David, I was a Minciu Sodas member years ago via invitation...but never quite got it. Can you please explain what they do, and what types of ways we might be able to work together? Thnx.

Richard Otieno sent me the following draft by Andrius Kulikauskas of "a proposal to to promote UK innovations in Africa":

Andrius prefaced the proposal by saying:

I will sleep for several hours and then I hope to finish my draft of my proposal so that you can write letters of support! Meanwhile, here is what I have so far. I am thinking of calling my proposal "Orchard of thoughts" because that is what Minciu Sodas means and perhaps there is a subconscious connection with gardens and orchards throughout our work. I appreciate our thoughts! Andrius

Orchard of Thoughts

Minciu Sodas is a worldwide community for independent thinkers. Minciu Sodas means "orchard of thoughts" in Lithuanian. We would like small gardens to be the concrete way that we come together around the world.

Small gardens are revolutionary. Gardens flourish as activity centers in the "food desert" of Chicago ghettoes; commitments to sustainability in Silicon Valley; "nutritional resistance" in summer and winter for Soviet-occupied Lithuania; a first income for alternative farmers in Missouri; a monastic refuge in Austria; a laboratory where women are free to experiment to heal HIV/AIDS victims in Africa.

Samwel Kongere, a Kenyan fisherman, led our Kenyan team for My Food Story. He organized a Minciu Sodas regional network in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. We collected 500 stories on-the-ground with the help of participants in Serbia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Israeli-occupied Palestine, India, the United States and the European Union. We learned that our world's food supply chain makes for concrete stories that link innovations and human values. Our friendships moved us to respond to the post-election turmoil in Kenya with our Pyramid of Peace of 100 online activists and 100 peacemakers, 1,000 volunteers on-the-ground engaging gangs, opening roads and saving lives. The Public Broadcasting System championed our innovative use of cellphone minutes for emergency barter. Our creativity embraces differences with human pyramids, community theater and peace caravans with camels.

Samwel now leads a center teaching ICT and entrepreneurial skills to 3,000 women. We appreciate the challenge of including African women.

Villages crush independent thinkers, but four or five of them can transform their village. We come together locally as informal hubs of projects and guests, working towards "global villages". We want to establish our global network of rural and urban hubs by cultivating our gardens.

How will clients benefit?

We are building human bridges that link us around the world with African women with small gardens who help us reach out further.

And the men and women who champion them.

Investigators gain education as if they were attending college. They gain relationships and along with them, computers, video cameras, travel to conferences in Africa and Europe, paid work. Contacts.

Our efforts are meaningful if they allow for others who think independently, if they reach out further to include other points of view. We are motivated to lift ourselves out of poverty, material and spiritual, when we are able to expand our context, which is to discover the significance of our actions for ever more sisters and brothers, so that in our work and play we love and are loved.

We want social networkers to motivate African women to think of themselves as included in this global context and to provide their leadership.

How many people will benefit?

We will grant 1,875 microloans of 50 GBP to at least 1,000 women for their projects for participating in our culture. 2,000 men will be taught enough ICT so that they can each contribute a "food story" about a woman in their family. They will all become active champions of our culture. We expect 20,000 people in their families to benefit from their projects and from the principles that they espouse. We expect 200,000 people to benefit directly from the nutritious produce and 2,000,000 people to take inspiration from the stories and ideas. We likewise expect 2,000 active and 20,000 supportive participants online.

Benefits in six months and in two or three years.

Impact and monitoring

375 investigators will receive 100 GBP stipends and 100 GBP microloans for their projects. Each investigator will coach and monitor a team of five women and they will be rewarded for each other's success to keep the default rate low.

Local coordinators. Microloans and microresearch projects

Food stories network of

Overcoming obstacles

We enjoy success in Africa because we engage our participants as equals. We expect them to have a deepest value, an investigatory question, and to work for free in the Public Domain on what they wish to achieve. We thereby repel the selfish and attract those who care. We are then confident to provide them with 50 GBP of paid work even never having met them.

We are able to share energy with each other as independent thinkers. Our care for their activity motivates them much more than any earnings, gains in productivity, or local opinions. Samwel notes that our "knowledge-based approach" transforms our minds so that we seek to learn in everything we do.

