First off less than 2% of Congress totaling 535 members, have professional backgrounds in science, whereas there are 222 lawyers.

When in 1987 the Federal Communications Commission removed the fairness doctrine of how difficult or controversial news was reported it open the door to more extreme punditry, take a bow Rush Limbaugh. And we have witnessed an increasing line of anti-science perspectives from Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, with the whip held by Newt Gringrich.

And Otto argues right now science is under threat by anti-climate change organisations – between 2009 and June 2010 the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. He writes that 96 of the 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress deny outright that climate change is real or are voting against it in one form or another.

That said Otto argues there are complex forces that are shaping the debate on public perceptions towards science, ‘the moral ambiguity createdafter the dropping of the Atom bomb and living in a nuclear MAD world’, or some of the terrible excesses of toxic pollution that killed and maimed ordinary people – coupled with the culpability of government, the effects of postmodernism on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist religion on the other smashing into each other. A deep distrust arouse around government and science.

This is the volatile cocktail that combines – commerce, science, truth and politics and results says Otto on an assault on American science that is unprecedented. Though the Barack Obama administration does not get away with it scott free

President Obama’s not much better. Running strong on climate change in 2008, he has since totally de-prioritized it, apparently marginalizing his scientist appointees like Chu, Holdren and Lubchenco, all of them outspoken on climate change, and now appears to be moving ahead with offshore oil drilling, lower air pollution standards, poor carbon standards, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. In a time when the science has only advanced further and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences says anthropogenic global warming should be “regarded as settled facts” — a time when China’s leapfrogging ahead on clean energy investments in the next economy, that’s not going to take America where we need to go.

Finally Otto refers to ScienceDebate2012 as he describes it, ‘a grassroots campaign for a presidential debate on science, technology, health, medicine and the environment’. Which was born out of Science Debate 2008 which was the largest political initiative in the history of American science.

We are on a journey from a linear world to a non-linear one (click here for more information) and we need good science to come with us. To attempt to shout down science, diminishes us all and limits the possibilities of our world.

For more information on Otto’s perspective read New Scientist October 27th 2011 (subscription required) or the Huffington Post- The un-American war on Science.

Shawn Otto has written book called Fool Me Twice: fighting thee assault on science in America

I was taken by his post on innovation, constraint, and design, he quotes Dave Snowden, and Aydin Örstan.

It is interesting that Africa is innovating in mobile and tech in amazing ways – simply because of, the hunger to make for a better life, and, to use what is available to hand, even though constrained. Those that do not see Africa as a place to study for why innovation happens almost in spite of so few resources – are looking through the wrong lens. Steve’s edict for his own operation is, make a telco as easy to operate as a wordpress blog, I LOVE THAT. And also – be as open as possible Principle #5 in No Straight Lines.

So over to Steve…

Constraint and Complexity

Interestingly, about the same time as Ethan was writing about constraint, Dave Snowden was offering his own tentative rules of complexity in the 5 Cs of Complexity.  The first of which is, you guessed it, constraint.  He says that

Constraint is key to understanding complexity, it governs the transition between the three ontologies. Increase constraint and you create an ordered system; do that inappropriately and you create the conditions for catastrophic failure; remove constraint and the system is chaotic…

Understanding the boundaries and critical variables in the environment that you are operating in is the key to intervening successfully in any complex system.  Too constrained and there is no innovation, witness most development projects based on a logframe.   With no constraint, innovation also doesn’t happen because (I believe) that innovation is a dialogue involving people and things.  With no control, innovation is easily dissipated in many possible directions.

Innovation and Evolution

Aydin Örstan has a great quotation from François Jacob (The possible and the actual, 1982) in an interesting post on evolution.  François says:

In contrast to the engineer, evolution does not produce innovations from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it a new function or combining several systems to produce a more complex one. Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. If one wanted to use a comparison, however, one would have to say that this process resembles not engineering but tinkering, bricolage we say in French.

 

Mitchel Resnick, Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, develops new technologies and activities to engage people (especially children) in creative learning experiences. His ultimate goal: to help people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, work collaboratively, and learn continuously.

His Lifelong Kindergarten research group developed ideas and technologies underlying the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits and Scratch programming software, used by millions of young people around the world. He also co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of 100 after-school learning centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies.

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.

Which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch –  today people are using communication technologies to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions. Why? Because those institutions have been recognised as being unable to deliver on their promise to society. Because they abuse their position of power, because they lose sight of why they were there in the first place.

