Expanding on social capital and organizational design…

Learning how to design organizations that reduce (or even eliminate) the “deadweight loss” of the social capital transactions within and between companies may be the greatest opportunity for a 21st century capitalist.

Let’s start with an example: Social Venture Commons.

Michael Lewkowitz (@igniter on Twitter) is right now leading the development of a Social Venture Commons (SVC) to create an open-sourced micro-messaging based collaboration platform to help people “discover and make meaningful contributions to purposeful projects”.

Why is SVC important?

We’re in a world where more people can independently create organizations to create value, and while the technological and cultural trends are pointing toward a more distributed model of value creation, we’re lacking the infrastructural tools / platforms necessary to create the structures we need.

It’s a model that creates the transparency and kind of interactions necessary to help people trade their personal social capital near par value for corporate use.

And it’s not just about social entrepreneurship or creating better interaction methods for non-profits; the SVC community is also testing the potential of peer-producing a for-profit startup using the SVC platform and organizational model.

Our organizational structures need to adapt to the new reality of constant disruption, and SVC is one path, one of many potential business model designs that are based on change, adaptation and flexibility.

SVC is hardly the only effort in the area: I can’t hope to mention all of them, so please chime in with examples and links to other efforts in the comments below.

What is being created?

• A “broadly accessible” collaboration platform: easy (web-based), distributed (available in any site) and portable (sms compatible).

  The beauty of using micro-messaging to power the collaboration? To quote Michael:

  My experience with Twitter and the emerging projects have been that they allow really fluid entry and exit without having to ‘join’ something. Follow v. join (or friend) is a very important difference in this. Similarly this is not about destinations – rather it needs to show up where people and ventures are/do/happen.

  This fluidity nurtures interest and discovery which I think also will nurture the best, authentic, passionate and productive contributions.

• An “action-oriented” collaboration structure: every interaction is a contribution, every contribution builds relationships.

  How can an organization optimize for micro-interactions? Me:

  The SVC model is based on a different culture: contribute and stay in or get out, but contribute.

  Imagine how the organization model would be different if all interactions were contributions, if every interaction created value rather than allocated value. Is it possible to reduce the need / ability to dilute contributions with politicking, bureaucracy, et. al.?

• A self-organizing, “interest driven” organizational structure: the platform is the organization, empowering people to fluidly find, follow, and do things that *are* interesting at every moment

  This is not simply crowdsourcing using Twitter; whereas most crowdsourcing models transfer value from participants / creators to buyers, SVC is about empowering creators and allowing some of that value to transfer back to the contributors themselves in the form of social and / or financial capital.

  Developing new tools is a necessary start, but the real value is in creating new rules for interaction and value creation. Interestingly, SVC is testing these new rules in its own development, questioning and developing its own organizational structure and interaction systems along the way.

How can for-profit endeavours apply the SVC organizational and economic model?

How can for-profit ventures own the intellectual property? How can these new ventures capture customers and revenue? How will contributors get paid?

How do we create an equity structure to allocate future distributions of wealth to fairly compensate past, present and future contributors?

Creating value on the edge is hard; creating new societal conventions and organizational structures based on still-emerging methods for interaction and communication is even harder. Can our current corporate legal structures adapt to allow the kind of innovation in compensation and ownership rights necessary for new organizational possibilities like SVC?

I’ll return to this shortly…

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Want to learn more or get involved?

• Track the #SVC hashtag to follow the progress, thoughts and people on Twitter
• Contact Michael via the web or twitter via @igniter
• Contact the current core contributors building SVC: Joe Dee, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Dan Williams and Peter Flaschner. Expect more to join…