We should reach out to the hard-to-reach, both the very rich and the very poor, so that we are all one human chain. We then value every person who reaches out further, but also those who hold us together. We plan to always have at least one "ambassador" from Africa work from our bases in the West, and from the West work in Africa, so that we discover a global context for each other's food stories, weave relationships and impress upon us our global relevance.

Indicate risks

Medium risk: Women often suffer domestic violence when they try to improve their conditions. We will ask men in their families to stand up for them and present their accomplishments with food stories that help us all engage them.

Medium risk: Women may default on the microloans more often than we expect. We will reward each team that completes its projects and repays its loans with 50 GBP for their own fund to loan to each other.

Low risk: We may get leaders who care about money and not our culture. We will therefore recruit as leaders those who have their own research interests. We will promote RNRRS innovations as catalysts for further African innovations.

Low risk: We may have trouble moving content back and forth between local languages and English. We will make sure that our local coordinators have a good understanding of our investigatory culture and work with them to structure our activities so that we can share globally what is most relevant.

Low risk: Our centers may not find work to sustain themselves. Yet we are tenacious, creative and thoughtful investors. We value the human capital that our centers and gardens yield.

Exit strategy

Our goal is a growing worldwide network of self-reliant rural and urban bases for independent thinkers. We will start with Kenya and Lithuania and within three years we expect to have rural and urban bases in Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and Missouri, Chicago, California and Austria. Each base will be led by a team and evolve into a physical center for co-working, which means a space for working-for-free on one's own projects such as education, arts, sports and also working-for-pay on projects such as ecotourism, knowledge work, agricultural sales to make a living and provide revenue for the center. Each center will provide Internet access, Skype and video bridge services. Our local network of gardens and thinkers will affordably accomodate those traveling from the countryside to the city or vice versa and those visiting from other countries. Our worldwide community will encourage research projects at each base and foster a culture of leadership through investigations. We will encourage individuals from the West to support microresearch and microloan projects with a website much like Kiva except that we share our food stories, we work in the Public Domain, and we invite all to engage our participants.

Mark says:

David, I was a Minciu Sodas member years ago via invitation...but never quite got it. Can you please explain what they do, and what types of ways we might be able to work together? Thnx.

I don't quite get it either. That's the reason for the thread. I hoped someone here might explain. For example, where is the revenue stream to finance their proposal?

Perhaps someone might invite Andrius here to explain?

One way the WCP might benefit from the Minciu Sodas proposal is - if it is workable - their networking approach using (paid?) local coordinators:

We may have trouble moving content back and forth between local languages and English. We will make sure that our local coordinators have a good understanding of our investigatory culture and work with them to structure our activities so that we can share globally what is most relevant.

One way Minciu Sodas might benefit could be from the overall WWC framework that may attract new supporters, especially from developed countries.

I might note that theirs is a (to me) dangerous adherence to a kind of "openness" or "transparency" principle which encourages people to use full names, email, phone etc during crisis situations (in the press, on the internet, etc) where reprisals are a very real possibility. This was evident to me in MS work during the election crisis.

Thanks, Lars. That figures.

My understanding of the communications infrastructure you have in mind for the WWC is that it be light weight and distributed. What I mean is that the central office--for lack of a better term--would have a Web site and a database of activities, but the correspondence between partner areas would more or less be left to the partner areas to figure out.

I mention that because Minciu Sodas offers a concrete example of what that sort of infrastructure might look like.

Something I've mentioned in various threads here might be framed as a question: Should David Bale be famous? Not once when I've brought this up has there been a peep. I take from the silence a resounding "No!" from David.

I'm saying this rather awkwardly, which probably means I'm not really clear on my thinking. In any case thinking of Minciu Sodas as a sort of model to look at for how the WWC might be organized, it might be worth while to notice how that organization depends on Andrius being "famous" in some sense.

What I'm getting at is figuring out how to make David Bale to not be indispensable to the welfare of the WWC is an important challenge to figure out. LOL either that or you're going to have to get comfortable with the idea of being "famous" David.

