You can’t make systems change happen by yourself, even through the practices you create. You need to get under the skin of the system and challenge the existing paradigms and support & nurture creative disruption so that everyone can feel included in the changes taking place, whether it’s the internet of caring things or disruptive cities. Looking at how you can make use of existing assets in your community — whether it’s new insights, customers, suppliers, or resources is a valuable building block.
As necessary is understanding the different groups in your community, what their needs are without forgetting what they can bring to the table, and developing design principles for those developing the solutions to bake these into their projects. We’ve been training young people to do exactly that.
Many of the initiatives developed could form part of the “sharing economy”, from sensoring up micro bookshares to enabling people to rent out their kitchens for community events.
So yes, we need to break down barriers in public spaces, but also between the different actors involved in the collaborative economy to set in motion systemic innovation, where the actors highlighted in the different circles in the Venn diagram can work together. How do we do that? @mbauwens sets out the scenarios for a collaborative economy.