So why is access to financial capital any different? In No Straight Lines: making sense of a non-linear world, I make the case and argument that as our world has become increasingly unfair, to the point whereby that unfairness is highly corrosive, people will take action, political action, dramatic action, action with consequences. It is no accident that today, communications tools are being wielded as powerful agents of political change. As much as everything ‘digital’ has affected our world, the point is we are in a social revolution not a technological one. And, as much as we have seen profound change in certain areas of society, the owners of monetary power (banks, venture capital, financing) have seemingly been unaffected by the disruptive energy of a non-linear world until now, other than by their own doing. But what the banking crisis demonstrated is how dysfunctional finance and money markets have become, not only in venture funding and lending but in pensions, the managers of which know they will never be able to properly pay back to society.

So at either end of people’ lives; the creation of jobs and then a happy retirement, the system which should support that has failed. Its not failing, its failed. So where do the new entrepreneurial companies that create the new jobs come from? How will we finance our retirement? We need novel ways to make this all happen.

In the same way that Martin Luther used Gutenberg’s printing press to reform the church, organisations such as GrowVC, or Profounder or Kiva or Zopa, or Kickstarter, to name but a few, are also part of this challenge to financial hierarchies and their positions of power that now serve themselves rather than society at large. And this process is starting to accelerate, (see the Startup Exemption Petition)

Disruption does not ask permission

So disruption does not ask permission, and it never comes from the centre, the future of investing and the kickstarting of innovation requires radical new ways of funding and this will have a significant impact on society. This innovation will flatten  powerhouses of financial capital and if the idea proves as exciting as the ideas explored and brought to life in the writings and pamphlets that led to the French Revolution, then that idea will spread. As Tony Judt wrote in, Ill Fares the Land, (review)

By the time the revolution broke out, this new language of politics was in place, and in so doing discredited everything that had gone before it.

And once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job. Who is an entrepreneur? Who is an investor? Who has the right to be either? Such perspectives are as skewed as the myopia of those that whinge about professionals and amateurs, and how the internet has destroyed culture. The question to that is who owns culture and who makes it? What we are seeing is a decoupling from the belief systems that have defined our world for generations.

In this process of the democratisation of venture funding, and the creation of a new innovation eco-system (to accelerate deal flow, that creates more companies and that creates more jobs), it has been reported back to me that some American’s believe this could be the re-invention of the American Dream. And Ross Dawson suggests, that a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. As head of vision at Grow Venture Community (GrowVC), I have watched these developments with great interest. I think, in the same way that micro loans work in many countries, rather than pointing to such financing models as ‘only for the really poor’, there is a more fundamental dynamic at work here, that participatory human systems when connected by the connective tissue of communications media can do some extraordinary things. It also I think breaks down the false barriers between who can and who cannot engage in wealth and value creation. This false distinction has corrupted many in their greed, consequently hurting society per se. As John Kay wrote, “Capitalists, are capitalism’s worst enemy – and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”. And yet many in the finance and banking world cannot accept even though they were bailed out by states around the world paying millions in bonus’s is fair. In the same way Ann-Marie suggested the starving in the streets of Paris ‘eat cake’, the financial institutions has become detached from understanding their role in the wider society (read here for a selection of posts that explores these issues). So change is gonna come,

Ross believes,

While we supposedly live in a capitalist society, the potential is for new and more open structures to create far better use of capital than we have today. A more fluid form capitalism could transform business and how individuals create value.

The Wall Street Journal,

Federal securities regulators are weighing demands to make it easier for fast-growing companies to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money by tapping thousands of investors for very small amounts of shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital. The issue is part of a wider review by the agency into whether to ease decades-old constraints on share issues by closely held companies.

The use of “crowd-funding” techniques has spread in recent years from artists looking to fund creative works to entrepreneurs trying to expand their firms. In a typical example, a company looking to raise $100,000 would use an Internet site to invite investors to buy as much as $100 of shares each.

If all goes well, small companies can raise cash relatively cheaply, while investors get a stake in an innovative business with limited downside risk. The SEC is now considering calls to relax its rules to make it easier for companies to use crowd-funding without having to undergo the full panoply of disclosure and other legal requirements required by the securities laws for share issues.

Lars writes in Japan’s super advanced mobile-web

The entire approach from key players in the value chain is focused on the direct benefit of the industry as a whole, ultimately via the satisfaction of their customers. A perfect example would be the generous – from day one – 90/10 revenue share to content providers. By the vary nature of building an open sales channel platform and offering an acceptable merchant billing fee the operators primed the data pump with plenty of interesting content rushing into their pipeline. Another key move from the operators was their decision in 2004 to make Flash-Lite a mandated pre-install on all devices. While of course their menus looked even more compelling, the move also allowed content players a common code platform with less concern about specific handset rendering parameters. The golden triangle of open web access combined with flat-rate data plans and ubiquitous 3G speed has lead to a server-side model driving ever greater adoption of content and services. Of course the telcos are happily counting their flat-rate data subscriber revenues as a result of even more great contents on offer and the satisfied mobile web surfers keep on clicking.. the win-win-win scenerio.

