Malaysian Mind Colonies is breaking through. Check this page:
Malaysian Mind Colonies
Ants have no (or little) problems with food and shelter. Ditto with birds and nearly every other species. Humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter. With minds shouldn't humans be thousands of times ahead, not trailing fractions behind ants?
"Inventions themselves are not revolutions; neither are they the cause of revolutions. Their powers for change lie in the hands of those who have the imagination and insight to see that the new invention has offered them new liberties of action, that old constraints have been removed, that their political will, or their sheer greed, are no longer frustrated, and that they can act in new ways. New social behaviour patterns and new social institutions are created which in turn become the commonplace experience of future generations."
Colin Cherry, "The Telephone System: Creator of Mobility and Social Change", in Ithiel de Sola Pool, The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge MA, 1977): 112-26.
Q: What does Bala Pillai do?
A: Some make the world happen, more watch the world happen, most wonder what happened. He makes the world happen. He synthesises, articulates and drives foresight. He's an inventor, producer, entrepreneur, agent provocateur, philosopher, networker and activist. He evolves and invents Knowledge Economy Brands -- self-sustaining halls without walls. These are also known as telebusiness ecosystems or mind ecosystems or mind colonies or autopoietic social networks. Think of business = a social process of trust-building, risk-taking, problem solving and complementing. Akin to a cross-media evolution of the non-violent warrior and violent pacifist Gandhi (including some of Gandhi's money man, then Birla), Bala is a feeling-of-connectedness, perceptiveness, self-reliance, self-esteem, Open Source (strategy, philosophy, standards connections, processes, content and software) and communityness activist. [Make a living with acumen, whatever form it takes]. He advises organisations on change leadership, virtual organisations and those that need fast ins into Asia through co-cognitive, co-responsive, "same page" minds as the conduit.
Since Asia minus Japan has not produced a single quantum invention since the times of Admiral Zheng He, in 1400 AD, though it was responsible for the majority of them before that, he is determined to reverse this unethical poverty-causing, anti-inventiveness mental climate -- a mental climate that does not allow quantum invention ideas and their not-so-quantum invention cousin ideas to germinate. [He sees anti-inventiveness as parallel to killing seedlings before they sprout, squishing buds before they flower and aborting every baby before it develops.] He accelerates ethics at meta-levels in Asia by accelerating mental bridges between inventiveness-friendly Silicon Valley/Europe and Asia.
Though born in a semi-rural village, population 1500, in Malaysia, because of his nomadic inclination, he's been online since 1982. Since 1995, he's been inventing mind colonies, especially for shared-ethos groups of Asian and Asia-friendly minds. He has done this off online-orchestrated offline communities, mailing lists, forums, print/TV and ground locations. Pioneering and leading mindcosms in their space, like Malaysia.Net, Tamil.Net, Asian Internet Marketing Community are amongst those led by Bala. At earlier formative stages in their lifecycle are Teleindia.Com, Singapore.Net, Indonesia.Net, Pinoydom.Com and Apec.Net
Q: What are mind colonies?
A: Equivalents of ant colonies for dispersed connectedness seeking humans. Ryze is a social network. Ant colonies are social networks plus plus. Reflect on this question: what are the topmost functionality differences between Ryze and ant colonies? Self-sustenance for inhabitants is one. Mind colonies bridge the functionality gap between social networks and ant colonies. They address the characteristics that are missing.
Imagine you are looking at Planet Earth from the Moon. Imagine nerves running all over spherical Earth. Notice human minds like dots pulsating and sending signals between them. Some nerve connections are bold , some are dotted. Some minds are emitting a lot, some nothing, some in-between. Some nerves have lots of noise/resistance/signal loss, some are flowing smoothly and rapidly like cholesterol-free arteries, some in-between.
Can you dissect "mind colonies" for me?
A: Mind colonies are trust and spirit-rich, self-sustaining, blended-media networked mind exchanges for shared-ethos groups. Energetic full-time hosts catalyse minds in a mind grid to learn, work, play and complement each other. The catalysing currency is a colony equivalent of Diners Card (alternative currency).
What are the most important imperatives in making mind colonies work?
A: (a) Shared-ethos (Common Purpose is *not* enough). Spirit. Intuition. Energy. Common Sense. Perceptiveness. Passionate Catalysts. Risk-taking. Legitimacy/transparency. Trust. Speech Acts. Customer Intimacy. Inner-strength (courage). Chutzpah. A Complementing Mindset. Commitment. Strategic Change Management Acumen. Process Savvy. Innovation Climate. Open-Mindedness.
