Marcin Jakubowski tells us how. In many ways this story is very much part of the story of No Straight Lines that I have been researching, evolving and developing over the last 7 years. You can find out more about No Straight Lines here and pre-register for the free browser book, or indeed lets us know if there are other formats of the project you are interested in.

Marcin’s story is at a very human level, but it also asks big questions about ‘WHAT NEXT’ looks like, economically and, organisationally. His story is about questing for a more sustainable and enduring world, something that Gabriel Branby also talked about.

Marcin asks the What If? question, but he is one of a growing band of people, and these questions are pushing harder and currently deeper into the consciousness of our everyday lives. and I think Marcin is a trailblazer but he is also connecting up to and creating an entirely new eco-system, a ‘human operating system‘ that wants to get stuff done in very different ways.

As Tony Judt argued in Ill Fares the Land, why is it that we struggle to imagine a different world to the one we currently have, when that world could be built upon a philosophy of a more humane sense of the world we live in?

These are:

• New visual outlook and improved usability
• It is free to create and publish investor and start-up profile
• Members can invest 100% of the micro-investment membership fee, you can buy $100 membership and invest that $100
• Grow VC iPhone app.

Though I think there is a bigger story to share. And that is of the idea that GrowVC represents an evolution how start-ups are funded. There is a growing recognition of a dysfunctionality within our money supply system, and that applies as much to venture financing as it does to banking.

But money supply cannot be separated from the trilemma of our current age – which is, when faced with increasing complexity we face three interlinked questions, [1] organisational, [2] social [3] economic. How can we organise better? How can we make for a fairer world? What does economic production and commercial markets look like when faced with institutional failure? The fact is, when faced with this reality people are learning to get what they need from each other.

Communities of interest are a new organisational model

At GrowVC we asked ourselves the following questions, who has the right to invest? Who has the right to be an entrepreneur? Where does knowledge reside in what to invest in and what not? What is risk and what is not? We came to the view that the Human Operating System we are currently co-creating in which networked communications becomes the connective tissue by which we can re-organise and create and co-create in entirely different ways could equally be applied to investing. We believed that everyone could be and should be investing in start-ups. And why not?

The failure of free market ideology

Banks and banking seem very high risk to me at the moment, pension funds are unsustainable, yet we spend extraordinary sums of money persuading people to play the lottery every week, and tell the ordinary Joe and Josephine that investing is not for them? Why? If we reflect on the banking crisis that nearly was a global catastrophe of even more epic proportions, we understand the dysfunctional nature of banks and banking. In the light of some of the greatest austerity cuts in the UK it is clear that ‘too big to fail’ has failed. People’s livelihoods, retirement funds have been wiped out – yet the finance and banking industries are still consumed by their own mythology – a form of myopia which prevents its from comprehending its own excess. And of course it comes down to power – who has it and who does not. I am not saying “away with the banks”, but what I am saying there exists other highly viable models, which should become part of the financial eco-system.

People embrace what they create, we know that identity, belonging and accountability are forged when we participate in the creation and building of things. My belief is that the idea of democratising investing could offer real long term value for society. Better wealth distribution, an acceleration and increase in the number of companies funded, a different type of engagement with investors and shareholders that could become the checks and balances that our society so desperately needs (News of the World and News International or Lehman Brothers spring to mind). And a new organisational model – lighter, sustainable, adaptive. The default setting  is human, inclusive, participatory, open. Representative of a new moral economy. And, Maybe you are an investor, an entrepreneur and a worker all at the same time.

So my advice is become an entrepreneur, become an investor, seek alternative models which are relevant for the world we live in today. As the artist Wassily Kandinsky once said, “every work of art is a child of its time.” And GrowVC is a child of its time.

Further reading: Democratising Financial Capital, “Crowd-funding will never catch on” investment trainee aged 46.

The presentation dealt with this idea: That mobile communications does not have to be a tactical endeavor, it can be a deep strategic one enabling companies to run leaner, to reach audiences in new and novel ways, to redefine a company organizationally, and create new markets with new revenues. In ‘creating assets and access in the intention economy’ I challenged our thinking in how mobile communications plays the key role in this rapidly evolving story.

Moving Brands/ Moving World from Moving Brands on Vimeo.

And the presentation of an evolving idea around what a brand for London might look like, inspiring.

Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

In Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift he writes, the hegemony of the market can undermine the possibility of gift-exchange, the esemplastic powers can be destroyed by an overvaluation of analytic cognition. Ushahidi is a gift to the world and asks nothing in return.

Juliana Rotich about Ushahidi’s Crisis Mapping in 280 seconds from 99FACES on Vimeo.