Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the invite Jose.
Hi Aine, Johan Van Niekirk of CPUT is friend of mine and had introduced me to the LENSin project a few years ago.
Hi Michel, Jose, et al.
My name is Gien and I'm a principal co-founder of Stop Reset Go, a global citizen's collective developing strategies for rapid whole system change aligned to global anthropocene targets.

Some of you know my colleague Professor Lorenzo Fioramonti of U of Pretoria who released his latest book: The Wellbeing Economy. The Festival is aimed at promoting a global Wellbeing Economy based on Lorenzo et al research. Together, we are hosting the Wellbeing Economy Festival, held Nov 27-30, 2017 at the CSIR Convention Centre in Pretoria, South Africa. Lorenzo suggested the name so that the abbreviation can be a Tongue-in-cheek, WEF2017 to the World Economical Forum. Our other organization committee members are bringing other resources to share with everyone. Dr. Alan Brent is bringing the Innovation for Sustainable Development network: http://www.inno4sd.net/News/Africa-Europe-Dialogue-Symposium-On-Innovation-For-Sustainable-Development.kl who will use the festival as an opportunity to transfer their knowledge to the development of the Wellbeing Economy.

I'm organizing the satellite city participation as well as indigenous community participation and a few other potential cosmo-localization projects we will present including Hack the Cape Town Water Crisis (which we will probably rename since so many other cities are also having major water crisis such as Nairobi and South of Spain).

SRG Cape Town has been holding a series of planning workshops. The next one is Saturday, Aug 5, 9:30am to 4pm South Africa Standard Time and Jose et al. are welcomed to join.

For WEF 2017, SRG is introducing a new conceptual framework designed for citizen's and the commons to drive rapid whole system change inspired by Stockholm Resilience Centre and prof Johann Rockstrom's work. The new framework will allow local actions to be correlated to global impacts in realtime by using the recently developed concept of Urban Planetary Boundaries (UPB) developed by Dr. Daniel Hoornweg of U of Toronto. Dr Hoornweg's paper was referred to me by Urban Metabolism researcher Paul Currie of U of Stellenbosch's uMAMA research division at a recent Stockholm Resilience Centre sponsored workshop in Johannesburg. The UPB is a critical framework to provide a unique fingerprint of the urban centre's unique set of biophysical and social challenges and to guide cities to measurable impacts that can be synchronized to global PB. Other complementary tools include:

• MuSIASEM (Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism) framework, developed by Mario Giampietro et al. of U of Barcelona for mapping out the patterns, flows and funds of complex entangled real world problems.
• Urban Footprint, an open source scenario planning software developed by Calthorpe Analytics for analyzing huge urban data sets that include hundreds of municipalities. Urban Footprint allows users to perform scenario planning and accurate impact projections across the entire urban landscape. Projections and measured impacts across the entire urban region can therefore be measured.
• Insight Maker open source modeling and simulation tool for Wicked Problem analysis
• 3 step multi-scale, multi-dimensional Stop Reset Go process of transformation as a simple tool for citizens to apply a 3 step turnaround strategy that will turn a situation of harm into a situation of wellbeing. We are applying augmented reality to geolocate sites in need of transformation and possibly geocache to gamify.
• Dr. Roberto Valenti's WEquest system. The crypto will start out using current existing platforms but we wish to evolve into a Digital Acyclic Graph to avoid unnecessary mining or even better, to base it on a real nature resource. The idea is gamified digital collaboration platform that will matchmake resources to projects and reward users for work that has the greatest impact using Karma points.
• Circular design methodology. I am also on Board of Stewards of Open Source Circular Economy Days and we are bringing the Open Source and Circular Economy global network onboard.

