An opera in the Klingon language kicks off its three-day run in the Hague Friday.

A fan prepares for the premiere of the Star Trek feature film in Detroit in May 2009.

An opera performed entirely in the Klingon language began its three-day run Friday in the Netherlands.

By SPACE.com Staff / September 10, 2010

Die-hard "Star Trek" fans may want to dust off their Klingon dictionaries and take a transporter to Europe for the debut of the first opera ever to be completely sung in the invented science fiction language.

The opera, called "u," kicks off a three-day run at the Zeebelt Theater today in The Hague, Netherlands. The title "u" is the Klingon word for "universe" or "universal." [Photo of Klingon opera rehearsals.]

Tickets for the performances were still available as of Friday morning, according to Reuters.

Klingon, which is spoken by members of the fictional "Star Trek" warrior race of the same name, has evolved into a significant pop culture phenomenon since the American science fiction TV series first hit the airwaves in the late 1960s.

Fans worldwide adopted the alien dialect and made it one of the most popular constructed languages, opera organizers said.

Even natural wonders have taken on the fake sci-fi language. In August, Australia's Jenolan Caves announced plans for the world's first audio cave tour voiced entirely in Klingon.

And, since opera occupies a large part of Klingon culture, the creation of such a show here on Earth seemed like a logical choice, opera organizers said.

In April, the show's producers sent a message out into the cosmos inviting the "real" Klingon community to attend the upcoming performances.

The invitation was sent by a radio telescope to the Klingon home star, Arcturus.

"The Klingon are known as passionate opera lovers but at the same time very little was known about Klingon opera here, so as far as I was concerned that was a very interesting challenge to try and make an authentic, or as authentic something out of that as possible," the show's creator Floris Schonfeld told Reuters Television.

The 90-minute production follows the journey of Kahless the Unforgettable. After being betrayed by his brother and bearing witness to his father's brutal death, Kahless faces his bitter enemy, the tyrant Molor.

Along the way, Kahless fights to regain his honor by traveling into the underworld, waging epic battles, and reuniting with his true love, Lukara.

The show was well-received after a preview was staged Thursday evening, as reported by Reuters.

"It was really well interpreted, the music was really good, and the performance of the actors were fantastic," Reuters quoted audience member Erwin Slegers as saying.

Once I had decided that my partner was poly and he wasn’t going to get over it in a hurry I started to think about what could possibly be in it for me.  The answers didn’t come all at once, but they did come and here’s where I’m at so far in no particular order:-

1.    I didn’t end  my relationship. Ending an otherwise good relationship over just one issue is a very emotional, heart-wrenching affair.
2.    I have an extremely happy, appreciative partner who realizes the lengths I have gone to understand and accept him.  What goes around, comes around.
3.    I am building a relationship with a woman I find very interesting and I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to know.
4.    Although I am mono at the moment and not seeking other relationships I am free to fully explore relationships that might come my way.
5.    I was actually quite bored with the mono, middle-class, couple scene, where the topics of conversation revolve around children, work, traveling, renovations, sports, gossip or grumbling.
6.    Polyamory is a great tool for personal growth and self- awareness.
7.    I have finally got something cool to write about.
8.    Our relationship remains hot and spicy rather than lukewarm and comfortable, or worse, cool and uncomfortable.
9.    I never take my partner for granted.
10.  We have a level of honesty and relationship I have never experienced before.
11.  Involving myself in polyamorous communities online has been an enriching experience.

You began with a glorious hallucination of what social media was going to do for your business, social life, and even writing ability. You tweeted, facebooked, and smothered Linked-in contacts with glowing recommendations. You commented on all the top blogs in your niche and dutifully updated your own blog on-schedule. You may have even dropped a few hundred dollars to listen to others tell you how to tweet, facebook, and smother.

Then you woke up. You may have read about a freelance writer moving to a tropical island, seen Dell Outlet’s sales report, or heard a podcast from some kids paying for college by selling iPhone apps. No matter the trigger, it suddenly hits you that you seem to be the only one not making big money from this social media “thing.” All the happy conversations, serendipitous connections, and lessons learned seem tarnished and heavy in your hand. You’re exhausted and have so little to show for all your labor! 

Welcome to the land of the living, friend! What you’re going through is common for most individuals who pursue a long-term goal without the guidance and feedback of short-term benchmarks. You haven’t done anything wrong. What’s more likely is that you’ve put a lot of energy into doing all the right things without knowing what to expect in return. Your dream of a burgeoning bottom line, pina coladas, and a diverse group of friends is still possible. You simply need to embrace a process. To borrow the words of Rene Descartes,

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.

That doesn’t sound especially fun, does it? Probably not. But you already had your fun at the beginning when you ran around, happily without direction, soaking up all there was to know about social media. And now? Now you need to put that knowledge to work with a process that will help you reach your goals. Here are three steps and five reminders to help you forward:

The Process:

1. Dream

Dreaming is the fun part. This is where you get to go crazy with brainstorming, mind-mapping, and generally embrace the irrational. If you’re lucky, you’ll come away with a general direction and perhaps some specific points you’d like to reach.

2. Dissect

Dissection is rarely fun. You have to take all the fuzzy bunnies from the dream stage and chop them into bite-size chunks. If you’re not comfortable with using spreadsheets and calendars because some conference guru told you that, “social media is about people, not MBA mumbo-jumbo,” I can’t wake you from your dream. If, however, you are ready to begin making tangible progress toward your social media goals, dissection won’t be especially frightening for you. Start with a big goal, divide it into smaller sub-goals, and outline how you’ll reach those sub-goals through weekly achievements. Take a deep breath. It’s cool. You’re going to be fine.

