 Cool. Hello, everybody. I'm John. This is Vivian. We are working on a project called Lumia and Vivian's prepared quite an excellent talk. She was showing it to me earlier. So I'm just going to kind of be here supporting her and filling in any of the gaps or blanks here or there and and then afterwards we'll have the question and answers and I kind of I work on the product side of things and user experience Vivian handles more of the you know relationships with customers and and business development and that sort of thing. So I think between the two of us we should be able to cover it all. Cool. So we're talking about Lumia, which is a New Zealand start-up, although it's a global business currently in 30 countries in 15 languages and we're just at that really exciting point of getting into a minimum scalable product. So just with that bit of background Lumia is a really easy to use online decision-making tool and it aims to do nothing less than change the way people make decisions in the world. So just a small vision and in its core, it's three really simple ideas. It's about productive rich group discussion. It's about having that discussion and form a group decision and then from a group decision, it's about engaged supported action and to give you a sense of the power of this very kind of simple idea and its relevance to all of us and the discussion today about eco-technology. I wanted to invite you to think about just for a moment decisions being made in your life. Where we make decisions in our families and our sports clubs and our workplaces and our communities and our countries and indeed in the world. And I wanted you to just ask yourself the question in any of those places in your life, are there decisions being made that you would like more say in? That you would like to be able to participate in more fully. And you might want to chat to the person sitting beside you just for a moment about what's running through your mind right now. Are there any places in your life and your family and your wider community relationships in your country where there are decisions being made that you would like to have more say in? So I'm wondering if anyone would like to share anything that came up. Anybody have an example of something happening that they would like more say in? I was wondering whether offshore drilling might not come up. In New Zealand right now. Local waste disposal. Absolutely. What else? What else came up? Where the family might holiday next Christmas? Great. Having a say about sex education in schools totally. Yep. So the the thing that we found somewhat surprisingly to us about Lumio is that the groups who want to use it started out being about activists has grown really fast to many many environments where people naturally want to be involved in the decisions that affect them. So Lumio right now is being used by local governments, it's being used in schools, it's being used by businesses, by social activist networks almost anywhere where people want to collaborate but are either time poor or resource poor you know traveling to get together or the idea of getting together is just impossible. In all these places Lumio is being used. So the real question for today is not you know what is Lumio so much but why is it? And what is it for? What does it serve? That those are the kinds of questions that that the Lumio team the 15 of us really engaged in working in Lumio are asking. And that leads to the kind of the the the founding story of Lumio which which John was absolutely a part of and he will give you a bit of an insight into that. Cool yeah so for me it started well I guess just before Occupy kind of happened throughout throughout the world when I was kind of thinking about the current capitalist system and and sort of the the inequality and and the the all the decisions that you know we didn't have a say in that we wanted to have a say in and thinking about that and then Occupy happened and I went down to Occupy Wellington and we started making meeting together and making decisions together and you know I met a whole bunch of other people who were you know thinking about similar things but you know the really amazing kind of transformative and eye-opening bit for me was just the actual process of decision-making itself that was happening at Occupy so you know we'd have to all sit down in a circle like 50 or 60 of us and decide how how are we going to make sure this was a safe space and how are we going to you know make sure to feed everyone and and that process was was pretty amazing at times when you know someone would have one suggestion for you know how we might solve one of these problems and and somebody else would be like oh we'll know the issue there is because of this that and the other and and just watching the group collaborate these people complete strangers but going going through this process of consensus building coming up with solutions that were better than you know any one person could have come up with on their own but then at the same time experiencing the the agony and pain when you get you know like two people who just fundamentally disagree with each other and their egos are just fighting it out and everybody's sitting there at this meeting for like three hours and you just have to wait and you know so there was a lot of painful moments there as well and you know for us the obvious thought was like what if you could take this process and and put it online then then it means that you don't all have to meet in the same place at the same time to still have that deliberation and that you know that dialogue that leads to constructive action you know and if two people are having a conflict they can they can either maybe solve it on their own time or even if they are having this heated discussion online you know you can kind of scroll past it so you don't have