Stewardship is similar to leadership. It assumes the initial functions of leadership: it reaches out to a community, extends invitations for collaboration, puts pieces together, and nurtures a project once it gets going. Stewards know that to grow collaboration, it is necessary to create a space of sharing and engagement. Transparency, flexibility, and generousity are all important here.

Stewards watch over the earth. They are the guardians of life as an evolving process.

Stewardship is a feature of sustained and successful collaboration. The good steward is a person who assumes responsibility for their role in a project and checks in at regular intervals to see that the project is proceeding correctly. In open projects and think tanks, stewards watch over the evolving discussion and steer it by providing perspectives on where the discussion is at, in the sense of what has been achieved, and what needs to be achieved, to complete the project.

Social cohesion and innovation need not be enemies of one another. Under the syncretistic gaze of a good steward, it is possible for a project to evolve in various directions without coming apart at the seams.

[This post is based on the co-authored article, 'Online Collaboration Doesn't Happen By Magic' [Coalitionblog Oct 2010])

Meanwhile the occupation grows day by day.

If camp in Manhattan makes the doyens of the status quo feel nervous, the explosion of Occupy Together events across the US last weekend will have sent anxiety levels through the roof. There were ‘Occupy’ camps in 70 cities across the nation last weekend. More events are planned for the coming days and weeks in the US and other countries.

Political leaders must be wondering what is going on. (‘Who are these kids? Would they vote for me?’) To be fair, it is difficult to say exactly what the the protesters want. They have no single message or identity. They represent, they claim, the 99% who are excluded by the standing political and economic system (the top 1% of the US population owns 40% of the wealth). The way the movement has accelerated seems to follow the pattern set in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world earlier this year: a hardened contingent of dissidents occupy public space; footage of their mistreatment by police is disseminated via Facebook and Twitter; this consolidates the sense of injustice and inequality that inspired their actions in the first place.

Last week, the movement crossed a threshold. A localized set of swarm events evolved into a distributed swarm network.

OccupyWallStreet is a new kind of political movement. The fact that the protesters have not leveled any political demands is significant. They are allowing the 99% to define the movement in their own way, creating a clamor of grievances that works surprisingly well to consolidate actions. In fact, the protesters are refusing to engage in traditional political action per se. They have no desire to follow the Tea Party’s lead, starting with mass rallies and using them to enlist representatives to sign petitions, spearhead door knocking campaigns, put pressure on elected officials, and so on. Matt Stoller rightly describes OccupyWallStreet as ‘anti-political’. To be precise: the movement is political, but this is a different kind of politics, which seeks to circumnavigate the tactics and fora of established political action.

This is a point that many commentators fail to appreciate. Lawrence Lessig, for example, wonders if OccupyWallStreet might be the movement to ‘call out’ and clean up the US Congress.

[The aim of] #OccupyWallSt should be to call out this corruption, and unite a movement across the nation to demand that we change the system that permits this corruption. This is the root in Thoreau’s “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.” This movement could be that one.

This is hoping for too much – and too little. It seems patronizing to assume that the fate of this ‘anti-political’ movement is to acquiesce to political reality and allow itself to be focused into a weapon for those fighting a well-known enemy on a familiar terrain. No doubt there are people in the Occupy movement who will heed Lessig’s call and apply themselves to the task of cleaning up Congress. But to see this as the destiny of the movement is to underestimate the power of the movement itself. To understand the true potential of the Occupy movement, we need to reflect on how the collective voice of the protesters is giving shape to a new vision of political culture, reigniting the hopes and dreams of those who are paying attention to it, in the US and elsewhere.

OccupyWallStreet is not a political movement in the traditional sense. It is a countercultural swarm. We need to see it as a swarm to understand why people are drawn to it, and what makes it the most important political force on the planet today.

The traditional job of social movements is to present a collective challenge to political institutions in the name of freedom, justice, or rights. The most powerful movements of the 20th century were identity-based movements, which created huge mobile blocks of power by gathering the oppressed and disenfranchised of the earth under the flag of united identities: workers, women, blacks, the colonized, and so on. ‘We, the oppressed X, gather together to challenge the forces amassed against us’. This is the logic of the ‘new’ social movements of the late 20th century. The new social movements profoundly reshaped Western societies. Notably, however, they didn’t achieve this by transforming the operating system of these societies: liberal capitalism. These movements ‘called out’ liberal capitalism and insisted that it operates in a manner consistent with its founding principles, ensuring rights and opportunities for all. In doing so, they improved life for a large proportion of society. But, at the same time, they consolidated liberal capitalism by demonstrating how inclusive and adaptable the operating system could be.

