We are working with former Rockridge colleagues (and others who’ve since joined our ranks) to bridge the gap between insightful knowledge about the mind, on the one hand, and the political world, on the other. A major thrust will be to restore trust in the political process by helping people understand the manipulative and deceptive techniques used to spread propaganda, reducing the effectiveness of these harmful techniques while empowering citizens with vital self-knowledge. Along the way, activists and advocates will gain valuable skills - and new professional practices - to enhance their efforts to build a more progressive world.

Want to learn more about it? Contact us directly with inquiries or sign up on our mailing list to receive updates as things progress.

And look for us in the upcoming issue of Environmental Forum, a publication of theEnvironmental Law Institute, where we explore the importance of cognitive policy for the environmental movement in the cover article.

The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.

The trick, of course, is to structure the process appropriately.

A tremendous breakthrough occurred during the middle of the 20th Century when two metaphors emerged in the physical sciences:

The new understanding, a foundation of information science, was that the form of physical structures can be understood as abstract representations and that they could be conceptualized as having an inherent “potential” which physicists call potential energy. So it became possible to think of information as the structure of energy and the potential work that energy could do in its current configuration.

What does this have to do with crowd-sourcing? Everything. You see, it is not sufficient to simply stand above the masses with a megaphone and ask questions. The potential work that the community is capable of will be influenced considerably by the structure of the community. So, for example, there needs to be an easy and cheap way for people to communicate with each other if ideas are to be exchanged. The internet provides considerable structure to communications with its myriad pathways and low cost routes for shipping snippets of thought.

There also exists a creativity potential through the contexts of interaction that shape what the situation means to participants. This is evident in scenes of genius (called “scenius” by some, as I’ve written earlier) where the context plays a vital role in shaping the inspiration of people who linger around. The “structure” of this component is immanently cultural and may be difficult to extract by emphasizing the material environment in isolation from its conceptual landscape.

Care needs to be taken in building the right kind of community if crowd-sourcing is to succeed. Structure is vital in this process and should not be overlooked.

I am optimistic that crowds can solve our biggest problems. Ultimately, the solutions to our climate crisis, energy needs, and sagging economy will be shaped by the technologies of social organization. Figuring out the best ways to organize ourselves will be challenging work, no doubt about it. We’ll need to depend upon existing structures - like the internet - to transform the pooling of effort into success.

Technorati Tags: community, crowdsourcing

This is a social solution. The community is built around the ideas of (1) producing energy locally and (2) sharing in the effort through a common infrastructure. In order for this to work, the homes must be structured in such a way that neighbors are in close proximity to one another.

Neighborly behavior is the future for solar.

This idea is taking hold in a number of places. Another example is the partnership between Global Green and Community Housingworks that has produced the first fully solar powered apartment community in the state of California. This community includes 54 homes and several business sites that share the wealth of abundant sunlight.

And that’s not all. Community Housingworks provides resources to its tenants including courses in financial management, special needs housing opportunities, and leadership training for broader civic engagement. Developers are shaping the future of these homes with a focus on community.

Already have a home? No problem. Home owners can get organized and purchase solar upgrades in bulk, reducing the cost for each installment and distributing the risk across the entire neighborhood. Community solar programs are offered by the company, SolarCity, to encourage “buying in bulk.”

Yes, of course there is a need for new technological innovations like MIT’s prototype solar dish that may prove to be the most energy efficient and affordable in the world. But the real breakthroughs will be in the ways we integrate these techologies into the structures of our communities.

Mark my words on this one - 21st Century innovations will be overwhelmingly social in nature. Ultimately, it will be about our vision of what it means to be a community.

Technorati Tags: community, energy, localization, solar, urban design

As we entered the park I noticed the sign photographed here. It’s meaning was immediately clear to me. The red image evoking impressions of danger (and the need to be cautious) and blood (images of mangled bears). A few miles down the road, I saw the same sign again. It clicked right away: These signs were placed along side the road in places where cars had hit a bear.

I had discovered a very clear example of environmental cognitive policy.

Throughout our posts here on hivethrive, Evan and I look for ways to incorporate our understandings of human cognition into green business, environmental solutions, and politically significant events. Yesterday, Evan wrote about how findings in neuroscience can help explain the effectiveness of misinformation campaigns. Smears work because of the way our brains structure information during the learning process. Today, I’d like to sketch how the policy at Yosemite to place signs where bears have been injured or killed is built upon insights into the nature of our lived experience.

