Tag Archives: Commons

Commons coming along

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On Friday, we had our open house to get feedback on the Sackville Commons. There was a good level of interest and some suggestions. I’m positive that we can build interest and get the project going this Winter. With 40 members we should be able to have one floor (second floor) dedicated to the Commons. There is not a lot of work to be done in this building and some people said that they could even donate furniture for the venture.

Let’s keep the conversations going and please send me any suggestions. There is a lot of background and related material here, under Commons.

Here are some photos of the building that would make a wonderful home.

Looking Up!

Looking Up!

Rebirth of the Sackville Commons

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I worked on the notion of a work/environmental commons for our community for about two years, but after raising about $200,000 to construct a new building, matching funds from the provincial and federal governments (originally promised) never materialized. I ran out of steam and parked the idea.

This was my rationale for a work commons two years ago and it hasn’t changed:

For a community to thrive in the Internet Age, it must be attractive to knowledge workers. These workers need to be connected to other knowledge workers so that they can remain creative. They need to have constant access to fresh ideas. One way to attract knowledge workers is to offer the right physical space and connections.

Secondly, many knowledge workers are not traditional salaried employees, they don’t need conventional office space. Many are starting to create their own alternative work and community spaces in cities such as London, Toronto, Vancouver and more locally – Charlottetown and Halifax. Several variants of Commons are being established all over the world.

The Commons will be our place that will help to build trusted relationships. It is a Third Space, being neither a dedicated office nor your home. Individuals will be paying members, but the cost of membership will be much less than renting a dedicated office.

Recently, a local landmark came under new ownership and we are currently discussing the possibilities of creating a work commons in the front of this 15,000 sq ft professional building. Both the 2nd and 3rd floors have about 2,000 sq ft each and depending on interest we may use both.

Commons2B

To find out if there is interest, we we will be holding an open house on Friday, December 18th from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM-ish. This is what we are proposing but we’re open to any and all possibilities:

  • We will create a non-profit organization to manage the Sackville Commons.
  • Membership will be a monthly fee, probably $50 per month with a one year contract.
  • Services offered will depend on interest and willingness to pay [here is a list of membership benefits from the QSC].
  • We are also looking into the possibility of offering shared art studio space if there is sufficient interest.
  • Membership will be for individuals only – one person, one membership.

Feel free to comment here or on Twitter to @hjarche or @harborne

Please join us at 131 Main Street, Sackville, NB (front door, across from the Mount Allison swan pond). [Parking in rear]

Sackville Local Food Day

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We’re having our first Sackville Local Food Day on Saturday August 15th from 9:00 am to 1.30 pm at the Farmers Market on Bridge Street.

  • taste the produce of our local region
  • meet some local farmers
  • buy from local artisans
  • listen to local music
  • win great door prizes

If you’re a new vendor or want to come out for Local Food Day only contact Cathy at the Bridge Street Café; tel 506-536-4428

Natures Route Farm

Finding the Sweet Spot – Review

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The first comment on the cover says:

“This one is a keeper. Buy three. One for you, one for someone you care about, and one for a friend who really and truly needs it.” Seth Godin

I was given a copy of Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot by a friend and read it on the plane home last week.  I’ve been watching Dave develop the model for natural enterprises for quite some time and even helped to coin the term, so I’m definitely a fan of the “natural entrepreneur’s guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work”. Natural Entrepreneurship is based on a six step model that is easy to understand, but will take some work to implement, but then anything worthwhile requires effort:

  1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
  2. Find the right partners
  3. Research unmet needs
  4. Imagine and innovate solutions
  5. Continuously improvise
  6. Act responsibly on principle

Implementing these steps does not require an initial outlay of capital and natural entrepreneurs can get started even while they hold down a job. Each step is covered in detail, with practical advice and some anecdotes. A key aspect of natural entrepreneurship is that it is not premised on the unsustainable notion of perpetual growth.

The book is well written and edited and doesn’t ramble on as a series of blog posts might ( a bit what I feared when I picked up the book). I would recommend this book to anyone growing or changing an organisation, from single start-up to small company or non-profit; though there are examples of larger companies in the book.

I will be adding Finding the Sweet Spot to a few select reference books that I’ve used for business strategy work; including Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Christensen’s Seeing What’s Next. Now I have to buy some extra copies to give away.

