My NELIS journey to Japan: Co-designing a networked organization
I spent the last couple of weeks in a deep immersion into the NELIS network of sustainability leaders who meet yearly in a global summit. The event caters to young people, mostly young corporates and students. In the days following the summit, the group retreats outside of the city to spend quality time and to strategize together. In the words of a colleague, “NELIS is still growing coming to a systematised institution, this year we hope to get our first global activity formats rolled out but we have so much we can learn from what you all have created (at edgeryders)”.
I am joining NELIS at a time when those who’ve been in it for the past two years wish to grow into an efficient structure. This bubbling energy is something I’ve seen before: struggling with meta-questions (“how do we organize ourselves”, “what is the container?”) and downright ambiguities (“who do we ask about branding?” “do we need permission?” “Which online channels do we use?”). Co-designing an organization is a brave step, and it’s not easy to reconcile it with the need for action. “We need to be deliberate about membership formalization, but not over-design”, Caitlin was saying. @Shravan and I found ourselves agreeing that consensus decision making doesn’t work because it is time consuming and doesn’t scale well i.e. when more people are involved.
NELIS is special because it considers local action the centerpiece of the global network. The model is: distributed local chapters and projects, connected by a critical mass of leaders. There is a need for risk management and distinctions between members and non-members, a lot farther from how I am used to building a community. And I remember distinctly Meelan’s remark that the hard distinction between global and local can be handicapping. In a session I led ad-hoc during the private retreat following the summit in Tokyo, I argued that finding a structure for the organization has to do with growing a culture of working together.
I made the case for openness and inclusiveness, as well the design focus on small, incremental wins and less on failure points at this early stage. It all departs from the journey with Edgeryders in the past six years, and the norms we have grown into, as well has helped those who joined later to adopt.
On the basis of a full fledged community experience, I am asking: Why don’t we focus on leveraging connections to build a truly international community that maximizes learning across borders? Instead of designing formalized local chapters, we could invite trials: if someone wants to create a local organization they should go ahead without permission or too much discussions. That reduces dependency, increases decentralization, and enables people to move fast. We would go by trial and error: what is the worst thing that can happen? Will it break us if things go wrong? Not really.
So what is at the core of our working together in a distributed network?
INCLUSIVITY: open access ensures anyone can participate as long as they are interested in making a constructive contribution.
LOW COST COORDINATION: good information management that reducing the work of internal communication and duplication or redundancy in sharing information. No e-mail policy: all the information should be accessible / searchable on the platform, up-to-date and well findable. Content — topics and replies are open by default or group of collaborators. Each user has control over the amount of notifications they wish to receive.
PROJECT SOVEREIGNITY: each project has a space set up on the platform and its own collaboration rules. Some things stand for all:
o Autonomous teams: Projects can decide if their workspace is open to all, to the “collaborators” group, or to a subset of that only — the more open, the better of course. Project work can happen on slack, Google drive, hangout, skype, but..
o Working Out Loud: ..teams commit to post regular updates and work in progress so that others can easily follow progress. The more open the work is, the more it will invite participation and support.
o Community calls: regular check ins followed by short updates by members and project teams
DOCUMENTATION: Working in a “capture all” style, which means all community calls and offline workshops or meetings result in notes shared online. Project reporting is also always public. Documented content, also looking at NELIS’s needs, can be: trainings content, local chapter guides, “how to” documents for communication and branding etc.
“WHO DOES THE WORK CALLS THE SHOTS”. If someone wants to do something or wants to change something about how we work and is prepared to put in the work, they can go ahead and do it without need for approval. Only exception: when their work prevents people from doing what they want to do. This rule stands in the case where someone wants to build a local Edgeryders organization.
I’m sharing some near future steps I’m encouraging, possibly in an Edgeryders — NELIS partnership or even a people led collaboration:
- Integrate local-to-global into a web platform a NELIS web home, one that allows for autonomous local work but where people can communicate easily about local progress in a way that is generative: their communication, if public, becomes great storytelling for the network without additional work.
- Make the platform open: several in the group have voiced the need to easily onboard new members i.e. volunteering for festivals (the Americas Festival). An open, interactive workspace allows training them in a very social way and point them to orderly historic documentation. My offer is a whitelabeled version of the edgeryders.eu platform (example). NELIS could have such a platform, with the added benefit of network mapping tools.
- Don’t invest in communication, invest in community management: in addition to collecting information from members and sharing it across, community management is about actively nudging people to share and collaborate with each other, find overlaps in their work and connect more, both online and offline.
