The global village
When I moved to San Francisco back in 2010 I was single, feeding myself on Cheerios and focused on the projects I believed in. Five years later I’m married, father of two and my new areas of expertise include the US school and health care system. Talk about a change!
Moving abroad expanded my horizons but with responsibilities increasing year after year, I also realized that it cut me off the various mutual assistance circles that we all unconsciously belong to — family, friends, state-run programs, etc.
Without anything or anyone to rely on, I was left with the universal solution to these ever-increasing needs — making money and fork out the credit card for everything. To keep up, that quickly meant stacking up short term contracts into never ending workdays.
However, in many cases, the same or even better services could have been obtained by self-organizing with like-minded, trustworthy individuals.
Take babysitting for instance. We cut on the nights out because getting a babysitter was becoming difficult and/or expensive — not mentioning the trust issues. After discovering that our neighbors attending the same preschool were facing the same challenge, we decided to take turns at babysitting and we resumed enjoying nights out again.
Cooking is another activity that could be shared: last time you baked cookies, what would it had taken to double the batch size and share some of your production with your homebrewer colleague?
Of course, managing groups of people can be cumbersome and frustrating: you need to track people’s availability, make sure you are being fair and deal with issues as they arise. The first grain of sand will soon derail your happy community — I experienced it firsthand.
To overcome these difficulties I recently started to work on Accretio, an open-source tool that helps local leaders define and implement processes that have a positive impact on people’s lives.
The idea is to start by writing a playbook for your project and then to execute this playbook semi automatically. A computer program will engage with participants, send out messages, decode replies and attempt to make decisions using the playbook, asking the human organizer to chime in and straighten things up when it can’t.
The benefits are twofold. First, the tedious chores that comes with any civic engagement are now automated, allowing the leader to focus on what really brings value to his community. Second, the experience learnt along the way is engraved in the playbook in an open and sharable format, allowing other people to pick it up for their own usage, improve it and share back their changes.
The result is a network of efficient local initiatives that share common experience globally through a universal medium — the global village.
Early December I committed a minimal but working implementation of Accretio. Details can be found at https://github.com/accretio/accretio and the service itself is running at https://accret.io.
The implementation currently has 3 components: an API to define playbooks in code, a sandbox to run them step-by-step and a scheduler capable of executing playbooks and handle email communications.
My immediate next goal is to come up with useful playbooks for my local community; I am initially focusing on children’s activities and neighborhood-bonding events.
The mid-term goal would be to have long-running playbooks implementing complex processes such as a parental co-op daycare. In the meantime, building a team around the project will be on the top of my to-do list.
If the purpose of this work is appealing to you or if you have ideas for playbooks and need help to implement them, feel free to get in touch at william@accret.io.
Finally, I would like to thank all the friends who gave me feedback on this early work, my wife Isabelle, my parents, Marc, Christian, Alexis, Vincent, Phil, David, Hugh, Brid, Ophir, Sean and many more.
Best wishes for 2016!