3. Demonstrate

Demonstration is not as much fun as dreaming but has the lovable perk of being the phase where you get to see real progress taking place each week. You have your goals, sub-goals, and steps. Now you need to actually go through those steps consistently. One thing I’ve found very helpful in my own process is the idea of a 20-minute daily base. It’s a short list of daily tasks that I must do if I want to reach my goals on-time. Even if I’ve let my schedule get away from me and I don’t have time to complete my full list of tasks, I always have time to get my daily base out of the way.

As you work to develop your own process for a successful social media experience, remember:

1. Money is seldom found in surprising places – If you consistently found money between the cushions on your couch, you’d quit your job and rely on your money couch, right? In a similar vein, the web isn’t loaded with wealthy eccentrics hoping to pay you for the fun of it. Put aside the stories of millions in minutes and focus on what you can do to make your own business model more successful.
2. Your memory isn’t good enough – Don’t trust yourself to remember birthdays, favorite blogs, special talents, and unfinished conversations. My father often quotes the phrase, “The dullest pencil is sharper than the sharpest mind.” Digital media is even sharper because it’s searchable.
3. Minimize “travel” time - If you walk 100 miles in planting a bag of seeds you’ll need to walk that same 100 miles every time you want to water, cultivate, and finally harvest your reward. Make sense?
4. Predictable quality is often better than predictable presence – Just showing up was enough to be a success 5 years ago when most of the developed world didn’t know or care about blogs. Times have changed. Maki (Dosh Dosh) can take 6 months off from blogging and come back without missing a beat. What would happen if Mashable tried the same stunt? The site would fail. Why? Because, while Maki is known for producing legacy content, Mashable continues to come under fire for finding its only relevance through timely remarks. For the individual and small business, Maki’s example is probably the best one to follow.
5. We all have to ration our time – You don’t have the time or stamina to be constantly online and interacting with strangers and customers alike. Recognize, prioritize, and move away from the activities you simply don’t have time for. Putting your time toward activities with real payouts might offend a few near-strangers in the short run but they’ll be back to buy your book once you’ve found success.

Would you rather have a marriage that drifts into dull and comfortable, or would you rather gamble for the relationship dynamic you really crave?

I used to be a girl who never took risks. Two years ago, the most exciting thing I did was or go to the occasional Renaissance Faire or watch the Gilmore Girls while knitting.  And though I still love all of these things, they aren't exactly the highlights of my week any more.  In truth, I sometimes look around me these days and scarcely recognize my life—except that it's the life I fantasized about for ages but was too scared to seek.

I think a lot of polycurious folk hesitate to make the Poly Plunge because they're frightened of letting go of things that are comfortable and secure.  What if you become poly and all of your friends and family shun you for your renunciation of normalcy?  What if your stable marriage dissolves when the two of you fall in love with other people (or even the same person)?  I say: A wise person has to make risk calculations.  Are friends and family who demand your conformity the people you want to write the priorities for your life?  Would you rather have a marriage that drifts into dull and comfortable, or would you rather gamble for the relationship dynamic you really crave?  In every case, it comes down to the stakes.

For me personally, making the Poly Plunge would have been impossible if I'd had children, for example, because I could reluctantly choose to gamble my marriage, but not my family (I certainly don't mean to criticize people who would choose differently, though).  And when it comes to choosing between your family of origin and the life you want, well... I can't lie: I don't know many poly folks who have close ties to their extended families by birth.  Most poly folks I know vastly prefer their Chosen Families, and the Goddess knows, a successful poly life has no shortage of people, as I've blogged about previously.  But then, the topic of Out & Poly deserves its own post.

For me personally, becoming poly was part of a larger process of deliberately choosing to take more risks.  I started by spinning fire for the first time (I had been diligently practicing for years), which, if you've never done it, produces an incredible high.  A week later, I ended up in a public sex playspace.  From that point on, I've been trying to carefully choose the risks I consider worthwhile as I stumbled into a firespinning band and an increasingly complicated poly life.

Psychological research suggests that the people who are most satisfied with their lives are not people who live comfortable staid lives, or people who constantly seek out new adventure and thrills.  Because about a third of the population falls into this group, engineer William Gurstelle (author of Absinthe and Flamethrowers) nicknames this happy group of people who take carefully chosen risks "the golden third."  I aspire to count myself among them, even though I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs, I'm scared of heights, and I don't like crowds of strangers.  But the risks I've chosen--playing with fire, and having a husband AND a boyfriend—are risks that have thus far made me a much happier woman.

This, for me, is the golden third. Knock on wood.

I’ve read hundreds of articles on how to corral your employees in social media. Posts on how to make sure they don’t reveal too much, waste too much time, or annoy people to the point that customers hate you. However, all that assumes that your employees and your team are comfortable stepping into social media and that they WANT to be there. It doesn’t account for the people who aren’t. The people who are fearful of the new tools, of casting bad light on the company they work for, or, even worse, accidentally getting themselves fired. While attending CapitolCamp here in Albany last week I was reminded that not every employee is socially-savvy and dreams of waking up to 15,000 Twitter followers. Some are still coming to the terms with the idea that our job means engaging with people in a brand new way. Some are absolutely terrified.

If you’re responsible for a team skeptical of social media, how do you calm their fears? How do you comfortably bring employees into the social media mix so that they see it as an opportunity instead of something that may get them fired? 

Here’s a roadmap.

Remove the Barriers

If you want to create a habit of socialness and collaboration, you need to remove the barriers to that behavior. And there may be many of them. For example, a barrier to a staff member using Twitter may be their having to learn to use tools like Tweetdeck to monitor it. By removing that obstacle and showing them how interact with Twitter via saved RSS feeds, something they’re more confident with, you help them step over that barrier. Or maybe the barrier is that there’s not enough time in their day to learn social media and fulfill their other job responsibilities. By re-assigning tasks or allowing them to tweet after hours on business accounts, you can remove that barrier. Every team will find that they have different barriers inhibiting their success. The trick is to understand the behaviors that are preventing them from being successful and then re-train or accommodate them.

