 I'm Alana. I'm a social entrepreneur who works with the Inspiro network, which supports social entrepreneurs and launches social enterprises, especially around the space of collaboration and participation. Because we're organized collectively, we've had to develop a lot of processes internally for things like decision making, budgeting, which we've then open sourced, usually as open source software, so that other people can access them as well. Inspiro is primarily a network. It's basically people who are drawn together by a set of shared values or positive social change through business. People who want to use it to as a business to make the world a better place. There's a lot of people who are interested in technology, but there's also other kinds of professionals like lawyers and accountants, and the main commonality is around these values. We're organized through shared leadership, collective leadership and collective ownership, and have a really interesting system of voluntary contributions sort of to the center, and then deciding together how the center is going to support everybody. Well, COMP project originally started out of a collaborative funding process that we were running at Inspiro. It began just out of a real need that we had. We didn't want just a few people making decisions about what we were doing with the money that we had, but we wanted to develop a collaborative process that was effective and fast and easy to engage with, but also was really inclusive that many different people could contribute to. So it really started sort of from scratch and just began iterating using really ugly spreadsheets and just started optimizing this process slowly. And it's been incredibly powerful for us. It means that now not just a couple of people actually have their heads around the numbers. Really everyone can engage with that. So the idea being that anyone could propose a project, the work that they wanted to do to get funded, sort of like internal crowdfunding, and that people would allocate their part of the money proportionally to how much they contributed back out to the projects that they wanted to support. And then out of that grew the co-budget software, which John has been doing a lot on the design of how do you translate that ugly spreadsheet process into beautiful, engaging software. You know, anytime you're dealing with money, there's just, and lots of different people contributing, say different ideas like, you know, I'm proposing this bucket or I'm proposing this new project that I want people to support. There's just a lot of different elements and figuring out how to do that as well in an interactive way that is both fun and intuitive, also simple and just makes sense and is easy to use. I recently visited the Participatory Budgeting Conference in San Francisco and I was able to meet a lot of people doing incredibly transformative social change work and community development through participatory budgeting, oftentimes like citizens directly allocating their tax dollars and that sort of thing. And now I'm talking to people on the participatory budgeting project and other people connected through that whole ethos about what would participatory budgeting look like in schools, what would it look like in community groups and cooperatives in businesses, in NGOs. Just anyone who really wants to practice transparency, inclusion and engagement at a whole other level, I think it can be really transformative for organizations. It has been for us, absolutely, to really feel that people have this collective ownership of outcomes. They really feel that their voice is being heard on something as practical as money and budgeting. So one thing that I realized talking to people doing participatory budgeting processes in sort of an analog way is that the implementation expense for them is huge. They were talking about numbers that were blowing my mind in terms of what does it take to do participatory budgeting in a city or a school. And I think that one thing we can contribute is by developing software that's easy to use, that's engaging and that's effective, it's sort of radically reduce that implementation costs and more and more people can participate in these incredibly empowering processes. And that's a theme that runs all across all the apps that we build and spiral, taking these, the cost of collaboration which can be quite large and just trying to really minimize it by orders of magnitude so that it really becomes accessible to people and with the hope that when we can make things like participatory budgeting and everyday democracy just massively accessible to people that that will create radical social change. One thing we I think learned really early on is that it doesn't make sense to do everything collaboratively. So there's some decisions and processes that oftentimes you say, actually we as the group think it'd be better if this person went off and did that instead of us all sitting around a circle and trying to do it ourselves. So I think one of the first things is just figuring out when it makes sense to do something collaboratively, when you think you'll get a better result when working collaboratively and then doing it in that scenario. So basically what we're trying to do is make it easier, make collaboration more accessible, not make it so it's required for everything. So that's the first thing I think. I mean I think there's a couple ways of looking at sort of efficiency in collaboration and if you're, sometimes collaborative processes do take somewhat of an investment upfront of time and energy. Then if you ask yourself how are we measuring the total picture? Like are we making good decisions? How expensive is making a bad decision? How expensive is it if a lot of people in your organization or in your group aren't on board with the decision that was made or are disengaged from or alienated from the process or from the activity of the group? That's really expensive in the long run. And so I was recently talking with a management consultant who put it was speed to implementation is not the same as speed to success and they're actually thinking about what success means and where you're trying to get to and the incredible power of actually including diverse voices on raising the quality of decision making, not getting caught up in group think or in just the perspective of a small number of people but also when you get people feeling like they have participated in the decision and they collectively own the outcome. The level of motivation that inspires is really off the charts and the ability, the