Joel Birch
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Thanks for facilitating a brilliant discussion, it was fantastic to have so many different lenses on the same core idea through the people in the room.

I thought I’d share my interpretation of that landscape we got to on the crossed axes, because to my eye it raises some wonderful opportunities for productive tensions of culture, activity, trust, and the meaning of authority in how people learn into the future.

A lot of the discussion on the night revolved around culture, technology, and language. All things that permeate change in society youth-first. The “Networked” end of the vertical axis in our scenarios is a pretty young crowd, and I see an opportunity for that Social Entrepreneurs & Activists corner to take an assertive position in mobilising the Hackers. The peer-to-peer, interest-driven nature of that corner suggests that it’s very receptive to “pull” forces. If the Social Entrepreneurs and Activists can make the right calls to adventure(to bring Joe Campbell into it) or throw the right kind of party (to put a hashtag on it), there’s probably some great stuff to come of it.

On the topic of “throwing the right kind of party” that Hackers corner is by its peer-to-peer nature, welcoming of expertise. There’s a fantastic environment there to usher the established Experts in the top half of the chart into this distributed contemporary landscape of brainpower. Hackers and Social Entrepreneurs sharing some core values while being deliberately welcoming and inclusive of those Experts provides an interesting tension to “keep them honest” by providing a social landscape that rewards and welcomes Statesmen, and imposes a Spiderman’s Uncle Ben-esque sense of great power/great responsibility upon the Master-Apprentice model.

    Joel Birch

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    Educator & Professional Development guy. Music, food, language buff. My music's over at @osiriscorp. Not the guy from Amity. Tweets & thoughts are my own.