern more broadly and more quickly? What can we learn from the viral spread of the idea to improve it and use it for other patterns of uplift? What can we learn from connecting local clusters of people around the world, sharing their ideas and patterns? What value can we create by helping folks pay attention to each other? We will be demonstrating some initial episodes for [Better World Radio|http://upliftacademy.org/podcast], an internet-based model of distributing audio information at a very low cost any where in the world. Connecting 6 billion people to help each other help themselves is an issue of massive abundance, not scarcity. It no longer constrained by the notion of “too many problems, not enough money,” but rather, how do we weave such a network? One of the tools the Uplift Academy is exploring is the [Pay Attention Toolkit|http://upliftacademy.org/attention] , a scalable approach to allow folks to pay attention to what’s working and feedback this information so that good things will bubble up and attract more attention. The Paris workshop will be asking this question from an eclectic group of people from around the world. We hope that we will be able to create a “strawman” architecture to describe this network. With the appropriate answers, perhaps we can move from a model of scarcity: “we have too many problems and too little money” – to one of abundance: “How do we 6 billion people to help each other help themselves?” [Please register on-line|https://www.kmcluster.com/reg/CDG] or contact munnecke@gmail.com for more information.