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Considering Amplification & Resilience

By admin | June 23, 2009

At last week’s NLab event at DMU’s IOCT the following video by the fascinating Andrea Saveri was launched…

Amplifying Businesses and Communities for Resilience - Andrea Saveri

One of the things I found most interesting about Saveri’s video was the idea of flexible, ad hoc communities/social structures. We often think of communities as long term, fixed entities that take a long time to establish fully. However, I was struck that whilst social media does help give us a greater sense of the wider world, it also appears to be giving us a more acute sense of our immediate, local world. It is also enhancing our concepts of involvement and responsibility when creating and organising community resources.

I had never really thought of community as something which could be fluid, ad hoc and temporary, but then I suppose I had always thought of communities as purely geographical rather than a thematic series of connections. Once I rearranged my thinking to reflect this, the idea of flexible, transient communities as a necessity for resilience in the face of changing economic and climatic conditions seemed really obvious! Such communities being amplified (or at least, featuring amplified individuals) also makes sense, as this enables the community to stretch out beyond its boundaries to find a wider range of expertise in the event of a crisis and to organise itself without relying on a traditional hierarchical structure.

Even though we now have freedom from geographical constraints when developing thematic communities online using social media, geography is still a vital element in terms of building business resilience - something that small businesses grasp and do much better than larger firms. Given my recent work on the @bathcsc project, I was very interested in the focus on the local throughout the NLab event, and the ways in which global social media tools are actually really effective in reinforcing and supporting local social structures. The most successful aspect of the @bathcsc experiment was that it was rooted locally and by effectively amplifying the customer services department at the bus station, I was able to build up a range of local connections that in turn amplified our activities and could have led to further development, had the project continued.

Saveri’s point about businesses needing to think of themselves as part of an ecology struck home here…. traditionally, businesses (particularly larger ones) don’t think of themselves as part of an interconnected, partially supportive, partially competitive ecology - but rather as part of a purely competitive business environment. Tapping into community knowledge sounds great, but competitive mindsets need to change if this is to be sustainable - i.e. mutually beneficial.

Amplification will only work as a resilience tool if it is used to engage with local communities - rather than as an alternative to the town crier. Despite being in uncertain times, I came away from Saveri’s video and the NLab event convinced that small businesses have the upper hand on this one - and may demonstrate the most resilient business models as a result!

Topics: community, nlab, social networks |

Considering Amplification & Resilience

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