The Quest for Meaning in Public Choice
A distinctive slice of Elinor Ostrom’s work. A roadmap for future cooperative economics. At the wonderful Cooperative Commons. h/t Howard Rheingold.
Author Archives: ontojoe
Planning
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Another thing that is clear, you can’t untangle knotty social discourses using a GANTT Chart. Project planning fails for deliberation, negotiation. Concentrated valuation sequences — they don’t work in a world of project planning that doesn’t allow things to go backwards.
In deals, things go backward all the time.
Get multi-stakeholder processes out of email and out of the structured project planning process.
Matching New Media To Democratic Practice
The Kettering foundation has developed a detailed and vital study of how cooperative solutions can be generated in the new media knowledge space in which we operate.
Social Entrepreneurship
An important component of what we are doing falls in the domain of having an impact on social entrepreneurship and how it’s modeled and extended. More. To. Come
How to Create a Group Mind | 100 Trillion Connections
A healthy mind welcomes and thrives on diversity of opinions, including contradictory ones. ~Duncan Work
Thinking, Planning, and Acting
At its core, E-Nact! is a platform to accelerate and humanize multi-stakeholder thinking, planning, and action. Its design enables participants to step back from the swirl of day-to-day concerns and slow the process of consideration down so that their thought processes can rise to the meet the challenges and complex dynamics inherent in multi-party processes. Consciously choosing a safe place to think, consider, ponder, and explore, with the attendant capacity to express and delineate those thoughts is, we think, a unique design point.
We assert that successful group planning processes require an up-front investment in alignment — of language and the background of understanding, as well as of the sense of relatedness shared among the parties. Too often, the prevailing mindset of competition and confrontation becomes the mechanism that groups employ as the background for their interactions. This is not a fault, but merely a default. E-Nact! brings the unexamined approaches to light such that participants have the opportunity adopt a new mindset and new mechanisms for expressing and balancing interests, and doing so in a way that opens new possible horizons for solution that would not have been otherwise explored.
Action is intrinsic to E-Nact!’s design. Fundamentally, its purpose is to orient participants to follow through on the commitments they make as part of the process such that accomplishment of the intended outcomes is assured. E-Nact! introduces a literacy of action orientation that situates participants in state of balance and ease with regard to the outcomes from the process.
Strengthening and Building
All the conventional wisdom with start ups these days regards failure. Fail fast, fail often, but learn, incorporate the feedback from the failure. And strengthen and build. Rinse, Repeat. Kind of like that.
E-Nact! has taken on a life of its own as an complex organism. It’s coming together-developing-falling back some time, but action and focus are present.
A Place to Stand
E-Nact! starts with a fundamental principle:
Coordination and collaboration for the sustainable well-being of all will be the fundamental operating principle of all governments, economies, and communities.
This is the meta-level issue we are addressing. We would assert this is not the case today. We further assert that recognition of how this is not the case — that a level of awareness more broadly engendered in the culture would represent a win for humanity and for the planet.
We seek to implement technology that recognizes the exquisite capacity that human beings possess to communicate, to express. Technology too often drifts into replacing human expression and capacity; we seek to leverage and amplify these fundamental capacities.
From inaction to enaction
It seems obvious but it’s an effective originating premise. From in action to enaction.
We work on developing the right terms, and terms that spring to hand as people work through the model of thins kind of enlightened settlement process. We are going after the apparent inaction – the status quo doubling down and locking up.
We are the people who build a bigger model. Would you like to join us?
Michael Sussman and Olivia Parr-Rud on Integrating Collaboration with Competition in business government and society
A treat — a far-reaching discussion of the new approaches called for by an ever-complexifying commercial and social sphere.
E-Nact Solutions LLC 
