how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.
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Optical force sensor for high density planar electrical interconnects - 0 views
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shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11
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Permaculture Principles | Design Principles - 1 views
permacultureprinciples.com/principles_business.php
permaculture principles design business resilience paper
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A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
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a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
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work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
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either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
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see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
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any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
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A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
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moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
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The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
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The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
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keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
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ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
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This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
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Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
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The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
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This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
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new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
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have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
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In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
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this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
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it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
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the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
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It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
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Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
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A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
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shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15
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Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views
www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing
ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper
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VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
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The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
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Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
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once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
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“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
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It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
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From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
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The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
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And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
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Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
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“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
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As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
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The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like
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His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
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Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
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Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
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Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
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It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
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The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
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all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
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A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
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For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
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For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
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Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
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Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
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Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
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A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
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In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.