 Oh, how about that wind this morning in their outdoor showers the wind would be gusting and the shower would move and it'll be like Oh, it's cold dancing with the wind It was awesome. So I'm appreciating the earth that's it's very much alive today and I'd like to take this opportunity to honor the land and the people who've stewarded it in the past and the people who steward it now and Yeah I'd also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge our Maori brothers and sisters the Energy you've brought to this event for me and the the stories and the songs and the sacrifices and work you do to keep those stories alive and to keep the language alive and to growing is Precious and admirable and the work you're doing for your people Inspires me and it reminds me that the burden of healing the scars of colonization Is meant to be carried by all of us so today I want to talk about weaving a beautiful world and I'd like you to pay attention to that little bird. We'll be coming back to them later it's called the sociable weaver from Africa and I spend a lot of time studying Organizations and collaboration and how we can do things together and I found few metaphors More apt than improvisation in a jazz band when musicians show up and they've all got their different instruments And there's no clear leader But there are people who are who have more experience and people have less and there's a lot of listening and creating space and filling space and we witnessed some of that around the fire a few nights ago and to me it feels like the way humans should work together and it's premised on the idea of having an instrument and In music you can sort of see what instrument someone's got They've got a guitar or a piano or saxophone or whatnot and you sort of and intuitively it gives you a way to orientate around them and When I think about the work of collaborating and working together The metaphor of a jazz band feels great, but what are our instruments? It's taken me 15 years to figure out what my instruments are in this work Because when you're showing up and you're working with people all we have is titles will have like Facilitator or programmer or leader or whatever it is and they're not very good definitions of our instruments of our gifts So I think a lot of learning to collaborate together is about learning how to Talk about what are our gifts? What are things that we bring and so where I've gotten to and myself after 15 years of collaborating is that The instrument that I'm most passionate about that I'm most excited by that I can't help but bring to every single thing I do is dreaming and chasing dreams and thinking about futures that aren't and trying to make them real and Doing little experiments just out of curiosity. What happens if what knowledge is there to discover here and This dreaming and experimenting I can't help but bring that everywhere. I show up And I'm also reminded by have you ever heard someone like learn violin or bagpipes or practicing as they go? Well, that's my colleagues over the last seven years. I've been figuring this stuff out So I'm very grateful for like tolerating that and supporting that and helping me discover the instruments and and I hope you all have Compassion when the bum notes come out and what not in the future But it's but that that's sort of that what lights that's what lights me up So what I'd like to do is share some of the experiments I've been running and things I've been learning over the last little while So six months ago. We started a process of forming a new team at Inspiral and it's called the golden pandas There are four of us. It's a cooperative. We each own one share in the company and The purpose of the company is to develop products for the commons We create new products that are aimed towards a generative commons based economy And we want lots of people to have access to those products and sell them make livelihoods from them That's sort of the purpose of the team and we're calling it a livelihood pod Because when you give something a new name it creates a new ambiguous space and you bring less baggage along for the ride so this is an experiment I've been running and Well, we've been running together and one of the things with this is that we're going we're practicing income pooling So all of us have got day jobs and we do different contracts or businesses where we earn livelihoods through as well as doing this Work of building up new products, which doesn't pay much at the beginning and we're pooling all of our money in the middle And we're having conversations with each other about how much should we get paid and right now? We've decided let's pay out everyone equally Let's just get a bit mace line paid to each other each other and then let's build up a cash buffer And let's have a conversation in the future so it's a very different way of running money through a small company and Instead of figuring out who's going to add the most value in the future We're going to trust our ability to have a conversation at that time if we need to start differentiating how much people get paid The other part of it is that our energy our time becomes a collective resource So instead of me just going oh, I've got an idea I'm going to run off and try that I've committed to a process of I'm going to talk with the rest of the team about it and we're going to give each other advice and we're going to collaborate on what should we be working on and That process that has been so liberating for me I've spent most of my life scheming and stressed and worrying and I had a job once in like 2002 and ever since then it's been the life of a bootstrapping entrepreneur and There's always like something going on so over Christmas. I had a holiday, but because The with the pandas we were committed to a process in late January on what are we going to work on? I didn't know what I was going to be working on in February that was so relieving and relaxing and There's something here where we're not committing to a particular business a