Incredibly happy to unveil something I've been working on with a group of friends. In 2017, The Global Challenges Foundation organised a competition to reimagine global governance for the 21st century, that will allow us to better tackle the great many challenges we face, and the ones yet to come.
complexcity is our answer, a method and mechanism for harnessing civic participation in grassroots-level collaborative complexity engineering. Quite a mouthful, but proportional and necessary to the nature of the challenge, I assure you.
We assert that the average 21st century citizen with a smartphone and Internet access is possibly more educated, more connected and more capable than even the greatest statesmen of previous centuries. This is, in our telling, a new superpower. So we must naturally ask what role the newly empowered individual citizen can take in navigating an increasingly complex world?
Our solution then should be understood as a kind of lens that harnesses this immense source of light into a million laser beams to solve global challenges bottom-up hand-in-hand. In a nutshell, this is analogous to scaling proportionality problems of the form: “It takes X men Y days to solve Z problems”. The volume and frequency of issues (Z) or the severity (Y) can be managed by sharing the cognitive load among multiple stakeholders (X).
During the New Shape Forum (May 2018), we were identified as one of the semi-finalists (top 100 of more than 2500 submissions in total worldwide), and not only that, our submission is hosted as part of the New Shape Library.
Curiosity piqued? Read the executive summary here, or check out the white paper.