Lisa Salem reports – All systems are a balance between order and chaos – natural systems especially. Communities are systems. Audiences built on the web are communities. Understanding the natural laws of community will greatly enhance the potential of how big your audience-community can be and what it can do. It will also help you in thinking of ways to crack the dilemma of how to monetize that system and explore the full creative potential of your community.
I met Joel Getzendanner at a talk he was giving with Riversimple – a company he’s currently consulting for. Riversimple is “a hydrogen car project that’s trying to shift the way the automotive industry works, the scale at which it can operate and the environmental and social benefits that can be captured from building automobiles in different ways.”
Riversimple is exploring ways of structuring a large-scale car business where the design of the car is open source and where the business model prioritizes social and environmental interests whilst still being financially attractive to shareholders. Joel is helping Riversimple to think about what kind of structures will ensure the whole enterprise to be sustainable – interpersonally and financially.
Joel’s an expert in distributed networks. He works mostly with social-purpose ventures that are global in scale. He’s worked on a wide variety of for and not-for profit projects as well as, extensively, with Dee Hock – the founder of Visa.
Joel explains: “You can build very large systems when decision-making isn’t centralised. If everyone’s mostly making their own decisions, by sometimes getting together to make some common decisions the burden on the organization becomes much lower and so the scale can get much larger.”
Joel comes at this from thinking about what kind of institutions can be embedded with ethical and social values and how we can achieve them more effectively. It’s a natural application of these ideas because they are based in the belief that by replicating natural processes and laws, we’re working in alignment with how organization itself, at it’s core, naturally works. He believes ethics are practical, not dreamy. When applied, things just function better.
So I was very excited to get Joel to try to apply these ideas to how new models of sustainability for the film industry might work. My special interest within this was about the communities filmmakers build with their fans – The structure of the relationship to the audience, the audience’s relationship to the filmmaker and – highly important – their relationships to each other. What kind of community structures might work best, what do fans want out of their communities and, most interestingly, what is the creative potential of those communities?
I believe that we’ll come to think of community-building (especially around content) as a creative medium in the same way as we think of film, sculpture, painting, music. Like all mediums, understanding the true potential of the form entails understanding what the nature of that form is and how the medium works. As filmmakers, we’re at the very early stages of experimenting with this and understanding what that potential might be – and right now we’re pretty focused on the purely utilitarian purpose of bringing an audience to our films just so that they can get seen.
If we can understand better how community itself works as an entity though, and how to structure it to work most optimally, then we can begin to explore beyond community-building as purely a necessity. In that process films can become less ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ with limited true impact. Their real potential can rise to the fore as we learn how to channel what and who it is that the film has inspired.
I’ve divided the interview into four parts. In this first part, below, we jump-in with Joel describing how and why distributed networks are formed. He covers the six different lenses that are useful in identifying what kind of agreements people need to make an organization work and then we begin to talk about the concept of ‘value’ in community – to figure out why people want to be part of communities at all. Finally, we begin to explore how to monetize community once the value is there. In general, we try to play with how these ideas might inform models that could work within the current media marketplace.
Related: Article about Dee Hock and Joel Getzendanner’s relationship as well as the back story of Visa.
Chaordic cluster / hub photo credit – vaXzine
LISA SALEM set out to walk the whole of LA pushing a baby-stroller with a video-camera attached to the end of it, facing inwards. When people approached her, she invited them to walk with her while she videoed their conversations. She posted those videos to a blog and in the process attracted a large and intrigued audience to what she was doing. Since then, Lisa’s been looking at the process of audience-building in detail. She lives in London now and when not working on her film-portrait of Los Angeles “WALK LA WITH ME”, she runs workshops that help filmmakers be more independent.
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