Connecting the Good: Using the Internet to Serve the “Outernet” Chapter 11, Part 2
Connecting the Good: Using the Internet to Serve the “Outernet” Chapter 11, Part 2
Welcome to the Birthing the Symbiotic Age Book!
NEW here? — please visit the TABLE OF CONTENTS FIRST and catch up!
You are in Chapter 11, Part 2, Connecting the Good: Using the Internet to Serve the “Outernet” — Building a “Super-Highway of Love”… One Sphera is Born .. The Currency of One Sphera: TRUST
Chapter 11 posts:
Building a “Super-Highway of Love”… One Sphera is Born … The Currency of One Sphera: TRUST
Are you trying to figure out where this is All Going? Read Building Bridges to a New World — embodying the Transcendent through the nodes of intersection within local, grassroots-empowered community networks.
Voice-overs are now at the top of my posts for anyone who doesn’t have the time to sit and read! Also, find this chapter post and all previous posts as podcast episodes on
Spotify and Apple!
REMINDER of the READER SURVEY
Previously from Chapter 11, Part 1
I contend that these other-serving acts are the currency of the Culture of Connection — an expression of what C.S. Lewis described as the “Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time.”
I refer to this as an Ancient Blueprint, where we are all connected, and out of that field of mutual benefit, all concerned are enriched.
OK, what does this have to do with using technology to connect communities?
Simply put, it means the technology of the Culture of Connection must be founded on the Ancient Blueprint and Love. The kinship we extend to those we already know and Love must now be extended to the community at large in Symbiotic Kinship—including those we don’t know and those we may not like.
Building a “Super-Highway of Love”
What really got me excited in those days was realizing that the principle underlying the emergence of the flow of Love and generosity in one-to-one relationships could be applied to more extensive networks in the community.
What a discovery!
Third-party trusted connections can be applied not just to individuals but also to existing groups and networks involved in charitable, religious, business, or governmental activities, just as our Local Living Economy, Local Food System,
Arts and Culture and Neighbors’ Networks did.
The Symbiotic Networks we created naturally extended the fruits of Symbiotic Kinship to all who participated and became “trustworthy,” not only because of lofty principles but because those principles were applied to address functional needs in the real world.
The antidote to top-down technology that tends to control us would be a bottom-up technology built on the trusted connections we’ve already developed to proliferate mutual well-being throughout the community. This is the “fractal empowerment” I’ve spoken of earlier, as other-serving Virtues emerge at every scale. The virtuous interactions of individuals in a healthy community are fundamental to building community networks – and the technology that extends and amplifies those networks.
Trusted third-party connections at any scale are the foundational infrastructure or scaffolding for extending kinship beyond individuals to organizations and networks –
to connect whole communities.
The Symbiotic Culture DNA that emerged through our process and progress offers a proven pathway to create a technological foundation for a “Super-Highway of Love.”
Beginning with Love and our common purpose to manifest that Love in the world, we identified the guiding principles that emanated from that purposeful desire and then the Virtues, like generosity, that reflect the Ancient Blueprint and led to one-to-one and broader network connections of all kinds.
These new trusted connections were then applied coherently to meet what we now call 12 shared community needs (local food, economy, energy, environment, water, education, housing, religion/spiritual, etc.) and brought forth naturally emerging multi-nodal networks to bridge the silos and Connect the Good around those needs.
All of which brings us back to the focus of this chapter – how we use the Internet to amplify benefits on the “Outernet.”
It all boils down to one thing.
Love is our coherent foundation, not as a “feeling” but as the underlying creative and animating principle and the central purpose --- with each of those other Symbiotic DNA elements radiating from the center in concentric circles. Love informs and empowers every one of those radiating circles. With Love at the center, the new technological, digital support system accelerates and amplifies loving actions in the real world.
This mutually beneficial idea stands in stark contrast to current technology and social media, which have become a top-down narrative delivery system that extracts information from users, amplifies echo chambers, reinforces the siloed thinking of the Culture of Separation, and keeps us enslaved by what can only be called a “global oligarchy.”
When we first became curious about how we could use technology without it using us in 2013, we hadn’t codified our Symbiotic Culture DNA, nor did we fully appreciate how technology would be used inside the Culture of Separation. We were, however, determined to find a way for it to enhance our Culture of Connection.
