Charles Cameron writes that one of the brightest shining events of the many that SocialEdge has presented (and still contains in archived form) was the Sohodojo-inspired Small Is Good World at the Skoll World Forum.

In this week’s event, a companion to last week’s workshop on how and why to scale up, he returns to the theme of Small is Beautiful, asking for your experiences and reflections on EF Schumacher’s (small, beautiful) idea and how it applies to our field as social entrepreneurs.

Here is Toby Beresford’s description of the Small is Beautiful approach, taken from that forum.

Small is good is a change of mindset. A new way of approaching the problems and opportunities the world presents.

• In social terms it means direct one to one relationships matter – your family, your friends and your neighbours.
• In political terms it means communities matter – let the people closest to the problem choose how to solve it. It recognises that the man in Whitehall (or Washington, or Jakarta…) doesn’t know best.
• In economic terms it means small shopkeepers and producers can deliver better overall value to the consumer than giant chains. This value might come through stories of provenance (organic, free range, fairly traded), better service (be known by name), reduced environmental impact (seasonal vegetables), and local appropriateness (get your special Battersea cakes today.)

To choose small is good you have to let go of your centralising instinct. You have to believe in the potential of the empowered individual, the resilient family and the vibrant community.

How’s that for a set of criteria? Who among us doesn’t believe in the potential of the empowered individual, the resilient family and the vibrant community?

Please share with us your own experiences, questions and insights regarding the small-is-beautiful approach.

Marguerite - Apr 23, 2006 7:49 pm (#16 Total: 132)

I was delighted to review CAWD and CAWDNET -- an interesting note is that I am currently involved in a "relocalization" effort in a small community in So. Calif. that faces some of the same challenges as does CAWD. Due to the "peak oil" crisis that is about to hit us full on as gas prices escalate, we see the need to grow food locally and learn how to process it for future use. And, guess what,I've just heard some women say "But I don't know how to cook" meaning "from scratch" so use to prepackaged food we are today.  And, I'm sure that before its all over we will be grateful for solar cookers.  So there's going to be a need here for vocatonal training to enable and empower us in relearning survival skills as the costs of transportation make food and other necessities of life unaffordable for the average person as the limits to resources force change of an unprecedented magnitude upon us.  The demand for skilled counselors to aid in facilitating this change will far outstrip the supply as community after community seeks to become self-sustaining and reaches out for assistance.       

I believe networked ICTs, as CAWD views them as:  "creative combinations of ICTs and human networks" (in small communities if I may add) are the answer, and am currently constructing what is intended to be a major website as part of the worldwide ICT that is spontaniously forming. In this sense, "small is beautiful" as we create spaces for learning/remembering to take place and then apply it at the local level. Since the natural flow of the Universe is from micro to macro this will allow for a natual transformaton to take place which will be "holodynamic" in nature and  replace the hierarchial and unatural structure we have today that leaves us in an  unbalanced and dis-eased position.  

Simply due to the magnitude of the challenges the human family faces today, micro-management offers the only humane solution which will avoid large numbers of people being dropped through the cracks. 

marguerite (ecopilgrim@aabole hm) 

P.S. My website at www.tii-clics.org needs maintenance and we are working on that as well as getting up several new sites which will provide curriculum for our virtual university.  We are also linked to the International Academy of Holodynamics, another virtual university,hosted by Dr. V. Vernon Woolf, who was instrumental in creating "perestroika" in Russia.  Vern will soon have courses online at the Academy. www.holodynamics.com  Dr. Woolf specializes in the development of high performance teams to manage social change. As well, he is developing a prototype Wellness Center which uses natural healing combined with some conventional methods.  This program has been 10 years in the development stage and is designed to work in small local communities to create change through health practices.

Thank you Charles, for the opportunity to post here.

honeymgm - Apr 23, 2006 8:15 pm (#17 Total: 132)

 

Pamela McLean - Apr 24, 2006 6:13 am (#18 Total: 132)

I wish I had time to respond fully to the postings from Prof Madhukar and Marguerite. I would like to follow up areas of overlap with you both. I feel I could spend days talking with each of you exploring ways that our initiatives could complement each other – but resources do not allow. That is ironic really as we would probably find that we are duplicating effort to a ludicrous degree. Let us not forget each other’s interests.