It is not my intention to demean or diminish the achievements of the new social movements. My point is that these movements have political limits, set by the system that they chose to work within. We see the limits of these movements when we compare and contrast the way that they shape the identities of their members with swarm movements. Simplifying a little, we can say that traditional movements shape and transform their member’s identities in the following way: first, by orienting thought in relation to a (mostly negative and critical) ‘cognitive map’ of how things work (referring to the capitalist system, patriarchy, the military-industrial complex, colonialism, or the coldest of cold monsters, the state); second, corralling identity in terms of a unitary social class or group (workers, women, ‘the youth’, gays, the oppressed, etc); and finally, by activating the movement by steering its energies towards contesting established political and legal structures.

Joe Brewer’s fourfold model of situated identity provides a useful tool for mapping this process of identity transformation. The process looks like this:

Swarm movements shape identity in a completely different way. First off, they are are issue- or cause-based, rather than identity-based, movements. Instead of seeking to reduce the movement to a single set of grievances representing the struggles of a single group identity, swarm movements affirm the diversity of participants as their fundamental strength. This diversity is irreducible to a single identity, but it is powerful when focused on a common cause. A recent post on the Occupy Together Facebook page underscores this idea:

‘We should remember that there are many voices in this movement and as much diversity among the protesters as there is in 99% of our population. These different backgrounds, philosophies, and affiliations can and should come together under a single cause: to end the corporate greed, corruption, and interference that has affected all of us’.

A second point of difference between traditional and swarm movements concerns what these movements seek to achieve. Traditional movements focus on challenging and changing institutions. The goals of these movements are thus extrinsic to the movements themselves: they are achieved as a result of movement activity. Swarms can (and usually do) set extrinsic goals. Their primary goal, however, is to sustain the critical mass that holds the network together. As a result, movement activity is focused more on the intrinsic goal of empowering the swarm than any extrinsic goal the movement might hope to achieve. This can make swarms look unfocused from an external point of view. But within the movement, conditions tend to be highly conducive for participation. Swarm movements are intrinsically empowering and thus intrinsically rewarding for participants. Ultimately, participants do not need to look beyond the act of participation for a reason to join the swarm. Swarming is its own reward; the payoff is the empowerment that comes from swarming.

The intrinsic nature of swarm movements makes them hard to understand from an external perspective. Commentators like Lessig, who are familiar with a more traditional style of movement, often feel compelled to fabricate or imagine extrinsic goals in order to overcome the cognitive dissonance they experience surveying a mass social activity that doesn’t play by traditional rules. But the more we look for extrinsic goals, the further get from understanding what really inspires swarm activity. Swarms are based in a common sense of potential. What catalyzes a swarm movement is the sense that here, today, a new way of working and living together is possible.

Swarms are transformative movements. Insofar as members acknowledge a common sense of  identity, it is a transformative identity, a sense of being part of a movement that is changing the world.

We can map the logic of the identity shift involved in swarm movements as follows. First, a mass of people acquire a new cognitive map, representing an original conception of what they can achieve together as a network. The cognitive maps that inspire OccupyWallStreet and Occupy Together resonate with innovations in the online world. OccupyWallStreet is an ‘open space’ movement. The camp structure is an open API that anyone is free to hack into and explore using MeetUp as a Directory. The second step in the process comes when the mass of people who apply these cognitive maps start reflecting on how working together expands their common potential. This insight gives rise to the swarm. A swarm movement comes into being as a swarm when a mass collective grasps what it is capable of achieving en masse.

Swarms transform our shared sense of the possible. This is what draws people to these movements. It is the key to their unique political power.

Victor Hugo claimed that no army in the world can stand in the way of an idea whose time has come. No government or political institution can hold its ground when confronted with a new collective sense of what human beings are capable of doing and achieving en masse. Every major social transformation, from the Age of Revolutions to the present day, has been driven by a catalytic swarm. Swarm movements do not expend their energies by contesting the status quo. They reinvent it. Norms slide in all directions and political institutions are forced to keep up.

We can diagram the collective identity shift involved in swarm movements as follows:

Swarms are vectors of mass transformation. They sweep across societies on the diagonal and reset political cultures in their wake. The protesters in Liberty Square and across the US are engaged in a more serious business than contesting dominant institutions. They are knitting together new cognitive maps based on peer-to-peer strategies and open source ethics and reworking politics from below. As Douglas Rushkoff claims, ‘we are witnessing America’s first true Internet-era movement’. And it is transforming our sense of the possible. The surges of energy coming off the movement are immense. All that remains is that the movement finds a way of articulating its power without reducing its intrinsic diversity. If OccupyWallStreet can achieve this, it could literally change the world.