My feeling is there is much to learn from Minciu Sodas, how they use various Web sites and manage their garden of small projects. It is kind of hard to do that precisely because their activity is spread out in many groups. Viewing it from the inside requires a time consuming plunge into the network. And Andrius serves as a sort of gatekeeper. The best way for a sort of view of Minciu Sodas is perhaps to engage with a few people who are active there. My first approach would be to look in an open-ended way rather than to go into the looking with an eye to collaboration.

John, thanks for your thoughts about Minciu Sodas.

BTW I don't think I would have any problems with being famous.

But as I wasn't born famous, would it be better for me to be seeking fame or waiting for fame to be thrust upon me?

;)

Most likely it's because most people don't think the WWC is such a good idea as I do.

:(

To be honest, I think Mark does a good job navigating this "tension" you raise John. I encountered something similar with Peace Tiles. Perhaps the most difficult challenge I encountered was something like:

• Starting something like Peace Tiles required a lot of heavy lifting by a small number of committed people who believe in the power of the idea

(Downside of this is that you get "boxed" or "pigeon holed" as the Such and Such guy - its a mixed blessing)

• Success of something like Peace Tiles depended on growing the number of people who believe in the power of the idea
• Sustainability of something like Peace Tiles required pushing "ownership" outward: ensuring space for people to "make it their own" - this can conflict at the strategic level

Just some thoughts. Being "famous" (which I define loosely as, "Your reputation precedes you") should be ancillary to the pursuit of an idea that you believe in IMHO.

[Deleted by author on 28 Sep 2008 05:15 PDT: r]

Richard wrote:

I think ms is the greatest thing that ever happened to Africa.

Could you perhaps say more about why you think Minciu Sodas is the greatest thing that ever happened to Africa, Richard?

Richard Otieno said:

David, I guessed Ceris of Wales could share some light on the issue?

Sorry, I don't know anything about Minciu Sodas!

Lars, by gauging from the kind of stuff these guys write seems things are on their way up to improvement and at an unprecedented pace.

Ceris, oh, sorry too; I think I confused ms and Kayiwa's non-profits. Do not know why I thought were related, anyways...

;)

Richard Otieno wrote:

...by gauging from the kind of stuff these guys write seems things are on their way up to improvement and at an unprecedented pace.

Hi Richard, I'm still not sure I understand. Can you say more about the kind of stuff the guys are writing, what things are on their way up to improvement, and help me understand the pace?

Much appreciated.

Lars, I doubt it is anything worth anybody's serious attention. i guess improvements and probably its pace are subject to human interventions at various levels. I doubt we need care much about them as much as we need yearn for the benefits of the outcomes.

Richard said:

Lars, I doubt it is anything worth anybody's serious attention.

I think quite a few of us are either interested, keen or simply curious to know more - good or not so good - about Minciu Sodas. I shouldn't think Lars is looking for you to provide a sound technical evaluation about what exactly constitutes an "improvement", just some indication of what's so impressed you about MS's work recently.

What would help me most would be to know:

• In which countries is the work of MS gathering "unprecedented pace".
• And where can we find out more about this?

Thanks.

edit for spelling

Edit: I put up a post which contained some really thoughtless parts. So thoughtless in fact, that the only way to parse them was as hurtful comments towards Lars and others. That's not what I meant. The trouble is I did post and I'm sorry. I went back and edited the post to try to better say the points I was trying to make. It's still not coherent, but I hope doesn't cast aspersions or is offensive to anyone. I did not mean to do that in the first place and am embarrassed and sorry I did.

All of you know that I'm going to go off topic. It seems to me what I'm thinking about is on-topic, but I'll admit in a tangential way.

What interests me about Minciu Sodas is that it is an example of an effort in some ways similar to the World Wide Connectory as a distributed effort of many. Minciu Sodas offers some communications infrastructure as well as a culture of practice or ethos perhaps summed up by the mission to organize free thinkers. They operate as a networking club.

As the WWC is still in the planning phase it seems a good idea to look for models.

As I understand it the WWC proceeds from the question:

What if the people of the world shared poverty?

