By George Pór for Enlivening Edge Magazine
Cities are the planet’s enlivening edge, where relationships flourish, cultures and commerce thrive, and innovations incubate. They are places where the intersection of the local and global dimensions of our existence is the most palpable. We dedicate this issue of EE to Cities, these marvelous manifestations of human spirit and co-creation.
Cities are also places where reinvention can scale across organizations, to the point of reinventing the city itself. That’s the theme that Marilyn Hamilton, “Integral City” thought leader, explores in her essays, Integral City: How Might Reinventing Organizations Reinvent the City? and Organic Strategies Reinvent Integral Cities. And that’s a significant scaling, because half of all humans now live in cities, and by 2030 it might be two-thirds.
Cities can also re-birth themselves as commons, where people co-produce and co-govern what they need for their livelihood and well-being. That’s the focus of an important, collaborative policy initiative by Jose M. Ramos, From Smart Cities to Smart Citizens: City as a Commons.
An aspect of city well-being receiving increasing Teal-tinged attention is urban transportation systems. We continue our focus on urban transportation, begun with a look ahead at Decentralized Autonomous Transportation Networks, by looking at what city policy-makers are beginning to think, around the world, about Our Urban Mobility Future.
Just as people and organizations go through stages of vertical development, so also do cities. Beth Sanders illustrates this in the article Breathe in the Teal City.
In the New Year, we want to express our gratitude for your support in new ways. Plans include not only covering the news of organizations “going Teal,” but also making the news: we’ll be giving support to the promotion and coordination of some worthy projects, such as Teal for Startups or City as Commons.
2016 will bring other exciting changes at our EE news hub, too. You are not only among the first to know about them, but also some of the first who can actually help make them a reality.
What‘s already clear is that EE will evolve into the next version of itself. Serving a fast-growing eco-system of organizations and initiatives going Teal, with our limited resources, will require injecting all kinds of innovation into everything we do. For example:
Social innovation
EE won’t simply act as a news hub and collective sensing organ for the Teal movement, but also as a constellation of communities/networks, e.g., writers, country correspondents, social reporters by sectors of society, videographers, copy-editors, etc. So if you feel inspired to participate in and/or facilitate any of these nascent groups, let us know.
You can also expect a strengthening in our coverage of the various sectors of society. We are establishing Sector Editor roles, the first two of which are energized by Stefan Groenendal, Sector Editor for Transportation, and Anna Betz, Sector Editor for Health. An opening for one of the other sectors might be your special area!
We will work with interested partners to help EE content reach new audiences, by syndicating for non-English editions, e.g., Spanish, German, and French, as well as for in-house editions serving Teal-curious organizations. Would you like to partner with us on any such initiatives? If so, we’d like to talk with you!
Learning innovation
We would like to develop, in collaboration with the team of the Reinventing Organizations wiki, a community knowledge garden, comprised of patterned descriptions of effective Teal practices worth replicating. If you have any experience with pattern language and/or information architecture, let’s explore how you can help.
If we can get Frederic Laloux and other “reinvention” thought leaders and trailblazing practitioners involved, we’d like to experiment with what a Teal-inspired webinar series might look like. So stay tuned!
Another possibility we are working on is to wrap the Teal Organizations track of the Integral European Conference 2016 (which EE is curating) in a blanket of “collective intelligence” tools and practices, as a joint effort with the Unleash Network. This will, hopefully, contribute to amplify the collective wisdom and effectiveness of initiatives for reinventing organizations. You’ll find in this issue Chris Clark’s inspiring interview with the founders of the Integral European Conference, Bence Ganti and Dennis Wittrock. Will you join us at the conference in May?
Technology innovation
We bring EE content to the world via a variety of channels, including “The Best of Enlivening Edge” digest on Medium. If you like EE and enjoy creating/curating great videos, why not become our “enlivening videographer” 🙂 and help us establishing and feeding a YouTube channel.
The present homepage format of EE makes photos difficult to change, so it might not be obvious that we’ve published over 40 new articles since our November newsletter went out! To make new content more visible, this Spring, we’ll renew the look-and-feel of the site by installing a different WordPress theme that will give you a more magazine-like user experience, with new material even easier to spot.
We plan to make our video content more prominent and better organized, by configuring a Video Gallery plugin to its full power, so that vids related to specific sections of EE can be found more easily.
We also want to explore and experiment with the tools and practices of transmedia storytelling. Advice and help from anyone with related experience will be much appreciated.
We will add plug-ins to our web platform that would enhance its functionality, as well as do mashups with emerging technologies which can power up innovative uses of EE.
Business innovation
Expanding the scope and depth of our work, in the ways mentioned above, in support of the expanding eco-system of organizational reinvention, calls for an adequate economic vehicle that can enable it. We’re realizing there are limits to how much we can accomplish relying on volunteer efforts alone.
Consequently, we’re exploring ways to transition to a new system of value creation and distribution, a new kind of Teal media enterprise that would combine the best of free, open-source content, services offered on top of that, and commons-based allocation of the revenues, keeping the generation of surplus value within the sphere of the commons and its contributors.
Aesthetic innovation
We want all our communications, including the EE website and newsletter, to be enlivened with visual clarity, beauty, ease, and fun. As a first step to that end, in our Holacratic® circle we’ve established a Beauty Catalyst role with exactly that purpose.
We strive for beauty and fun not only in how EE is presented, but also in everything we do. If that appeals to you, join the EE team and help us manifesting it.
Here’s to an enlivening 2016! Enjoy the journey to Teal!
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