particular industry a particular hypothesis on how We can make money in the future what we're committing to is each other So no matter what businesses we go in or what work we do where they're to support each other as a team So it's subtly different from other teams. I've been involved in and it's a really rich experiment for me a Lot of my work. This this was inspired by a meme around happy birthday. I care. We baked you a cake and And it's essentially along the lines of Decomposing organizations when you look at organizing systems that there's typically a brand There's a legal structure. There's a social structure. There's money flows There's information flows and typically you're in all of the systems or you're out of all of the systems And I'm very interested in in dynamics where you're in some of them and not in others How can we have blurry layers around our organizations? So when I start thinking about the word in terms of world in terms of these livelihood pods Then I also start thinking about the world in terms of products and instead of a product being owned by a company Owned by a single team. It can start to become a nexus of contracts between teams It's like a web of relationships and agreements about how money will flow how governance will happen How work will get done is a future of a product that I can imagine and then you can start to imagine how products meet Customers through marketing channels and so on and who controls them and who has livelihoods in them so this world of a blurry web of people and different language and different ideas to me is the is the Organizational form which is really drawing me a lot at the moment at in spiral. We're going through a really interesting process right now We're essentially a cooperative of people and what you call those people is kind of up for grabs Some people like entrepreneur or change maker or activist or intrapreneur. No Not you can never find a word that everyone agrees is the right label But we're a group of people who are fundamentally aligned about trying to make the world a better place and to me It really speaks to some threads. I've heard here around what what is it that binds us together? How is it when you meet someone here or in the world where you just go? Yes, that's my person That's someone I want to collaborate with and the idea that there is a bunch of people who are working to weave a brighter future They're working to weave a better world They're committing their whole lives to it and I think that's the unifying principle So right now I'll just call them weavers after that little bird But in spirals a cooperative of them the key structure we've had since the beginning is we have members and a member has a share in the cooperative and Their members the dynamic is a member is someone that most members trust a whole lot So you have a group of people where as the group grows in size It becomes more expensive to join that group because you've got more people to build trust with has a natural bound and Size a contributor is someone that one member trusts a little bit and supports a little bit So this is someone where that that size of that group is naturally bounded by the number of members in the group as well So you have a natural size there we've hit that size and we're having conversations about how do we essentially go through? constitutional reform How can we rewrite the fundamental roles the identities the language we use in the group to go from one circle to multiple circles? And we're in the thick of it right now and we're having conversations about do we want to do this if we do want to do this How do we want to do this and that process of going for a group who's been together for? Five years six years seven years for some of us to go through a fundamental rewriting of how we work together is really informative So platform co-op this is what Joseph asked me to walk about and this is a diving platform who's heard of platform co-ops? so If you think about a software platform like uber or air bnb Then a platform co-op is a simple idea that that software platform is owned by the people who benefit from it and depend on it So it's an uber owned by all the uber drivers or air bnb owned by all the air bnb hosts The reason it's so important is that platforms tend towards monopolies So if you build a Facebook and you're successful you will eventually be the only social network in town same for air bnb Same for uber and if you think about the situation that someone who depends on uber for their livelihood or air bnb for their livelihood Is in then they're essentially in the position of a medieval peasant if you're a peasant and your king sucks You don't really have much of an option or you can really do is risk your life and liberty in a rebellion Maybe change power the innovation of democracy was that you can have peaceful transitions of power If you get a lot of people together agreeing with you you can have a transition to a new new way of being And that's the that's why I think platform co-ops are so critical because platforms tend towards monopolies and because The power differential between the constituents of the platform and the monopoly is unfair Unless we're going to see government regulation, which is very unlikely to break up Monopolistic platforms then I think platform co-ops are essential to an equitable way of doing business in the world of online systems And I think there's another opportunity here and this is the opportunity of if you have If you've got a million people on your platform and you're trying to figure out a way to them to govern it and exercise power and agree And whatnot that's a really interesting experiment if you figure out something interesting that that might have direct application to how our cities and Countries work So if you have hundreds of platform co-ops around the world you have hundreds of experiments in governance and the future of our countries So that's another reason why I think they're really worth in diving into so some other things we're