Socio-collective financing

As my round of calls to practitioners ended last Friday the consensus was that while business is tough, the impact is patchy. That fits with what Gary Turner said in comments to my post Can you see the brick wall? Even so, I’m not getting a sense of a canceling out over the whole of business. Just that some are either better prepared or that they happen to be in sectors that benefit during recessionary times while the majority live in a fog of  uncertainty. I’m also seeing evidence that more people are considering internet based home based businesses as an alternative to employment in companies that might at best be shaky.

During my conversations, I’ve said that on-demand/saas/cloud computing solutions might go part way towards providing advisors and clients with the early warning they need to solve or at least mitigate the problems currently faced. Principle among these is debt management. Of course none of this helps if your local bank has shut its doors to fresh lending. Then I read a Wired article: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online. It’s a long piece but worth the time investment. It charts the growth of what it terms ‘digital socialism’ where people come together to share, cooperate, collaborate and innovate. If you’re familiar with Wikipedia then it will make sense. Towards the end, the author says:

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don’t know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

It was the reference to Kiva that caught my attention. For the princely sum of $25 you can lend into an organization that has raised many millions to help microfinance small business in poor parts of the world. It’s interesting that while numbers vary, I’m struggling to discover how much Kiva has raised so far. Some estimates say $25 million, others $45 million. All done by word of mouth and a web presence. Whatever the figure, the amount seems secondary to the purpose of like minded people coming together to get things done. In similar vein I notice that Wayne Schultz is sharing a free utility to debug MAS 90 and MAS 200 that was passed on by Mark Chinsky. Stacey Monk is competing to win $10,000 that will help complete the building of a school in Tanzania. Almost everyone I know is passing on some idea or another they think might be useful, often via Twitter with links back to a blog post. It is a social-ism of a different kind, one that taps into collective need wherever it arises. Regardless of economic circumstances, that doesn’t change.

All of which makes me wonder why professionals are so loathe to share knowledge and information that might be of value to business generally? What is it about our DNA that makes sharing such a difficult thing? If professionals don’t do it then others will, undermining our ability to be of use to the communities we believe we serve. The tragedy is that the very people who could be of greatest value might well be the ones that end up ghettoised. Surely we can do better?

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Tagged as: Peer-to-peer, Wesabe