What if we could accelerate the connection process inside our Symbiotic Communities to “weave” and Connect the Good more efficiently and effectively?
How many more “frozen assets” trapped within the global economic system's siloed structure and current dominance hierarchy could be released for mutual benefit locally?
It’s almost as if we had discovered a formula as profound as E=MC2 – how the energy of Divine Love can tangibly impact the material world as the Transcendent becomes Immanent.
Once again I was reminded of what I have called my “lineage” – an Ancient Blueprint that dates back to the life and teachings of Jesus and practices of the early Christian communities, expressed through Gandhi’s vision of a “Commonwealth of Village Republics” (based in part from his understanding of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount) and then Dr. Ari’s creation of Sarvodaya Shramadana— a national commonwealth, a current network of 5,000 village economies in Sri Lanka.
If it seems that I refer to that lineage repeatedly, it is intentional. In a world where we tend to get enthralled by the next great idea, it is essential to remember that this ancient wisdom and Blueprint, largely untried, has succeeded spectacularly when tried.
So, based on this Blueprint for success, imagine how technology could be used to aggregate the pre-existing spiritual, social, and economic capital within each community and facilitate their global connection in a new Global Commonwealth of strong regional economies.
This would seem to be the essence of Cosmo-localism, offering a new bottom-up global trading system that would become stronger as the top-down, vertically integrated system of nation-states and corporations weakens because it cannot care for the needs of people on the planet — let alone the earth itself.
Given the proliferation of smartphones and other technology, there was now an obvious way to empower every community to hold their own keys to Connecting the Good
in their hands — literally.
What if each community's total “intelligence” was shared and accessible to everyone?
To illustrate this new technology's ability to flatten hierarchies and accelerate beneficial connections, a visual came to mind. Imagine each local community with a vast “cloud” over it, an overarching “dome” that contained access to all of its combined resources (knowledge, land, people, organizations, financial capital, etc.)
Imagine anyone at any time being able to reach out into that cloud of resources and find whatever they need, as well as share what others might need—in real-time.
This “cloud,” unlike the one you now have to pay to be part of and has access to every aspect of your life, is truly open source, simultaneously benefiting everyone 24/7.
When we consider the blessed synchronicities that emerge from trusted third-party connections – finding a job, a mate, a place to live, building a business or project, forming a network – we can only imagine how these trusted networks amplified by trusted technology could accelerate these group and network synchronicities throughout an entire community.
And …what if technology could be employed to share our collective intelligence more rapidly and at every scale, from local to global, becoming a new “nervous system” for a spiritually based network-centric global civilization?
This was the true promise of the “Global Village.”
Again, this was before social media had fully reified as a top-down system of imposing narratives rather than a bottom-up system of proliferating new and sometimes radical ideas. And …just as surely as Symbiotic Circles and the Symbiotic Networks they spawn can become a common “neutral” space, that open neutral space that extends the promise of an open internet and a true global village is on the horizon – if we so choose.
OneSphera Is Born
A funny thing happened as I wondered how we could create a technology that amplified and extended our Symbiotic Networks. As has often been the case for me, a synchronous meeting with a friend seemed to be an answer to a prayer.
My friend, who is passionate about spirituality and community, wrote the original code for My Space, an early social network that predated Facebook.
Just to get a sense of what he had accomplished – he onboarded
six million users in 9 months!
Back then, again, before Facebook, that was HUGE!
He, too, saw the potential for using technology to Connect the Good, and a new project was born. We learned how to identify and connect connectors and super-connectors through our real-world Symbiotic Networks based on shared interests like food, education, economy, environment, arts and culture, religion/spirituality, etc.
Was technology the new “super-duper connector” that would allow any community anywhere to do what we did and have it spread rapidly across the planet, effectively building a new layer of the Internet, creating a new planetary superorganism, and bringing in a new era of cultural symbiogenesis?
Facing this ambitious challenge, we found ourselves in unfamiliar territory.
Every one of the projects and Symbiotic Networks we had already launched required only informal infrastructure, and none required funding. We rented whatever space was needed (or space was donated) and called the meetings … and the Symbiotic Network stakeholders did the rest.
That was the beauty of our Symbiotic Networks.
Instead of being another competing silo or networked silo with a worthy mission, we created a transparent network designed to support everyone inside of it.
It was an “unbrand” to lift ALL brands.
