Wagn as a collaborative tool

Nobody wants a quarter inch drill bit, but they may need one if they want to make quarter inch holes, and they will need a drill at the same time.  Nobody wants a Wagn, but organizations need to retain and evolve institutional knowledge, more advanced organizations want to be learning organizations who strive for continuous improvements of their business processes.  Collaborating knowledge workers need a Dynamic Knowledge Repositories in order to function. As a learning organization, it needs the flexibility to share knowledge with the public and to secure sensitive information. These are the work products to those working with that information, they will often be in different stages of development as these are works in progress.  In a mature communities of practice, many/most of the documents will represent a working or final consensus, but many documents will be sites of active work and collaboration (and marked as such to guide the work).

The Wagn community also needs to be sustainable. What you see today is the result of a lot of work by a small number of people, and we want to give it to you.  We also acknowledge that this would be impossible without the contribution of countless others who contribute to the networked gift ecology that is Free and Open Source Software.  What we ask in return is that you enter into a grand experiment, that you become participants in a new kind of economic production.

We intend to develop the operating systems of a gift ecology and to participate with any community who adopts this emergent operating system.  We anticipate the development of a network of gift ecologies, with a shared operating system, and the creation of new niches for learning, work and career and larger wealth transfers in collective trust and commitment.  Metacurrency systems will provide the systems of acknowledgement needed for trust to scale from the handshake to the tweet.  We will co-learn social media excellence in networked collaboration in the production of our learning communities.

Radical inclusion is where we begin and end.  Diversity is strength, but that doesn't mean we are as weak as our weakest links, no, we are stronger than our strongest.  For every core developer working in Ruby on Rails or Javascript, there are ten Wagneers designing resources and repositories, and for each of them ten editors creating content, and for them ten reader/users who need know nothing of Wagn.  Not ten exactly, but you get the idea, and all of these circles of engagement are engaged in a collective purpose.  Each community is autonomous in the shaping and evolution of their collective purpose, and as members of networked gift ecologies they will be exchanging patterns, processes and practices.

 The call is not just for Wagneering per se, but to learn the basics of Wagn and more and more importantly to learn to work and learn collaboratively.  These classes will be the working crucible where we develop the patterns and processes of a gift economy.  Those drawn to weaving the fabric of communities will peer produce "a federated linked-in-like tool" where each network weaver is empowered to manage contact information as well as "mapping flows and intentions" in between and inside the organizations and groups within their communities.

Sales won't be that visible as an activity, the production work is

1. Building and maintaining the contact network, calling the contacts and updating the information and maps accordingly, and
2. Catalyzing flows (Wealing cycle from Intentions through actions and acknowledgements).    

The tricky part is connecting the scarce currencies with this system.  In a traditional "sales" cycle, you "close the deal" and a contract is signed obligating the parties to do things for payment in scarce currencies, but here what is valued is flows that make the network robust and healthy.  This is a design challenge, and not a block to success.  Sales people will not be "paid for hours worked, or contacts created", but they will be acknowledged in currency, and there will be a way to translate from the wealth a person is building in common with her peers into access to scarce currencies.  Developers and Wagneers will have different currencies than the network weavers, and they will all share in the wealth produced by the network.  A lot of that wealth won't ever be represented in scarce currencies.  It will depend on what people need, and how quickly we transition to the new currencies.