maturity in an organization for people to say, I'm going to set aside my pet project because I can see the whole picture and I can see that this other thing that someone else is advocating is actually more important and I'm going to put all my energy into making that a huge success. That's a whole other level of efficiency. The way we're starting out with co-budget in the Inspiral use case is that we've already got core expenses decided by a smaller group of people basically and we use co-budget to decide what to do with the discretionary funds and that's something that the people on the ground level are going to have a better idea of what sort of new projects can we start up that are going to make this part of the system run better that somebody at the top might not know about. So I think it really opens up a lot of possibility there. On the other scale of like the really large budget, which is something that we haven't really tackled with the co-budget design yet, there's a number of ways to do that and in some of the collaborative budgeting processes that are used so far what happens is a whole bunch of people say, here's what I would want this full budget to look like and that all gets collated together and each person's perspective of what should the budget look like, that's kind of like a story and a perspective and then there might be a smaller group that's elected by the company or the organization who will then take all of those different stories and perspectives on what people think the budget should be and turn that into something that kind of represents that diverse perspective. I think there's an incredibly important connection between budgeting and strategic thinking and when you start to really understand the power of budgets and what they're really for, you realize that they are in some ways the implementation of the strategy. And I hear a lot of leaders talking about how they want everyone in the organization to think strategically about the larger goals of the organization and how their work fits in. When you connect it up through this actually really engaging visual kind of gamified process, what ends up happening is you understand not just the discretionary budget but you can see what those fixed expenses are, you understand how much taxes do we pay, how much does an accountant cost, this idea that everybody should be able to at least understand why. If there is a hierarchy in senior leadership who's making decisions like why they might be making those decisions, that's really important and also asking themselves how does my work contribute to the bigger picture strategy. So in our internal budgeting process, we've got our year's strategy on top of every month's budget. So as everyone's considering what the immediate needs, everyone's thinking about the long term as well. So yeah, not everybody's going to have a view on every part of an organization or a project, but that's okay. I think if you design these processes well, what you get is a really amazing balance between the collective voice and the individual voice. If somebody really knows another part of the organization, maybe they can have more influence in budgeting on those projects and just not decide how the other budget's going to be spent. It's a really dynamic process. So you can choose to delegate your decision-making power back to the group if you feel like you don't have the expertise that you need and that kind of gets the best of all worlds. I think there are a whole bunch of sort of proto-processes being trial-dead and spiral right now and it's exciting because we're really sort of an experimental group of people, kind of an entrepreneurial bunch and so we can do this kind of experimentation, optimize some of these processes and then figure out how do you open source them in a way which is going to be accessible to people who maybe can't be quite as experimental. And that's not only about technology, it's about digital technology but also what I call cultural technology which is how are all the ways that we interact as humans and all the processes and the ways that we communicate that support great collaboration including the great use of collaborative tools. So I think a lot of people have had the experience of introducing some piece of software that's supposed to solve all the problems and it kind of falls flat on their face and that's because it's not just about the software itself, but it's about what's the culture in which you're using it. And one common theme between both Lumio and Co-Budget and probably some of the other inspired ventures that have started up is that they did start out as purely cultural technology so with Lumio it was down to occupy people making decisions together democratically and that consensus process has been going on for hundreds of years and with Co-Budget it started out with Alana making some really awesome spreadsheets that facilitated the process before we turned that into technology and I think putting the emphasis on the cultural technology first means that when we actually go to build it we know what we're building it's the right thing, we know that it's actually valuable. Did you know that actually the Co-Budget process comes from an even more analog process before that? That there was an intentional community that used to do their budget by actually writing what they wanted to do on posters and then having a bucket and everybody would get monopoly money and go and fill out their bucket and this is what we call Hawkins Buckets in Co-Budget. But it's about taking these amazing group process technologies that many amazing people have been working on for a long time and bringing them into the digital age in a way that's massively more shareable and scalable and accessible to all kinds of people who I feel like these kinds of processes and ways of collaborating to revolutionize how they can work together. The thing about collaborative technology is that it helps companies to make more empathetic decisions. I think there is a real upswell of more humanistic ways of organizing people and you're seeing this amazing convergence between new practices in business and new management philosophies alongside new social movements like for example the octopi movement or Podemos movement in Spain and lots of environmental movements are all kind of recognizing this amazing power of bringing down the cost of collaboration and communication really radically increasing the amount of people that can uniquely participate in the transformational power of that kind of engagement on the individuals involved