We just got the idea and started. We needed no investors, business plan, or plans to profit or operate as a nonprofit.
However, this new technology project would be different in one very significant way. We had to create a formal organization—a budget, a team, and a financial investment. Although we didn’t put it that way then, we had to make one more separate siloed business to birth the technology required for this tech-driven meta-network.
We called the first iteration of our digital platform “CONEXUS,” which we described as:
A “purpose-driven civic engagement app” that “provides a common ground to empower local community organizations, local businesses, churches, local government agencies, and citizens to interconnect and collaborate, creating thriving, self-reliant, local economies.”
Again, we hadn’t abandoned our face-to-face networks; instead, we applied technology to extend those networks and accelerate connections. We called it “crowd-sourcing civic engagement.”
When you consider how successful we had been using “weak ties” to connect previously unconnected communities (i.e., “islands of coherence in a sea of chaos”), you can imagine how excited we were about speeding up connections of trusted networks and amplifying and multiplying the good in our region.
As we wrote in our prospectus, “CONEXUS encourages offline, face-to-face meetings with people and organizations outside of one’s personal network ‘bubbles.’”
Our tagline was: “It’s not who you know, it’s who you don’t know and need to know that contributes to innovation.”
Unlike so many other great ideas that sound good but are untested, Conexus was uniquely different from all other mobile and web-based technologies because it was first discovered, tested, and proven in the face-to-face world of actual community development and then translated into technology.
It still is. A network like this has yet to be built.
We loved the name CONEXUS, but unfortunately, someone else already used it, so we had to pivot and create another name. We tested SharePortal, which reflects the “sharing economy” and offers a vision of “a worldwide network of empowered, self-reliant communities.”
However, SharePortal wasn’t quite it, and after a few more months, we finally landed on a name that stuck: OneSphera.
We had to create a business plan/prospectus to pull off our digital network and show how it would generate income. Building the digital platform to empower “a purpose-driven New Economy” would require financial resources, staff, and a formal organizational infrastructure. This was radically different from any of our previous networks and required creating another silo – even if it was the “silo to end – or transcend – all silos.”
Our initial target market included the 1.8 million formal nonprofits that existed then, the millions of informal community groups, the 90,000 local governmental departments within the 12,000 separate municipalities and townships with populations over 2,500, and the 3,000 counties in the United States.
Our “financial sustainability”—that is, our ongoing income—would be based on what we called “Google-like advertising for local businesses” augmented by “premium services to non-profit organizations, local government, locally owned businesses, and residents.”
While our system of Connecting the Good by connecting local trust networks had been proven in practice, no one had yet put together an online platform and monetized
it as we planned to.
We saw our “reality-sourced” platform as the perfect match for local, “hyperlocal” economy, community resilience, and self-sufficiency.
By early 2014, we had raised our first capital from friends, family, and angel investors, and we set about to “translate” our face-to-face community symbiotic networking process into something technology could emulate and accelerate. That required me to consider every operational process in forming our successful symbiotic networks.
This was a challenge because, as I realized at the time, my process for building community was largely “intuitive” so I didn’t have a “how-to” manual.
In building our real-world networks, I instinctively reached out to key “catalytic connectors,” brought those initial super-connectors into a trusted network and then expanded trust and networks through multi-nodal hubs.
I followed the principles of Symbiotic Networking, which involves creating a context broad enough to coalesce people and groups beyond society's divides.
This enabled us to engage and inspire everyone, bring together the community's “catalytic connectors,” and then allow the process to form organically.
Here is one of our original short videos about One Sphera from 2015, which is almost ten years old but still needed today.
Looking back, I realize that my awakening experience to what I have called the Transcendent and then to an interconnected nature’s web “naturally” led me to “follow the natural order” I wrote about in Section I.
As you may remember, I observed that nature was organized as interconnected growth hierarchies. In contrast, human society was “disorganized” as fragmented dominance hierarchies. This stark contrast led me to wonder whether there was a way to bring communities together in a radically new way.
Symbiotic Networks in the “Field of Doing” in real communities literally emerged from the Ancient Blueprint, empowered by Divine Love.
That means that Symbiotic Networks reflect fundamental ordering principles underlying reality—the Logos we have spoken of throughout this book.
This might sound incredible to some, but it is congruent with both my “other-worldly” and “this-worldly” experiences.
