Scaling

• Daniel Schmachtenberger has pointed out that the people that have been effective at building organizations at scale are the ones who care little for the people and planet they affect. It’s the very qualities of not caring that have allowed them to build these huge companies and bulldoze through every obstacle that came along. His challenge was that people who care have to get better at making things happen at a global scale.

• Buckminster Fuller talked about “multiplication by division,” and part of what he meant by that is that you can’t keep doing more with more, you have to do more with less. If I can make a widget with half the energy and materials, I can make twice as many widgets with the same resources.

• If you think about how trees “went global,” you quickly see that they didn’t do it by growing one huge tree that spread across the planet. They replicated themselves, staying in the size range that was effective for them, and they adapted to local conditions. In dry, rocky soil, they grew smaller, but if they managed to generate seeds, their offspring could grow away some distance where the soil was better.

• Open Artifacts projects can be created as “generalized” designs that need to be adapted to local conditions when used. I’m thinking as an example, a community garden because it was mentioned as an example by Nora Bateson:

“And so in order to, I think, play with this notion of future, I think one of the first things that we can do is to bring in that rich detail and pay attention to it. Tend to those details. If we don’t do that we end up with these weird top-down plans, and you can get community organization that sounds like its very locally oriented, but you can’t just have a plan to put a community garden in every community. That has to come out of the detail in the community, or you get, in three months time, a community garden that got abandoned. It wasn’t in the relationships that built relationships that built relationships. So this, I think, is something to really think about in terms of even what we mean by scale. What do we mean by scale?” — Nora Bateson, “Festival Opening Panel, Jordan Hall, Nora Bateson & John Vervaeke,” 45:15 (https://www.rebelwisdom.co.uk/members/172-festival-opening-panel-jordan-hall-nora-bateson-john-vervaeke)

• So first, by creating an open artifacts project, you’re not deciding that there should be a community garden in every community. You’re making the creation of a community garden easier and better designed for those communities that decide they want one.

• Also, in the case of a community garden, an open artifacts project would want to be as flexible as possible because of the wide range of variance in creating a garden like that. Communities will have big variations in size, soil quality, orientation of the site, not to mention the different temperate zones across the world.

• At the same time, there are things that are common. For example, a plan for building a container for soil could be part of the project (or they could “import” a few good variations from other projects) and while these might be placed in different configurations according to the local site, the parts can be made consistent.

• I think too, that expressing a Design as a [[ Pattern Language ]] in these instances would make a lot of sense. You can create thought-out patterns that help the users place the containers in the best location, decide what seeds to plant and I’m sure a lot more. Just like this book, it guides the evolution of the garden without directly defining it.

Therefore: