Working Together

So I really haven't had much to write about lately. Nothing has inspired me to write. However today I was Twittering and I came across this article/blog. I really believe that he's on to something. Creating collaborative environments is something I think we have lost lately. It has been more important for the "I"'s in our lives than the communities. I think that Whittemore's article is interesting and while it is not my work I would like to share it.


Creating Ecosystems for Collaboration Around Social Innovation
by Nathaniel Whittemore
category: collaboration
Published June 12, 2009 @ 09:56AM PT
(One of my students and his partner in a collaboratively-designed after school sports program in Kampala, Uganda, 2007)

Andrew Wolk has a short but important post up about his recent attendence at the Future Trends Forum in Madrid, Spain. In it he shares one of his major take-aways about a new take on collaboration:
I left Madrid with two takeaways I thought were worth sharing. The first was a general agreement that we have been too focused on scale by replication, and have not thought enough about scaling ideas. While this is not new for this blog, I heard a new angle on what should be an increased emphasis on collaboration. As one attendee put it, we do not need another water filtration system to solve the world’s clean water access problem; rather, we need to bring everyone working on the issue of clean water together to collaborate and work on a distribution system of the best solutions.

I'm a member of an extremely collaborative generation. Our use of social tools, our experience in group based learning and other factors have predisposed us to working together where possible.

For example, I'm the member of the Consortium for Student Global Service, a group of student-founded global service organizations that convened to support the work of peer groups, and which has recently collaborated with Change.org on the new Global Service blog. What is interesting to me about it is that I know for a fact that these organizations have to, by definition, compete for resources. There simply aren't enough institutional founders for all of us to get our big pay day. The tone and tenor of the group though is all about the idea that each of the different groups have something slightly different and complementary to offer one another, and that rather than competing for the scraps off the donor table, we should be thinking about ways to better leverage our networks and get creative about social enterprise strategies to generate the resources we need to thrive.
Moreover, my work with the Northwestern University Global Engagement Summit and my new startup Assetmap has all been focused, to greater or lesser degrees, on enabling great people and ideas to find one another in order to create something magical. What I've learned in that time though has subtely but fundamentally shifted my approach to collaboration.

The big difference is where I once talked about facilitating collaboration, I now focus on creating ecosystems in which collaboration can thrive if it wants to. The difference seems small but the approach, at least for me has been profound. The biggest difference is that the "ecosystem" approach recognizes the central role of convening around self-interest, and puts the onus on the nature of collaboration on the people who come together. In other words, this approach disintermediates the community organizer, an inherently temporary force with imperfect information, from the community that will be charged with implementing any partnerships and reaping the consequences, good or bad.

Community development folks out there - particularly those coming from backgrounds like asset based community development or appreciative inquiry - will probably be thinking "duh" at this point. The role of the organizer is always about revealing the assets that exist and allowing people to take charge of how those resources are put together.

But this shift is easy to loose site of. In the heat of agreement about the vital importance of collaboration, it's easy - at least in the communities that I've been in - to remember how fundamentally messy and democratic the collaborative process actually is. It mandates, I think, more and more attention to the vital intersection between online and offline.

Who is most effective at facilitating collaboration out there currently? What lessons can we learn from them?