Imagine if value was abundant, not scarce. When we reframe economic production as relational, rather than transactional, we start to change the game. We can create value by engaging the relationships around us. We can co-create, rather than suck value.
Douglas Rushkoff‘s talk on “Radical Abundance” provides a history of how we arrived at a scarcity model of economic production and proposes frameworks and mental models of abundance.
What is work? What world are we making together?
Transformative learning about work is itself a kind of work, work on ourselves. It can be exciting work and hard work. As we explore “work”, the self can run the gamut of experience, from the passive child who says “you made me” work to the adult, who says “I create” my life’s work to a social entrepreneur who says, “what world do we want to make together?”
Does “work” mean economic production to you? Is “work” a dirty word? Is “work” your livelihood?
Transformative learning about work asks us to question what we do not yet see about ourselves, how our history and society has shaped our worldview. How do we internalize society’s stories about work? it requires us each to see our choices, the stories we tell ourselves about our identity, our self-worth, our motivations, our relationship to authority and external environment.
We each enact different stories about “work”, depending on who we are at any moment in time. For some, work is a paid job. Work is a thing in supply and demand. You can create work by hiring. You can “get work” by connecting with people who need your skills. For comparison, recently, I’ve been learning with a group of new Dreamfishers, Maasai women entrepreneurs in Kenya. Their work includes carrying water for hours, creating beadwork for sale, milking cows, and repairing huts. From the sale of one beadwork item, a family buys food for one month. Working is caring for one’s people. It is an age-old practice. As a third comparison, for some Dreamfishers, work is facilitating the empowerment of African girls to build self-worth and technology skills. Work is transformation.
These are dramatically different enactments of work – Work as a thing you get, work as a practice, work as transformation.
I’d like to offer another view by telling you a story from my history that shapes my worldview of work. In my early 20′s, after living a high life in a successful startup in NYC, I lived a year in an economically depressed rural mountain town, where I made my way into an abusive relationship. I was in a daily surround-sound of abuse, physical and psychological. Within months, I spiraled downward into being homeless, living out of a car for six months in winter.
Poverty was no longer a vicious cycle that other women knew. It was me, barely keeping my clothes clean enough and my body healthy enough to work two part-time jobs. As I lived out the patterns of economic and patriarchal oppression, I daily made choices that reinforced self-defeating narratives about the value of my work. I chose to work jobs, where I was constantly criticized and not at my best.
But, then, I did make my way out of this cycle. I found my way out by seeing that I could choose. I could work my life differently. Part of my work became building a new support system to create a new surround sound of care. I reached out and opened up to people, who believed I could create a new performance of my life. A new friend told me of an opportunity in a nearby town managing a college kitchen. Even though I had never managed a cafeteria or cooked for 250 youth 3x a day, I knew I could manage an operation, I could cook and teach cooking.
So, I took a leap into a new performance as a manager. Slowly, as I experienced my life anew, I continued to make new choices about work. As I served food to college kids in the cafeteria line, I realized I too could go to college. So, I made part of my life work “going to college”. And, when I became critical of institutional education, I made my life work to be building peer-to-peer transformative learning environments for adults.
I share this story, to say that transforming economic production or oppressive stories about work is a journey. Day by day, work was the journey of fishing my dream. A journey that I did not take alone. On days that I couldn’t see the way, I made a path with the many bits of kindnesses gifted to me.
Work is how we perform our life. Work is what puts the life in livelihood. Work is how we create the value we each want to manifest in the world. And we can create different performances.
Work is what I choose to do on this day with the precious life I have still. That is my work. Your work may be cooking for your children, gardening, building software, taking care of a sick friend, making art, teaching a group of children, or connecting people to resources.
We are all entrepreneurs, creating value together. When we recognize that we are intertwined with the systems around us, we create value by doing more of what we love to do and connecting to people around us who share our joy.
It is from this understanding that Dreamfish was founded as a global work cooperative. It is a place in which we can provide a mutual support system for each other in our journey of work. Success looks like bits of thriving, unfolding in creative ways for each of us.
Transforming economic production is not just about tranforming other people; it is about transforming ourselves. Unhealthy patterns that are internalized are subtle because they are often barely conscious to us. Yet, together, acting as support systems for each other, this work can transform ourselves and our world.
There is $120 billion dollars in the U.S social capital market, money waiting to be spent on social good, according to Hope Consulting’s new report. Imagine what that investment could do for alleviating poverty. Why are investors interested in investing in a better world?
Because money is not the thing. People use money to create what they really want – belonging, health, peace, making a difference and environmental balance. People are choosing to lead a simpler life and give back to society more (London School of Economics, Boston Consulting Group).
Now, to free up this value for good is another thing. We need new new business models, organization design and social processes grounded in the new paradigm of a relational economy. The Dreamfish cooperative is building such a relational economy. We are developing value tools that are grounded in the fundamental idea that development flourishes in connection, not control.