Nigeria has the same problem that Prof Madhukar describes of graduates with no employment prospects. There are precious few real jobs on offer - unless you know people with influence. The young graduates know they should be doing something more intellectually demanding than subsistence farming, or petty trading - but what opportunities are there for self employment - other than armed robbery? That is not said flippantly - there is no social security system in Nigeria, and armed robbers are a constant threat and reality. There is such a waste of talent amongst Nigerian youths - made more tragic in my opinion because many of the young job-seeking Nigerians that I have met are idealistic, industrious and desirous of helping to create a better Nigeria.

I have heard of various initiatives that could be relevant for these young people – along small is beautiful lines that would promote genuine community development – but I haven’t got the resources to follow up those tantalising information trails on their behalf so that we can act on them.

 

Marguerite – I’m glad you relate to CAWD and Cawdnet - I see so much overlap with your concerns too - small-scale developments, enterprise, Californian and Nigerian experiences with solar energy, and more. We have much to learn and we need to learn with each other and from each other, There are so many of us doing similar things - if we consider it all under such headings as sustainable energy, enterprise and livelihoods. We need to come together more effectively – and that is what ICTs are helping us to do. It is simultaneously local and global in ways that “outsiders” do not understand. 

 

Perhaps this experience/lack-of-experience of the local-global reality is part of the conceptual difficulties that we are have sometimes regarding communication on issues of scalability and funding and suchlike. It occurs to me that the kind of activists I know, in their tiny, struggling and largely self-funded organisations are a bit like parentless children. We are continually pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, falling on our faces, picking ourselves up, learning from our mistakes, plodding on - because things can’t stay as they are and forwards is the only possible direction. It shouldn’t all have to be learnt in the school of hard knocks. We know where we are headed – but struggle to find the words to express it to people who don’t share experience of our reality

 

I don’t really think we want to “replicate” or “scale up” our projects and organisations any any more than children want to be cloned – we just want to grow naturally. Currently we are isolated and our growth is stunted.  Our vision and energy is sapped by constant struggle for the basics of day-to-day survival that mature organisations take for granted. We need some respite and nurturing while our organisations/projects/systems continue to learn and develop and grow. We need a chance to grow up more as “part of a family” rather than as “struggling street children”. Then that family will grow, as new collaborations and replications of ideas and projects happen. Maybe I take the analogy too far – but I don’t know how else to express it.

 

I am trying to express the organic growth of “our kind” of projects and organisations. It comes back to valuing and counting-in the intangibles of information, ideas, networks, trust and all kinds of social capital. It comes back to learning as you go along, within your own projects and through information exchange with other projects. It comes back to equal partnerships, mutual-mentoring, and community-based, needs-led development– development where problems and needs are evident but poorly defined. It comes back to solutions having to emerge – not be pre-defined and imposed.

 

Hmm - and that of course brings us back to the issue of funding proposals that we were discussing a few days ago…

 

 

 

JessicaMargolin - Apr 24, 2006 11:33 am (#19 Total: 132)

Pamela said: "I don’t really think we want to “replicate” or “scale up” our projects and organisations any any more than children want to be cloned – we just want to grow naturally. Currently we are isolated and our growth is stunted. Our vision and energy is sapped by constant struggle for the basics of day-to-day survival that mature organisations take for granted. We need some respite and nurturing while our organisations/projects/systems continue to learn and develop and grow. We need a chance to grow up more as “part of a family” rather than as “struggling street children”. Then that family will grow, as new collaborations and replications of ideas and projects happen. Maybe I take the analogy too far – but I don’t know how else to express it."

Interestingly, my thoughts along this line came up because the ED with whom I was writing grants was spending so much time explaining what she was doing yet had ever-increasing requests for more explanation. In other words, it was a way to facilitate getting the 80%+ out there for her so she COULD concentrate on growing "her own" programs.

Marguerite - Apr 24, 2006 8:26 pm (#20 Total: 132)

My feelings are that writing grant proposals and waiting for funding is like waiting for a personal ride on an Apollo project -- it ain't going to happen and if it does the funding is going to be tailored to the funder's agenda and won't fit yours. There is an excellent book on this put out by Kumarian Press, sorry I can't think of the name of it right now but do a Google for them and search their catalog.  Lot's of good books written by people who have been working in development and in the know at the local level from this publisher if you haven't tapped into them as yet.  

Really do believe the answer is to create a local currency -- with the price of oil escalating we're going to see a major worldwide depression and the only way to survive this is for communities to delink from the national economy and become a sustainable living community that is self-secure regardless of where they are.  Another resource that is absolutely marvelous on this is: Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism by Richard H. Robbins.  He also has a website on the Net so again Google for it.  He gives an example of how the Guarani in Venezuela survived for hundreds of years using a local currency and investing in the conventional market when it was to their best advantage and staying out of it when it wasn't. They also practiced a form of agro-forestry which conserved their capital and acted as their savings bank from which they did not spend.  

