Really Simple Social Action (RSSA)

One of my early lessons learned during my involvement with the Veterans Administration's Decentralized Computer Program was the power of networking people together. (see George Timson's view of the History of the Hardhats) I had been using a computer system called Confer II designed by Bob Parnes in the early 1980's and rewrote much of the functionality into a DHCP module called MailMan allowing threaded conversations between users. (Larry Brilliant adapted the same approach to create the Well, and Charles Roth adapted it to become today's Caucus software).

MailMan went on to become the most popular application of both the VA's DHCP (now VistA) and DoD's Composite Health Care System (CHCS), at time approaching 25% of the user interaction. People just needed to communicate. Supporting informal, peer-to-peer interaction was an amazingly powerful tool, even in very formal hierarchies (and perhaps because of the formal hierarchy. This was an important lesson to me in the power of information technology leading, rather than following an organizational design.

If you took a poll 20 years ago about who needed electronic mail, you would have found most people answering, "what the heck is email?" and "we don't need email, we have this guy in a kart that comes by twice a day and delivers everything I need in a nice folder." Only after folks saw the value of networks, and the network itself reached a certain critical number of users did email take off. Building the worlds greatest quadraphonic telephone set doesn't do much for you if you are the world's only user. Only if enough folks adopt the other end of a peer-to-peer relationship do we see the "network effect" take off.

As we have seen repeatedly with Internet surges, it is simple things that catch on that trigger the greatest network effects. Starting with simple initial conditions, the network grows into an ever-expanding space of activities. Growth fuels more growth.

Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the web, describes his vision in creating the web:

“What was often difficult for people to understand about the design of the web was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no central computer “controlling” the web, no single network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that “ran” the Web. The web was not a physical “thing” that existed in a certain “place.” It was a “space” in which information could exist.”

He created the simple initial conditions which fired off the web's evolution that we see today. He did not try to create Google, Amazon, or a Dewey Decimal system to "organize" the web. By creating a space for things to happen in, rather than trying to design the systems to accomplish some specific goal, he created an open, evolving environment that bootstrapped itself into ever-higher levels of richness and complexity.

He also defined constraints on his initial conditions. He specified that the protocols would ONLY work on TCP/IP, ignoring the powerful proprietary standards of the day that we used by AOL and Compuserve, for example. If AOL was charging an hourly fee to access their service, for example, why would they ever want to link out to a competitor's network. So, rather than "integrating" AOL and Compuserve, he simply created his own open space. I will be referring to constraints such as this a "Generative Constraints" - the good fences that create good neighbors.

We find this pattern repeating itself across many following successes on the Internet:

Pierre Omidyar didn't go to the auction companies of the day to "integrate" their inventories and "streamline" their activities, he simply created a tiny, more efficient space for folks to sell very small items efficiently - and the eBay market space grew to 150 million users today. His space evolved according to the reputations of the buyers and sellers - trustworthy sellers earned a reputation that gave them higher sales prices and lower escrow costs.

Jimmy Wales didn't go to the encyclopedia companies to develop an "integrated" encyclopedia, he simply created a wiki that allowed users to contribute their work and it became WikiPedia. His space evolved according to the notion of a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) which constrained authors in their writing habits.

Jeff Bezos didn't go to the booksellers to integrate their activities, he created an innovative approach to connecting people, books, and reviews.

These innovations came from creating a space outside of the prevailing industry, rather than trying to fix the old hierarchies. Trying to apply innovative technology to hierarchies, no matter how much folks say they want to "integrate" is not a recipe for success.

I learned this as part of the Vvaleo Initiative for health care reform, which tried to apply Dee Hock's "Chaordic" ideas to health care reform. At one of the Appreciative Inquiry Summits of about 175 "stakeholders" in the health care field, I made a suggestion about streamlining health care. Another woman at my table said, "oh my, that would put my husband out of a job." Lesson learned: Gathering all the stakeholders in a perversely incentivized industry and asking them to streamline themselves is not a productive approach. Those who are benefiting from the inefficiencies and power hierarchies in the existing system will be the last to suggest innovation.

The most fertile areas for large scale transformation, I think, is to find "virgin territory" within which a positive, innovative networked approach can thrive.

Rather than trying to fix the Health Care system, create an [Epidemic of Health].

Rather than build more efficient fundraising systems for non-profits, define attractor networks that can be supported by [Micro Philanthropy].

Rather than plan disaster relief systems, create [Resiliency Networks] that can respond to emergencies in an adaptive, evolutionary manner.

Rather than fight an epidemic, create a [Global Immune System].

Rather than keeping children from being left behind in schools, create a [Viral Learning] model in which folks help each other learn.

These ideas may seem idealistic and unworkable from the "industrial" perspective. How can folks take care of their own health, for example, when doctors have such an arsenal of tools and technologies at their disposal. We can't have "do it yourself brain surgery." This is of course true. If I had a brain tumor, I would want the world's greatest, most specialized surgeon cutting away at it, if it came to that.

But consider also the global health menace of addiction and all of its flavors. The most successful approach to controlling additive behavior is not a pill or a doctor's visit, but rather the approaches pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. AA is a self-organizing, self-propagating organization that collects no dues, maintains no membership list, and generates no medical transactions. Yet it has proven itself the most successful approach to addressing the problems of alcoholism. It's 12 step program has evolved to be used around the world, and in many other forms of addiction. It is a "peer-to-peer" model of health - members help each other stay sober, and in so doing, help themselves stay sober - a wonderful example of [networked reciprocity]

We can't always predict these patterns of [Infectious Good] in advance. RSSA supports the [Search/Amplify] model of discovering what's working and how to do more of it. This is in contrast to a more predominant [Plan/Execute] model of experts deciding a course of action, to be executed over time.

There are certainly many areas in which Plan/execute is appropriate. We can't expect poor women in Africa to discover a cure for polio, nor a collection of workers to build a skyscraper with a very well defined (and approved by a government planning department) blueprint.

On the other hand, particularly dealing with personal transformations such as health, education, and development, we can look to self-organizing, self-propagating models. For example, we can look at Savings-led microfinance as model in which women save their own money, earn their own interest, and develop their own business activities - and to teach each other how to do so. (see [NanoFinance] effort)