Today on this ol' server

Looking at NGOs decentralized

Went to Long Now seminar by Paul Hawken. Was amazed how many NGOs there are, (he includes both human rights and environmental watchdog groups as ngos). Literally there are just overa hundred thousand. He says this is the first time we've had a social movement that is decentralized. Reminds me of the rise of opensource. Talked with a religious expert and he said that the Catholic church would have remote churches where the priest would be the head and they would be more or less autonomous from the rest of the org. To which I said that was a local phenomenon, and they they still had to be "under the rules" of the parent org. (centralized) Reminds me of source code management. Paraphrasing Stephen Hahn, you can have a decentralized source code management software act like a centralized one at a local level, where as a centralized scm can't act like a decentralized model.

My friend and I started to talk about why this is happening now and hasn't before, and came up with the collective community answer, near-real time communication. This is the first time a large majority of the population can communicate with each other in near-real time. (I say collective community answer because I think I've heard this before, maybe not in this exact context but certainly applied to opensource.)

Paul Hawken also likened ngos to our immune system. which is funny as most medical texts use the war/battle metephore to describe the immune systems function. The war/battle metaphore is a transaction based metaphor. I like NGOs as I can see them as a transformational metaphor -- bottoms up, grassroots orgs decentralized changing the way we see and do things. Maybe I'm just too old school to see the immune system in a transformational way, today.

Humm, brings new meaning to think globally, act locally. Sorry couldn't resist a coding joke.

Posted at 11:05AM Jun 11, 2007 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]