I think also that employment opportunities are in short supply.  The statistics are that only 30% of the worldwide laborforce, due to technological advances, is necessary to provide all of the goods and services for the 6 billion plus people on the planet. So, we have a tremendous oversupply of skilled labor.  And while the need is for entrepreneurial skills, we have millions trained in management with no place to go. Also, for the first time in the history of the world in the early 1990's the labor market became delinked from the stock markets as more people derived income from the markets through passive investments than from the efforts of human labor.  (Rifkin - End of Work 1997) Everything is stacked to create more poverty and the push is relentless.   

I have copied our discussion here and will stay in touch. We must get these ICT's up and running so we have information exchanges going.  Warm regards and love to everyone. 

marguerite  ecopilgrim@aabol.com

honeymgm - Apr 24, 2006 9:44 pm (#21 Total: 132)

following notes of anilpansari  Pamela McLean Jessica and  MargolinMarguerite down sizing is is a classical thought of all business giants . Down size to profit or scale up to profit and in the process eliminate labour , retrench office staff and  executives ,out source for momentary demand ,ditch people during lull periods and so on with their games.... .Traditional agrarian economies provided more security than the present where do the neoeducateds  go unpredictable corporations, suicidal agrarian economy

Madhukar

intechibm@gmail.com

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 26, 2006 1:55 pm (#22 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Prof. Madhukar:

Thanks for your comments. I’m not sure quite where you are going with your more recent post. As you say, businesses routinely scale up or *downsize* for reasons of ROI, and the results are often not pretty in human terms, What do you see as the solution, how does social entrepreneurship fit into the picture, can downsizing be both profitable and socially healthy?

Regards,

Charles

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 26, 2006 2:07 pm (#23 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Hi again, Pamela:

You write:

I wish I had time to respond fully to the postings from Prof Madhukar and Marguerite. I would like to follow up areas of overlap with you both. I feel I could spend days talking with each of you exploring ways that our initiatives could complement each other – but resources do not allow. That is ironic really as we would probably find that we are duplicating effort to a ludicrous degree. Let us not forget each other’s interests.

This must be a fairly comment sentiment among those reading and indeed posting here on SocialEdge – the sense that we’re close to forming connections that could facilitate our work, but don’t quite have the time to pursue those connections at the time of recognizing them.

One option that we’re considering is having a forum here designed specifically to invite people to make those connections – but I suspect that where very busy social entrepreneurs caught up in working the many details around an undefended project in the field are concerned, the first condition for moving to the stage where such connections are made would be to realize that they can be made slowly in an asynchronous medium such as this one.

Posting we seems to have common issues, I’m interested and would like to talk more, in other words, is in fact a first step, and I’ll get back to you in a week or so is an acceptable response, with I’ve been thinking a but since you said you were interested in our approach, and realized that one aspect of our work that might work for you too is this-and-this a week or so later beiong a follow up that really kick-starts the detailed transmission of ideas.

A slower pace may be a viable workaround for being too busy to network right away, I mean.

Hope this helps,

Charles

JessicaMargolin - Apr 26, 2006 2:25 pm (#24 Total: 132)


In my experience, downsizing is wellknown to be a manipulation to increase short term stock price in exchange for longterm value creation, except in relatively rare situation where it's an unfortunately necessary thing to do because of previously inept strategic management in organizations that actually can afford strategic and risk management processes but don't. Ironically, but with no humor, the very people who have instituted the poor systems and mismanaged the organization tend to be the ones who decide who must go when the business is, in effect, failing.

Unfortunately very small enterprises don't have the risk management or strategic planning resources available to enormous companies, so the real economy in my mind is the ability to have occasional slack to devote to those endeavors, as Pamela says.

When I first heard a Social Edge talk over a year ago, I ended up with a grid, with the speakers down one side and the reasons I would need to talk with them along the top. In that way, by simply putting a note to myself in a box, I could track which things I needed to bring up with whom.

It might be a nice enhancement to be able to grid something here, where in addition to a discussion forum there's a series of topics (for example) along one axis and people who need or have resources or ideas in those areas in the other. Some other dimension (color?) could be used to encode the urgency of the situation, so that people could enter notes in the grid box that corresponds to them; maybe an additional dimension (font, shape) would correspond to something else like distribution, or education, or physical materials.

Sort of a super-bulletin-board; in any case a different way to organize multi-noded information.