That's not exactly how you stated the question, David, and I'm sure you said it better, but it gets the gist. This question interests me very much. Richard has as fundamental questions about what poverty is, and in my own confused mind have been wondering too. But even while questioning, I've never really moved from the feeling that poverty is a bad thing.

But proceeding from another set of questions, for example questions about how to overcome sexism, how to reduce environmental destruction, to challenge the ever expanding demand for wants at the expense of needs, for all of these the way to proceed seems to be economic cutback. Economic growth ignorant of limits imposed by the larger ecosystem seems a cancer on the body politic.

The Global Fund, a worldwide effort to do something about AIDS, malaria, and TB. More than a billion people have died from TB since 1700. People in rich countries more or less figure they don't have to worry. We imagine that our wealth somehow inoculates us. With good sense we would worry because while disease afflicts individual people what to do about disease prevention requires thinking about how disease affects a population.

We are connected whether we know it or not. So the question about sharing poverty gets turned around:

What if people knew we shared poverty?

A second question easily follows:

What would we do?

And it seems to me that these questions are what the WWC seeks to answer.

People have been volunteering their efforts in service to others for a long time. But the Internet and other communications tools open new ways of organizing such efforts. Following many threads here at Ned the idea of P2P or commons-based peer production is an idea we all are wondering about.

There's a great Ted Talk by Clay Shirky Institutions vs. Collaboration. It seems quite relevant because part of the planning about the WWC is how to get people collaborating. Clearly the purpose of the WWC is encourage and promote collaboration, so it good to look at ways that institutions oppose collaboration. Dave Pollard's post today Agents, Intermediaries and Collaborators touches on this subject. I noted that the first comment was Jon Husband. The tag line on his blog is:

You know more than me, we know more than you, and wherever this all going, we’re going there together.

Right now we assume that to do something we have to get organized and we presume the way to get organized is to make a hierarchy. Husband's blog is called Wirearchy and this is how he defines that term:

Wirearchy - "a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology."

The ways we think about doing things is changed by the hyperlinking networks of online collaboration, so that many of our presumptions based on a hierarchical perspective are altered. I know that many in the poor partner areas have less access to the Internet, but still at root I believe that the WWC is a P2P collaborative effort which makes the questions about how the WWC might be organized very important.

But we're new at this sort of thing and there's lots to invent. Omidyar.net was one sort of experiement to invent ways to organize in this many to many way. But experiments show it's not always so smooth. Remember all the arguments at Onet whether we were doing anything good at all?

The way that collaborative efforts are organized is often different from ways that traditional employer-employee organizations are. Even organizations which engage volunteers to provide goods and services follow lines of authority.

The idea of the WWC seems to be to match partner areas and have these areas organize their own collaborations. It hard for me to imagine the lines of authority for the more than three thousand partner areas when the WWC is fully operational. There will be thousands of experiments of various scales going on. Some of these ways of organizing will not be particularly worthwhile or successful. Many of these attempts will be contentious and questions raised about their legitimacy. So issues about how to maintain the credibility of the WWC organization are difficult. The important thing is to imagine what one can be reasonably be responsible. There's been quite a bit of discussion about here about the issues of responsibility of the WWC in ongoing discussions.

I do think that the way that Minciu Sodas is organized points out some pitfalls in how to run collaborative organizations. It seems to me that Kulikauskas tries to keep the legitimacy of Minciu Sodas by being sort of a personal bottle neck. Since the idea of the WWC is so expansive such a bottle neck in David Bale seems a poor model to follow. In short I don't think it's good to imagine that David Bale can control the whole organization, unless he controls a hierarchical institution. But that seems no good because the very core of the idea of the WWC is not a hierarchy, but rather to use Jon Husband's word a wirearchy.

David has a great idea which he's invested so much of his time. The institutional approach would be to set up an organization or foundation and partner areas would form their own organizations or foundations which would be members of the main organization. I'm painting with a broad brush here, but I think everyone would understand a set-up something like this. But this may not be the best way to conceive of the organization, nor the only way it might be conceived.