Every Friday, we host a Leadership Lab to explore new ideas in “human work” and relational economy. This last Friday, I introduced this Relational Value model. This model is the outcome of a Dreamfish Labs project started in 2009 by Paul Loper, Peter Kaminski and Marguerite Manteau. The first phase of the Value Project focused on what is value and how do we relate to it? Do we create it, exchange it, transfer it? At what moments of work collaboration do we experience it? What kind of social software tools enable us to generate value? The second phase has led to a codified map of categories and processes that are grounded in both an analysis of Dreamfish member experience and research in micro-enterprise development and human development.
Want to swim a little? Here are the notes and audio-recording (available for limited time).
There are three views of the Relational Value model. The first graphic above shows you “what is value”. The second below shows you “how do we get there”. The third graphic shows what the experience is that social designers and change agents design for.
The Relational Value Map above is an analytical tool. It offers individuals and teams a tool to make meaning and evaluate what kinds of impact you want to make. These five categories have subcategories.
The Relational Value Flow above is the “how we get there”. It is iteritive and agile.
The Relational Value Experience describes the individual’s experience. This is helpful for designing a social experience. You know your design is in the right direction when individuals say things like this. To paraphrase Nancy White, “we build social software for networks of people, but it is individuals who experience it.”
What’s under the hood? The Relational Value model is built from an analysis of Dreamfish member experience through a lens of my research in knowledge and relational culture design. The map correlates with Relational Cultural theory, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Brian Hall’s Value Technology. (For a deeper read and application to an organization, there is a case story project to build a culture of resilience and sustainability in Dreamscape, Innovations in Transformative Learning.
Commodity thinking versus relational thinking?
I’ll leave you with a great quote from last Friday’s Dreamfish Leadership Lab. Leonard Perlson told a great story that illustrates the difference between the Value as commodity or value that is growthful. Leonard says,
The difference between trading value and creating value is the difference between trading a Picasso and developing an artist.
People are artists of life. Let’s develop the next billion out of poverty.
Want to dive more into value? An upcoming opportunity is upon us. The social capital marketspace is forming at the SOCAP conference, October 4-6th.
[Note: the Humanifesto has evolved with tweaks and nudges. The current version is here. ]
We want to flourish.
We want a workplace, where everyone can create meaningful work. We can find happiness. We can thrive in our livelihoods.
Dreamfish was born to create a new open world of good work for everyone, everywhere. Dreamfish is for us, all of us – the world’s women to work, get capital, move out of poverty or reenter a workforce or work in open source, for men to explore freely new ways to feel at work, for a person in recovery from anything to make a living, for a young genius to stretch wide, for elders to contribute experience, for the homeless to gain confidence, for a professional to learn creative out of the box skills, for the investor to contribute to what matters, for a young worker to gain meaningful work experience, free of silos. This is sustainability at work. This is ”our” world of work.
We are welcoming. You may speak Urdu, Spanish or Chinese. You may identifiy as a woman or a man. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, a suit, leather, piercings, a pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something we can only dream of. You may carry a backpack, a guitar or knitting needles or a cane. Conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist — we believe it’s possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to be agents of entrepreneurship. We welcome youth and elders, mothers, activists, professionals, artists, engineers, bloggers, crafters, academics, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, gardeners, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to do business, people who want to keep in touch, people who want to make great art. We welcome Internet beginners.
We will thrive at work.
In our future, we want for millions of us to have created more meaningful work, moved out of pov
erty, completed thousands of successful projects, and grown as people. We want to:
*Increase sustainable income – Those of us who are below the poverty line will significantly increase our income and report an income that enables us to be self-sufficient.
*Resilience – The Survival rate of micro-enterprises is extraordinarily high after five years.
*Value creation – We each will have transformed our understanding of what is value, and be actively creating a viable, collaborative economy.
*Environmental footprint – We will reduce, reuse and recycle more. We will dramatically reduce our environmental footprint of our work by working locally and virtually, and sharing resources.
We can work our way. We want to:
* Create a livelihood for ourselves with all the necessary tools to succeed.
* Realize our dreams by working on projects that interest you, not the other way around.
* Learn valuable technology skills for the new economy.
* Build a strong support network of dynamic, like-minded individuals to exchange ideas and collaborate.
* Find the right people to help us accomplish goals.
* Grow both personally and professionally through collaboration.
* Share our wealth by mentoring and investing in other dreamfishers.
We are happy, healthy and principled:
Diversity principle
Diversity is core to Dreamfish as a work community. We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, color of skin, ethnicity, nationality, ability, class, income level, religion, culture, subculture, and political opinion.
Collaborative Learning Principle
We mutually support our growth and development. We learn from experiences. We learn by working together. As we do, we develop socially, ethically and professionally.
We believe that when we jam ”with” our differences, not against, we innovate and transform. Resilient results can come when people from different worlds and world-views move as an organizational jam. A jam is a practice of presence. A jam is not a debate about rightness. It is not fight or flight. It is not positional arguments. Jamming is listening, really listening. It is saying, “Yes, And”.