Being Local

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I spent the weekend helping out with a few community events. We had our Fall Fair, with some great entertainers and also had a farm field day that saw over 5,000 visitors, followed by an environmental trade show on the street – Green4Generations. The latter included a free showing of Who Killed the Electric Car, with David Swan, one of the engineers on the original GM project. David brought along a Toyota RAV4 electric car:

On Sunday I remembered what Lester Brown had said the night before – that there will be a trend toward local energy and local food. We already have our own solar energy specialists in the area, at Ener-green Coop:

We are also supporting local farmers through the Sackville CSA:

Being local doesn’t mean being out of touch with the Web and the global community. You may have noticed that I’ve used WordPress to set up a few of our local websites, keeping costs to a minimum at only $15 per year for a domain name. Our local sustainability initiatives include communicating what we are doing to anyone who may be interested and learning from others. All of this was started by a local outdoor shop, Wanderlust Outfitters. The idea of Community Supported Agriculture is not ours, but we’ve adapted it for local conditions. As Lester Brown wrote in my copy of his book, “Let’s do it!”.

“Climate change is the result of a massive market failure” – LB

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If you want to address climate change, then the best thing you can do is get politically active, according to Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, speaking here in Sackville on Saturday evening.

Some highlights of his presentation:

  • How many failing states do we need before we have a failing civilization?
  • It is possible to cut carbon emissions by over 80%; we just lack the political will (and Brown has the numbers to prove it).
  • We may be reaching a tipping point in our willingness to do something about climate change but the major obstacles are at the political level.
  • New thinking is happening today and even the oil companies are starting to focus on renewable energy.
  • The trend is toward localisation, for both energy and food. Our food choices will decrease and we’ll move back to seasonal products.
  • We are in a race between tipping points – natural and political. If we can tip the political will then we can stop the natural tipping points, such as the meltdown of the Greenland ice cap, which will increase sea levels by 23 feet.
  • Based on the advice of prominent scientists and economists around the world, the best way to significantly reduce our carbon emissions are 1) reduce individual income taxes, while 2) increasing carbon taxes.

I picked up a copy of Lester Brown’s latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization and look forward to reading it.

Finally, some memorable advice:

Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.

Queen Street Studios

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A theme on this blog is that of a Commons, or third-space that connects people in their work and living. The Queen Street Commons on PEI was one of the first in Atlantic Canada and a slightly different model is offered by Queen Street Studios in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia:

Fondly known as QSS, its genesis emerged from the personal and professional background of its creative director Julia Rivard. Her vision was to create a place for creatives to meet, work and share ideas. Together with her husband Trevor, Julia purchased the historic Union Protection Company property, built in1895 at 50 Queen Street in Dartmouth. In the summer of 2006, the interior of the building was transformed into a unique space and Julia’s dream became a reality. Today it is a vibrant space nurturing the creative energies of its members, and reaching out to the HRM community and beyond, to further the growth of the profession.

QSS offers various levels of membership services, ranging from $150 to $675 per year. It also houses the for-profit QSS company, which provides the nucleus of the business energy that seems to result in many opportunities for its members. Students are welcome and QSS will be offering an incubation program soon.

This looks like a focused and pragmatic business model that is growing a local ecosystem of independent companies. It is the kind of business development that our governments should be supporting, instead of creating jobs (a.k.a. indentured servitude) by luring multinational corporations to set up temporary shop in the Deep East.

Blessed Unrest

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blessed-unrest.jpg

Over the holidays I read Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken. This is a book that is more a reference than a story and what will serve me well after reading the book is the extensive appendix, which is about 1/3 of the book. Hawken covers many themes familiar to readers of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down.

The approach taken by “the movement” to address problems, noticed by Hawken, is one that makes sense to me, given my own consulting business as well as some local initiatives that I’m involved with, such as our Commons.