doing is around workshop tours and will building international networks and Running an online learning community and whatnot But I think the the vision which is pulling me in lots of these experiments is Imagine a world where there are hundreds or thousands of these tight-knit cooperatives of people weaving better futures committed to supporting each other All under their own brands and auspices and sovereign under their own right But imagine them linked up imagine them aware of each other and each of them I guess building their own businesses and experiments What if one of those discovers the next Uber the next Airbnb whatever it looks like and instead of going towards Silicon Valley and VCs and a command and control coercive extractive Financial model what if they scaled it by asking all their other co-op friends to scale it out with local money and local talent? Would it be possible to start building some quite large entities quite powerful entities Helping lots of people Democratically controlled cap returns for investors social mission intact part of the generative economy I don't think we need to do that too many times for the world to take notice Because one thing about the economy is if you start to make lots of money Everyone pays attention to you and everyone tries to copy you and if the competitive advantage of a platform co-op is You give power to everyone who is benefited by you who everyone you depend on and if everyone just copies you doing that You've inevitably meant the world better So this idea of swarming networks is something which Fundamentally interesting and and lots of the experiments are pointing in that direction So this is a nest that that bit word at the beginning weaves. This is the biggest nest in the bird kingdom so they essentially collaborate they can build nests that but sort of South Africa and east coast of Africa and they can build nests with like 400 500 individuals share They get massive benefits from this It starts to act like a thermoregulator so that in like the desert with huge temperature fluctuations This smooths it out means the birds need much less energy and they're very competitive. It's quite a successful species The nests are actually so heavy that the telephone companies because they really like straight poles for building on them The power companies have to build stronger poles because they fall down with heavy nests Otherwise because the water gets on them and they just knock them down So it's so a great thing but to me it really articulates one of the biggest opportunities of our times If you look at the dominant narrative in many of our institutions, it's that of competition It's that survival of the fittest compete with each other kill or be killed and it's in our economy It's in our politics. It's in so many of our institutional systems and the opportunity is that that's only half the story the other part of it around cooperation like yes we have competitive nature in us, but we have a deeply cooperative nature as well and That story has been missed by so many of our systems So if we're looking at building a better world, I think we can essentially out cooperate the status quo By getting better at cooperating by leaning into those muscles learning those instruments I think we can start to basically build stuff much faster and bigger and better than anyone expects So I'd like to finish with an idea this is an idea I've been bumping into for a few years and it's also an idea that I've been bumping into a lot at this event and It's This isn't my idea by any means, but I'd like to give a voice today to you. So in 2040 it will be 200 years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi And What would it be like if on that day about 23 years from now the people of Al Tiroa signed a new document? What would need to be in that document? What conversations would need to happen to get everyone in the country agreeing on something? What conversations would the Parkihar weighed down with unconscious guilt for the crimes of colonization They're barely aware of what would they need to see and hear and be part of to fully participate in this document What conversations would Maori need to be part of to to put their faith in a new agreement? 200 years after the old one and everything that happened since then What healing would need to take place? What facilitation? What would actually be in such a document? What could we imagine if we dream into the best world we can think of? What would it be like if 23 years from now? Al Tiroa, New Zealand had legal rights of nature unassailable legal rights every mountain every river every forest Equal alongside human rights Would that be possible? Do you think we could get that done in 23 years? What would it be like if in that document there was a resource-based currency like the world's never seen before? What would what would that tail? What would we need to figure out what experiments what who would need to collaborate? What if there was a fundamental rewriting of the relationship with the land? What if the concept of owning land was replaced with stewarding land? Do you think you could get that done in 23 years that level of agreement? What instruments who would need to collaborate? What instruments would they need to bring? What instrument would you want to bring if we were collaborating on that like everyone's busy? We've got lots of nests. We're building everywhere But what if this was one nest many of us could collaborate collaborate on what would that take? So that's just an idea which has been I've heard in this group And I'd like to give voice to and I'd like to leave one part of it is that I've had a few friends over the last year a few Years changed their names John became mix Ruth became a Charlie and it was such it took a while to get used to like we'd known them for a while He had to practice the new name and whatnot, but it was a fundamental and Announcement of their identity their intention who they wanted to be and who they were right now So what if 2040?