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 26, 2006 2:34 pm (#25 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Marguerite:

You write:

Due to the "peak oil" crisis that is about to hit us full on as gas prices escalate, we see the need to grow food locally and learn how to process it for future use.

I've invited a friend over to join us, a man who designs sustainable and highly efficient systems in Alaska:

http://biorealis.com/resumes/projects.html

I'd be very interested to see his response to your comment.

Re your name, Turtle Island Institute... I'm a big fan of Gary Snyder, incidentally. I once had the privilege of co-teaching a course with GS, Richard Nelson and Paul Shepard at Lake Tahoe… what a fine group!

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 26, 2006 2:56 pm (#26 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Hello again, Jessica:

And thanks for all your contributions here.

When I first heard a Social Edge talk over a year ago, I ended up with a grid, with the speakers down one side and the reasons I would need to talk with them along the top. In that way, by simply putting a note to myself in a box, I could track which things I needed to bring up with whom.

I was thinking a while back that we could make an overall SE grid with places (parts of the world) along one axis, and topics (areas of interest, expertise, need) along the other, and invite people to log in and “populate” it – then the Social Entrepreneur Index was started, and served some of those functions.

It might be a nice enhancement to be able to grid something here, where in addition to a discussion forum there's a series of topics (for example) along one axis and people who need or have resources or ideas in those areas in the other. Some other dimension (color?) could be used to encode the urgency of the situation, so that people could enter notes in the grid box that corresponds to them; maybe an additional dimension (font, shape) would correspond to something else like distribution, or education, or physical materials.

I have no idea of the feasibility of your idea in terms of software, design etc, but it seems to address the same kind of concern, but from a personal / distributed angle.

As it happens – way above my head – Anthony Judge recently published an account of toroidal grids, suggesting they are superior to matrixes in handling the challenge to richer comprehension and how it needs to match the complexity of policy-making -- especially when different factions prefer to order their understanding of complex systems in different ways If your head for math is clearer than mine – which seems entirely likely – you might be interested to read his comments:

http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/torus.php#from

!!

Warm regards,

Charles

surya prakash.Vinjamuri - Apr 26, 2006 9:03 pm (#27 Total: 132)
Life-Health Reinforcement Group

Checked in to this dialogue at the fag end but I like to place these in front of the group:

• Being small is being big at heart
• Being small is being sure
• Being small allows you to take informed decisions
• Being small says you are serious
• Being small says that you are available
• Being small states that you are accountable
• Being small says you are contended
• Being small says you are prepared to stretch to survive

These are learnings gained through the work we are involved in.

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 27, 2006 9:46 am (#28 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Interesting -- thanks for those points, Surya Prakash...

Charles

isbume - Apr 28, 2006 9:03 am (#29 Total: 132)

Dear Pamela, I am very much delighted to know that you are in Nigeria and you are doing a great work.  My name is Segun Benson, a British-trained Nigerian professional with many years of experience in consultancy and training.  I will like to meet with you as I am very much involved in this idea of small business incubation facilities which I developed as a way of achieving an integrated entrepreneurial development in rural areas of Ogun State, Nigeria.  Recently, I presented a paper to the 4th Global Conference on Business and Economics, which took place at the Oxford University, Oxford, England: 26-28th June, 2005.

It is true that there is need for entrepreneurship development, but we need to identify the sector area to be developed in order to achieve sustainability for our youths and unemployed graduates.  I feel that small business incubation concept with solve this problem greatly.  The paper which I presented to the conference is titled: The Dynamics of Small Business Incubation Facilities in Fadama Areas of Ogun State, Nigeria: An Anti-Poverty Device.  If you are interested, I will send a copy to you.

I will like to discuss with you further on how we can network here in Ogun State, Nigeria.  I am the current President of Kings & Priests Network Nigeria (a non-governmental organisation) as well as the President and Head of Missions of the Institute of Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship here in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

I really believe that small is beautiful and the only way we can make it work in the area of entrepreneurship in Nigeria is to focus on high-growth enterprises in the area of agro-industrial development in the rural areas.

Please, let us talk further. 

Meanwhile, remain blessed.

Segun Benson

Charles Cameron aka hipbone - Apr 29, 2006 9:27 am (#30 Total: 132)
HipBone Games / Rheingold Associates


Segun:

Thank you so much for your post above -- this is exactly the kind of connection and "mutual aid" that SocialEdge hopes to encourage. I hope that both yourself and Pam will keep us informed as to the results of this contact.

Regards,

Charles

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