leaving enspiral membership

I just left enspiral membership. I requested an exit conversation and got lined up with @antz. We went out for coffee this morning and talked about a few things. The following is a brain dump of topics meant mainly as notes for me. I'm going to revist this space with an invocation for what comes next

• I've been a 'stagnant' member of Enspiral for a couple of years, but been very active in the adjacent Scuttlebutt
  • I'm still on the mission "more people working on stuff that matters"
  • it just looks and manifest differently
• when I left Unlimited, I still believed in the vision, and I was keen to stay in touch:
  • I wanted to stay connected to the vibe, and contribute where I could
  • I had brand new skills and connections (art school, social enterprise, open source)
  • I tried to build a bridge and invite others, because it felt like Unlimited could benefit a lot from what those of us who'd "left" could still offer
  • No-one cared enough (or understood), so it flopped, died
• I think this is the Network of Networks problem
  • I want to have a go at it in a ground up (instead of top down design some protocol way)
  • it might looks like a monthly Show & Tell
    • not as the ends, but rather to recreate the shared kitchen to keep communication and chance replication of ideas up
  • I want this thing to not be "owned" by enspiral
    • Enspiral and Scuttlebutt are welcome to be contributors / sponsors
  • I need 1 or more co-hosts (ideally someone still "in" Enspiral)

There were so many other great threads in our conversation. The next steps look like :

• @antz is gonna calendar a follow up call for us 2 weeks fro mtoday
• I'm going to reach out to other enspiralites who've left or are at a distance, and see what resonates for them:
  • @Chelsea, Derek, Silvia, Alanna, Bekka ...

cc potentially interested parties : @rich @mikey @Dan Lewis @Nanz / @nanz / @Nanz

I wondered if other people who had previous communities of practice feel anything about this sort of thing. Would also like to discuss @cameralibre (edgeriders, ...), @piet (kamahi) ...

Oh yeah, for me I had this gut feeling that staying wasn't quite right, but that Istill had important connections and work to do. The decision to leave has felt like a conscious and good death and I've been really excited by the new things it's made space to grow.... like creating a new type of role and connection which is just right, or rather, is radically empowering. WOOP!

This is cool. Like you @mix, I want my community development efforts to mostly be serving a commons bigger than Enspiral.

Dunno if it is obvious that most of my work for the past 2 years has really been on this network-of-networks thing: travelling, building relationships, and developing language that resonates in different contexts. First with the patterns for decentralised organising, now with microsolidarity.

If you can see an 'alumni check-in' pattern or a 'internetwork show and tell' emerging, I'm interested to hear how that goes. My gut reaction is, "sounds nice, but what's the value exchange? why will people prioritise it?"

I have some hypotheses about why microsolidarity feels like it has traction, maybe some of these are design principles that could inform what you're doing?

• big vision is motivating ("small crews of support are gunna fix the anthropocene")
• right-sized investment (if you want to participate you have to start or find a crew, probably with a commitment to 5 or 10 calls)
• immediate returns (good feels after the first call, noticeable growth after the 5th)
• someone who is willing to hype it relentlessly for a few years (me)

My bias is "networking networks is super hard", so it could be useful to puncture that with some 'appreciative inquiry': what have we seen work really well?

@katekb @joshuavial any ideas? (I notice there are people I want to tag who are not on SSB -- another data point for what makes internetworking hard.)

@rich why would people prioritise lunch with friends, or working in a co-working space?

I'm going for less A B thinking ( type), and leaning more into invite people together, and things will happen, not sure what yet but expect it to be good thinking ( type). If it was a show&tell + grabbing a drink after, things I think might work for people are growing empowerment by honouring peoples learning, and creating a container for pleasant surprises and unexpected challenges to hit one another.

I was leaning towards show&tell because it's a fun and low cost (right sized, not some miscy new protocol), it's easy to test (immediate returns / feedback). I'm leaning into the hype thing - I think of this as beating the drum - and am looking for people interested to experiement with me and get hyped in this space. I think nailing some big-vision motivation could be a good idea - this isn't about getting together for cozy drinks and talking about the good old days, this is about pulling your head out of your arse and getting more inspired, and learning more magic spells. (I need to work on my sales skills...)