Focus on One Network

To get employees comfortable in taking the leap and creating a culture of being social, allow them to focus on just one network to start. Pick whatever network you think will allow you to best connect with your audience and start there. Do not have a social media novice immediately create a presence on every channel available. That’s how you’re going to intimidate and scare the bejesus out of them. By focusing on one tool you allow them to really master it and to push it to the limits. You give them an opportunity to become an expert at that one channel. The result of this is two-fold:

• When you really learn a tool, you can learn to hack it to find your own success instead of copying everyone else.
• You limit your newbie mistakes to one channel instead of repeating them all over the social Web, ensuring that ALL of your customers spot them.

Give your employees time to find their social media legs before you throw them to the wild. It’s much better that they establish themselves on a network then to create a bunch of presences you’ll have to rework once they know what they’re doing.

Give Them Guidelines For Interaction

While at CapitolCamp I spoke to a business owner who prided himself in letting employees figure out social media on their own. He didn’t create a rulebook because he didn’t want them to feel “restricted”. It’s possible I winced when he told me this. Realize that your employees are looking to you for how they should be engaging. They want clear and written guidelines so that they can refer to them in times of trouble and so that they have a blueprint for how interactions are supposed to go. When you plot out on a new adventure, you bring a map, a compass or some other tool to help you find your way. The same applies to social media. By giving them a social media rulebook to follow, you help them make the right decisions for your brand. Your rulebook serves as their life preserver in the waters of social media. Have that social media talk and then follow it up with a written plan of action.

Create an In-House Resource

One great way to help your employees feel comfortable using social channels is to create an internal resource or Wiki that they can refer to when they have a concern or that they can use to share experiences with other employees. Let this Wiki serve as the hub for the company’s social media policy and be turned into an outlet where employees can ask questions, find education links to outside resources or simply study up on internal guidelines. Giving your employees a place to go to talk about their frustrations and pick up new tricks helps them to feel like the master of their own destiny. In the spirit of removing barriers, make this resource accessible from their home computer so that they can study it in an environment where they feel more comfortable and where they’re not being rushed to get their other work done. People want to learn new skill sets and master new marketing techniques. You just have to give them the resources to do so.

Highlight Real-Life Examples

How do you cure a skeptic? You show them real-like examples of campaigns that worked, cultures you admire, or successes that will teach and inspire them. We all work better when we have model for what we’re doing. Let them see the rewards of social media to not only give them an example of how these tools can be used, but as proof that they work and can bring rewards. Pick cases where you can show ROI and that there’s a reason to all this madness. Concrete evidence gets people on board much faster than rainbows, puppies and cupcakes ever will.

 

In the late ‘90s the company I worked for was installing a new network in anticipation of the Y2K bug.  I was responsible for training how to use the computers on the network.

Back then most people didn’t have computers.  So before we could teach them how to use the computers, we had to teach simple things like using a mouse.  I recall a few people who actually waved the mouse in front of the monitor hoping to get it to work.

E-learning has a similar history.  Because it was new and there wasn’t a lot of consistency around interface design, most courses started with a “how to navigate this course” course.  It made sense back then.

I’m not sure if it makes much sense today because most people are familiar with computers; so figuring out how to click a play button or forward arrow isn’t too hard.  And besides, many elearning courses use a similar layout which makes it easy to know what to do.  Because of this, it’s probably not necessary to have a mini course on how to navigate the course within your course.

With that said, the majority of the courses I see do offer the mini course.  I think that in most cases they can be eliminated or at least simplified.  Here’s an example from a recent course I previewed:

This is the volume button.  Some slides may or may not have audio.  Those that do have audio can be adjusted using the volume control button.  If you want to increase the volume, place your mouse over the volume control.  To turn the volume up, drag the mouse to the right.  To turn the volume down, drag the mouse to the left.  Find a volume level that is comfortable for you.

Do I really need a thirty second explanation of the volume control?  This same course continued through explanations of all of the player features.  They even went on to explain the logo panel.  It probably took about 5 minutes just to get through the user interface.  I’m not sure exactly, because I fell asleep.

Obviously, you want to let the user know how to get around the course.  However, in many instances the navigation is obvious and needs no instruction, or just something real simple.  They definitely don’t need a full course on how to navigate the course.

The goal is to create a frictionless experience.  A mini course on navigation impedes the flow and pacing of your course.  So here are a few tips:

• Get rid of the navigation instructions. When you watched your first YouTube video, did you have problems figuring out how to get it to play?  If your course player follows convention, then it’s usually not hard to figure out what’s a play button and what’s a back arrow.
• Follow conventions and don’t customize every course you build.  It’s more fun to create a custom look and feel for your elearning courses.  But, there’s a lot of value in having a consistent player structure.  It means people know where things are and where to look for help.  This lets them focus on the content and not how to navigate the course.
• Provide clear instructions if you do have unconventional navigation. Ideally, the interface should be comfortable and intuitive…and shouldn’t require a lot of instruction.  But if you do violate some conventions, then be sure to provide clear instructions.  Something to keep in mind is that if you have to offer a lot of navigation tips, you may want to rethink how you built the interface.
• Offer just-in-time prompts.  Instead of throwing all of the navigation tips out at once, just offer them at the point where they need to be used.  For example, the first time you want them to click play, just add a “click play now” prompt.  After the first time, they should get it.  This is a better approach than offering 30 navigation tips and a long, boring tour of the interface upfront.  Most people won’t even remember all of that stuff, anyway.
• Create a “voluntary” player tour.  You may not be comfortable offering no navigation tips.  And some clients will demand it anyway.  So instead of forcing everyone to go through the tour at the front end, just add a help section where they can get some tips if they’re stuck. Many people who use Articulate Engage will create a drop down tab with detailed instructions for those who need them.
• Consider your audience.  Personally, my choice is to avoid building the “how to take the course” tour.  But I still have to think about the audience needs.  If you work with a pool of people who are not familiar with computers or seem intimidated by taking a course online, then you want to do everything you can to make it easy for them.  This is where convention and just in time prompts are valuable.
• Don’t hire people who can’t figure out how to press a play button.  It’s one thing if the elearning course has some novel interface that is a bit confusing.  But most elearning courses have the same basic structure.  If the person can’t figure out how to advance the screen without help, they might not be the right person for the job.