to sit there for an hour and and I just started thinking as well okay that this means this could open up decision making not just to the people in Wellington but also Occupy Auckland and and you know Sydney and you know you just start imagining it scaling out and out and we're like whoa this could be really big but that was just the start of it so you know we started talking about that um we ended up meeting some people from Inspiral and and they were like yeah this is great you know we're a horizontal organization and we really need to make decisions as well collectively but right now it's really hard there's just a couple of us that end up making most of the decisions just because of the energy of and and the resources required to you know try and involve a whole bunch of people and collective decisions so you know Josh ended up making a large percentage of decisions back in the day um so we had a meeting and they were like yeah that's great and and we were convinced that um they would they would build it for us we would just be like yep and they're like yeah this is good and then a month later there would be this decision-making tool and we'd use it for Occupy and we'd use it for whatever else and that'd be great but um and you know it'd be open source as well and the world would just take it away um and go with it take it and run with it but um we had the meeting and they were like this is great and um we don't have the resources to build it so you're gonna have to do it and um that's kind of like okay well I guess I know a little bit about programming um so with their support you know they gave us a place um a space to work in and mentorship um we started building a this social enterprise um and very quickly realized that this isn't this isn't an issue that just affects um you know people at Occupy this is a decision decisions and or something that everyone is involved in all the time you know whether it's your country or your community or your business um and so kind of away we went and here we are like two years later so the journey for me is a little bit different because I've spent 30 years working in the community sector in New Zealand mostly in human rights organizations and most of my real reflective learning has been through participating in this stewardship learning community which has been meeting over the last 25 years or so um in the 1980s there might be other women in the room who were involved in women's collectives and women's movement work um and you know pretty much we failed at achieving um a new power structure organizationally um I think women's refuge is the only women's collective organization left and I've spent a lot of time working with them over the last few years and they they run like a series of independent incorporated societies not really like a collective so the culture and um form of alternative power structures and organizations which really Occupy was calling for has um over many decades all the decades of my working life failed to really be resourced with tools that make that possible so what I learned in the 80s was that you know conviction and passion and really wanting it to work wasn't enough to make it work and so when I met John and the other young people involved with Lumio what I got was that now the internet provided a platform that could make things that we tried really hard and failed at 30 years ago entirely doable now and to me that was an incredibly exciting moment to think that um you know stuff that was still important but really on the back burner um could now come forward in the meantime I'd spent 15 years as chief executive of serious of a series of large New Zealand community organizations and really it had immersed myself in hierarchical structures all the time with real questions about whether this was the best way to get the best out of what we were doing the best way from the point of view of charitable paradigms which always work with what's left or are defined by what a government wants to purchase or a philanthropist wants to support or the best way from the point of view of organizational hierarchy and um I can hear myself say very regularly how would I organize this organization of 800 people in such a way that everyone felt like they had a stake that everybody felt like they were an owner they worked like an owner so um I formed a view about two or three years ago that capitalism and charity are two sides of the same coin they're both broken they are equally broken that by definition the problems caused by the excesses of shareholder capitalism in the world define the resources available to those organizations who define themselves by fixing those excesses the community sector is by definition risk averse it has to be because it's using other people's money and failure for the public who are donating money or for the philanthropists investing money is unacceptable so that makes innovation you know real new systemic thinking really hard making mistakes is just not um part of a learning journey like it is in entrepreneurship it's um it's a reason for court cases and um turnover of senior staff and resignations of boards so for these reasons after 30 years of community sector work I reached the conclusion that scalable global social change and social justice is not possible using NGO and capitalist paradigms and we did some talking about paradigms earlier in our gathering um I want to make a distinction between um what I'm saying here and between using the market and the tools of business or the cultural wealth of communities um I think that's quite different I think we must use the wealth and knowledge of community and community development and the wealth and knowledge of business and combine them in new ways to get to scalable social change I think in particular that business speaks to scale and pace and momentum and markets