I new this event was going to be different when we arrived, though I was already excited because of the design of the event, and the quality of speakers. And I knew something special might happen, when on the first day sitting in the faded grandeur of the ballroom, we were asked to close our eyes by a Tibetian Lama, and to take the red, white and blue pill for inner peace and harmony, to feel the quietness of the inner body. We all did it, it felt really weird and it felt really really good.

Yes we were all there because in some way or another, the idea of connectivity and communications enabled by mobile technologies was the gravitational pull, yet the agenda I can tell you was as broad as the diversity on this planet. Favourite speaker was, Kazi Islam – CEO, Grameenphone IT, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as his message to us was compelling and humbling. His statistics of the probability of too many people that will never make it beyond child birth, to the age of 5, the chance of obtaining clean water or an education to lift them out of poverty – forced us all to pause and think what we filled our days up with – we were he told us in the 0.01% percentile blessed in so many ways that we all take for granted.

I also felt there was a desire to want to effect change, to build the world afresh, but also that we could do this by also making money, redistributing wealth, and creating a more equitable society.

The Open Space and Future Cube experience, where speakers and attendee’s collaborated together to look at for example, Justice, Wealth Distribution, Emerging Markets, Media, was part of the special part of this journey of discovery for us all. So we were actively working together to look at problems and trying to discover/design solutions. Paul Bay spoke so elegantly about media being sensorial, emotive, and fluid. S if you did not go missed something special and if you did it was an honour to hang out with you all.

Emerging Markets Future Cube. Very intense very productive

Ralf Rottman wrote:

When Peter Giblin and Harald Neidhardt set out on their journey to create the MLOVE concept, there was one key driving factor: Putting the people back into the center of everything. Many, if not all, business events and conferences are grouped around the central concept of an audience and speakers. Two distinct roles. Some who listen. Some who talk.

While “a great chance to network” is on every agenda these days, I never quite experienced it as intense, as enriching as during the MLOVE days. Both, for work and for my personal life.

It was this intensity of engagement that made this event special, the only other experience that has moved me as much is the Do Lectures, And the art projected onto the facade of the schloss was something that took this whole experience onto another level, created by these very special people.

As the Beatles sang, All You Need is Love.

It was said that Alan Moore sounded like a character from a Guy Ritchie movie at his SXSW keynote. Skyping in from Over, England (a village outside Cambridge), Suz and Alan talk about our collective responsibility to leverage open social systems, global connectivity, consciousness and lightweight (green) business practices to the way we strategically create companies in the future. More on No Straight Lines. My SXSW presentation. Do Lecture (Video)

Proudly calling itself “the world’s first fully-specified mass production workstation made entirely of cardboard”, this is the Paperweight Desk, from British company Cardboard Future Ltd.

“We are aware that cardboard furniture has enjoyed a mixed press over the last fifty years,” says Chief Executive Rod Fountain, “and it is going to take an exceptional product to win over the cynics. But we think we are launching the right product at the right time – it’s elegant, very strong, extremely eco-friendly, and excellent value for money.

Via Eqsuire

The founders say

The cardboard box changed the world, but that was 150 years ago.  Since then this fabulously versatile material has enjoyed a modest press, but in the environmentally sensitive, cost-conscious world of 2009 its time may have come.

This autumn we launch a range of fun and practical furniture products for the home and office made entirely of pristine corrugated board, designed and built in England to mirror the mood of the times.

Simple, clean design combined with clever engineering makes these products extremely light, immensely strong, fully functional and excellent value for money.

Starting with the stunning Paperweight desk, we are rolling out a comprehensive product range to include storage, pedestals, book shelves, wardrobes, beds, and tables in a wide range of shapes and sizes.

More on the Do lectures

Riversimple explain

The Riversimple approach has five key elements:

A lightweight network electric vehicle, constructed from carbon composites and powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

[1] Open source design and development. Riversimple will invite the community to help develop its vehicles, by licensing its designs to the independent open source foundation 40 Fires.

[2] A service concept – we will lease cars not sell them. This aligns the interests of the manufacturer with the interests of the consumer and of the environment – everyone wants cars that have a long life span with maximum efficiency and minimum materials usage.

[3] Distributed manufacturing – The economies of scale of carbon composites frames are very different from those of steel-bodied vehicles. Riversimple vehicles are likely to be produced in small factories producing 5,000-10,000 vehicles per year.This allows for considerable local variation in the car.

[4] Broader ownership – The corporate structure of Riversimple is designed to ensure that all stakeholders in the enterprise have a fair say and share in the benefits of a successful business.

They say they believe that business can be a powerful force in addressing the greatest issues that face humanity. However, it cannot be business as usual. The business must be driven by a profound purpose, must be democratic in structure, must seek to give back to society more than it takes and must be highly flexible and responsive to changes in its environment.

I think we can say the riversimple subscribes to the values and idea of the No Straight Line rule.

Re*Move posts

Today, on the terrace behind London’s Somerset House, Riversimple launched the culmination of nine years research and development – their new open source, hydrogen powered city car. Like Local-Motors in the US (more on whom soon), Riversimple are utilising open source principals to design and develop a new car. But that’s only half the story. Riversimple have, in effect, today launched a blueprint for how the car industry could reinvent itself – with wholesale changes to the way vehicles are designed, how they’re fueled, where and how they’re built, and how they’re sold.

