Building on the success of SoCap in San Francisco, which has grown from around 500 attendees to a capacity 1500 in four years, the SoCap team initiated SoCap Europe in 2011. We have worked with SoCap for several years, co-designing the International Development track in 2010, and designing and moderating the Polycentric Solutions track in 2011.

For SoCap Europe 2012, hosted in Malmo, Sweden, we designed a learning journey for participants. This expedition took them outside the confines of the conference venue into the Rosengard neighborhood of Malmo. This is a high immigration neighborhood, with significantly higher than average levels of poverty, unemployment and failing schools. The city of Malmo in conjunction with community leaders in Rosengard is pioneering support for social entrepreneurship, enabling residents to develop businesses that contribute to the well-being of the community. In collaboration with SoCap staff we designed the learning journey, and created version of our expedition materials to guide observations and discussion. View more here.

We uncovered some fascinating insights curating our track at the Social Capital Markets Conference, Polycentric Solutions: Local in the World. We’re still buzzing here at CI with the interesting conversations and great people we met and worked with. On-the-ground leaders from Oakland to Sweden to Kenya came together to cross-pollinate best practices about local solutions to global problems. Facts and highlights from the track include: (more…)

At the end of the day, all impact is local. Creating impact means understanding the complex web of local relationships in which it takes place. Scaling that impact requires a deep understanding of where those complex local environments overlap- and where they don’t.

That’s why the Polycentric Solutions track at the 2011 Social Capital Markets Conference is being built around two living case studies: Berjeson, Gotenborg, Sweden and Cherryland, CA, USA. Though separated by half the globe, these two communities have numerous parellells that SOCAP attendees will be leveraging in hands-on problem solving throughout the conference.

Meet the Communities

View Polycentric Solutions in a larger map

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In most ways, the Roman Empire was a boon to everyone involved. Once-warring tribes were brought to a place of peace. These tribes could suddenly trade local goods, exchange ideas, and invest in shared infrastructure. The only drawback to the Pax Romana was Rome. Rome sucked resources that it burned on extravagant gestures, often designed to distract. It served as an information bottleneck, forcing bad decisions onto people with the local knowledge to make better ones. Worst of all, Rome became a single point of failure that eventually brought the entire system crashing down.

Today, these wealthy, ill-informed single points of failure are still causing disasters on a regular basis. Our small tribes accept them as a necessary evil because in a deeply interconnected and interdependent world we need our Pax. But that may be changing. For the first time in human history, advances in social technology are letting small tribes build an empire together without elevating a Rome. (“Social technology” refers to systems of organizing like democracy, not social media tools like twitter.) These emerging technologies and their practitioners will be featured in an upcoming Polycentrism Track at the Social Capital Markets Conference. (more…)