in ways that in the community sector we've never really got a handle on I'll just add that that's the same same thing for me coming from an activist background uh at Occupy you know um you can kind of you realize at a certain point that you can you know scream as loudly as you want but that that's totally different from you know actually building building alternative solutions um and so for us like for me personally when we first went to Inspiral and and Joshua kept on saying like you need to turn this into a business I was just like what are you talking about like coming coming from this almost anti capitalist um background I just thought like oh no businesses are what the problem that got us here and and for me personally uh there was a really big shift in thinking and a really big like gotcha moment when I saw how the tools of business could be used to scale social impact and I think that's been a really big part of the Lumio story is um growing a new kind of organization in the space between community sector and charitable organizations and businesses um and and like all new things that create some reaction um but always coming back to the idea the simple idea that um we are visioning a world where everyone affected by a decision can be involved in making it it's a simple idea but it's a complex thing to achieve because of course it's cultural change and that's systemic and our own system has become really important to us Lumios is social enterprise it aims to scale it wants to make a whole bunch of money because it wants to have money to invest in further scale and further social change in order to achieve that we formed a cooperative and right now it's a workers cooperative um so everybody who works in the business owns it we all have one share each and as we mature and develop there'll be other um shareholding members of the cooperative like our channel partners who are our distribution network and our users so that all the people involved in using Lumio will have a say in how it develops and that's given rise to the idea that one of the things that Lumios about as a disruption technology is building new public infrastructure and I've only really come to grips with this idea because it's very outside of my experience the you know working in an internet business has been outside of my experience until the last two years we take we take for granted that the roads we use are publicly owned by and large every now and again we use a toll to get some new development but then it reverts in New Zealand to being free again we haven't carried over that thinking to the internet so we're seeing this huge rise of the internet in the world largely owned by private companies without really considering that these new public spaces we're growing Facebook or Google plus are owned by somebody else not us and we're playing in those spaces like it's a playground where somebody's recording our conversations and then selling the data so the politics of this internet net spaces suddenly arrived full blown in our lives and um as Lumios started to be picked up around the world we've become more and more conscious of the idea of growing infrastructure that all people own and that the data that you put in there is yours and and that you can take a copy of the code and use your your own version of it and we're really delighted that in the last couple of weeks wiki media who we spent some time with in san francisco um Sue Gardner who's the chief executive there has led out on starting wiki media's own version of Lumio in order to be making better decisions in the back end of wikipedia and that kind of like makes our heart beat fast and it makes us start to feel like um we're part of a community an open source community a global community who feels passionately right alongside us about that the way we grow this resource called the internet um one of the ways to make Lumio most grabbable is to tell some stories about who's using it and link said just as we were walking in the door you know read out the quote from the woman in brazil and you know i haven't got the quote from the woman brazil but let me tell you um it some months ago now six months would it be when people in brazil were hitting the streets because bus fares had gone up and it was kind of like their last straw and hundreds of thousands of brazilians protested and within hours we had an email from a young woman called um myra who said um in brazil right now as you will know we are inquiring into the meaning of democracy and we are um we are worrying we've forgotten how to do democracy well some core things are missing in our lives like engage discussion like um focused inclusive decision making and like people feeling like we can have a say in the way our country goes Lumio looks like a platform we can use to engage each other in deciding together what democracy should mean for us and we kind of all stood there and looked at this email and sort of cried we went wow that's it's such a powerful um summary of what is democracy but also the challenge in the world right now which is um does it just mean voting once every four or five years or does it mean something much more than that and um and that's what Lumio is beginning to be it's beginning to be uh what you do after you've protested to rebuild the positive action you want to take in order that in your family or your community or your workplace um everybody who is part of that um can easily have have a say the way we think about Lumio is as a Trojan horse um it is a disruption technology it solves ordinary problems you know like the problem of how do you really fit in all the meetings you could go to um as opposed to get momentum in action how do you in an organization of 800 people hear from the most marginalized of that organization the ones furthest from the head office or if you're a multinational