(This is some text from a proposal we are developing at the moment)
Digital networks have transformed the world. Mobile phones, mobile access, mobile lives. People have never been freer to access information, and shape it on their own terms. Across the world, for young and old alike, this new power is creating new markets, new products and new forms of organisation. The networked society is changing everything, but most importantly it’s changing how change happens.
People who are better able to organise their own lives, have become suspicious of big organising principles. The traditional institutions that strive for change in business and society fumble in the dark for their legitimacy.
Political Parties fight for the authority to make policy, for citizens who are better informed and suspicious of polititians motivations.
The great Corporations of the last century are struggling to align with staff who simultaneously face market demands to be more autonomously creative and see it has central to their job satisfaction.
Trade unions and religious organisations compete with the power of the internet for rapidly mobilising communities of interest around issues that people care about.
Cultural institutions attempt to virtually do the impossible, by trying to reflect the kaleidoscope of different cultural interests and activities across societies.
The collective institutional angst is a response to the same issue; the power and aspirations of people. If consumer society gave us the power to become individuals, the networked society has given us the power to build our own communities. While the big institutions have fought to reorganise their workspaces, brand development and strategic planning to align with this world, people have been busy making it.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that early adopters in this world of new communities, are social actors. It is these people who are the new drivers of change. The founders of companies with ethical interests, web 2.0 start-ups, sustainable architects, food cooperatives, fair traders, social software developers and an army of new campaigners, activists and thinkers struggling to reform the economic and political systems they have been exiled from.
As the political divide falls back to arguments about “responsibility” vs “statist paternalism”, and institutions turn in to justify themselves to one another, we are in danger of missing this new source of social and economic dynamism. These actors and the logic of the organisational forms they are creating, point the way to a different future. They might solve our problems, but they’ll definitely show us how to interact.
But at the moment these actors are working against the grain of the system. What if we configured our cities, workspaces and governance structures, to work with how they work? Demos, one of Britain’s leading Think Tanks in collaboration The Hub, an international leader in workspace innovation for social entrepreneurs, propose a radical and ground breaking programme of action research, product prototyping and social innovation, to create the supporting circuitry for the organisations of tomorrow: The Social Switchboards.
For more information and an extended version of this proposal, send an email to charlie.tims@demos.co.uk.