Alan Moore mobile/enterprise keynote video

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• The DoCoMo-Baccarat Phone: Smart in Another Way (blogs.wsj.com)

Following on from my post about Cumbria’s DIO (Done It Ourselves) community, The People’s Supermarket again demonstrates an alternative way of getting stuff done. In a way that perhaps is more realistic and more humane, where once again people, and community, and commerce can be more equal partners. Arthur Potts Dawson, who was behind London’s environmentally sound, award-winning Acornhouse restaurant, the mission statement is “for the people, by the people” which in practice means a not-for-profit co-op. Pay a £25 membership fee and sign up for a four-hour shift once a month and you become a part owner, have a say in how it’s run and receive a 10% discount on your shopping.

There is a C4 programme on its way to a TV/iPad/laptop screen near you in April.

Liz and Max Haarala Hamiliton have been photographing the people and their store.

Photographs by Liz and Max Haarala Hamilton: http://haaralahamilton.blogspot.com/

The area that Rory represents is vast, communities can be small, as he says the problems are distance and isolation. This means broadband companies are reluctant to lay the cable to deliver broadband – not cost efficient. But as we know connectivity makes commerce possible. And without connectivity, communities dwindle even further for social as well as commercial reasons.

Broadband would allow our businesses to follow our local fishing supply shop, which does £1m of sales a year out of the door but £7m online. Farmers could fill forms online; Lake District B&Bs could market themselves in Japan; and “creative” industries that depend on fast internet speeds could grow. Parkinson’s patients could talk to their neurologist by videolink without leaving home (and grandparents could talk to their grandchildren in Canada); children could take classes which they couldn’t find in the district. Village shops could collaborate online to increase their purchasing power; village halls could share bookings; medical teams could exchange emergency calls more efficiently. People might decide again to work and bring their families up in villages.

£100m has been invested in broadband in Cornwall, but Cumbria is twice as big, with geographic challenges. This where the design challenge comes in – an intractable dilemma. Commercial companies say ‘non’, based upon their criteria, which has real social and commercial consequences. So what happened next?

But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the school. The school let him splice off the fibre to a cabinet that he calls a “parish pump”. From that he ran a wireless network, with transmitters in the church tower and one, powered by solar panels, on a dead tree to reach the outlying farms. He has persuaded 70% of the village to sign up and is making enough money (as an unpaid volunteer) to upgrade the network. Local farmers have agreed to lay the fibre, at a fraction of the commercial cost. This is not a just impressive technology, it’s astonishing community action. And it suggests a model for rural Britain. The 130 activists who drove to Great Asby are now aiming to replicate it in 100 more villages. They have established a new website – though some of them have to drive to Penrith to log on. Libby, in Kirkby Stephen, is photographing and mapping all existing telecoms cabinets. Freddy, in Morland, is exploring alternative technologies from microwave transmitters and wireless hubs, to laying fibre in sewers. Five out of six farmers around Crosby Ravensworth have offered to forego wayleave charges and help dig trenches. Kate, in Stanwix, is training people to get online. Daniel, in Alston, is piloting medical tests from homes.

This is what happens when communities are empowered, when they are driven to create something for themselves. Traditional orthodoxies don’t need to apply. And of course the economics of community run networks is different, because communities can sign up well over 70% of a village to use broadband, they are much more attractive economic propositions. But if companies don’t invest, communities will bypass them entirely and build, own and run their own networks. The market orthodoxy wants us to behave in a certain – for their benefit. The Eden community demonstrates that designing a different solution, means they can change the rules and deliver a service that probably is more sustainable.

A two-day conference at the Eden Project exploring the emerging trends driving business change and revealing new opportunities for design practice. It will happen from 2nd – 3rd March 2011

Intersections 2011 will bring together a powerful mix of leading industry figures to discuss the issues that will shape the future of business and the economy.

Gain insights on innovation and design from the likes of IDEO, Think Public, Elmwood, More Associates, Forpeople and Thomas Matthews as well international perspectives from groundbreaking individuals and practical viewpoints from CEOs of inspiring organisations at the vanguard of change.

This is an inspiring event for me as I am arguing in my No Straight Lines project that what we face is a design problem, from successfully migrating from a linear world to a non-linear one.

Follow @Intersections11

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Here is a brief overview of the story and the challenge