country and you I mean country a multinational organization and you're trying to make decisions across time zones how do you make that easy to do but so that's the that's the reason why people start using Lumio those kind of everyday problems but what they find once they start using it is um a platform that grows our confidence around collaboration so right now the European Youth Pirate Party are using Lumio to um they they they've got their act together way faster than the pirate party itself who haven't yet formed a European there's a German one and a French one and an Italian one but they haven't got organized um to get a European one together but the young people have and they're using Lumio to make all their decisions about um priority policies that they will then run through liquid feedback which is their much more complex bigger um software that they use um for um you know like hundreds of thousands of people to participate in policy making and kind of just on that note about um you know Lumio being a Trojan horse and and people originally using it just for you know kind of maybe born day today sort of stuff it really ties in in my mind to what Joshua was talking about yesterday in terms of you know creating these viruses which you can kind of send into companies which then go and actually change the the DNA of a company or of a culture and so for us um we like to see Lumio as this you know just really efficient easy to use tool like oh of course we're going to use Lumio to make decisions um because it means um you know we get better decisions faster um but what's kind of subtly happening is by an organization using Lumio they're actually subtly becoming more democratic more participatory we really love that strike debt who who here has heard of strike debt who are the Americans in the room who know about strike debt so strike debt is one of the offshoots of Occupy movement and they a little group of people from in New York decided that they would um crowdfund um money with which to buy health debt from poor people in America so that in New York they started off rated crowdfunding campaign and raised four hundred thousand dollars with with which they bought fifteen million dollars of health debt and um they are now uh scaling right around America with um strike debt groups starting up all around the country and we feel very chuffed that they are organizing on Lumio so this is a uh New Zealand kind of like outcropping of Occupy that's supporting strike debt which is another initiative out of Occupy and I love those stories because lots of people I meet tell me that Occupy failed and um you know I think Occupy has barely begun and we're yet to see the the intergenerational learning and initiatives that come out of it and one of the groups using Lumio more and more is um different councils throughout London and they are using Lumio because they want multi-stakeholder input to neighborhood decision making and they've got resources and focus on making that happen so um Lumio kind of by accident is a global business and our challenges are about how we get the distribution of that um right for the kind of business we are um our challenge in terms of product is how we do a good enough job of our development pathway so we get rapid organic growth and we're just kind of on the cusp of that right now our challenge is also to build Lumio with enough a light enough touch but a clever enough design that we introduce the um the craft of collaboration wherever Lumio is being used we just completed a world trip as a result of being invited by the world forum on democracy to present Lumio in Strasbourg in France and went to about six countries including coming home through America and um one of our inquiries was social impact investment and we've come home feeling incredibly excited about the large investment organizations internationally who want to invest in social enterprise and you know their um their main criteria are not what is your legal structure not um are you for profit or not for profit um which country are you in which country are you in but rather what's your measurable social impact so an organization like Nestor in London would totally delight be delighted to invest in Lumio um so long as we can measure the social um impact that's happening in the UK as the result of Lumio being used we're delighted right now to be working with a um partner in the UK who's got a community of 24 000 people living with mental illness we're being run off an internet um platform that doesn't serve their needs and they're shifting the whole community into Lumio and funding our development pathway so they get the features that they want in order to deliver to this community of 24 000 people and the social impact outcomes of that are really clear so we immediately have a partnership that we can take to Nestor a project in the UK and um so that's you know really exciting to us Brian and Matthew here introduced us to Carlos at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and I was blown away by how focused on problem solving this man was you know in America there's particular laws about charity but if you're not a registered charity that's fine because we do it like this and we work it like that and um you know we've got this kind of fund and that kind of fund how can we work with you it's such a different experience it's such a more mature collaborative peer based experience than my experience of any kind of fundraising in the New Zealand context it really was powerfully positive for us to just go and be part of those conversations a midger um foundation um you know these are organizations who are investing billions of dollars and they just ran through their head um investment person again who we got to through Brian and Matthew's introductions just sat us down and said are you open source are you a