Perhaps the new mode of collective enunciation has already been created. The human microphone system that OccupyWallStreet protesters use to facilitate their General assemblies is a remarkable expression of direct democratic culture. Electronic amplification is banned in the square. The speaker says half a sentence and the crowd repeats it, so that everyone can hear. The speaker then completes the sentence and the crowd repeats this too. Matt Stoller, who has participate in the assemblies, described the experience as follows:

At first it’s extremely… annoying. And time-consuming. But after a few hours, it’s oddly refreshing. I felt completely included as part of a community forum even though I had not been a speaker. But what I realized is that the act of listening, embedded in the active reflecting of what the speaker was saying, created a far richer conversational space. Actually reflecting back to one another what someone just said is a technique used by therapists, and by pandering politicians. There is nothing so euphoric in a community sense as truly feeling heard. That’s what the general assembly was about, not a democracy in the sense of voting, but a democracy in the sense of truly respecting the humanity of everyone in the forum. It took work. It took patience. But it created a communal sense of power.

The human microphone system is a physical expression of the appreciative process that happens on the internet all the time. When a blogger posts something that others think is significant, they share the message through their networks, so that that others who are not included with the author’s networks may enjoy it too. In doing so, they affirm the incredible power of open networks to create collective knowledge and wisdom. OccupyWallStreet applies the same modus operandi to transformative political action. I see it as a living expression of the intuition behind ‘Coalition of the Willing’:

Let’s take our lead from Web 2.0 and the strategies of open source culture. It’s time to recover the true spirit of the 60s counterculture, with an internet-based swarm offensive aimed at triggering a 21^st century culture shift.

In the course of the weekend, we hope to hack together the basic structure of the Catalyst Network described in the film.

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a joint initiative between Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, NASA, and the World Bank. RHoK hackathons focus on creating open source solutions that impact on disaster response, risk reduction and recovery. RHoK-3, which is taking place at various location around the world, has a special focus on climate disaster solutions. We figure that this is the perfect environment to start working on the Coalition Catalyst.

The Silicon Valley hackathon will take place on the Google Campus, Mountain View, on Saturday, June 4th and Sunday June 5th, 2011. Coalition member Mark Junkunc will be on the ground leading the work effort. If you have questions about the event, please contact Mark or one other of the ‘owners’ on the CotW page on the RHoK site.

You can register for the Silicon Valley event here.

For directions to the Google Campus: http://goo.gl/WhTOw

Want to live in a more sustainable way but don’t want to get all worthy and accidentally blame a friend for causing climate change?

Then read The Otesha Handbook because that’s almost exactly why we wrote it.  At The Otesha Project we spend our days working with young people (this doesn’t make us old people) to transform day-to-day actions into little sustainable revolutions. But for some reason our work didn’t translate easily into good conversation.  Perhaps it’s a British thing, but sustainable development never seemed to be our friends’ favorite Friday night topics.

So we decided to write a book about it. We got together as many experts as we could, wrote The Otesha Handbook one chapter at a time over a year, and each month gave a new chapter to the world for free to download, read, share, and contribute to. Along the way, we incorporated stories that people shared with us, ending up with over 25 contributors in all. We wanted to spread and share good ideas – from cycling to free-cycling; from free-range to fair trade – and create social and environmental change through our everyday lives, so we focused on eight different themes – food, fashion, money, trade, water, media, energy and transport – and showcased personal stories, inspiring examples, and individual actions that everyone can take straight away, rather than just hammering on about the problems surrounding all of these issues. Our friends loved it, and people we’d never met downloaded it! Others told us it was better than Harry Potter, we weren’t sure how to take this, although it did make all the late nights fighting with endnotes and formatting templates worthwhile.

Basically, the Handbook is about kicking sustainability into the full light of day and making it dance – on a bike. It tells the story of the thousands of young people who want a more sustainable world now and aren’t going to wait for it. The Otesha Project is about making sustainability irresistible. Have a read and tell us what it kick-starts you into action! Follow us on Twitter @OteshaUK and like us on Facebook facebook.com/oteshauk.

a look inside the Handbook

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It’s easy to tell when a climate denier is really on an ideologically hate rant. They almost always bring up Al Gore’s name or use the word politics a lot in their diatribe. That’s the give-a-way.