The term solving for pattern was coined by Wendall Berry, and refers to a solution that addresses multiple problems instead of one. Solving for pattern arises naturally when one perceives problems as symptoms of systemic failure, rather than random errors requiring anodynes. For example, sustainable agriculture addresses a number of issues simultaneously: It reduces agricultural runoff, which is a main cause of eutrophication and dead zones in lakes, estuaries and oceans; it reduces use of energy-intensive nitrogen-based fertilizers; it ameliorates climate change, because organic soil sequesters carbon, whereas industrial farming releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and is the second-greatest cause of climate change after fossil fuel combustion; it improves worker health because of the absence of pesticide; it enables soil to retain more moisture and is thus less reliant on irrigation and outside sources of water; it is more productive than conventional agriculture; it is less susceptible to erosion; and it provides habitat for pollinators, birds, and beneficial insects, which promotes biodiversity. On top of all that, the resulting food commands a premium in the market, making small farms economically more viable. Solving for pattern is the de facto approach of the movement because it is resource constrained. It cannot afford “fixes”, only solutions.

This evening, I’m off to an executive meeting of the Sackville Community Supported Agriculture group, as we plan for this year’s challenge of supplying 60 families with good, locally-grown produce; up from 20 families last year.

New models for living, working and learning

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This week I’ve noticed that everything seems to come back to our artificially created systems. If I’m waiting for a decision it’s because of poor information flow at some bottleneck in a hierarchy. If I’m not able to take action on an idea that would help many people it’s due to some artificial construct called a regulation or policy. No one is responsible; it’s the system. I feel blocked at every turn and I’m not alone. Mark Federman sums it up best with his thesis pitch:

I make the observation that almost all organizations that we have in our world – be they business corporations, non-profits, volunteer organizations, sewing circles, soccer clubs, schools, religious organizations – they all look like factories. By this I mean that they are Bureaucratic, Administratively controlled and Hierarchical – in other words, BAH! I suggest that this is not because it is human nature to be BAH, but rather this is an artefact of the Industrial Age that was mechanistic (with roots in the Gutenberg Press), industrial, fragmented, and functionally oriented. Now, as I look around, I observe that we are no longer in the Industrial Age. Rather, we are living in a world in which everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else – an age of ubiquitous connectivity. This brings about the effect of being immediately next to, or proximate to, everyone else – in other words, pervasive proximity. I therefore ask the question, what form of organization is consistent with the ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world of today, rather than with the 19th century?

We are in desperate need of new models for living, working and learning. Rob Paterson has been discussing the messy world that we now live in and how modern armies cannot win against insurgents or stabilize failed states. Dave Pollard & Jon Husband recently talked about the value of leadership. Leaders may be required in hierarchies but are they necessary in wirearchies?

The great work of our time is to design, build and test new organizational models that reflect our democratic values and can function in an inter-connected world. Failure by our generation to do so will leave the next one to deal with the reactionary forces of corporatism; something our children are already facing.

Hard-wired for Collaboration

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According to this article on The World Cafe, we humans may be more inclined to collaborate rather than compete:

Swedish scientists have done extensive research on this and they found we first lived in small groups of 20 to 100 people who in any given week averaged 2.5 days for gathering and hunting and 4.5 days on talking. The conclusion they came to from this data was that the brain, the neurological system, and our hormonal systems have had 90,000 years of programming us for talk and collaboration, and only 10,000 years for competition and fighting.

Dave Pollard sees collaboration and facilitation as a skill that he has developed as he has matured:

The role of facilitator, as I try to practice it now, entails the following:

  • Pay attention, listen, and understand why things are the way they are now.
  • Probe to discover what the obstacles are to co-workers’ work effectiveness, and work to remove those obstacles.
  • Imagine ideas, suggest frameworks, co-develop visions, and create tools, that might make things easier. Offer them, demonstrate them, as experiments, and then let the group do what they will with them — evolve them, adapt them, or fail them. Let what works work, and let what doesn’t work go.
  • Appreciate — thank your co-workers and show you appreciate their work and their ideas.
  • Collaborate when you are invited to do so. Invite others to collaborate to solve important workplace problems.

A few years ago I talked about collaborating to compete and it still seems more natural to me than trying to compete head to head with a winner-take-all attitude. The challenge is that our models from the past few thousand years don’t help us much. School is still competitive and so are sports and much of our business. Collaborative inter-networked technologies seem to be helpful in fostering collaboration but we really need to work on the social, cultural and economic models to reassert the importance of collaboration.

Places like the Commons could provide alternative economic models, but even that is proving to be a hard sell.