Staying with the conversation teaches us about what we did not know, and humbles us in the awareness that there is much more that we don’t know that we don’t know. We learn to live in the gap between what we thought we knew and what is possible. Jamming is not superflous to our work. Jamming is the work. As we practice to jam with one another, so, we emerge with what is possible in our work, in ourselves, and in the world.
Sustainability Principle
We actively make choices that mindfully supports the health of projects we work on, our coworkers, the earth and its creatures.
We believe that sustainability goes beyond a triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. Physicality is core to what is sustainable work. We thrive with biodiversity here as we are part of the biodiversity of our planet. We believe accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. As we share the air with each other, our own breath reminds us that the self is common to both humanity and to the earth. Listening to our body, we learn that work is a practice, not a production. We learn that we are collaborative systems, not silos. We learn that our gut can make a critical decision, when the frontal cortex may not. We learn that our community is a dance, not a data set 
.
Fishfood Principle
We believe that we value differently. You may value the deep satisfaction of putting money to work. I might value: food and shelter. Learning. Accomplishment. As we work, we each listen to what we truly value and then can create this blended value through projects. As schools of fish, we create fishfood for all. Our revenue model is designed for diversity.
Working Out Loud Principle
We are as open and transparent in our work as possible to be highly efficient with resources, and allow more people to benefit from the work created. Many of us contribute to open source development, and Dreamfish is built with open source software. Working out Loud allows one coworker to easily learn from another coworker (e.g., on how to use a tool, how to run a meeting or manage a project). This is also why our main workspace is a wiki. If you want a private space, you are welcome to create one. This may take some adjustment, if you have worked behind a wall for awhile. But, those of us who have made the transition, find this new way of work liberating!
We practice the work we want in the world:
Guidelines are agreements that we make to our coworkers.
We practice Respect
Each person’s contribution in this community is valuable. We expect for each person to be treated with the upmost regard and respect. We respect people’s time, efforts, and expressions. Please see our Diversity Statement.
We practice Extraordinary Project Management
We want a healthy workplace throughout the whole cycle of work, from the early relationship-forming process through project management to project close outs. Project-based work can be an efficient flexible way to get work done. We can keep costs low. To enable this new way of work, we strive towards excellent project management practices. As we are at different skill levels of project management, we teach each other as we learn.
We practice Effective Communication
There are things we don’t know that we don’t know. By giving each other feedback, we can become more aware and more effective at work. Our perspectives are often different from each other. We check our own assumptions out directly with the other person. We strive to own our own interpretations and feelings about the situation. If need be, we ask for help to facilitate.
We practice Responsibility.
When we leave or disengage from the project, in whole or in part, we do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project.
We treat creativity as a practice. We love creativity, especially collaborative forms that arise as people work together — from dance to video, from a code snippet to a page on the wiki, from the person who’s been doing this for decades to the person, who just picked up a video camera last week. We support maximum freedom of creative expression, while respecting our work communities. We will never put a limit on creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable.
We are learning as we go. We may not be able to satisfy everyone. We may not be able to provide for multiple languages or better accessibility as quickly as we would like. We each can certainly work to avoid offending anyone, and learn. And we can listen carefully and respectfully to each other. We can work together.
We want a thriving workplace for everyone, everywhere. We are not bosses and minions. We are not in or out of the workforce. We are not demographic groups. We are not producers and consumers. We’re people working with people.
Please, support this humanifesto by adding your name to the list on the wiki.
==== Attribution ====
The context for this humanifesto:
As a practice of diversity, this text is a remix, with much thanks to Dreamwidth for allowing us to repurpose text in their Diversity Statement. This text is usable under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA license.
Our relations shape us. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Dreamfish on a journey over the last couple years to arrive at where we are now as a work cooperative. In 2006 in the International Society for Systems Sciences, we began under the name of Dreamfish as a NGO project, to support systems scientists to collaboratively work on issues of sustainability, and democracy. In 2007 – 2009, we engaged thousands of social entrepreneurs to share resources with each other in projects with PopTech and Craigslist Foundation, Fielding Graduate Institute, Organization Development Network, Greenmuseum.org, and Planetwork. Several core dreamfishers meanwhile worked as Touchy-Feely group facilitators for Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Women in Management program. Now, as a community, we are going to come full circle. Now, with the belief, sweat and effort of a small staff, nearly 100 community members working on projects, 3000 supporters, and investors who believed in this woman entrepreneur (!), we are moving our vision to life.
If you want to get involved, and volunteer on a Dreamfish project, we are looking for leaders, writers, programmers, operations folks, wiki contributors, investors and funders of open source projects. We are inviting employers who want workers to seed job opportunities to post jobs. We welcome you to join us in building Dreamfish.
Work is hard. Work is not fun, or one must work to have fun.
Really? Time to check out CocoVivo, the island of coworking, where people go to figure out how to live well as they work alongside nature.
As I think of myself walking in the sand barefoot, or lounging with my laptop in a hammock, my deeply ingrained got-to-hurt work ethic rooted in a Protestant /Chinese/ Irish upbringing niggles at me. I am considering a visit to CocoVivo, to challenge myself. (of course, it would have to be a challenge. 
sigh.)