Climatologists have known for decades that climate change is happening. Al Gore didn’t invent or make up climate change information. He just compiled it into an effective documentary from many scientific sources.

As the science progresses and gets more sophisticated, more is discovered. Weather patterns are regional and the snow storms are just that, weather. The operable word for climate related storms is: extreme. Many parts of America had very extreme weather events. A recent snowstorm was 2,000 miles across. You can see a satellite photo of it at NASA’s website. Ask Australia about extreme weather. They had the most extreme flooding ever seen in that region. If I had the space here, I could go add a very long list of extreme storms.

The bottom line is, CO2 concentrations have increased by 110 parts per million (PPM) in the last 150 years from burning fossil fuels. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more moisture rises and the more comes down in extreme storms. When Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth came out CO2 was 385 PPM, it is now 390 PPM and rising by 3 PPM per year. That’s a fact!

Rather than listening to ideological hate rants and following hearsay by people that have no clue what they are talking about, find out the real facts by following reliable scientific websites, get the science from the scientists not misinformed ideologues:

NASA http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
National Snow and Ice Data Center http://nsidc.org/
NOAA’s National Climate Data Center http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html

Richard Whiteford
Savebiosphere3@verizon.net

Q. What is GreenTribe? What are you trying to do? How did it get started?

The Green Tribe is a place for people to find practical environmental information – how to recycle a computer, what is the most water-efficient shower head, who are their local environmental agencies – and a place for people to work together towards sustainability. We want to gather all the people that are working individually for the environment, and provide them with tools that they need to work together, and take action as a mass.

We started with the basic idea that a large portion of the population is concerned about the environment, and wants to work to make the earth more sustainable, but the task feels overwhelming, and a lot of people feel like their individual efforts are like spitting in the wind. We wanted to create a space where these people could gather, and be invigorated by the number of people working alongside them, and work together to turn their individual actions into something massive.

From there the idea evolved into something really community driven, and what we have now is a place where people can go to learn, share work they’ve done, brainstorm, problem-solve, create strategies together, and ultimately take action and swarm to borrow your terminology.

Q. The Directory is a central feature. You’ve decided not to use a wiki for this – why not?

Well, right now the directory has rudimentary wiki-functionality – we request that people add or delete links with our submission form, then we review the submissions and add them to the directory. We emphatically want to grow to be an open-source venue in all aspects of the site and movement. When I say all aspects I mean the directory, blogging, campaigns and initiatives, social-networking, down to the store where we’d like users to decide, and even create the designs and items we sell.

Our problem is we don’t know how to start and manage all of these things openly at once. We’ve taken a first step, but in the spirit of open-source culture, we want to know from our users how to move towards a more open infrastructure.

The task at hand is a bit intimidating, and daunting, so we thought it best to take steps forward and allow the components of the website to evolve towards openness naturally. So at the moment we can give people something to use, continue to update and add content to the directory, and invite participation. But this is something on which we would seek input and direction from our users. For example: what is the best program to build a wiki directory? How do we build that infrastructure? What are the imperative functionalities that we must consider before launching it? We’re hoping that the green community will engage us and help lead and inform us as to what direction we should go to best serve the community. We’ve taken the first step, and launched a site that demonstrates clearly some of our direction. It was really important to us to get off the drawing board and into action. Now that we’ve launched we want to open up the evolution of our site to the community, and see what works and how.


Q. Green Tribe is an Action Hub. What are your plans for building this side of the project? Any particular strategies you’d like to share?

The main thing we want to do with the “take action” part of the Green Tribe is open it up entirely to the community. We want our users to identify the problems that are important to them, research them, come up with solutions, and strategies for action, and take action together. So we’ve implemented what we think are some good first steps for creating community:

1. Our blog is the mouthpiece that brings everyone’s ideas together. We post news and information on people’s projects in the hope of igniting a spark. If we get some people that are interested, we’ll keep going, ask our users to research the topic and think of solutions. We publish the best ideas, and then start to talk strategy. We post the community’s ideas as they come in, and invite experts to write guest blogs. Once we have a viable strategy we initiate the force of our userbase.

2. On top of that we’ve got the green club registry, where we want student and community groups to register their information, so that people can browse through, see who’s active in their area, and lend a hand, and groups can get in touch with each other to offer support, and coordinate regional campaigns.

3. In the tout section we feature awesome environmental projects sent in by our users. The idea is to give other environmental groups blueprints to take on awesome projects with impact, and contact with groups that have successfully pulled them off.


Q. Eco-branding (clothes, tote bags, water bottles, stickers) is an important part of the Tribe. How do you understand the relationship between branding and building your social network/action hub?

