More on Abundance

John and I recently spent a day with a group of 19 executives from NAB (National Australia Bank), organised by Richard Hames. We were asked to share our provocations on sustainable and radical innovation and seed their vision to drive “Fair Value” throughout the business of banking.

Inspired by Shirky’s rhetoric at SXSW that – “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. And civic sharing helps bring us all greater value” – and the thought behind our business “Abundancy Partners” , I spoke about Abundant Models (download the presentation here). Shirky framed his view around the Napster model of the value generated by sharing more and more i.e., the more people that can participate (in society, music, human growth, economics etc.) the greater the societal gain.

I’m currently working (with Nokia and The Feast/Lovely Day) on a collaborative research and strategy initiative exploring the potential role for ICT to drive positive social and economic impact in the world’s poorest communities. And this theme of ‘abundance’ keeps emerging again and again. Collaborative connectivity and one-to-many knowing are key to development challenges and ICT key to enabling these (amongst other things). Pretty obvious stuff. But who is framing climate change challenges and development goals from the baseline of a total conviction to a vision of abundance? COP15 aimed for an agreement on ‘CO2 reduction’ and development aid on ‘reducing poverty’. Both are failing (miserably in some instances) to achieve their goals.

Possibly a shift is coming. Communication technology is enabling collective abundance through by connecting more and more of global civil society.

We’ll see what comes out of our fantastic workshop/event “Feast on Connections”, Wednesday March 31st. We have representatives attending from the Earth Institute, Ushahidi, Presidential Climate Action Project, Digital Democracy, UNICEF, Grameen Foundation, CGI, Avaaz.org, WIGSAT,  Free Dimensional, University of California, Irvine, mHealth and Telemedicine Advisor, Millennium Villages, FrontlineSMS:Medic, Witness, Global Urban Development, Kopernik and more. It’s an open/shared initiative, so all being well the learning from this work will be available to all and gain greater value from this.

Posted by Tamara in Featured