mission driven organization are you potentially able to globally scale you know they had about five questions and with every tick they opened up more resource um I just found it incredibly heartwarming and it reminded me there are wonderful things about growing a social enterprise in New Zealand but truly the the scope and possibility and opportunity doesn't come into focus until you're out in the world so um we are back here in New Zealand now we're about to run a crowd funding campaign that will be our international launch of Lumio and um will deliver us the money we need to complete our development pathway to achieve that minimum scalable product and um once we've got weekly substantive weekly user growth pathway then we've got three or four large organizations ready to invest whatever we need so that's our trajectory for 2014 we're incredibly excited about it um really focused we've got lots of learning and deepening to do around our horizontal organization um but really without trying being in 30 countries and 15 languages um we're just celebrating that and being really grateful for each other and the support we've had from the global open source internet activist community thank you so before we finish a couple of things um some of you won't have seen how communities heal which is a book about New Zealand social entrepreneurs and the work that's been done probably the first publication in New Zealand about communities and community work and there's four copies here please feel free to grab one of that you feel like it's got your name on it and the other thing is you know part of my work in the world is around holding resonance I call it resonance magic and this morning I was looking at my crystal collection and this crystal talked to me about community and diversity and I wanted to give it to you Brian and Matthew here for your community as you get underway at this rich learning and community building you're doing um to remind you about all the little bits that go into creating a whole so thank you I think we have a few minutes for questions so thanks for that presentation Vivian John um getting to know you guys and the team uh over the past 11 months one of the things I really admire about Lumio is just a cohesion of the team uh I haven't seen many teams that work really well together um I'm curious to hear from you guys what are the lessons you have learned about you know getting a team so aligned behind a vision that each person is sacrificing so much um to work towards it and and work together by putting a bit less emphasis on personal ego and a lot more emphasis on division yeah um the the first thing that came to mind when you said that yes it was um cooperative and and cooperating you know um well I'm on the product team so I I don't I don't deal as much on the business side and so when Vivian and Ben you know and and a couple other people on that side of the organization started talking about the idea of us turning becoming a cooperative at first I was a bit skeptical you know because I was like oh it seems like a lot of extra you know I don't know red tape or you know you know just like why don't we just set up as like a traditional company or a non-profit or whatever um but now as I've seen more people join our organization and become cooperative members begin as we invite them to become owners of the business and seeing how instantly overnight as soon the our most three recent cooperative members they worked for six months as contributors and as soon as we invited them in as as worker owners um it just changed their relationship to the business instantly it became less about them and more about how do I help keep this thing alive and make it thrive um so I think that has been one of the really big things that I've seen people bring their whole self to work every day so that's one thing I mean I think that the uh value base of Lumio right from the beginning was really clear that the wanting to be part of not just creating a collaboration tool but a new organizational model we see ourselves as map makers so in order to do that well we need to live it and the kind of the the discussion and the work that goes into you know how without any bosses you keep um real focus on momentum and productivity um that means everybody's got to be good at supportive nurturing conversations and everybody's got to be good at tough challenging conversations I was really struck Joe in your presentation earlier about the the hand of God well of course in my world it'll be the hand of the goddess um and I think we've we've overemphasized in our conversations I've called this the balance between power and love um we've almost fallen into the trap of being so accepting and loving that hand is the hand of support and there's not much shove behind it and you know one of our learning edges about our team culture is how we get this wonderful mix between the um the brutality of the task of getting up the hill and um doing that together as a team and so um you know it remains a challenge but it's almost one of the points of engagement everyone who comes into Lumio stays because they are entranced by that dance yeah I just thought it was an amazing tool obviously quite inspirational for the here and now and I'm just trying to solve the problems that we've probably all grown up with I'm just wondering um the first thing I thought what would this look like in a family scenario and have you seen it deployed and have you seen how children kind of embrace this new way because we haven't gone up with it and watching them grow up with it is probably going to accelerate it or will be an inspiration for me awesome yes I mean this is one of our big um dreams and uh right now in New Zealand there are four schools using Lumio they're all intermediate age schools so that's 10 11 12 and school the the the the students council