The branding is important in two respects. One – we’re allowing groups to raise money for their organization through the sale of our merchandise, which could be a vital source of income to student and community groups that are often underfunded. Second, community is essential to the success of our project. We need a lively culture of people sharing ideas and working off each other to create the best solutions and campaigns. Branding is an important tool to raise awareness, and build mass. 


Q. What does the future hold for GreenTribe?

An active community of people sharing ideas, working together to solve problems, and organizing action. Really what we’d like to see the most is us stepping more and more into the background as the community grows, and our users assuming control of the processes – from contributing links to starting conversation, and directing the initiatives. Hopefully from there we create a snowball rolling downhill, picking up ideas, with more and more people participating in the movement until we have a massive populist tool that directs environmental change.

The latter part of 2010 was an intense period of brainstorming, crowdsourcing, and collaboration for members of Coalition of the Willing. A volunteer team in Hamburg set up this blog, we started a translations wiki, and sought to broaden our community through two online MovementCamps. We launched http://cotw.cc, a community MediWiki and routing portal into the Coalition, and started using BetterMeans as a workflow management system.

We haven’t saved the world – not yet. But we haven’t been idle. We have been preparing a launching pad and landing space for the ultimate Coalition of the Willing, a global human swarm. There is much to do and a great way to go. But the pieces are coming together. We hope that you’ll continue to follow us and even help us out as we connect the dots through 2011 and prepare something truly awesome for 2012.

One thing that distinguishes Coalition of the Willing from other online networks is our open approach to leadership. We believe in emergent leadership. Swarms take shape through emergent leadership, as people step up to pursue common goals independently and collectively. Most of the things that we’ve achieved thus far have been achieved by emergent leaders – extraordinary individuals who saw an opportunity in helping build the Coalition and went for it. In many cases, people have contributed for no other reason than the fact that they believed in the Coalition itself. People have wanted to help create the Coalition of the Willing and be part of it.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the incredible people who have contributed to Coalition of the Willing to this point, and helped to make it what it is.

Let’s start with the film. Coalition of the Willing was an enormous production directed single-handedly by Simon Robson on zero budget. It involved twenty top international animation teams, totaling seventy seven people, all of whom worked on a pro bono basis. Collaborators included Adam Gault and Stefanie Augustine, Bran Dougherty-Johnson, Cassiano Prado, Mario de Toledo-Sader, Dave Baum, Decoy, Dom Del Torto, Dylan White and Andy Hague, Echolab, Foreign Office, Andreas Gebhardt, James Wignall, Betterment Bureau (Loyalkaspar), Sehsucht (Mate Steinforth), Mighty Nice, Parasol Island, Thiago Maia, World Leaders, Yum Yum London, Cristobal Infante, Ladyverd, Arctic Stock Images, Tim Dillon, Eggplant Digital, Marotori, Richard Das, Ademar Varela/Mind Bike, Kester Hynds, and Fernando Valente. Please let me know if I’ve left anyone out. You can find out about this extraordinary team of people on the film website. Clapham Road Studios donated Simon a workspace and a lighting rig to shoot the film. Gavin Little (aka Echolab) put together an incredible soundtrack that literally makes the film. Tim Dillon designed the beautiful film website, and put it together with the help of an interactive team including Eggplant Digital in Beijing.

This was the team that made the film and launched it. First generation coalitioners, so to speak. The second generation burst into being with the film release. People were writing to us from all over the world. They said: ‘How can I be part of this?’ Jörn Hendrik Ast was the first to step up. Jörn Hendrik is one of those incredible people who steps into your life and changes things for the better. He put together the blog that you are reading with help from the mighty Dirk Brünsicke.

Tausend Dank, guys. Without you, nothing.

About the same time, Michael Maranda from Chicago, Illinois, got in touch to say that he’d like to help evolve the project. Michael consults on movement building and info-strategies for the social benefit sector when he’s not wrestling with his kids. Michael and I were exploring ideas when Chris Watkins from Appropedia made contact. Things started to build from there. We put together http://cotw.cc – a platform and evolving resource – developed by Chris with assistance from Jason Smithson. On October 10, 2010, Michael and I MCed the first of two Movement Camps, which took place on a bespoke Drupal platform designed by Michael, with livestream and IRC links.

We scheduled the first Movement Camp to participate in 350.org’s Global Day of Action. OneClimate/One World generously lent us a Justin.tv account for the day.

