Radically Optimistic Solstice Exec Summary from Integral City 2.0 Online Conference

The Integral City 2.0 Online Conference gathered 60 visionary thought leaders, designers and practitioners, with 600 participants from 6 continents, to inquire into how to design a new operating system for the city. The 12-day Conference allowed exploration of each of the 12 intelligences from the book, Integral City: Evolutionary Intelligences for the Human Hive, and their contributions to city vitality.

The Conference was designed to be co-generative and appreciative, with an action research focus, collecting data through guided interviews aligned with each of the 12 intelligences. Over 70 hours of recorded interviews and dialogue were generated (audio podcasts and webinars), and subsequently transcribed into over 500 pages of transcripts. 660 thought leaders, designers, practitioners and participants gathered synchronously and asynchronously in a spirit of radical optimism, an essential evolutionary aspect of life.

The four voices of the Integral City – city-zens (UL) , civil society (LL), government/agency (UR), and business/organization (LR) – confirmed that a new operating system for the city is needed because cities face global crises related to water, food, energy, finance and climate change. The four Integral City voices say that this operating system resides within each of us and between us. Moreover, the new operating system is epitomized by, and optimized with, the Master Code: take care of self, take care of others, take care of this place/planet.

In exploring the Master Code, we found that principles of living systems resonate with the intelligences and principles of Integral City. This was independently confirmed by 5 visionaries using different lenses of human systems: groups, cities, sustainable design, investment and organizations. Our data shows that our ecological transactions, cultural translations, structural transformations and planetary evolution are emerging the early stages of a collective consciousness. The city is co-creating us and we are co-creating it. The city is alive.

The new operating system for cities embraces a transdisciplinary design with strategies that embrace all four Integral quadrants: UL Intentional, LL Cultural, UR Behavioral, and LR Structural. It embraces a desire to act as a planet of cities embedding living system, resilience and life cycle strategies. The Integral intelligence of the new operating system allows cities to be Gaia’s reflective organs, with human city-zens as the cells in that organ, their wellbeing dependent on their relationships with each other and the planet. The logic processors of the new operating system connect the dots by aligning purpose, priorities, people and planet with the natural flow of information, energy and matter. Finally the power source for the new operating system is an evolutionary manifestation of the Master Code, with care and compassion as core, renewing energy.

It is not enough to ask what can the city do for us? It is time to ask what can we do for the city? City-centric individuals and organizations with vested city interests (governments/agencies, business, civil society) must play catalytic roles – to co-generate inquiry, innovate learning and strengthen city relationships as the true currency for evolving city capacity and spirit.

This is our Executive Summary of the Radically Optimistic Inquiry into Operating System 2.0. The full proceedings will be released in January 2013. Drop us a line if you want to be on our notice list. Subject: Proceedings  integralcity@gmail.com

… the city sends signals to itself
for speed, agility, vitality
using any channel
to connect
civilization to nature
making sense together
using all means
to manifest
connectivity …

Meshworks Manifest, B. Sanders

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Power of WE3 on our Planet of Cities: an MR-WE Scan

Blog Action Day! The Power of WE!

What and how did we discover the Power of WE in the recent Integral City 2.0 Online Conference?

Without the many WE’s in our conference, we could never have emerged the insights to create a new operating system for the Human Hive. But with the power of WE times 3, here is a “peep show” of what is emerging.

1.      ACTION RESEARCH DESIGN WE

We launched a month-long Action Research Inquiry about how the 12 Intelligences of an Integral City could help us develop a new operating system for the city.

Each intelligence had three WE’s as presenters who spoke for the value of a particular intelligence to the city. Thought Leaders explored with us What the intelligence is? Designers framed for us So What is important about incorporating this intelligence into city life? And Practitioners told us Now What can we do to implement this intelligence in service to the wellbeing of the Human Hive?

2.      PRODUCER WE

We used a methodology that was built on the DNA of the Master Code for the Human Hive:

• Take Care of Self
• Take Care of Each Other
• Take Care of This Place

3.      CITY VOICES WE

It was critical to hear from as many voices in the city as we could attract. When participants registered we asked them to identify what voice of the city they most identified with:

1. Citizens
2. Civil Society
3. City Government/Institutions
4. Business

POWER OF WE3

The power of these three WE’s produced an exponential learning blast. This explosion of WE power is still circling the earth like volcanic emissions. You could say the effect has made our sunrises brighter and our sunsets awesomely colourful! This kind of blast casts a radically optimistic outfall of evolutionary patterns across our city grid.

We realize we can no longer use a simple/single MRI scan to understand our beloved Human Hive. To grasp the power of our discoveries, we need an MR-WE scan.

Two beautiful protocols have emerged. One (from George Por) gives us a personal practice to live the Master Code as a set of principles for evolutionary expansion.

The other (from Alia Aurami) unpacks the trajectory of the Master Code across the developmental span of the human system.