Below is a quick demo with a few different ideas on how you can approach the slide navigation instructions.

Click here to view the tutorial.

There are a lot of ways to build navigation tips and prompts into your elearning course.  There’s really no right or wrong way.  In fact, in reviewing the recent Articulate Guru Awards, it’s interesting to see some of the ways this is dealt with.  I’ll share more later.

How do you deal with this in your elearning courses?

Miss Conduct, The Boston Globe advice columnist recently fielded a question from a father concerned about his daughter and son-in-law’s polyamory lifestyle.  His daughter came out to him that she has a lover as well as her husband and would like her dad to accept this.

Of course, he can’t. But at least he was looking for advice rather than shutting his daughter out completely.

My only issue with her advice was calling polyamory an “experiment”.  I don’t feel polyamory is anymore an experiment than monogamy, and based on monogamy’s long-term success rate I’d say monogamy is an ongoing but failing experiment.

With the new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality the authors contend that “human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners.”

A tribe.  Or as has been said: “It takes a village to raise a child.”

Monogamy is actually a newcomer in human evolution.  Some say with the rise of Christianity, but even affluent Catholics, including priests and bishops, practiced polygamy up until 1022 when Pope Benedict VIII banned all marriages and mistresses for priests in an effort to protect children of such relationships from having any claim to Church property.

So it would appear from anthropological evidence and written history, as well as the number of people who cheat and the number of people that practice serial monogamy, getting married several times during their life, that the idea of “one true love” is nothing but a myth that general society has bought into over the years.

So how is polyamory an experiment?

If I could add something to Miss Conduct’s answer to the concerned father it would be this:

Be glad that you instilled such strong ethics in your daughter that she is not leaving one good relationship in ruins just to explore another, and that she is doing this with openness and honesty with herself, her husband and with you.

Polyamory sends visions of orgies and free love to most people who first hear the term and definition. Even after careful explanation to the uninitiated, they still walk away thinking polyamory equals f***ing anything that moves. This belief that polyamory is about sex is what send people into a frenzy about morality, commitment and family values. The Montel show did a wonderful show on polyamory but when one of the poly guests compared polyamory love to loving children and the ability to love more than one he made the statement “But I don’t have sex with my children”. In our culture we are sex obsessed and sex phobic. This obsession, according to most people, means sex changes everything.

American culture is challenged when it comes to sex and this generates much confusion. Sex is an important part of many romantic relationships but it is not the end all and be all. Sex has been equated with romantic love for centuries and, in more recent years, with monogamous marriage and commitment. Sex, love, romance and intimacy are not all the same thing and you can have one without the other.

Polyamory is more about romance and love than sex. The non-poly world just does not seem to get it; it’s not about the sex. Yes, poly relationships include sex but just like monogamous ones people are there for love, romance, intimacy and numerous other reasons. Sex is often an important component but it is not by any means the focus and sometimes it isn’t even there. But it is the sexual component that seems to evoke such passionate reactions to polyamory, swinging and other forms of alternative sexuality.

People are different in so many ways. They have different hobbies, interests, likes, dislikes and we all accept this. One person may love the water and boating and another loves rock climbing and mountaineering. People have diverse work interests, raise their kids a certain way and have preferences on where they live. This kind of diversity is not seen as right, wrong or even surprising in any way. Yet when it comes to sex and romantic relationships, we have this narrow parameter of what is acceptable behavior. We accept change and fluidity in every other aspect of life and then seek to box in love, sex and intimacy, the very things we should expect the most freedom with.

We would never tolerate our personal choices in work or where we live to be dictated by the neighbors or the government and yet, as a culture, we seek to control who a person loves, how they love, what sexual activities are accepted and even how many they can love. Why, one may ask, because of SEX. Gay marriage, gay relationships, bisexual relating, polyamorous relating all include sex and sex scares most people.

In the sixties and seventies our culture made a shift toward opening up sexually. The ideas of free love, swinging and the one night stand were being explored. Unfortunately so many of the young people exploring had been raised in families that had no communication, where masturbation was forbidden and no one talked about sex. Many were taught good girls were supposed to be pure and hold out their virginity for marriage like a bartering chip. Boys were supposed to push girls into submission. The same people who opened up the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies also brought in their own bad habits as well as unconscious fears and shame. Many were like a kid in a candy store, enthralled and lacking the self control not to overdo it. Free love instead of coming from a place of love was often coming from a place of rebellion and need to fit in with peers. In many cases people, especially women, were pressured into swinging or sex when it was not right for them. As a culture we lacked the important skills or role models to handle free love.

Sex has been demonized, used as a weapon and made a sin, first by the church and now by society. People have suffered terrible shame, guilt and even pain about their sexual nature and their sexuality. These ideas about sex as sinful can wreak havoc on the unconscious mind and sabotage people’s attempts to free themselves and embrace their sexual nature. Part of this cultural programming is that when we “really” love someone we should only want sex with them. We are only allowed to experience this naughty pleasure in the boundaries of a “committed monogamous relationship”. This originally comes from religion and yet people, who have a completely different set of beliefs and values, from atheists to pagans, continue to perpetuate this boundary.