The 10/10/10 Movement Camp was an exhilarating experiment and a genuine socio-technological innovation (with all the bugs and hiccups this entails). It worked because a bunch of people believed that the way to change the world is to change the way that we work and collaborate online. I recommend that you check out the clips in this post from the first event. Inspiring, inspiring stuff. Thank you Micheal Maranda, Suresh Fernando, Fernanda Ibarra, Dan-Eric Archer, Jason Smithson, Marius Bauer, Gabe Stern, Chris Cook, Ken Dabkowski, and everyone else involved in the MovementCamp experience.

Meanwhile, I was trying to corral a swarm of translation talent. As soon as the film came out, people were asking: ‘Where are the translations?’ Translations, we thought? Er… hadn’t thought of that. Ladyverd came to our rescue with French, German, and Spanish translations. Working on open source principles, we set up a translations wiki and asked if our community could help us. The response was amazing. We currently have translations in ten languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Serbian, Greek, and Romanian, with more coming in. Thank you Diogo Louro, Cesare Carli, Max Izmailov, Bill Gouveros, Roxi Tamba, Daniel Hires, Pamela Maguigad, Roso Lazaro, Tamara Tosic, Norberto Ritter, and the man known only as Mauro. You guys rock.

Translators – I salute you! You guys are heroes! I’d especially like to thank Vicky Mohieddeen from Electric Shadows, who translated and subtitled Coalition of the Willing into modern Chinese, and Carissa Welton from Greening the Beige, who organized a Beijing screening of the film on October 10 as part of the day of action.

Most of the translations will be appearing on the film website soon – stay tuned. In the meantime, check out all the good work done on the translations wiki. You’ll find the names of the contributors on the respective translation pages.

Recently we’ve started doing subtitling work on dotSUB. This is an amazing service that enables people to quickly and easily add subtitles to online films. All you need to do is register, then follow the simple instructions on ‘Translate/Transcribe’. We have Russian and Italian translations up there already, with more to follow.

No round of thanks would be complete without big ups to the team who keep the fire alive on the Coalition Google Group. Michael Maranda, Paul Horan, Pamela McClean, Ben Brownell, Mark Roest, Fabio Barone, Darren Hill, George Mockray, Suresh Fernando, Chris Watkins, all of you – it is you who have kept this going and kept my mind wide open! If anyone out there is interested in riding the wave of contemporary possibility – I urge you to sign up to the group and join us.

This is what we’ve been doing for the last six months. What do we have coming up?

Joe Solomon, social media coordinator for 350.org, had plenty of inspiring things to say at the 10/10/10 MovementCamp. He hit the nail right on the head when he argued that what the global climate action movement needs today is a common ‘map’ that would enable groups and organizations to coordinate their projects and function as a swarm.

We couldn’t agree more. Interoperability is the key to next-generation climate action. This is a topic that we’ll be focusing on in 2011.

One recurring criticism of ‘Coalition of the Willing’ concerns the use of ‘war talk’ in the film. Do we really want governments to launch a ‘war’ on global warming? If they refuse to issue the call to arms, should we expect civil society to launch this war itself?

This is what we suggest in the film. Of course, we are talking about a cultural offensive, not a military one. But our metaphors are militaristic, and for many, this is unacceptable. Surely, it is said, the global campaign against climate change is a campaign for peace, not war? War is what we’ll get as a result of forced migration, water depletion, agricultural failure, and economic collapse. If we are against all this, surely we should be anti-war? What is the sense in promoting a globalized revolution in militaristic affairs, a online war on global warming?

I have thought about these criticisms for months. I’ve decided to stick to my guns. Yes, we need an online war on global warming. Yes, we need a swarm offensive for the internet age. We have a fight on our hands, and it’s time we accepted that.

What kind of fight is this? How should we understand the war on global warming?

The war talk in the film is intended to be provocative. It is also intended to be slightly ironic (just in case you missed it). The idea for framing the film in these terms came from the title of this cover story in TIME magazine in April 2008: ‘How to Win the War on Global Warming’. It made me laugh. ‘The War on Global Warming’? What War on Global Warming? That’s when it struck me: why isn’t there a war on global warming? We have a war on terror, on crime, drugs, poverty, you name it. So why is it that, to date, not a single government in the world has officially declared war on global warming? The answer is: because then they would be obliged to invest the same amount of money and resources in combating the problem as they currently invest in their conservative crackdowns and brutal overseas adventures! They’d be obliged to put their nations on a war footing, bending all energies and resources to the task of rapidly greening their economies. Wouldn’t that be great? Isn’t it precisely what we need at the moment: for the nations of the world to throw themselves wholeheartedly into a massive effort to green the world? This is why, despite my personal peacenikism, I think it makes sense to call for a war on global warming. If we could convince our leaders to engage in such a war, we might just have shot at beating the climate catastrophe that Gaia has in store for us.