All projects on the platform will fall under one of the UPB categories, either biophysical or social. In this way, all projects can be totalized for each biophysical or social UPB. Dr. Hoornweg is trying to secure funding to develop the UPB for 100 cities with populations over 5 million but said in principle, if the city has the data, it doesn't have to be a large urban center. It can be much smaller. By aggregating the results for all cities, we can have a total global planetary boundary value, hence syncrhonizing local impacts to global ones. Hoornweg's paper makes one thing clear - we are violating Doughnut economics (Raeworth, 2013). Our challenge is to apply all our tools to ensure any social development takes place within the Doughnut.

For WEF2017, we are also inviting participation of the global indigenous community.We have been invited to work with one indigenous community coalition that represents approximately 10 million Khoi and Nguni people to help develop a regenerative development strategy for their people. This will leverage open source and circular designs as well as agroforestry-centred food production systems.

One of the ideas we are workshopping and will present along with this global change framework is an innovation community pilot project that consists of developing a parallel WEconomy using this innovation platform. The idea is to see if we can get members of the global open source circular (OSC) design innovation community "off the MEconomic grid" through a cosmo-localized sharing of high quality OSC designs that every local innovation hub has the ability to download and locally produce. Hence, we are forming a Cape Town innovation hub and Johannesburg hub and other SRG members are looking at forming or using existing hubs in their respective community. Here in Cape Town, we are building an OSC Ecohome and sharing all the design technologies in the network. We will pilot here first and go into local manufacturing with the technologies that are marketable. Those designs will then support the local innovation hub member's livelihood. Once we have proven saleability locally, that serves as evidence for other global hubs that the concept is viable and they can elect to go into local manufacturing with it. For South Africa, we have a two stage roadmap: 1) to develop the first innovation hub to a point where everyone within the innovation cooperative is collectively producing a majority of the goods and services they consume, lowering our cost of living significantly. 2) to port those proven designs to marginalized communities everywhere by tapping into the national university network of students who are from townships across South Africa. We are also looking to tap into incarerated gangmembers and re-educate them so that they can 1) become paid active community change agents and 2) effectively lower all the crime in their respective communities. This strategy rally depends on effectively scaling cosmo-localization. We need to have enough innovation hubs that we can co-create all the designs necessary to add to a usable knowledge commons so that community leaders can find the designs and system appropriate to building their own local OSC economy.

Hi Gien, thanks for sharing all the amazing things you are involved with.

With my connection-spotting hat on:

Dr. Hoornweg is trying to secure funding to develop the UPB for 100 cities with populations over 5 million but said in principle, if the city has the data, it doesn’t have to be a large urban center.

The idea is to see if we can get members of the global open source circular (OSC) design innovation community “off the MEconomic grid” through a cosmo-localized sharing of high quality OSC designs that every local innovation hub has the ability to download and locally produce.

Concerning both data and OS design, if you haven't already connected, talk to Massimo Meninchelli of Fab Lab Barcelona ([email protected]) re:

http://dashboard.fab.city
http://market.fablabs.io

The Global Footprint Network, who maintain comprehensive accounts of physical production/import/export/consumption for 200+ countries back to 1961, with thousands of data points, have recently made all their data available, and there is an API

http://data.footprintnetwork.org
http://data.footprintnetwork.org/api.html

This data is captured at the national level by statistics agencies, however it would be a reasonable rough estimate to divide a national figure by country population, then multiply by urban population for city figures (though GFN do have a methodology for city work). I am not sure if this meets the needs of anyone here, but GFN curate a LOT of data from reputable sources like the UN FAO.

I am not familiar with Calthorpe's Urban Footprint, but from what I can tell looking at the Calthorpe Analytics site, it is doing something different to GFN:

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/cities

I saw that your colleague released his book recently, and shared it on the Post Growth Institute Facebook page (I helped found PGI in 2010 and built most of the page following). I am hopeful that our book, with an allied theme, will be out this year:

www.howonearth.us

Thanks Sharon!