and the efficacy of the movement. We've seen a lot of amazing stories coming out of using collaborative software for social change. Things like Lumia for example is used in a big mental health services NGO in New Zealand and I recently did a workshop with them and they were telling me a story about how they have a real value around including all of their staff, some of whom have had challenges with mental health themselves or maybe aren't used to being in leadership positions or empowered positions including them in decision making and that rolling Lumia out throughout their whole organization has let them see individuals who never would have spoken up in a meeting or never would have felt empowered in that way have their voices heard and be meaningfully included in decision making and that starts this really virtual cycle of them stepping more and more into a position of leadership and empowerment. There's amazing stories out of participatory budgeting of people who go through that process are then for example more likely to vote because they actually feel that they are meaningful citizens and members of their civic community and that being engaged in one way can have really positive knock-on effects and how you're engaged in other ways in your society and in your company. I really do think that if we can start doing democratic processes in our everyday lives that we will all upskill ourselves in this thing called democracy that it's not something that's about voting once every three or four years that it's about how do we collaborate and make decisions and talk to each other every single day in all the groups that we're a part of and that's the skill that we can work on building up together and therefore be able to build a better society together. I think that open source, social mission driven companies is not at all at odds with a really strong revenue stream and a really good business model. We do really sort of radically transparent collaboration with our Lumia community and recently hosted a big discussion about what should the financial model of Lumia be and our users hosted a proposal and said we want you to charge for it. We want to support this thing financially so that was really amazing and way more meaningful than trying to force money out of people that doesn't make as much sense. Co-budget I think is especially well positioned to be a thriving social enterprise as a business because by definition everybody using co-budget at least has some money and in my experience people really do want to financially support things that are useful to them and especially things that are made by people that they trust and if they can actually transparently see how the company is going to be participating maybe in some decisions or in the direction of the project they're really motivated to support it and make sure it thrives. So I think that a strong business model is just as an important part as a strong social mission is in place. Yeah and on what you said about trust I think that's one of the most important things with all of the Inspiral apps and organizations is like really focusing on how do we build trust with our users you know especially and the more we focus on creating a really good user experience for instance instead of you know just trying to manipulate people into paying us the more they'll freely want to give us money and help us thrive and continue to build the organizations and the apps so yeah. I think we do need support financially and I'm not exactly sure I feel like the world hasn't figured out the right model for how to scale really mission driven enterprises yet venture capital isn't quite it philanthropy isn't quite it even impact investing isn't quite it but when you have something that's been tested on real people is getting a lot of pull from users and has massive potential for being really useful and having a positive impact we need to find where is that scaling capital how do you take that validated concept and really blow it up big and we're still working on that so far we're bootstrapping everything I think when it comes to different kinds of investment you have to kind of look at what's incentivized in the model so if what's incentivized is a big exit that's really different in the long term sustainable maybe slow growth company everybody kind of knows about that one but even with philanthropy it tends to incentivize constantly writing grants for example or not being exposed to market forces in the same way and not having that rigor which I want that rigor I want to be exposed to those market forces and have to relentlessly optimize for user value I think that's really positive for our project impact investing I feel like I don't know for some reason the thinking around it hasn't quite mature people don't know exactly what metric are we measuring here I don't feel like the it's kind of like regular investing except you're not going to make as much money back which is not maybe that's unfair to say but I just feel like people aren't feeling that connection to investing in the social outcomes in the same way and we really need to connect up I know that there are people out there who are super passionate about doing good but we need to create the models to make it easier for them to plug in resources to those outcomes to get social returns the world is changing and I'm a really optimistic person some people a world is evolving in some extremely exciting ways and for me they really are about including more and more people and real diversity and really getting at how do we have the best of the individual voice and the best of the collective voice and you can see this in how software is developed in how new political movements are happening you can see this in how really effective new paradigm businesses are being run I'm super excited about being on that wave I think it's only going to go further and further but we need the tools we need the tools and we need the cultural expertise that it's not just about tearing down what's there it's not just about removing hierarchies or removing the existing system because that just leaves the vacuum it's about being incredibly conscious what are we building next what's really going to support the society we want to live in and so we're in our own small corner trying to build a certain part of that but I think we all have to work together what we need is a huge diversity of different people all working in their own corners building up the tools and the expertise and knowledge and sharing them with each other and supporting what each other is doing