We as a culture exalt romantic sexual love to this sanctified realm. We say it is different from love for friends, siblings, parents and children. That because of the sexual component it has to be limited and you can only share this activity with one person. But as many people understand, and studies have shown, we are really talking about lust and it fades over time. The maddening lust of new relationships is replaced with long term love more akin to love of family and friends, though often deeper because of the deeper intimacy sex can bring in a relationship.

We know people are able to love many people. Sex is one component of a vast array of ways in which people connect. Why is it so hard to make the leap that people who love someone deeply, are committed to that connection and have a sexual relationship could also love another person as well and in the same way. Human beings do it all the time, they have an affair, they go from one relationship to another, often overlapping, and they often still have strong feelings for past lovers.

Perhaps this is why, in the end, polyamory is so damned scary for many people. Polyamorists admit the truth; they romantically and sexually love more than one person. They choose to do so honestly and openly despite the possible repercussions of lost jobs and threats to their children. Polyamorous people embrace what many people already feel but are afraid to acknowledge; love is free flowing and abundant.

Many poly people do get the opportunity to explore and embrace their sexuality. When the boundaries are removed within the support of a loving committed relationship then there is the opportunity to explore what excites you and what gives you pleasure without losing your lover. You can deepen intimacy through honesty and working your way past jealousy and insecurity. You can remain open to love, connections, attractions and become an explorer of your own sexual nature and what intimate relationships really mean for you. It is challenging, exciting and at times risky. You risk being hurt, being rejected, trying things that scare you and losing people you love. You can gain personal growth, insight, living life to the fullest and an abundance of love and relationships to share and/or dance in and out of your life. It is not easy and not for everyone.

Sex is a beautiful and natural expression of love and affection and it is good for you. We have made it into something fearful and shameful rather than celebrating the joy. The simple truth is polyamory has nothing and everything to do with sex. Polyamory is at the core, about loving romantic relationships. These relationships usually include sex but can also embrace deep intimate and romantic friendships without sex. They can be fabulous networks of sexy connections. They can also be a family with children and multiple parents; raising kids, sharing a home, doing chores and watching TV, hoping they might have time to squeeze in a little sex play between bedtime stories and passing out for the night. They are no different and no more about sex than any other relationship style.

Most poly people have experienced the phrase “But if you’re poly, you should have sex with me”. While I might want to yell “It’s not about the sex” the truth is, I am polyamorous and I am also picky. Just between you and me, with the kids, the house and balancing relationships, if I can find time I am much more interested in spending quality time with the partners I love then exploring sex with a random person I feel no connection with.

We moderns tend to think of sexuality as the province of more-or-less monogamous couples, bound together by bonds of love, romantic possessiveness, and jealousy. But According to Sex at Dawn  authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, before 10,000 years ago the basic human sexual unit may not have been the couple at all, but rather the small nomadic hunter-gatherer group. Because nature provided for all their needs in abundance, these early humans would have had no modern concept of ownership or property. Everything would have been  shared with the group, including sex. Sexual promiscuity would have been the rule rather than the exception.

The evidence for this theory is surprisingly strong. Accounts of actual hunter-gatherer societies, from Captain Cook's Polynesians to recent inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest, confirm the above narrative in all respects. The evidence from comparative anatomy is even more compelling. As Ryan summed it up in a recent PT blog article, "women's breasts, orgasms and reproductive anatomy echo the same story told by men's testicles, penises, and seminal chemistry. It's an X-rated tale of the orgiastic origins of our species."

After the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, according to this theory, when humans settled down to work the land, the organizing principle of human existence changed from abundance to scarcity. Individual ownership of land and other precious resources became the norm. Sexual life was transformed as well. In the new ownership societies, one person could now claim another as his or her exclusive sexual property. Cultural institutions arose to enforce sexual exclusivity. Chief among these was the new cultural ideal of monogamy.

In our modern world's fascination with the infidelities of its leaders and celebrities, the authors of Sex at Dawn see a vague recollection of a bygone era when sexual liberty was considered everyone's birthright.

Lead author Christopher Ryan  is an American psychologist living in Barcelona (and a fellow PsychologyToday sexuality blogger). I was able to persuade him to make time for the following interview --

Author Christopher Ryan

Christopher, many authors have noted that the human body seems designed to generate near-constant sexual interest. Your book offers an explanation why -- because it motivated early hunter-gatherers to mate promiscuously, which was good for the group.

We've known that grooming behavior was crucial to maintaining social networks among group-living primates. But this same logic hadn't really been applied to sexual contact before.

Your idea that the basic sexual unit in hunter-gatherer societies may not have been the couple, but the group -- how did this idea come to you?

When I was working on my PhD dissertation, back in the late 1990s, I read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877). Morgan is largely forgotten today, even among anthropologists. He spent long periods living among Indian groups in upstate New York, and wrote about the "primal horde" as an early stage of social organization. I suppose it was Morgan who really got me started down this path.

Reading your book, I thought, "Of course early human sexuality was a group affair. They didn't have bedroom doors."

Right. There was very little privacy for most of our existence as a species. Even today, many pre-agricultural people live in communal dwellings where sex is at least a semi-public event.

Among sexuality scholars, there's always a tension between the essentialists who look for enduring truths, and the social constructionists who say all sexual norms are dictated by culture. Your book seems to move back and forth between these tendencies.

How so?

Sex at Dawn gives great examples of the social construction of tastes and attitudes, both sexual and non-sexual. For instance, some hunter-gatherers report that grub worms taste great. You suggest that if we saw our parents eating them, we would eat them too.