I’ve written elsewhere about the idea that every policy has a material part (the “expression in the world”) and a cognitive part (the ideas, values, and understandings that allow it to make sense). This distinction can be seen clearly with the Speeding Kills Bears signs. The material part is the metal signs and their placement in locations where bears have been hit by cars within the park. The cognitive part includes the understanding that cars often harm wildlife, that speeding cars have a more difficult time swerving to miss obstacles, and that many bears emerge onto the roadways in Yosemite National Park.

What do human brains have to do with this? It is helpful to know how information is stored in the neural circuitry of our brains and is shaped heavily by our past experiences. Thinking involves simulation of past experiences in order to make sense of current happenings. Remembering is more like “re-enacting a story from the past” than retrieving an item from a drawer. So when I am driving through the park, my body is immersed in a stream of perceptions that make sense from times in the past when I have ridden in a car. I feel the familiar sway as the car veers around turns - familiar because it has happened so many times before.

What’s more, I have experienced the shock of impact when the vehicle I was in had killed an animal. Many bugs have been smashed to death on my windshield. There have been a few more traumatic moments when birds crashed into the grill and, more potent still, a few tragic moments of death for dogs that ran out in front of me before I could swerve to miss. All of these lived experiences shape my emotional responses to a sign about bears in the wilderness.

I also live in a country where cars rule the road. Many a time have I seen small white crosses appear where a loved one was killed in a car accident. When these ceremonial objects appear alongside the road, often adorned affectionately with flowers and a photo of the beloved whose life was lost, I know right away that this is a place of mourning. I am reminded again each time that cars can take life away quickly and violently.

The same is true for bears.

This wealth of knowledge, built up in my bodily experiences of the world, is the source of an effective policy to slow drivers as they travel through Yosemite’s winding roads. It is not the outcome of benefits weighed against costs that causes me to ease up on the gas and ready myself for braking “just in case.” Rather it is the full bodily experience, lived day in and day out, that makes these signs work so well.

Cognitive policies can be powerful and consequential, shaping human behavior toward positive ends. They allow us to clearly understand the consequences of our actions, helping us to act in accordance with our most deeply help values - especially the sacred value of life itself.

Technorati Tags: cognitive policy, environmental policy

How do we solve this problem? Is it sufficient to elect leaders to represent us and craft public policies on our behalf? Or is there a more active role we should play?

I am inspired by the approach Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has recently taken. He sent a request out to his email list for his constituents to tell him how they are doing economically. Here is how he describes the response he received:

Dear Friend,

As gas and oil prices soared and as the nation slipped into recession, I made a request to Vermonters on my e-mail list. I asked them to tell me what was going on in their lives economically. That was it. Frankly, I expected a few dozen replies. I was amazed, therefore, when my office received over 600 responses from all across the state, as well as some from other states. This small booklet contains a few of those letters.

It is one thing to read dry economic statistics which describe the collapse of the American middle class. It is another thing to understand, in flesh and blood terms, what that means in the lives of ordinary Americans. Yes, since George W. Bush has been in office 5 million Americans have slipped into poverty, 8 million have lost their health insurance and 3 million have lost their pensions. Yes, in the last seven years median household income for working-age Americans has declined by $2,500. Yes, our country, for the first time since the Great Depression, now has a zero personal savings rate and, all across the nation, emergency food shelves are being flooded with working families whose inadequate wages prevent them from feeding their families.

Statistics are one thing, however, and real life is another. The responses that I received describe the decline of the American middle class from the perspective of those people who are living that decline. They speak about families who, not long ago, thought they were economically secure, but now find themselves sinking into desperation and hopelessness.

These e-mails tell the stories of working families unable to keep their homes warm in the winter; workers worried about whether they’ll be able to fill their gas tank to get to their jobs; and seniors, who spent their entire lives working, now wondering how they’ll survive in old age. They describe the pain and disappointments that parents feel as they are unable to save money for their kids’ college education, and the dread of people who live without health insurance.

In order to try and break through the complacency and isolation inside the Washington Beltway, I have read some of these stories on the floor of the Senate. It is imperative that Congress and the corporate media understand the painful reality facing the middle class today so that we can develop the appropriate public policy to address this crisis.

Let me conclude by thanking all of those people who have so kindly shared their lives with me through these letters. I know that for many of you this was not an easy thing to do.