Massimo sounds familiar but I'll contact. Thanks for reminder about GFN. I have downloaded their dataset in previous years. I haven't checked out the latest yet. I'm studying the online Coursera course on MuSIASEM right now:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/sustainability-social-ecological-systems

It's a very appropriate approach to use for addressing the complexity of problems we face today. They focus on the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus. With the Deep Humanity Human Interior Transformation work we are developing, we are thinking of possibly extending MuSIASEM by adding psychological dimension to the existing social one. Although I don't know right now how one would measure it.

Calthorpe's Urban footprint works on a different scale, on an Urban scale (so being an urbanist, you might be interested in it).
This video shows an example of how changes in transportation scenarios affect land use in California and explains how they developed the software as a response to monster data sets that no existing proprietary software tools could handle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvL8uTgmXGQ

Base Data - Detailed data canvas of what is on the ground today
Then scenario development and analysis based on the Base data.

This is a very powerful tool because it allows you to do very accurate urban metabolism studies. You can do scenario planning for every aspect of material and energy flows in a city. The tool has been used to project how scenarios could save california billions of dollars and make water, energy, transportation, food production, employment, carbon emissions, etc...all much more efficient.

So the power for us is that if we develop solutions that can scale, we can perform scenario planning with each city on the planet for that solution that can project it's impact in multiple dimensions. In short, it can show the impact of cosmo-localization across every city that employs it as a metric. So imagine we have commons innovation hubs around the globe in all major cities and we develop open source designs that allow local communities to download and develop their own local economies. As an example, imagine developing agroforestry solutions. We could then enter all the land and climate conditions required to grow an agroforest for a specific guild of plants optimized for that urban environment. We could also enter social conditions. Then Urban Footprint would calculate the total amount of land that could be used for that, and from that how much water is required, transportation to markets, output, climate mitigation, biodiversity and ecological services, etc. Then we would aggregate the impact on urban biophysical and social boundaries across all the cities to give us specific measurements of impacts across multiple global biophysical and social planetary boundaries.

If we combine MuSIASEM with this and couple that with UPG, we get a way of scaling the impacts of cosmo-localization in a global way that we can make global projects of impacts and measure actual impacts, relative to global planetary boundaries. The Hack the (X) Water Crisis event will be a great place to develop and test this integrated methodology. MuSIASEM is designed to handle multi-dimensional, multi-scale complexity inherent in socio-ecological systems.The course shows examples of how to deal with water in the WEF nexus and that perspective can be applied to the Hackathon for each city involved. I hope to finish MuSIASEM coursera course soon and then read through Daniel Hoornweg's paper thoroughly to see how we could combine these two. The Hackathon ideas can be examined and scenarios examined via MuSASEM. Because of the multi-dimensionality, we can examine all kinds of solution, both direct and indirect and MuSIASEM
can determine the impacts. Those solution scenarios can then be mapped onto Urban Footprint for each city and we can determine the total urban impact of each such solution. By aggregating all those solutions, we can then see how we compare against the water threshold of the UPB. The whole idea is to "bend the curve" and pull back the current disastrous trend back away from the threshold and back to safe levels.

By gamifying it, we can incentify change agents and create a strong sense of community. It would really be awesome to see how our efforts are bending the trend graph and bringing it back to the safe zone. If we develop data visualizations that show this in realtime, it would be an awesome game!

We will be describing it in detail in our upcoming opinion piece with Lorenzo in the Solutions Journal and then even more detail in the white paper we will present at WEF 2017.

Regarding book, I'm sure we have much in common! Looking at the same problem from different perspectives.Everyone here has an open invitation to participate as a satellite city of WEF 2017 on Nov 27-30.

dear Gien,

amazing work and developments you are doing and describing!!

thanks a lot for this overview, especially of usable metrics!

I participated in a conference organized by Lorenzo 2-3 years ago on global well-being, when I visited SA, Irma and met you,

Michel

Thanks @Michel

Well, we who are above 50 years of age have less than half that remaining in our lives so we have to use it as effectively as possible. Each day, I try to leverage what I know and do to maxiimize its altruistic effect.