If you can see an 'alumni check-in' pattern or a 'internetwork show and tell' emerging, I'm interested to hear how that goes. My gut reaction is, "sounds nice, but what's the value exchange? why will people prioritise it?"

I'm seeing that in the form of ecosystem builders connecting in #microsolidarity crews. The value exchange is sharing information and building bigger networks. @Sea & @Songyi might agree with me?

hey it sounds good @mix, don't listen to my tummy, that's just for me!

Nope, it's an idea baby @Alberto. I'm thinking about bottom up ways of building a network of networks ... or ... a way to share learnings more widely in a fun light touch way

@Dan Hey, amazing writeup! I have another perspective towards change. I think it happens like small waves in an ocean. Small events eventually grow & push forward masses of people into various schools of thoughts / ideologies right? A catalytic event will obviously give a huge push towards this & bring more people into questioning the things that are happening around the world but I think the smaller, more personal events are what will eventually spread the "virus"

I agree @buoyantair, I like the waves adding up. I often think about a drum beat as well... where the bass layer attracts people but also gives people space to bring instruments and jam around the beat.

hmmm, maybe we need a catchy channel name to gather some of the storytelling around @joshuavial

Just caught your message @Dan.

Here are powerful women doing amazing things, all of which have potential for scaled up impact. And it got me thinking, rather than trying to build another new thing why not just focus on helping the women who have already got started.

THIS. I feel like there's an abudance of mana in networks around us that doesn't look anything like patriarchal fucking shortsighted capitalism. I want to cheer on these others.

I don't feel any need for a catalytic event, I think that's just a predeliction for narrative arcs. I'd say looking for a catalytic event is like "focusing on the level of emergence"... as in mushrooms only pop up because there's a massive body that's been growing for ages, you just might not have seen it.

I get you on the virus metaphor. I think it's a complex of genes that are going to do the work - as "doing checkins" is one powerful gene, but it only really shines when it's paired with other aligned genes like "valuing the full complexity of people" and "vulnerability enabled learning" or "long-term profit". I don't think there's a perfect synthesis, because the there is no such thing as uniform culture. But we can gather these powerful mini tools and culture, and share them. It's slow, but people experiencing care, and safety, and cheerleading, and constructive disagreement ... I think these change people quite deeply.

woo, I feel kinda passionate about some of this. Exciting to think big some, I don't often let myself dream or feel ahead that far. I'm often all caught up in the simple but very involved detail of listening, supporting, cheerleading, sensing, provoking, invoking....

I think microsolidarity.cc is naturally going to be that list of networks. I got this fam!

Focusing on emergence is a way of finding these outliers.

No @Dan what I meant was focusing on the level of emergence is "wrong" because it's like saying "I want innovation". Innovation is the end result, the mushroom that pop up. If you want mushrooms, the best way is the think wider about the conditions in which fungus thrives, and support that, because we know thriving fungus tend to put mushrooms up. I'm saying _go deeper, and invest in systems which are doing good, which have the hallmarks of a healthy fungus forest"

One of the conversations I had at #enspiral-summer-fest-2019 was about starting an open list of networks that are somewhat aligned and publishing it on a website.

I'm not so interested in these things (though I encourage you to experiment). Pesonally I believe in human-based routing, so I'm more excited about lifting up the pattern of "let's grab lunch and talk about what matters", because for me / my mind, I can see ridiculously far after 4 such lunches. It's actually a lot like epidemic-broadcast-trees, but meat-space.

@mix Its awesome to see you getting pumped up about this work.

I'm not getting pumped on this, I've been pumped on this beat for years! Similar to @rich's "I don't know if it's obvious, but the last 2 years have been all about this...". It could be that talking about what we care about and our theories of change is just a new and exciting cross link that's not happened to date, and it's generating some fruitful conversation.