The booklet he created is published on his website. You can download it here as a PDF. I would like to focus on a potential lesson we can all learn from this activity.

When society enters a state of crisis, such as the economic situation we find ourselves in today in the United States, there is an opportunity to call upon the people to come together and build new foundations to place the community on more solid ground. The simple act of Senator Sanders - to ask for the sharing of stories - makes real the connection we all share. When so many are suffering in similar ways, it becomes clear that we cannot truly be on our own.

If it is possible to bring together the suffering of others, is it not also possible to bring together our wisdom? What might happen if Sanders followed up with a request for local solutions to the problems people face? The working presumption of elite democracy (as contrasted with popular democracy) is that the masses are a rowdy and unruly bunch - not the place one looks for solutions. What if this presumption is wrong?

In my experience, people are generally pretty clever at finding solutions when they feel empowered to do so. The source of their empowerment is often a support group that provides resources, wisdom from past experience, and helping hands when it is time to get the work going. This coming together is a precursor of collective decision-making. It is the starting point of responsible governance. And it is a place of opportunity where crisis brings about new possibilities.

I’d like to see the democratic process applied to building solutions. What an experiment it could be.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, democracy, economy

This notion of genius emerging on “the scene” has been dubbed scenius by Brian Eno. Learn more about it here.

(Thanks to Rikard Linde for passing the link along.)

Here’s an excerpt:

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

I think there is some merit to this idea. The scene at the Rockridge Institute was quite stimulating, especially when a “random meeting” would emerge out of a question from one researcher to another. Pretty soon there were five people sitting around the table - as passersby got sucked into the conversation - and myriad insights would fly into the light.

This is a special case of the wisdom of crowds where the cultural environment itself is so fertile that new ways of thinking emerge from no one in particular. Many of the ideas I have now could not have come about through solitary introspections. They were incubated over the 15 month period of immersion in such a stimulating environment.

Of course, these scenes are difficult to engineer. Top-down controls do as little in this context as they would in a garden. The dynamic requires ongoing growth in fruitful directions that are typically impossible to predict ahead of time. Yet, they still emerge on occasion when the conditions above are met.

Makes me wonder how such scenes might emerge around entrepreneurial efforts…

Technorati Tags: crowd sourcing, innovation, open source

Town folks came together and formed a group called Felton FLOW (Friends of Locally Owned Water) to discuss what they should do. As of today, they are in control of their local water supply.

How did this happen? Learn about the power of people below the fold.

First, a brief comment about framing. The concepts underlying our reasoning shape what we perceive to be possible. The people of Felton recognized this intuitively when they realized that the central issue of concern was the locus of control: Should their water be controlled by investors on the other side of the world or should it be controlled locally by the people impacted directly by its management? The answer was probably obvious to them from the get-go… they wanted “locally owned water.” This is how they framed themselves when they chose the name Friends of Locally Owned Water. It was not the name itself that has the power to shift people’s thinking, but rather the way of thinking behind it that resonated so influentially with other community members.

So what did the members of FLOW do to successfully defeat a multinational corporation (and the 3rd largest private water utility in the world)? They applied collective decision-making through their local government. The first step was to create a local water management organization, which they named the San Lorenzo Valley Water District. This management team was comprised of local land managers who had a clear stake in the long-term viability of the local water supply. Then, the community members sought to purchase the water. A detailed description of their struggles can be found here. Their argument, as presented on their website, clearly promotes the benefits of locally owned water:

Under local control, if you have a problem, the people who answer the phone will not be in some distant office in Illinois or Indiana, they will be here in San Lorenzo Valley. And the person doing the repair will not be based in Monterey County, they will live and work full time in our valley and report to a local board of directors. If we don’t like how the system is operating, we won’t have to petition the Public Utilities Commission for relief through a bureaucratic maze. The SLV water district board is accountable to us the voters in regularly scheduled, democratic elections. We will control our water and watershed, not a foreign company with distant investors and directors whose primary motivation is maximizing their company’s profits.

We believe that affordable water is a right, not a commodity. Local ownership with local accountability will keep it that way for everyone in the San Lorenzo Valley.

What I find so inspiring is their ingenuity. They sought direct negotiations with RWE. When that didn’t work, they took matters into their own hands and pushed for the city government to use the right of eminent domain to claim the water for public use. The people voted for a property tax on water utility users to pay for the $10.5 million municipal bond that would be delivered to RWE for the land and water rights. And they won.