But I should stipulate that I've never eaten a grub worm. I'm as much a victim of cultural programming as anyone!

But then you tack in an essentialist direction - saying that we are "essentially" promiscuous by design.

I think it's pretty clear that human beings are both. We're highly adaptive and responsive to cultural conditioning, but our experience and behavior also reveal deeply ingrained structures reflective of evolutionary pressures. Our culture has convinced many of us that a Big Mac, fries, and a milkshake constitute a good meal. But when we eat this way, our bodies inevitably rebel. So we're highly malleable, but only within certain biologically-imposed parameters.

The media have paid lots of attention to your claim that monogamy is the equivalent of a Big Mac with fries. The social constructionist part of your book, with its careful exploration of culture's influence on sexual attitudes, has been pretty much neglected.

 As Tony Soprano would say, "Whaddyagonnado?"

You're not discouraged?

Frankly, we're thrilled the book's getting any attention at all! As Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

Your vision of early human male sexuality is pretty consistent with our standard notions of "essential" masculine nature.

Yes.

But your depiction of early human female sexuality is a radical departure: you depict early hunter-gatherer women as sexually bold, confident, autonomous, and novelty-seeking.

I think it's difficult for most of us to really imagine how women would behave if they weren't backed into a corner by being economically dependent on men - and carrying several millennia worth of sexual repression on their backs. Even as we speak, clitorectomies are taking place in North Africa, women in Iran are being stoned to death, and American girls are committing suicide because their classmates call them "sluts" online. The world is hardly a safe place for women to express sexual curiosity, and hasn't been for a very long time.

Co-author Cacilda Jetha

I was surprised by the book's ending. Given your argument that monogamy was a natural outcome of our transition to an ownership society, it surprised me that you argued that we could now incorporate non-monogamy.

We argued for incorporating honest communication about our true feelings and experiences. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans considered marital infidelity the worse thing a person could do, beating divorce, suicide, abortion, medical testing on animals and the death penalty. Clearly, there's room for a bit of realism to be interjected!

I came away from Sex at Dawn convinced that once you have an ownership society, you're stuck with monogamy.

Maybe. But there are different types of ownership societies. Denmark is very different from the U.S., for example, and those differences are reflected in family structure and sexual behavior.

But let me ask you.  How would you have ended the book?

I'd have said that abandoning our hunter-gatherer ways was tragic in many respects -- but that we can't go back to Eden. 

Good luck selling that proposal to a publisher!

Come to think of it, maybe a good sequel would be to explore Sex at Dawn's religious implications.

Forget it. I'm in enough hot water already, thank you.

© Stephen Snyder, MD 2010
New York City

 

Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.

What sparked my interest in particular was the Dachis Group’s list of Six Social Business Trends to Watch which referenced the phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: “Design for the loss of control.” His point was more IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group writes: “Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be.”

No longer in control

The new paradigm Hinchcliffe describes has implications far beyond just IT. For one thing, employees, who are facing an increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most effectively without having to ask anyone for permission. Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.

Moreover, customers, too, seek out relationships with brands that go beyond the merely transactional. Empowered through ubiquitous access to information and therefore radical transparency, through an abundance of choices on the web, as well as the ability to contribute and tap into social networks (and thus social capital) in real-time and on-the-go, they expect brands to offer engagement and collaboration models that match the more distributed and multi-layered mechanisms of value creation through social media.

Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control.

 

The power of pull

So what can they do besides just bemoaning this loss and passively observing how the new centrifugal forces of the Social, Real-Time Web are disrupting their traditional business and engagement models? Li lays out how business leaders can and (must!) embrace the new rules of openness. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, in the The Power of Pull, provide an actionable framework for how these new forces can be leveraged through “shaping strategies” on the individual, institutional, and societal level.

These “shaping strategies,” as the term suggests, present an exciting challenge for design. If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control, they will have significant impact on how this new economy is shaping up. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to develop what Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison call levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty.

In essence, businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them. This may sound counter-intuitive but the upside is considerable. A deliberately designed loss of control grants companies the only remaining and arguably most critical competitive advantage – access. As long as they enable and facilitate knowledge flows, ideas, passions, skills, and experiences, they have access to them. In fact, if they fully leverage the “powers of pull,” these assets will gravitate towards them.

X-problems and social networks

Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new “pull economy.” Because we’re increasingly dealing with “X-Problems,” as my colleague Adam Richardson reckons in his book Innovation X, we need approaches that allow us to come up with creative solutions to problems we may not even know yet. In other words: Solutions that help define the problem. Or as Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison put it: “If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it.”

The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a company’s network (inside and outside of the organization), and, as social network research has shown, weak ties are more conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills – because they move faster from one node to the other as the network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. The further you get away from the core of your network, the less control you (may want to) have.

You could argue that designers have been designing creation spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory experiences for some time now. They certainly have, but perhaps without fully recognizing or deliberately orchestrating the amount of loss of control that their designs represented. It seems like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that, going forward, shall serve as blueprints for “design for the loss of control,” across different corporate functions and disciplines.

Frequently, these solutions will involve de-institutionalizing decision-making by removing the intermediary. In many cases, this may imply an act of democratization, but it is also important not to see this as a zero-sum game. Control is not just shifting from one hand to many; rather, it is dissolving and defragmenting and along the way diminishing – or turning into something else, far more valuable: social capital that resides in the public domain and is no longer controlled by anyone. The formats that propel this new mode of collaboration and value creation are emergent and informal, and they typically carry a significant amount of tacit knowledge.