When I met Paul and told him what we were trying to do and he referred Hornweg's paper to me, it was as if my prayers were answered. I had been searching for that paper for years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26897006

This gives each urban centre a unique biophysical and social fingerprint so offers the potential to guide the local/regional development of each city in a way that is completely aligned to the global planetary boundaries. Until now, these global planetary boundaries have been a great theoretical result but were not practical at all because, as you have often written about, we all live locally and nobody has any consciousness of the ways we contribute to the destruction of the commons.

Yes, I remember meeting you....it was the day before we hosted our first OSCEDays in Cape Town back in 2015.

dear Gien,

I'm not an expert, but I'm reacting to:

<< With the Deep Humanity Human Interior Transformation work we are developing, we are thinking of possibly extending MuSIASEM by adding psychological dimension to the existing social one. Although I don’t know right now how one would measure it.>>

the first thing that comes to mind is the extensive subjective measurement tools developed by the adult development communith with people like Susan-Cook Greuter, Robert Kagan and the like

I keep track of metrics and measurement tools here at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting

for example it says there that the following has a subjective component:

• Sustainable Community Indicators ( https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sustainable_Community_Indicators ): "Of the expanding “family” of alternative wealth measures, sustainable community indicators are probably the most comprehensive expression of qualitative wealth and community development generally. At their best, they synthesize a range of quantitative and qualitative data, including people’s subjective preferences."

so have a look at the nearly 500 metric systems and concepts we have identified, with items on topics like

• Alternative Measures of Human Well-Being ( https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Alternative_Measures_of_Human_Well-Being )
• https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Conviviality_Metrics

etc ..

Thanks Michel,

Will do! We want to apply MuSIASEM during the Hackathon, pre and post analysis if possible so it would be great to see if it can be applied in conjunction with some of the other metrics you are referring to. Lorenzo could possibly help with that as well with his knowledge on human wellbeing indicators. In reality, it will be a great opportunity to apply many principles.

A PhD student in political economy and energy transitions has invited me to coauthor a paper with her on developing a map for North / South energy transition. She is the one who referred MuSIASEM to me. We have been looking at conviviality matrices but find a need to extend it. Verena hasn't done in-depth study of MuSIASEM yet so I'm trying to do a crash course so I can perhaps incorporate it into the paper. It would really be great because it really is designed for complex real world problems. It's quite a different way of looking at things. I think that human psychology is very important and is too often missed. My gut feeling is that if it is included, it can contribute insights that will create better solutions.

thanks a lot for your work, very important indeed!

Hello all,

Thanks for adding me and nice to meet all of you and learn about your work!

I am an assistant professor in design innovation (Loughborough University, UK), visiting lecturer (Royal Collage of Art, UK), research associate (TU Delft, NL). I have been working in sustainability for some time, starting off in eco- social- design, eventually working as a policy advisor to Welsh government. I'm generally interested in socio-technical systems and sustainability at a landscape level, but some years ago I became very frustrated with the 'mainstream' sustainability discourse and this led me to co-founding the Open Source Circular Economy global community (soon to be formalised association) in 2015 (with the very inspiring Gien).

At RCA I have been working on (re)distributed manufacturing systems through the Future Makerspaces project (amongst others):

http://futuremakespaces.rca.ac.uk/

Day-to-day I work out of 'Here East':

http://hereeast.com/

...an area that is planned to be 'London's home for making' and the largest innovation (read 'technology') hub in Europe. Despite the complexities of this development (regeneration and all that comes with it) there is lots to experiment with in this context.

Hi Sharon,

I think we need a hub like that in each major city! We really need a space for SRG here in Cape Town so it may be worthwhile to develop a concept for this, apply all the circular design ideas we have to build such a centre and work with everyone here to apply commoning principles to create an innovation collective and co-working space.