Symbiotic Culture and Networks, and now the OneSphera technology platform, were not plucked out of thin air but emerged from a lifetime of spiritual experience and the repeatable patterning of an ancient lineage that, for me, was rooted in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
So, I wasn’t doing this as a community development professional, a network weaver consultant, a systems change enthusiast, or a government official. I wasn’t an academic with a PhD or even a nonprofit executive. Nor was I a 23-year-old newly hatched computer scientist coming out of Stanford filled with great ideas about the newest mobile app for the community—but without a clue about the real needs of real communities or how communities actually function.
My work emerged from real-world experience, including my experience as a community-based nonprofit executive and a Main Street business owner. While building our radically inclusive Northern Nevada networks, we had to consider other local businesses, nonprofits, churches, and community groups, as well as local government departments working day in and day out to do their best to solve community needs.
Rather than operating from some “neat formula” or an imposed system that might look good on paper, we learned from citizens’ and leaders’ actual challenges and needs while being intuitive, open, and flexible. We also had the benefit of Sarvodaya’s decades of experience, as well as having Dr. Ari as a friend and mentor.
Essentially, we were “reverse-engineering” our successful face-to-face community-building process to design OneSphera.
So, I spent the better part of two years translating the previous twenty years' real-world community development experience into a technology platform.
I had to recreate the process that I used to make trusted third-party connections individually, as well as how the same principle operates to connect across organizational networked silos — building Symbiotic Networks within a whole local region.
This required sitting down in dialogue, interviewing people and leaders who had participated in Symbiotic Networks, and then translating these conversations into the discreet steps that were part of the underlying software architecture that anyone could use to Connect the Good in their town or region. When I asked these leaders how they made connections, I found that there was a precise yet universal way that they connected with other people and built their networks.
For example, when they were sitting with someone and wanted to make a third-party connection, I found that specific phrases about their shared interests unlocked memories of trusted connections and resources they could share.
So, the connection was first contextualized within their minds around a broadly shared community interest—for example, local food, economy, environment, arts and culture, religion/spirituality, and more. Then, they would drill down to sub-interests related to specific projects in the local community.
If the conversation was about local food systems, for example, key phrases related to their specific passion – like “farmer’s markets,” “backyard farming,” “farm to table,” “community supportive agriculture,” or “funding within food systems,” etc. —would repeatedly come up, helping people remember key individuals and organizations in their networks they might otherwise have forgotten.
At this point, when I discovered how the community made these essential keyword connections, I followed up with a survey of leaders — in each of the community needs areas.
To continue with the above example, I wanted to know what the local food system leaders cared about and what they were doing in their part of the food system. I surveyed twenty leaders and asked them to rank their top key food sub-interests—what we had called “Sub-Spheres.”
I have included a graphic below highlighting how we used real-world and real-time community needs as the foundation for the design of One Sphera. What was striking about this approach is that it naturally encourages many levels of network formation.
For example, while we built an overall Local Food System Network, we also encouraged people to form subsphere networks. Two good examples are creating backyard farmers’ and permaculture networks.
This aligns with how natural systems function as nested and interconnected parts and wholes, as discussed in Section 1.
The Currency of One Sphera: TRUST
While doing this deep dive on Spheres and Subspheres, which validated my experiences regarding community connections, I was immediately reminded of a fundamental prerequisite for fruitful connections and collaboration: trust.
In his influential 2006 book, The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey declared that trust is “… the new currency of our world today … the engine of the sharing economy … the ultimate collaboration tool.” Mistrust and suspicion cause what he calls “friction,” and, as we already know, friction slows machinery down.
Trust eliminates friction and lubricates the process of collaboration.
Our symbiotic community didn’t need to read Covey’s book because, for all intents and purposes, we wrote it!
Trust and trust networks were our currency from the beginning, from the first meetings of potential connectors who agreed to share their connections. Trust was built day-to-day and face-to-face, as businesses and organizations made and kept agreements with one another, and just the immediate accountability of being part of a local network spurred participants to be more trustworthy.
Because our networks were “infused” with the purposes of Connecting the Good and mutual benefit and service, those who were there to promote their own agenda above all,
simply fell away.
Those who stayed with the network came to recognize the best way to
get their “selfish” needs addressed by being part of a more extensive cooperative network that expands their potential.