Still, what troubles people about the language of the film isn’t the idea that governments should be launching a concerted green offensive. Criticism of the war talk came mainly from activists who had spent their lives campaigning for peace. It disturbed them to see a cause that they support – the campaign for climate action – cast in militaristic terms. I have nothing but respect for the actions and motivations of these people. Initiatives for peace bring out the best in human beings, and advance the cause of civilization. Yet, I believe that the current situation calls for war. Not a war between armies and opposing factions, with guns, tanks, and bombs. We need a war on the cultural norms that we have inherited from the twentieth century. We need a swarm offensive to liberate new collective forms of life and creation for the future. This is what we mean in the film when we talk about triggering a 21st century culture shift. We are not promoting a new wave of ‘clicktavism’, the pursuit of one million fans who ‘like’ the idea of cultural change. We are talking about a revolution rising from the global grassroots. A revolution in global collaborative culture.

This is possible today. We can use the internet to change the world. It is already happening in isolated offensives across the info-sphere. But we need to bring these initiatives together. We need to issue a general call to arms to the human swarm:

Grab your weapons of choice – be they spades and shovels or laptop computers! The Coalition of the Willing needs you!

Another world is possible. To bring it about, we need to go to war on the silo culture that exists today.

In 2011, let’s think outside the square. We need a grand mash-up of silos. We currently have LinkedIn for professionals, Change.org for activists, Appropedia for ecologists, and InnoCentive for innovators. Imagine pulling these systems together into an interoperable whole, branded as a catalyst for harnessing the human swarm. Imagine feeds and spaces enabling diverse groups to interact in cross-functional teams, exploring common projects and synergies. A multi-functional interoperative system that would prepare the ground for one thousand projects to bloom.

Consider the revolution in action. Imagine some aid workers in Kenya need a cheap water purifying device. They post the problem online in the Open Innovation Center, and it’s solved by an ad hoc group based in Seattle, Tokyo, and Seoul. It is then promoted on the Catalyst system as a successful project, where others pick up on it and start applying it to different problems. Such a system would represent a revolutionary bottom up approach to tackling globalized problems. It would be revolutionary not just because it enabled online collaboration (plenty of that already), but because it was specifically set up to enable online collaboration between radically different groups: scientists, aid workers, innovators, entrepreneurs, designers, creatives, activists, etc.

Such a system could function only if it were underpinned, practically and ideologically, by new way of working together. A way of working that is agile, open, and transparent. A way of working that is based in the belief that together, by pooling our skills and
talents, we can achieve incredible things! A way of working that sees difference (in skill-sets, motivations, perspectives, objectives) as a resource, not a hurdle. A way of working that begins in the realization that each of us, in our own way, are stewarding processes of creation and transformation that transcend us.

Sometimes in order to save the village, you need to destroy it. Saying this will ruffle feathers, but in this case it’s true. We need to go to war on the closed, isolationist, competitive tendencies we’ve inherited from the past. We need to explode silo culture into a million interactive pieces. We need to make joy in collective creation the key to a new revolution and take a flying leap into the future.

We could dream of a planetary nervous system, of a united humanity, of a species cooperating on a marvelous magic satellite. We could philosophize over the destiny of mankind, over teleology and the universal mind. We could delve into collective intelligence, shifted consciousness, raised awareness, and speak of transcending boundaries, hierarchies, races, genders, of wonderful futures and shifted values.

Let’s look at what we’ve got though. We’ve got to a point where as a species we have threatened our own survival, and that of our fellow species on this incredibly wonderful planet. We’ve got a privileged few who are determined to hold onto their power, no matter what. We have a great majority who feels there’s something wrong with our world but doesn’t know what to do. And we’ve got an energetic restless bunch who are trying hard to creatively deal with the opportunities of the times and spearhead possible “other worlds”.

The current social arrangements grew out of a positive response to systems that had attained their limits. Most of its banner-wavers are or were well-intentioned, enthusiastic idealists. We grew out of monarchies, slavery, and spiritual monocultures. In the same way we will grow out of the current configuration – a powerful and unstoppable tide is already building up about us. Like everything this ephemeral and unfathomable spirit called life has brought forth, it is coming together in an organic form – unprecedented, emerging, unpredictable.