This is a clear case of community solving its own problems through local organizing and innovation. Think Global, Act Local is more than a clever slogan. It is a strategy for success.

This time the hero is the Small Town itself.

Technorati Tags: community, localization, privatization

A society changes from within - through a growing movement of its own citizens to form a society-wide intentional community.

Barack Obama’s conversation with his campaign staff presents this simple fact in a powerful way. Check it out. It’s well worth taking 13 minutes and pondering the reality behind-the-scenes for what is the biggest grassroots movement of our generation.

My wife, Jessica, has been closely involved with the Obama campaign since its humble beginnings, so I have personal experience with this phenomenon. It started with a riveting speech and the launch of a new kind of website. The website was built on social networking software that allows people to sign up, type in their zip code, and find a local group in their neighborhood to meet up with. If no such group exists, you are invited to start your own.

Jessica’s first experience with the campaign was a house party in Oakland. I was there too. It was a vibrant group of people (~15 of us) all huddled into a future friend’s living room. There were warm smiles all around and personal stories - most starting with some variation on “I’ve never done anything in politics before!”

The success of Obama’s campaign has not been his intelligence or eloquence (extraordinary though they are). It has been a powerful community comprised of millions of everyday people across the country who have gathered together in their own towns.

It is this community that brings political transformation. Only when the community speaks will real leadership emerge - breaking the mold of thought that claims a leader to be pulling the people along. The truth is far more nuanced and interesting. Real leadership is the act of exemplifying the aspirations and concerns of the people and providing a beacon for the community to lift up and shine back on itself.

Real progress - real change - takes a community. So much for the myth of the lone hero who saves the inept community. That tired tale is finally being laid to rest.

- Joe

Technorati Tags: community, obama, social change

For those of you who have yet to experience this cool idea, here are a couple videos to help give a stronger impression of what we’re talking about.

This video is cool because it shows how a person who has a garden can transition their hobby into an economically viable business and provide healthy foods to their community at the same time.

This one is in Illinois! (I enjoyed the farmer’s market in Urbana when I lived there, but didn’t know about CSA at the time.)

This just goes to show you that when people come together new things are possible.

- Joe

Technorati Tags: community supported agriculture, csa, food, organic farming

How does this way of thinking hold up to the real world? Not so well, actually.

There are many different ways to think about the world. Some ideas about community contradict each other. One view may hold that each person has a fixed place in the order of things. Authority figures determine what each member of the community should or should not do. Another may hold that each person engages with a web of shifting relationships. Prescriptions about how to behave are developed “on the fly” as each member responds to the situation at hand - preferably with strong moral sentiments about how people should be treated that is grounded in a sense of basic dignity and equality for everyone.

It just so happens that I am doing a bit of “light” reading right now with The Big Book of Concepts by Gregory Murphy (a psychology prof at NYU). It is a 600 page tome about the latest and greatest findings in psychology about what concepts are and how they work.

One thing that he writes about extensively is what are called “typicality effects” for concepts - where some members of a category are easier to identify and reason with than others. So if I ask you to think of a bird, you’ll probably think of something like a robin or sparrow instead of a penguin or ostrich.

Is this funny little feature of our mental categories important to societal transformation? I think so. If the most typical ideas in our culture stand at odds with our collective well-being, they should be challenged and replaced with a different set of ideas.

When we talk about community, it will help to sketch out what it is and how it works in each setting. Otherwise, it may seem confusing when community is talked about in different ways. I know that I have muddled things a bit in my posts here. Is community the collection of people sharing books as an alternative to buying them new? Is it the email list that MoveOn mobilizes for political action? Might it be the awareness of societal impacts in alternative legal structures for business?

In each of these specific examples, there is something vaguely held in common - namely that I am alluding to collections of people who all fit into some category. Does this ambiguity make me unclear as a writer? Or is it more about the way our brains construct categories?

It may also be helpful to know that our concepts have structures to them that allow for the contradictions alluded to above. These “contested concepts” are the ideas we hold most dear: freedom, fairness, democracy, art, and yes, community (and many more).

Just as the gestalt switch in the picture at the top of this post cannot be a face and a vase at the same time, the contested meanings of our ideas cannot simultaneously hold contradictory meanings. As we envision a new and better world, it is our entrepreneurial duty to think clearly about our ideas and promote the ones that coincide with our goals.

So, I’ll ask the question: “What are the ideas that give meaning to a progressive community?”

Technorati Tags: community