As I mentioned earlier, we noticed that before building our Local Food System Network, for example, restauranteurs generally felt they were in competition with each other. After the food system network was developed, we noticed a dramatic shift. Within 6 months to a year, a new community dynamic of cooperation and collaboration emerged among restauranteurs and everyone involved.
This dramatic shift in perspective was no accident.
Our common-sense “spiritual” approach acknowledged the foundational role that universal “religious” and “spiritual virtues” (like Love, compassion, generosity, etc.) play in what Dr. Ari called personality awakening—where individuals consciously embody the qualities that will produce trust and cooperation and allow them to unify a community.
And now that this approach has been proven to work in practice – it also works in theory!
Modern science has finally caught up to this 3,000+ year-old Ancient Wisdom
of the Ancient Blueprint.
The radical shift in an entire community’s trust within Symbiotic Networks offers real-world proof of what evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson both contend. When multiple groups or networks compete, the more internally cooperative and unified groups will typically outperform those that are more fragmented, competitive, and less cohesive.
Put more simply, it means that win-win social networks of mutual benefits, like Symbiotic Networks, can outperform and outcompete networks based on win-lose – essentially, all of the networked silos we find in the Culture of Separation.
Initially skeptical of what has been called “group selection, " E.O. Wilson eventually came to support the idea later in his career. His book The Social Conquest of Earth argued that human evolution and social behaviors—like cooperation, altruism, and morality—can be better understood through group selection, where groups that work together effectively outcompete others.
The “lubrication” provided by trust and other Virtues like generosity, which facilitate connection, cooperation, and collaboration, enhances the viability and survivability of groups and whole communities.
Without knowing anything about the deeper spiritual reality of an Ancient Blueprint – or the successful work of Dr. Ari or our Reno networks – these and many modern scientists have concluded that our basic biological and cultural makeup, our very physical DNA,
favors cooperation.
It is somewhat paradoxical that science now seems to agree with something aware humans have known for millennia – that tapping into a deeper Transcendent power, dare I say God, is what creates coherence and a desire for cooperation that goes
beyond survival to “thrival.”
Inside a Culture of Separation where individuals are seeking to “make their mark,” I have seen time and again how well-meaning professionals feel a need to “package” and make “acceptable” what is universal ancient wisdom coming from humanity’s religious traditions—East, West, and Indigenous—to make it more acceptable to the media, academia, the public, the corporate world, and politics.
I decided early on that I did not want to do that.
Why would I want to “domesticate” the fundamental power of Creation and the Universe, which most humans accept as common sense – that Love is the foundation?
Why should we feel the need to “water down” this ancient religious sensibility – the power of Love that is our birthright?
Love shouldn’t be tamed, played down, or dismissed. Our work is to release, liberate, and use it to help build the “wineskin networks” that accelerate the flow of Love in a community and channel it to where it is needed.
I am reminded of my medical field, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which works by super-oxygenating the blood from within so that more oxygen can go to the part of the body where it is most needed.
Symbiotic Culture and One Sphera is like a Super Highway that infuses and circulates the “oxygen” of Love for the benefit of each and all – and especially helps make visible and can then deliver what is needed to those “on the margins” – the “least of us.”
So, it’s great that science now affirms the reality we experienced in Reno and the poorest and most disenfranchised communities experienced in Sri Lanka.
Just as we had become “radically inclusive” to build our real-world networks in Reno, the survival of our civilization primarily based on science and materialism depends on including and honoring the Ancient Blueprint that points us toward the Beloved Community.
The Virtues and Principles that radiate from that blueprint are the glue that holds community and society together, whether you see things from a scientific, cultural, religious, or spiritual perspective.
So now, on this unshakeable rock of Divine Love, we sought to build OneSphera to extend and amplify these principles, automating and accelerating our face-to-face organic process into a genuinely heart-based technology.
Stay tuned for the next post, Chapter 11, Post 3… OneSphera Value Chain Liberates Frozen Assets … Using a Gaming Engine to Incentivize Win-Win-Win Symbiosis: .. Inverting The Global Financial and Political Pyramid.
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Thanks for sharing this Richard. We have been in Zoom rooms together and this is just another reminder to me that I would love to connect with you one-on-one. This is exactly the kind of solution I was looking for when we were developing https://www.thesource.directory/ - Hopefully when we are both less busy we will be able to connect.