Below in Table 1, is just a little sampling of how the power of WE3 intelligences are being released when City Voices intersect with the three DNA strands of our Master Code, on our Integral City Intelligences MR-WE-scan. (You can find out more details by visiting the website www.integralcitycollective.com. Registration is free.).

Discover how the Power of WE3 releases the DNA of our Master Code in communities, capitals and capacities in all the cities on our Planet of Cities. Join us in our ongoing inquiry at the Integral City 2.0 Online Conference.

 

Table1: Releasing the Power of WE3

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Thanksgivings and Question-Harvests in the Human Hive

Ten days after the final Integral City 2.0 Online Conference (IC2OC) … and we have celebrated our first Thanksgiving (whose timing we borrow from Canada :-))

We are thankful for the people who made the IC2OC possible: all the volunteers, the speakers, the affiliates and the participants – in a constantly
intermeshing order.

We have an inventory of harvest outcomes that is almost overwhelming in its plenitude: products like 50 mp3 recordings; 36 pdf transcripts of
interviews (in various stages of completion); daily harvest summaries; website postings from participants; conference member profiles; weekly harvest paintings; music; video; social media and more to come.

We are grateful for all the relationships we discovered – not only with individuals, but with affiliates, partners and suppliers to name a few.

We are awed by the complex learning and research processes we created to produce the eLaboratory and Live Event phase of IC2OC.

And now we are harvesting a process that took 36 months to produce 36 Live Event sessions. We are noticing natural patterns emerging as we
immerse ourselves in a sea of amazing data about the Human Hive.

These I pose now simply as research questions, that we will be exploring as we gather, store, appreciate and re-purpose the Harvest in service to our Planet and her Cities.

• What have we learned about designing a new operating system for the city on a Planet of Cities?
• How is the new paradigm of the city integrally based on the Principles of Life?
• How do those principles of sustainability and resilience emerge from Energy, Matter and Information?
• What are the protocols of behaviour, thought, relationship and systems that we need in our cities on a Planet of Cities?
• What is the new story of the city on a Planet of Cities?
• What are the life-giving practices for individuals and communities in our cities?
• How do we source and re-source Life in our cities for our planet?
• What is the relationship of City Spirit to the new operating for this city on a Planet of Cities?
• What have we come to understand about how the Master Code impacted our inquiry, our processes, our conference?

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Evolution Intel Impacts City Purpose

The relevance of evolution intelligence to the whole field of city wellbeing influences how the city develops its purpose, identity, vision, values, cultural relationships and even its infrastructures.

When a city can be aligned around core evolutionary values in an explicit way (like storytelling instead of non-inclusive city planning practices) it can more easily sustain quality of life for all citizens. Cities like Curitiba, Vancouver and Songpa improve quality of life by aligning qualitative and quantitative sustainability indicators

Now What? Three simple rules can be proposed for applying Integral City Evolution Intelligences:

1. Expect the unexpected.
2. Pay attention to the rules of city intelligences.
3. Enable emergence and resilience by transcending and including integral capacities at all levels of complexity.

Finally evolution intelligence requires that we practise a Master Rule:

• Take care of yourself.
• Take care of each other.
• Take care of this place.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Evolutionary Intel Ensures Survival of Human Species

Exploring the intelligence of the city is a necessary research project to ensure the survival of the human species on this earth.  

Bucky Fuller   “The 21st century is when we find out if the human race is a failed experiment.”  “We do not have a political problem, we have a design problem. We must design a world where everyone can succeed, or everyone will fail.”

The never ending quest of the human evolutionary impulse, will likely lead us to continue to reach off earth to access the infinite supply of resources elsewhere in our solar system and the univese.  Eventually evolutionary intelligence will lead us to create the conditions where human life can be supported in space cities or colonies.

If our experiment on earth succeeds, we will then be able to apply the intelligences we develop on earth to obtain the resources to build space colonies from space. (For we do not have sufficient energy or resources to move the necessary resources from earth to a space colony.)

Thus we have many years of Integral City capacity building ahead of us — from food production and shelter construction, to inner space people development systems to mining meteorites — to create before a self-sustaining planet earth can serve (and a space colony can emerge).

This will require us to grow the capacities of collaboration, community, constellation and colonization beyond any context the human system has ever evolved.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Evolutionary Intelligence Emerges New Intel

Evolutionary intelligence is the capacity to transcend and include the intelligences we currently demonstrate, in order to allow new intelligences to emerge.

Evolutionary intelligence looks backward at our evolutionary history and forward to our evolutionary future. It assumes that life conditions will continue to change and the human species will change and adapt and evolve with such changes.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Navigating Intel Works With Meshworking Intel

From an Integral Vital Signs Monitor design, the Integral Scorecard can become the reporting vehicle for informing all the stakeholders of the city.

