social enterprise
Sharing brand, ceding control, gaining influence
Steve wrote:
> [K]eeping the community together and allowing it to grow and diversify is something we need to think hard about. My instincts are to do this is a way that is participative in keeping with the 2gether vibe. George Por and David Wilcox have already submitted ideas about how this could be achieved and have suggested I look at some of the emerging open franchise models that being experimented with.
Thank you David for calling our attention to the Open Franchise model! I looked into it; it inspired some ideas, to which I will come back in another post.
Steve, thanx 4 the plug. In what I referred to in my email as “augmenting and mobilizing the collective intelligence of people and organisations engaged in social innovation projects and events,” I see a critical condition of “Solving bigger problems.” (Btw, kudos for the courage and creativity to whoever came up with that line!)
> I want to explore how we can share the brand with others, share the various social tools that we used at the event so that others can pick up on and experiment them with them and share their learning and do all this is a way that doesn’t compromise the values, ethos and vibe that the brand has already generated.
We can explore that by a co-branding model of the Open Franchise idea. What if we, at CommunityIntelligence, developed the “Led2Innovate4Change” event that is on our drawing board, under the following double label:
Lead2Innovate4Change
a 2gether event
> How can we cede control and gain influence?
Well, the control issue may get taken care of if we establish and cultivate an “Open Franchise” relationship based on partnering rather than domination that frequently characterizes classic franchise.
Regarding influence, it will most likely grow when we put a new attractor in the field, by presencing a shared future of the two memes: 2gether and
Lead2Innovate4Change
Part of that increased influence (increased share of hearts and minds) will come from the new event’s capacity to augment and mobilize collective intelligence that I wrote about in Potential revisited .
How does that sound to y’all?
Tags: ceding control, co-branding, collective intelligence, ethos, gaining influence, Open Franchise, partnering, social innovation, values Discussion
8 comments for “Sharing brand, ceding control, gaining influence”
Post a comment
Content on this site is Creative Commons Share-Alike unless otherwise stated.
Contact information
© 2008 2gether08. 
I was on Yahoo and found your blog. Read a few of your other posts. Good work. I am looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tom Stanley
George - thanks for picking up on the open franchise and adding ideas from your own very considerable expertise in this area.
For all this to work I think we need new forms of leadership, facilitation, curating. Steve has shown how to be a super-creative and collaborative event curator. I’m focussing on “social reporting” and there was a greater wealth of expertise at 2gether08 in how to take a lead in blending online-offline for on-the-day and longer-term benefit. Would those roles and skills feature in Lead2Innovate4Change?
hi David, thanx 4 your question that helps unpacking our thinking about the L2I4C as a meme and model for an unconference that I want to (co-)design for bringing social, tech, and peer learning innovation in the world of change champions inside (large) organisations.
> For all this to work I think we need new forms of leadership, facilitation, curating.
Spot on!
> Steve has shown how to be a super-creative and collaborative event curator.
Indeed. I admire what he is doing. We hope he will be interested to use the L2I4C initiative as guinea pig to develop a practical model of open franchising, which will preserve the 2gether values and ethos, and combine them with what we call “social technologies of freedom,” e.g.: Art of Hosting, Presencing, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry, etc. We’ll see how much affinity he feels with our approach, our focus on organizational transformation, and our passion for boosting the collective intelligence of autonomous zones (such as unconferences) for the sake of growing sustainable systems of influence that lead to wiser social institutions.
> I’m focussing on “social reporting” and there was a greater wealth of expertise at 2gether08 in how to take a lead in blending online-offline for on-the-day and longer-term benefit.
And I have a huge respect for and interest in what you are doing in that regard. I enjoyed watching your vids that filled me in on sessions of great interest, which I couldn’t attend.
> Would those roles and skills feature in Lead2Innovate4Change?
You bet! We couldn’t do it without them. “Blending online-offline for on-the-day and longer-term benefit” is central to our “self-organising knowledge ecosystem” and “community knowledge gardening” concepts. So far, I haven’t met many people (outside CommunityIntelligence) who appreciated why they are foundational to evolutionary emergence. Let’s talk soon.
Dear Friends, it’s fantastic to see the spreading power of our movements - it is only just 3 days since George and I co-created the L2I4C mantra in Brussels, now it seems to be all over the net already…
I would like to see the combination with 2gether; I want us to show the connectedness in what we do, sense that it is not fitting any more that one isolated events lines up after the other but that we show the roots and seeds of one idea in the other, and this is well possible by this kind of blended naming/branding.
And I’d like to go on exploring the open franchise model as a very special pilot for social enterprising. We are kind of performing such a model at Gaia University with the chaordic country centres, but not wholly conscious and defined yet.
Well, I am not sure who is in this field right now as I wasn’t part of the 2gether event, but am confident that we will meet soon.
Hi Kathleen - you can find many of those who attended 2gether08 across on our networking site … do join in and post over there too. How are you going to pull these ideas together? Where are you based? - David Wilcox
[...] Original post by 2gether08 [...]
[...] on the other hand. It is that gap that CommunityIntelligence wants to help closing with a now-planned unconference that we call Lead2Innovate4Change . Tags: business innovation, organisational innovation, social [...]
I just learned about the “International Social Franchise Summit - Economic Theory for Doing Good,” http://www.un.org/partnerships/YNewsInternationalSocialFranchiseSummit.htm held last December and a book that grew out from it: Social Franchising A Way of Systematic Replication to Increase Social Impact.pdf . It’s much more elaborate than what we need but has many good ideas worth t consider if 2gether is going to grow in an Open Franchise way.