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business innovation
July 2009 
from empowering people to changing systems
Posted on Apr 16th, 2007
by 
Duri
Duri
Brian wrote:
> In 2007 we'll be focusing on empowering people in the business of empowering people as we offer micro-communities for life coaches, veggie restaurant owners, meditation and yoga teachers and other “conscious entrepreneurs” passionate about making a difference in the world and getting paid to do so.
It's a good focus, no doubt, but I'm wondering whether it is not too narrow compared with a fuller potential for growth with integrity. The examples you gave are practitioners in the business of empowering people, one person at a time. What about those who focus on empowering workplace communities, making social institutions wiser, practitioners of system change? Why don't we see here more of the artists of the Art of Hosting, Action Learning, World Cafe, Collective Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and some of the other 60 organizational change methods and disciplines described in the Change Handbook. Even if they are not in the current focus of Zaadz, they could have shown up here in a larger number. If they didn't, there must be a reason for that. Let me guess why it is so.
My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even "social networking with a cause" but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.
That's the need around which I built a business concept. It has generated some interest in the "conscious business" funding circles but when I saw Zaadz having already implemented slightly over half of the platform functions I wanted to build, I suspended pursuing it and started to reflect whether it wouldn't make more sense to join forces with you, given our high degree of philosophical and spiritual alignment and complementarity of professional competences and networks. From my perspective, it would. Would you guys want to explore that possibility?
> In 2007 we'll be focusing on empowering people in the business of empowering people as we offer micro-communities for life coaches, veggie restaurant owners, meditation and yoga teachers and other “conscious entrepreneurs” passionate about making a difference in the world and getting paid to do so.
It's a good focus, no doubt, but I'm wondering whether it is not too narrow compared with a fuller potential for growth with integrity. The examples you gave are practitioners in the business of empowering people, one person at a time. What about those who focus on empowering workplace communities, making social institutions wiser, practitioners of system change? Why don't we see here more of the artists of the Art of Hosting, Action Learning, World Cafe, Collective Intelligence, Appreciative Inquiry, and some of the other 60 organizational change methods and disciplines described in the Change Handbook. Even if they are not in the current focus of Zaadz, they could have shown up here in a larger number. If they didn't, there must be a reason for that. Let me guess why it is so.
My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even "social networking with a cause" but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.
That's the need around which I built a business concept. It has generated some interest in the "conscious business" funding circles but when I saw Zaadz having already implemented slightly over half of the platform functions I wanted to build, I suspended pursuing it and started to reflect whether it wouldn't make more sense to join forces with you, given our high degree of philosophical and spiritual alignment and complementarity of professional competences and networks. From my perspective, it would. Would you guys want to explore that possibility?
Access: Public
Very, very interesting perspectives, George! I have seen the Change Handbook and had several face to face conversations with the founder/CEO of
www.openspace-online.de
About the whole context. (Opensapce oNline was one of the WorldChanger Award 2006 Winners).
I am ready to involve in these explorations.
Albert
“My guess is that their primary interest is not social networking per se, not even “social networking with a cause” but social networking with results that support their work on not only empowering people but empowering communities and changing whole systems. They would need collaborative workspaces, knowledge ecologies, and change processes embedded in software, so that they can invite their client systems to play with and explore them in a safe environment.”
bingo! in your opinion, should Zaadz implement the infrastructure from scratch or partner with existing technologies that are already out there? do you know of, or are you already using a technology that makes this collaboration possible? for example, i can see basecamp as one of these possible tools.
~C
basecamp is one of them indeed but it's proprietary, which means that you have to pay for use and can't tweak it much - a better bet could be its open source sibling, activeCollab that you can integrate into the Zaadz engine with hopefully not too much trouble.
Besides that, if and when there was a decision to expand in the direction that I am suggesting, along the lines of the EvoNexus concept, Zaadz would need something like PurpleWiki and the sophisticated taxonomy modul of Drupal. The good news is that all of that is open source. The bad news is that they don't exist in one package and integrating them may require a lot of work. I am not really a geek, so can't guesstimate just how much work.
(By “EvoNexus concept” I mean my unpublished business concept, not what you can see at the site because it's not much more than a technically underdeveloped early prototype with some amazing pieces of content… )
When you set up the new pod, let's put these two comments in a new topic of a forum on Technology Innovation. Btw, wouldn't that duplicate a forum that you may already have on your intranet?
did u say system change!!!!!!!!!!
YES YES n not to mention YES
n yeah i dont care about social networking either but about collaborative plerkspace for the new educational system i m playing with @ Light Source where the entire administration will be removed (or reduced to the minimum when absolutly necessary) n i wonna create something in between wetpaint n columbia so both “students” n “teachers” post what they offer n what they wonna learn without going through the mantioned admin as a “middle man”…
so would be great if this can be achieved through zaadz so would love to be kept posted
~love~
PS. talking about a platform here is what Andrew wrote on Software for a New World ^.^
What a honor to read a comment in my humble blog from Princess Jasmin! If one of the outgrowths of the conversation that I am catalyzing here could be a better collaborative plerkspace for the new educational system that you and your friends are breathing to life, then the time I am spending on dreaming, contemplating and sharing is more rewarding than I ever imagined it could be…
There are soooo much co-creative fun, joy, and imagine floating on Zaadz, which could provide energy for changing many obsolete systems we inherited from the 20th century! Let's liberate that energy by removing the internal and external obstacles to a newclear fusion!
You will be kept posted… And I wanna learn more how Zaadz can help better Light Source University… Did you guys discuss what additional software features it would need, if any?