Here are some recent examples:

Open ideation/crowdsourcing: Open ideation (or crowdsourcing) is based on the assumption that the best ideas for new products, services, and business models may come from outside of your organization or from those people inside your organization who are typically (by function or hierarchy) excluded from the ideation process. Like all open innovation efforts, crowdsourcing redistributes control from an elite group of thinkers and doers to a broader group of self-selected participants. By broadening the funnel, companies can harness the accumulated or aggregated knowledge of these voices. Crowdsourcing is usually focused on ideas and insights but can also cover a wider array of collaborations with external parties throughout all stages of the innovation cycle. Dell, Starbucks, P&G, and many other organizations use crowdsourcing. Nike partners with Creative Commons and Best Buy for GreenXchange, a platform that promotes “the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide sustainability challenges.” TED is expanding its reach through TEDx, “independently organized TED events,” without compromising the exclusivity of its brand. Furthermore, Victors & Spoils brought crowdsourcing to the world of advertising; and IDEO recently launched its crowdsourcing platform, OpenIDEO, inviting the public to join “creative challenges” that tackle social issues through design. And there are firms such as InnoCentive that specialize in crowdsourcing services for other companies. All these companies not only make ideas accessible to more or less open publics (to some extent, giving up control over IP) but also commit to making the follow-up on these ideas (at least partially) transparent (giving up some control over agenda-setting and strategic planning).

Open design research: frogMob, developed by frog design, is a tool for crowdsourced design research, based on the idea that everyone can be a researcher for a day, just by paying a little more attention to the world around them. frogMob uses guerilla photography and stories to take a quick pulse on global trends, behaviors, and artifacts. Launched internally first – tapping into frog’s eight global studios – we are now expanding frogMob to a broader public. Through frogMob, we are able to “mobilize” not only our internal network around a specific assignment but also external contributors on an ad hoc basis, in a short amount of time (like a Flash Mob). frogMob allows us to provide lightweight, rapid design research for clients who ask for a “trend scrape” that identifies patterns and offers unexpected inspiration. The key here is to tap into existing knowledge flows – in a nimble way that does not require too much commitment from the participants and eliminates bureaucratic hurdles.

Open strategy: Crowdsourcing can also take place as a combination of online and offline collaboration, as demonstrated by NPR and its Think-In on the future of digital media. Supported and facilitated by frog, NPR hosted an open strategy session, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. The Think-In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators, and it developed concepts that NPR incorporated into its organizational roadmap. The event was augmented through live-commentary and streaming via various social media channels. This social augmentation made the workshop accessible for a broader audience, which – like the on-site participants – felt so genuinely passionate about NPR that they committed some serious time to this collective brainstorming. Such passion for brands could also be put to work through a more radical version of a Think-In: a “brand hijack” that convenes customers and other interested parties to explore new directions for a brand – yet with the twist that the brand itself would not participate (but may have the option to co-opt the results of the session afterwards).

Open-source humanitarian software: In the software space, open-source projects have long been an established form of open innovation, see IBM’s Eclipse platform. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), founded by teams from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, uses open-source methods to “hack for humanity.” It describes itself as a community of “developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world, working to develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today.” The group runs “Hackathons,” inviting the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to tackle disaster relief issues with through software applications. The Hackathons are designed as so-called “codejams,” fast-paced competitions that give the participants a set amount of time to solve the challenges they are given. At the end of a two-day marathon of hacking, a panel will review each hack, and the winners will walk away with prizes, as well as the right to call themselves “RHoKstars” ever after. Another example of open-source humanitarian software is Ushahidi’s CrowdMap which displays crowdsourced crisis data on maps as a free cloud-based service.

Open-(source) social networks: Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor, built its own networking site called Eureka Streams and released it open-source for the public to use. As Fast Company writes in a recent blog post, “The company’s management had recognized that an internal social networking tool could have all sorts of procedural benefits for a large, and geographically disjointed organization. Essentially it lets ‘knowledge workers’ inside the company find and talk with other experts who may have valid input to particular projects, but who would otherwise have zero oversight or input.” Dow Chemical is another example of a company setting up its own social network, in this case to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. Dow has even extended the network to include former employees – a smart move. Closed networks are of diminishing value. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report argues, “In the longer term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of tasks rather than the ‘ownership’ of workers’ and advises executives to ‘make the network the organization.’”

Open branding: In the spirit of transparency, design firm Continuum is partly revealing to the public its creative process. The specific challenge is to create a brand identity for the Design Museum Boston, a nomadic institution that exhibits mainly in the virtual space. For six weeks, Continuum is partnering with Core77 on a blog series that will reveal the firm’s process and progress as it takes on the challenge. Readers are invited to comment but it is not quite clear to what degree they can influence the creative work. It’s a non-commercial client and a low-risk project but in any case, making a creative project transparent – even somewhat haphazardly – is an interesting experiment that is worth following. The more radical experiment would of course be to put the creative control over a project fully in the hands of the “smart crowd” and have the creative team steered by a disperse group of “remote creative directors”- beyond just input comprising of insights and ideas. Other, more radical formats are imaginable: For example, sharing a company’s entire communications (some, more or less tightly managed corporate Twitter accounts are in a way a precursor to this) with the public. This would be radical transparency indeed, and an experiment with unpredictable outcome – will the benefit of enabling reciprocal, collaborative relationships outweigh the risk of reputational landmines and IP violations? Is it IP, in the end, as proprietary “knowledge stocks” (The Power of Pull), that serves as a company’s greatest asset or isn’t it rather the ability to attract talent and grant access to knowledge and skills? There’s another, softer benefit to it: Brand personality comes from being personal. The more transparent and the more vulnerable brands are, the more personal, they more authentic they will appear. Transparency is a prerequisite for authenticity – an unmasked and immediate act of communication.