Countless organizations, individuals, and groups are assembling and becoming active. They are empowered by great ideas and new ways of imagining our human essence. I don’t assume that they will make everything better. As with any system before us, anything we will create will bear the seed of its own incompleteness, of its limits, and its demise.

It’s not difficult to identify the essential developments happening today. Collaboration, cooperation, sharing, relationships and networks are the new language, overriding concepts such as competition, economy, markets and corporations.

How does a lush ecosystem evolve? First you have pioneers, who colonize the ground. These pioneers prepare the soil with nutrients, inviting followers to participate; new relationships are built up. Slowly but steadily the place changes, and new species step into an environment that was previously hostile to them.

This is how I see the new movement unfolding. We are blessed with charismatic pioneers and fiery colonizers. If you are reading this, I am sure you can list lots of sites and names participating in this blossoming culture that I have never heard of. The Internet, born from defensive military thought, is the unifying agent bringing people and groups together, like rhizome threads linking trees, shrubs and plants.

If you share this vision, our first endeavors should simply be to extend the reach of the rhizomes, so that more and more pioneers can start making new links and making connections. I don’t see the need for a central planning body to supervise this expansion. Let it grow organically, making small connections where there is affinity. A nitrogen fixer works best in concert with nitrogen consumers; a plant may be best rooted where it’s relationships with its most closest neighbors are optimal; a cell in my fingertips does not need to know about a cell in my foot, and yet both are beautifully contributing to such a complex being such as my body.

Most of us are bounded by national regulations, financial restrictions, cultural norms. We appreciate the power of limitless connections, but we haven’t learned to activate this power. Many of us feel the potential, but can’t envision its fulfillment. It’s time to connect the dots.

This is a radical approach. It means tearing down national borders, racial differences, cultural trenches, ideological blinders. It means putting together those who want to work together, directing resources where we want to see them, and following our passions.

What will it require? Legal structures that allow people to gather around subjects and projects, irrespective of where they live. The adoption of an open source attitude to knowledge and work allocation, such that contributors decide for themselves what they want to work on. As every open source software developer knows, this does not require frenetic anarchy; it requires reputation based leadership, open and transparent processes, and access to information and repositories. This can engender value-based exchange schemes, an evolution of the profit-oriented exchange maxim. Trusts can be set up for the stewardship of commons.

Chris Cook’s idea of open capital partnerships is a seed that sprouts in this direction. In Cook’s framework, investors offer financial or other resources to a project, and contributors offer their labor and skills as on-par elements of the arrangement. A trust-like group takes on the steward’s role of managing assets. The project output is redistributed commensurate to the share of contribution of each element. The group decides on rules and types of remuneration upfront: a project may decide to redistribute financial gains, but it could also issue shares on the physical output, like vouchers on energy created, items produced, etc.

We could imagine a bunch of geographically-dispersed people collaborating in this way to provide financial resources and skills to help a village in Africa become energy self-sufficient. Imagine clean-tech practitioners contributing to the work in the construction of the physical energy generation equipment needed in the village, working alongside locals who learn from these professionals and become proficient themselves. The “investors” get paid in kWh vouchers that they can use to pay their local energy bills. During the whole process knowledge is accessed, captured, customized and made available for others in an open source way.

People working in distributed environments need tools on which to meet, exchange, share ideas and documents, assemble into projects, and manage their tasks. Bettermeans.com is an example of how this can evolve: project management takes a community-embedded flair, tasks are transparently and democratically handled.

Cook and BetterMeans are pioneers. I am sure that many other proposals and initiatives will emerge in the coming years, focusing on different aspects of distributed community management (for example different flavors of voting, reputation, inclusion schemes, etc.).

The work of the future will be delivered by horizontal assembling over vertical service providers. Such service providers could focus on different parts of project management: www.dreamfish.com for example is already excelling in facilitation, online interaction management and worker inclusion. I could imagine substantial need for such services for distributed teams! Everybody contributing “a service” to the project would be remunerated accordingly – as opposed to per platform, per contract, etc. Accounting could be organized in reference to some external value. This could be kWh, Dollars, Euros – or some new exchange reference (like the Terra maybe?).

At this point we need to seed countless projects so that all these new relationships can emerge – by doing. We need to rapidly evolve all these fantastic initiatives bubbling up through the digital mesh. It’s too big and complex to control in any way, but we can surf it one connection at a time. Don’t think in terms of platforms – think in terms of people coming together in projects. This is how we form swarms.

^TR

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The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver’s hand takes too long to feel its way.

The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.

But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that – when you feel it – brings you to your knees.

There are yet words that come near the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

Photo and poem from Panhala, via Visionshare