Why another platform?
I am not a techno-optimist. I agree with Doug Tompkins that over many millenia, technology has made us disconnected from nature, and paved the way for the Anthropocene, a newly defined geological era in which humans are shaping the planet to their immediate benefit, having lost sight of the deep, finely tuned interconnectedness of all living beings that created our planetary eco-system.
That said, I have spent my life working with newly emerging technologies that connect people. I don’t share the nostalgic view that we can just drop what we have created and go back to a more simple way of life. The only way forward is through - we need to look at the root causes of why it now seems unavoidable that in order to support 8 billions human lives on Earth, we need to continue accelerating the destruction of the environment - and inevitably, we need to support new emerging approaches that can change this process, using the technology that is available now. The problem is not about ‘solutions’, including tech. The problem is finding the right questions, the shared problems, the lowest common denominator among the stakeholders where we can all connect.
Awareness-based change methodologies like Theory U, and Dialogue, propose that in order to comprehend why we are stuck in a suicidal economic system, and to discover new ways forward, we need to understand ourselves and our fellow humans better: to inquire with empathy, acceptance, curiosity, and to embrace what is present. Facts and analyses are not enough - despite all the information now presented in the mainstream media on a daily basis, we still keep consuming more and more, burning more fossil fuels, cutting down more forests, and destroying living eco-systems with ever-growing speed. To understand the disfunctional system, we need to examine why it works - what makes it important to guard the status quo for the humans who hold it in place, including ourselves. We need to listen.
collaboratio helvetica has been dedicated to creating social spaces where such encounters with oneself and with others can happen. The intensive and deeply moving face-to-face events have drawn a budding community around the organisation, and these explorers hold the potential to both bringing more and more understanding to the table, as well as more new ideas to work on - and to reach beyond the change-maker community and catalyse societal transformation. However, the magic of face-to-face events is limited to those present, so it doesn’t facilitate easy follow-ups, non-synchronous encounters, and a tangible, connected network. In order to enable our community to converge more, and grow further, we decided to build a digital platform that can provide these functionalities.
On the one hand, what we needed was clear from the beginning. However, creating a tool always involves more than just looking at the known problems it can solve. We wanted to look at what unknown problems there are in the community, and what unknown consequences there may be of such a platform, to make sure we end up with something that furthers our vision in multiple ways. This is why the platform design process included an extensive series of stakeholder interviews, and researching existing community platforms. We learned about why people join or not join such a community, what hopes and desires our community have, and what invisible structures we need to pay attention to while making key decisions.
We decided on a few key points that were not foreseen when the platform idea came about. First, we placed the content of the platform under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA. This means that instead of the default copyright laws, everything that is posted can be re-used as long as the borrowed ideas are attributed back to their source, and that the new ideas, tools and projects they inspire are shared under the same licensing. Attribution creates a respectful environment where people’s contributions are appreciated and accounted for, and the ‘share alike’ principle shortcuts the well-known problem from open source technology, that some profit from others’ generosity by putting a copyright on their products but don’t give back to the commons. Second, we decided to (slowly in time) create groups around all collaboratio helvetica activities and move the daily operations of the core team there, enabling the entire community to see how the organisation operates, and eventually become involved. We also introduced a new circle of affiliation with collaboratio helvetica: the curious. Before signing up as an explorer, anyone can join the platform and have a glimpse of the community. We hope that the pull to join will only be greater if we make ourselves visible without paying a membership fee. Finally, we are now actively thinking about how to lend the powerful features of the platform to other change-maker organisations, and form closer partnerships with companies and institutions across Switzerland.
We hope that the digital platform will extend our community and become a principal meeting point and knowledge hub for anyone in Switzerland who is interested in supporting the transformation towards a sustainable way of life. We also hope that our method of creating a small tool mirrors how we envision such a transformation - in miniature, we try to implement the processes we believe in: deep inquiry, listening, and systemic thinking.
The platform is just a tool - the collaboratio helvetica community is our main point of focus, and we hope that by offering it, we make a further step towards the collaboratio helvetica vision of catalysing awareness-based societal transformation in Switzerland.
Katalin Hausel is responsible for organisational health and evaluation at collaboratio helvetica. She has gained three Masters degrees over the years. Katalin has a past in writing code, making and teaching art, working on rural regeneration and social cohesion projects, building IT tools, designing learning and evaluation tools, developing learning and evaluation solutions, working on new forms of collaboration and generally putting her mind to complex situations and finding a way through. Lately, she has been focusing on developing a framework for social innovation initiatives to use observation and organisational learning as a project evaluation methodology instead of predefining objectives. As a dedicated discipline-roamer and paradigm-shifter, she has been exploring how to craft situations, tools and spaces for transformation and learning to support systemic change and the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).