Open social-capital enablers: Small, ad-hoc, start-ups are popping up that leverage the principles of self-organization, which Clay Shirky so aptly described in Here Comes Everybody, to rethink “capital” and reinvent human resources allocation in order to tackle global issues. Originated from the Sandbox network, an exclusive network of young innovators and entrepreneurs under 30, this movement calls itself “Emergent Transformation,” and Max Marmer, one of its masterminds, writes on its group blog: “Lately we have been observing an accelerated movement of ventures that are revolutionizing how we take initiative on a global scale. They can be mostly found in the areas of education, innovation, collaboration, networks, entrepreneurship, and human development: spaces that most likely will dominate the future of value creation in our society. These ventures are leveling the global resource play, unleashing unused & undeveloped human capital and leading to a socioeconomic transformation.” For example, there is Supercool School, an online school platform that strives to give people worldwide access to education by building a new global infrastructure of live online schools. Or Assetmap, an online platform that helps individuals discover and leverage resources directly from the community around them, using the methodology of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). Max Marmer believes “One huge differentiator that sets these projects apart from almost all other organizations is their emphasis on ‘human potential’ or ‘social capital,’ rather than economic capital. The hope is that by creating a clearly defined space for these organizations to work in, there will be more opportunity to share this social capital, allowing them to achieve complimentary aspects of mutually shared visions. Their aspirations are tied to value creation, based on co-operative contribution, and will allow them to fulfill personal passions. Giving new meaning to their work, it’s helping people lead happier lives.”

Open conferences: Un-conferences are facilitated, face-to-face, participant-driven conferences centered on a specific theme or purpose. They are the antidote to the conventional conference format, radically disrupting the delineation between curator and attendees, speaker and audience. The attendees are the experts. Many organizations and groups have begun to use un-conferences to capture and externalize the full breadth of expertise assembled at conferences. Some conferences prefer to incorporate only some un-conference formats into their program – participant-driven sessions that are developed on site in real time.

Open conversations: Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And ad shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky did it. All of them use their corporate web sites as social hubs that curate what is being said about their brand rather than staging what their brand has to say. These efforts are attempts to at least co-opt the conversation on the Social Web before brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of the brand’s social universe. In other words, what if a brand faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than the brand itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.com, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information, salary information, and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web. Take a look at how Get Satisfaction’s “community-empowered customer support” plays this – it is not an uncontroversial model, but it is “designed for the loss of control (of brands),” enabling customer-to-customer service. You could also spin the idea of a “social homepage” a bit further and not only curate the social web conversation about your brand but actually give away your whole homepage to third parties and to public service announcements, stories, or art. Give up control – gain social currency.

Open HR: Of all critical business functions, HR might be the one with the greatest potential for innovation. With dynamic, quickly accessible expertise replacing static piles of proprietary knowledge, and companies moving from organization-centric to network-centric modi operandi, HR becomes a key enabler of assets through the nurturing of relationships, developing talent, and fostering a culture of openness and participation. This is not just pep talk but includes new tools and methodologies that radically alter the relationship between employee and firm. A recent study by Birkman International that surveyed nearly 20,000 HR professionals found that 83 percent of respondents see great potential in social media-based HR solutions, particularly when it comes to improving communication, learning, and knowledge sharing. Here at frog design, we have launched frogForward, an open-ended, conversational, and social performance management app that allows our employees to provide 360-degree feedback any time throughout the year (not just during review cycles). Goal-setting is entered as a stream, and the feedback – peer, managerial, and employee feedback – can be shared openly or privately. This new approach reflects the changing realities of work performance, from a task-driven control and coordination approach with quantifiable goals to a holistic view that is more situation-and context-aware, gives the employee significantly more control of the process, and considers intangibles such as tacit knowledge, social intelligence, and relationship-building. frogForward shares this approach with Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback.

All of these initiatives, whether they apply to brand, CRM, product development, R&D, customer service, or HR, exhibit some similar characteristics:

- easy access;

- open platforms that harness the creativity and expertise from people outside of the organization or untapped sources inside;

- open-ended formats that can evolve as the problem statement changes;

- ample room for participation and emergent self-organization;

- easy mechanisms for tinkering and hacking (e.g. through open-source formats);

- small formats that can be easily shared

- strong incentives (ideally intrinsic motivation or social currency);

- real-time visibility (through sharable content);

- tie-ins to dormant or active social networks;

- and distributed decision-making.

Openness as permanent crisis

There is another aspect to this: The most imminent and urgent manifestation of “loss of control” is of course a crisis. And in times where terrorism, financial downturns, natural disasters, as well as catastrophic events on the individual level are a steady companion to our societies and personal lives, designing for crisis has become a default skill, forcing designers to make contingency planning an integral part of the experiences they create. Often, this means developing exit scenarios that are flexible enough to provide a structure for emergent solutions in response to emergencies. (The notion that architects design spaces so they can be escaped from has been thoroughly examined by Stephan Trueby in his book Exit-Architecture – Design Between War and Peace). In other words: an easy way out. And in. Because exits are entry points as well. If you design ways out of the system, they might as well serve as ways into the system.

If you think about it, this insight may provoke a different notion of openness – understanding it as a system where exit and entry are identical. In this line of thinking, an ecosystem on the Social Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis – it is always in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if we understood “designing for the loss of control” as designing for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of planning and programs (the “Push” model) so despise. At their own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation. “Designing for the loss of control” means designing for variance.

One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for its content very much depends on a highly controlled environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks’ “there are no secrets” claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there is no WikiLeaks without secrets.

Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.

These are just some initial thoughts. What other formats and business models can you think of that “design for the loss of control” to everyone’s benefit and increased social value? What other variances can be created and effectively shaped? What design principles must be applied?

Over to you.