are using Lumio to have their say and their input into the school board of trustees and in some instances student groups are using Lumio to add as activists in their school to advocate against you know we shouldn't have homework where there's plenty of proof that it doesn't work or I want to be able to use my scooter in the playground at lunchtime and and right now the rules say I can't so let's see what people think about that so um Ben Knight if he was here would say his vision is that the next generation grows up expecting to be involved in decisions that affect them but more than that expecting to support everybody in the ecosystem of that decision to be involved so this is the shift from my right to have my say to a paradigm whereby part of my role is to ensure that everybody affected by this decision is having a say about it and that that becomes the norm so um in families we've been blown away by the way families are using Lumio most recently this is a really touching story a woman who heard us talk on the radio who we had never met rang us up very early in the Lumio story and said I heard you on national radio I love what you're doing I really believe in it I'd like to give you $15 a week to help you and so for the last two years she's been paying us $15 a week which is pretty amazing and just in the last few months her son who's actually visited us he's a 21 year old has been diagnosed as having leukemia and he's in Australia and she's here and he's got a brother in England and people who care about him all around the world and they formed a Lumio group so that he stays in control of communication he's not bombarded with emails but he can share and talk and ask for help and that's starting to take off in the um in the sort of the can I say the cancer community so you know they're sharing with other families who are starting Lumio groups and well we never dreamed that that is how Lumio would be used but it is being we have a family who own a piece of land a biodiversity park and um you know the parents are in Dunedin and there's children in UK and Australia and New Zealand and they make all it they never meet they make all their decisions as a family about this biodiversity park um on Lumio so yeah it's pretty exciting hi Viv um I'm really curious about what you said about your 30 years of experience before this leading up sort of seeing this as a tool which allows things to be possible which didn't seem like they were possible before I've spent most of my life sort of managing people or projects and for me it's always seemed that the biggest challenge I've had is actually dragging people away from their computers and making them sit down and talk face to face right and that so much more can happen face to face than that can happen behind a monitor and it sounds like you're saying the opposite I'm really curious about what your reflections around that are yeah nice point um I absolutely don't think it's either or um it but I do think that that uh we are increasingly very local and very global and we need to be able to operate really skillfully in both spaces so when you're very local face to face can work it still marginalizes some people and um so the combination of local like for example in the Wellington City Council used Lumio to have a conversation with people about alcohol management strategy for the city now they also had face to face meetings but the people who engaged online were not the people who engaged in face to face meetings so overall the council heard from a much greater diversity of people by doing both than if they'd done either for global businesses though or global networks or organizations getting together just isn't real it isn't going to happen one business uh who some of you may know Catherine Korach's business um who's a New Zealand woman with a global business based in London um she they have their management meetings at midnight weekly just because that's the best time for that's the best time zone they can get for everyone to be there well Lumio just solves that problem for them you know they make decisions in their own time zone with the same momentum without someone having to be awake at midnight so um it's not either or when I was referring to something that is possible now that wasn't possible then I just think that um in our women's collective vision about uh collectivism as an organizing principle rather than hierarchy we we just didn't have tools we had cultural form we had intent but we didn't have things that would make that easier and that's what I mean I just think that the internet offers things that would make that easier um we met with a woman called Amory Slaughter in Washington who is leading out on a part of the American government's work on growing democracy in the developing world and um you know this is an incredibly high-powered woman one of the really fantastic things about being in America compared to the rest of the world was that there was women's leadership in the internet space that I didn't see anywhere else I was so delighted to meet these women like Sue Gardner and Amory Slaughter but she's working with people to grow I haven't got the right the right language but like when you've got internet connectivity without going on the internet like people grew in the occupy movement so that pardon yeah the whole peer-to-peer thing and so she's combining that with Lumio so countries in developing worlds have not only got connectivity but they've got a platform to make decisions about how they're going to use it well both those things come out of the possibility of the internet neither of them would be possible without the internet both of them can be done really cheaply so that emerging democracies can grow a whole relationship to participation that we are going to have to catch up with in this more developed world great thank you