Re*Move go on

We’ve said before and we’ll say again, open, networked forms of design and collaboration are going to change how we solve many problems. They’ll also shape the future of our cities, towns and villages, how we work in them, the ways we move and interact in them, the vehicles we design and the way they fit together.

Mitch Altman talks open source and networked design

So if you want to follow the No Straight Line rule of doing something. Get over to and get stuck in with Ecotopia.

Become the change you want to see in the world.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20237352@N00/4002179056

America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent, and traveling beneath the mainstream media’s radar. The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism—through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, cooperates, empowers, and benefits fellow workers and community members.

Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up—worker-owned companies and cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises. In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking economics into their own hands.

Writes Maria Armoudian

It connects with the economics of happiness and a signifier that there is a movement away from the prescriptive ideology of how a mass consumer society sets out our lives from birth until death.

In conversation with Maria is the University of Maryland political scientist Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism. Alpperovitz points out that in the US currently,

There are also 120 million Americans who are members of cooperatives—a huge number, about a third of the population. About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories. One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood—health care and nutrition, education and jobs.

So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.

Maria points to the fact that, worker-owned cooperatives seem to be the most progressive and democratic models. Usually nonprofit making with profit circulating back to workers and communities, and coop practices democracy in the workplace—one person, one vote. And she asks, how would you compare this model with other models?

Alperovitz, explains that, ‘the one-person-one-vote worker cooperatives in the United States are the most democratic, advanced and ideal. But they number at about 500 maximum, maybe 1,000. These co-ops are on the cutting edge of the democratization process and where the learning will be taking place for the rest of the movements. People are experimenting with full democracy and full equality’.

He refers to the Mondragón region in Spain, and this is how it works, as explained by Dave Smith

Mondragón collective

The Mondragón cooperatives of Spain combine credit unions and service cooperatives such as grocery stores with industrial manufacturing cooperatives, research centers, and a university — all as one intergrated unit. As a cooperative corporation, they are “an association of persons rather than an association of capital.” That means one person, one vote rather than votes apportioned to the amount of capital invested. It also means that the individual workers own and control the company they work in. They are the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, doing many billions of dollars in sales. They own and operate thousands of supermarkets, a travel agency with hundreds of units, and gas stations. They also manufacture automotive parts, domestic appliances, bicycles, and bus bodies.

Wikipedia explains

The company was founded in Arrasate, a town in Gipuzkoa known as Mondragón in Spanish. The town had suffered badly in the Spanish Civil War and there was mass unemployment. A young priest, Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, arrived in 1941 and decided to focus on the economic development of the town, settling upon co-operative methods to achieve his goals. Co-operatives and self-help organisations had a long tradition in the Basque Country but had died away after the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1943, Arizmendi set up a democratically-managed Polytechnic School. The school played a key role in the emergence and development of the co-operative movement. In 1956, five young graduates of the school set up the first co-operative enterprise, named ULGOR (now Fagor Electrodomésticos) after their surnames, which during its early years focused on the manufacture of petrol-based heaters and cookers. In 1959, they then set up the Caja Laboral Popular (”People’s Worker Bank”), a credit union that both allowed the co-operative members access to financial services and subsequently provided start-up funds for new co-operative ventures. New co-operative companies started up in the following years, including Fagor Electrónica, Fagor Ederlan and Danobat.

It has also extended by inviting other co-operatives to join the group and offering rescue for some failed companies on condition of co-operativization. The group companies give preference to fellow co-operatives. Co-operative workers manage their finances through Caja Laboral, hold health insurances and pension funds at Lagun Aro and have discounts at Eroski markets and on Fagor appliances. Eroski stores are furnished by co-operative trucks. Members may have studied at a group ikastola (college) and extended studies at the Mondragoón University while having a labor stage at a co-operative. The reference research centre is Ikerlan, which is focused on applied research since 1974.

In Supermarkets No-thanks Tom Moggach writes about the rise of the farmers markets and local collectives in the UK

The motivations are many: fears about food security; food inflation; the power of supermarkets; the bruised image of capitalism; a lost sense of community. Across Britain, food co-ops are sprouting up in school halls, community centres, farm sheds or even your neighbour’s front room – anywhere, in fact, where rent is free.

So, are cooperatives the way forward to challenge the current system in which we live? Alperovitz says that,

Ultimately there needs to be systemic change. But it is very important, and it’s one thing that can be contributed. At this point, two central principles are developing in these “schools of democracy”—they are changing who gets to own and benefit from capital, and they are changing the participatory process. And in addition to cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and organizations, cities and land trusts, state pension funds are being used in [socially responsible] ways.

The movement that is underway below the radar in the US, Alprovitz compares to the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, its a bold statement – but one that warrents attention

Other interesting things are happening in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland where, like in the ’60s, people are meeting, reading, thinking and taking action from that. They are staging “action book clubs,” where they read a political book and discuss, “What can we do in the direction of building something for the long haul?” So if you don’t like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want? What is your vision, your knowledge and theory? It’s time for us to do that again.

Business is a social science, in Cleveland, one of the business schools is beginning to design a course based on social business and cooperation. We are seeing business schools working on “social enterprise,” and and these principals are being now adopted and taught at Yale and Harvard, as we yearn for and seek an alternative way of living.

http://icanread.tumblr.com/post/85622811/via-inothernews