Models like the Red Cross, or the Boy Scouts depend obviously on many volunteer efforts, but still at root are hierarchical organizations with employees and chains of command. The model that Mincu Sodas provides is of a networking club. A unique response to this challenge of inventing new ways of organizing. The problem I imagine with this applied to the WWC is that the ethos of the organization is enforced through one person which I don't think will scale well to the size that David imagines for the WWC.

I don't have a solution as to what to do. But things seem to be moving quickly and I'm concerned thing will get tricky quickly.

John wrote:

Or consider Lars' concerns about Kayiwa and the KJT right now. Due diligence for Lars means: show me your license, show me your accreditation, show me your books, prove to me your legitimate by showing me your hierarchy. Lars is of course a very nice guy, and the demands he's making have a moral resonance, so it's an easy step to go from no-hierarchy = bad, or even criminal.

John, you are dangerously incorrect here, and so - whether nice or not - I'd like to ask that you not put words in my mouth.

John, you have a fine appreciation of ideas - and from the start have attuned yourself precisely to what this project is intended to be about - but your appreciation of people's characters is sometimes surprisingly wayward. I've never met Lars but have now read hundreds of his posts here and on Onet and I was a little shocked at your caricature of his attitude towards Kayiwa and the KJT.

I think Lars expressed himself very precisely (in separate posts) on the matter of MS and of the KJT Supporters Club. I believe he was wrong in suggesting that the two are connected in some way. But that is not the point. My understanding of what Lars said was not really about due diligence (and certain not about due diligence as described here), but about some misgivings he felt about lending his support to an organistion (MS) whose rhetorical grandiosity rang alarm bells for him.

In other words, Lars seems to be someone for whom intuition plays a part in his decision making and not someone whose only criteria for decision making is that all the required crap is there and that it is all stored in its proper place.

No wonder Lars has reacted strongly! I don't believe for a moment that he is remotely a control freak. At the same time you'd have to be pretty stupid not to pay due attention to due diligence.

And one thing I'm sure we can both agree on is that Lars is not stupid!

I think I've posted [my last post] too soon.

I might have guessed that John would have the generosity of spirit to want to edit his post and avoid misrepresentation.

I really screwed up. Lars highlights just one of the offensive passages in my post, but is enough to show the gist of what's wrong with it.

I had to go do something else right as I saw Lars's post, so the best I could do is to take it down. Probably should have deleted it, but I wanted to take a look at how best to deal with the context of this thread.

Putting words in someone's mouth, saying what they have not said is inexcusable. I am very sorry.

I apologize to everyone who read the post. I'm still sorting out how to make amends.

I don't want to sound like a clunky, self-absorbed meme BUT I want to write something about Minciu Sodas and it feels like if I do it now, I'll be interrupting. (and will end up being sent to Meron & Gayle's Corner or something!)

7. xoxox :)

David, thanks for the clarification. You may be correct that MS and KJT are not connected - it could be something I've wildly read into the whole connections for wellbeing and minciu sodas relationship. Please don't hesitate to tell me directly when you think I'm off point.

John, thanks for pulling the post. I'm sorry to be short tempered - I guess you've inadvertently discovered a pet peeve (guess you couldn't have known I take my words as seriously as I do my art, teaching, etc. As Obama recently said to Palin, "Come on, words mean something!").

Anyway, consider this a handshake.

....and my four year adoration of you guys continues with a big dopey sigh.

PS: out of time....I'll be back later to OT the daylights out of this thread!!! :)

KJT is not connected with MS as its not the source of support for it.

However, personnaly am a member of MS and a love it because i have got many connections there there are many people there Individually whom i have met face to face share good ideas, get help from people on ms as aperson, just like recently i have recieved 3 books called Creating A world without povert by Yunusu muhamed from bangaladesh and i have given them out to some friends including lectures to read through and improve their bussiness skills

So i would suggest that if we need to know more about MS then we have to invite The Director for it here, he is called Andrius and his email is open to every one on www.ms.lt

However, I fell like you have some questions about KJT which iam one of its leaders Please feel free to ask me direct of course using simple english because i must admit that although am in the university doing Social work bachelors, i find hard to Understand the english Lars, David and Powers and mark use some times its too pure lol