It tells us whether we are achieving the purpose and objectives of the city in a sustainable way. It reveals to us if we are amassing the energy, matter and information that we need to sustain ourselves. It is a way of mapping capacity and potential and has the power to reveal imbalances that indicate unsustainable practices.

Navigating intelligence using IVSM works hand in hand with Meshworking intelligence to design new governance systems that research, plan  and manage the city.

Three simple rules for applying Integral City Navigating Intelligences

1. Select the future destination of the city based on its vision.
2. Design and implement integral dashboards, using integral indicators of wellbeing for the city.
3. Notice outcomes and make course corrections to enable progress naturally.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Navigating Intelligence Enables Course Corrections

Navigating intelligence allows us to scan the environment and make decisions about our course corrections using Integral Vital Signs Monitors (IVSM). An IVSM is a reporting system whose design is based on an integral framework. It utilizes life-sustaining indicators and communicates its results in a universal language.

An IVSM system mines existing databases, gathers new data and reports observations in a global graphic language that is accessible to all (in multiple versions and multiple translations). Its purpose is for providing life-giving data for making decisions that develop, maintain and emerge the health of local and global systems of interest, for the current generations and the generations to come.

IVSM’s can exist on any scale of the human system, and are designed so that they can scale up and down from the individual to the planet.

Navigating intelligence develops a vital signs monitor with indicators and benchmarks that recognize :

• climate systems that affect natural and human sustainability (eg. rainfall, water tables)
• the limits of carrying capacity for the basic resources of air, land and water
• bio-psycho-cultural-social health indicators for individuals, families, workplaces, neighborhoods, and city systems
• sustainable economies
• sustainable infrastructures for transportation, health, education and commercial development
• congruent and incongruent neighbours that affect the health of the natural and human systems (eg. air shed, water quality, transportation systems, human movement,communicable diseases, etc. )
• physical, psychological, cultural and social boundaries

Navigating intelligence that uses IVSM adds value in four ways:

1. The essential design elements of the IVSM provide a framework, indicator organizer and common language to communicate results across cultures. We can see the investment of resources that we have made in each quadrant and level; ie. we can track energy, matter and information.
2. We can translate the investments into terms of traditional financial management; strategic financial investment; density of social networks; or sustainability vectors such as carbon-based resources (or all).
3. By the use of hyper linking, we can see the linkage between realities (four quadrants); levels of complexity (eight plus levels); time (development/evolution); and scale.
4. It allows us to compare results internally within urban systems and externally between urban systems.

From an Integral Vital Signs Monitor is designed, the Integral Scorecard can become the reporting vehicle for informing all the stakeholders of the city. It tells us whether we are achieving the purpose and objectives of the city in a sustainable way. It reveals to us if we are amassing the energy, matter and information that we need to sustain ourselves. It is a way of mapping capacity and potential and has the power to reveal imbalances that indicate unsustainable practices.

Navigating intelligence using IVSM works hand in hand with Meshworking intelligence to design new governance systems that research, plan and manage the city.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Navigating Intelligence Discloses Wellbeing of the City

Navigating intelligence monitors and discloses the wellbeing or general condition of the city.

Many city information officers are now developing versions of vital signs monitor for monitoring and reporting the health of the city. From an eco-regional perspective the indicators should track what Jared Diamond noted every society must pay attention to for long-term survival:

• Climate change
• Environmental health of the eco-region
• The city’s responses to environmental problems
• Positive economic relationships with other cities and/or eco-regions
• Incongruent neighbouring cities and/or eco-regions

Vital Signs Monitors become Integrally (IVSM) framed when they serve as community indices to measure the quality of overall health and wellbeing.  This becomes owned by the whole community when community partners (like the education institutions, health care systems, justice system, economy, recreation facilities, city hall)  contribute core data so that a composite picture of the whole community emerges from the integral map.

As a result, each community partner has a stake in the success of the IVSM and together the community of partners gains insights how their interconnections contribute to the wellbeing of the whole city.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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Meshwork City Research, Planning & Management

Meshworking intelligences contribute to research, planning and management in the city.

Meshworkers and meshweavers can create the conditions for aligning purposes, priorities, people and planet.  They can engage individuals, groups and sectors as stakeholders from each of the integral quadrants and focus on issues and purposes (like Millennium Development Goals).  Meshworkers can help these stakeholders to “connect the dots” and align their intentions so systems flow.

What are the principles meshworkers should use? Three simple rules for applying Integral City Meshworking Intelligences are:

1. Catalyze fractal connections within the human hive.
2. Build communication bridges across silos, stovepipes and solitudes.
3. Enable meshes and hierarchies that transform, transcend and transmute capacities.

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This blog is a prologue to the Integral City webinar conference  City 2.0 Co-Creating the Future of the Human Hive . We are inventing a new operating system for the city.  Click to get more details re the Free Expo and eLaboratory membership  scheduled September 4-27  2012. You are invited to attend and participate.

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