(b) Grasping that 90% of the value of a person today is the sum of:-
i) how she uses her mind *plus*
ii) how great she is at building actionable relationships
Notice none of these appear in the balance sheets of companies -- does that give you a clue for why the telco+hardware+software+accountants driven dot com bomb happened and can recur unless the underlying metrics are perceived and fixed? And therefore greater opportunities for the earlier foresightful birds who can see where the value in an Acumen/Knowledge/Networked Minds era springs from? The opportunities from organising bankable social capital valuation metrics? You may ask what is the root cause of this gross misvaluation. It is the mislanguage thus the miscognition of resourcing. The language of resourcing, of finance, is accounting. Accounting values ends and tangibles rather than processes, climates and values. Accounting values the end, the golden egg more than the process, the golden goose. It values the product of a mind more than that mind. That which is under-signified is under-recognised. That which is under-recognised is under-measured. That which is under-measured is under-valued. That which is under-valued is under-resourced. Thus the misallocation of resources. Retrofitting of the mislanguage, accounting, is not enough. A fundamental shift in line with Nature's common sense is required
What's blended-media?
A: First take the mind as the pivot. Be mind-centric and mindcosm-centric (as contrasted with being tools, medium or protocol-centric). For example, be story-telling-centric. Realise that *complementing* is the game that all folks are doing with the plethora of F2F (face-to-face), email, email groups, instant messaging, web, POTS phones, VOIP, mobile voice, SMS/MMS, WiFi, broadband, television, video-conferencing, radio, P2P, streaming, books, photos, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, call centres, IVR, interactive television and movies. Get better and better at coming up with the right cocktail mix of these for given shared-ethos groups, for categories of purposes. Always bearing foremost in mind that you are dealing with human minds that want simplicity and fun in complementing. That they put up with dissected complexity only as much as they are not aware of better alternatives in an overly-cluttered world.
Is it hard to sell mind colonies to prospective members?
A: No. Because they create jobs and income opportunities. They bring an A-Z of small and medium service and product providors, who are first of all human minds (eg Ryzers) together. For example, they bring those who want jobs and income opportunities in the Knowledge/Acumen/Networked Era with those who can train or apprentice them into them in a congenial way. They develop societies. They are easy to sell because they are self-sustaining.
They are in line with where the world is going, i.e. grid computing, Web Services/Service Oriented architecture, convergence, the support economy, distributed capitalism, the Global Brain, virtual organisations, telecommuting, Adaptive Artificial Intelligence, outsourcing, offshore moves, more wanting jobs that grow their passion than jobs to merely pay bills, more wanting to get out of the drudge and routine in the cities into better intentional community locales, more caring for the environment and wanting to live closer to and with Nature; lots more Open standards including business processes standards to enable small businesses to interconnect with each other on a global services grid,turbo cchange management (serious games) and networking in the mind age. They are like the Linux movement on steroids with non-geeks being the majority. What better killer WiFi/broadband application is there than mind colonies - complete Acumen economies?
How do mind colonies make money?
A: (a) Similar to how credit card companies do. just more, because a deeper set of services are provided and underutilised capacity is unleashed. Prospective members go through psychometrics and credit evaluation, and based on that amounts averaging US$2000 is put into their account with the cooperative. This "free" money reduces the customer acquisition cost and the costs of incentiving folks to self-change. They *must* use the money to buy products or services from the network. And they repay this by providing products or services to the network. When someone buys a product or service from a fellow mind for $100, they are charged $110 in their account with the cooperative, and the seller gets $90. The $20 goes towards all the trust, matching, clearing, camaraderie building, consensus climate, standards leadership, role models provision and digital-era societal/cultural services the cooperative conceives, organises and provides mostly through third party service providors or by member firms.
(b) after introductory periods, membership fees and selected user-pay services to members.
(c) fees from larger companies for providing targetted audiences to them - these are companies that satisfy a strict criteria pre-approved by the membership and applied by a task force for this purpose (an evolution of how the Olympics business model works. The nexus for the Olympics is the attentiondom from love of sports; the nexus for mind colonies is the attentiondom from the love of culture/ethos/societal longevity)
What's the biggest challenge then?
A: (a) Buying. You would think common sense is common right? Wrong! You would think that if ants have no problems with food and shelter, Mankind with minds should have less problems with food and shelter right? Wrong! Getting the attention of service providors to grasp this, in a "30 seconds of CNN attention mesmerised" world and to sequence and synchronize them together is the biggest challenge. So if you can complement me in speeding up our buying of these services, by referring service vendors who have attention spans and who are interested in ongoing revenue streams for ongoingly providing ever-improving services in their space, rather than a quick immediate sale tomorrow , we can launch full-fledged mind colonies (given the acumen and wisdom gathered since 1995 and before and the viral marketing extendible beach-heads of minds in our existing colonies) in no time.
(b) Communicating common sense. For example, (i) that one man's income is another's expense; that we can increase income in a network by incentiving expense; that we can fund expense incentiving by liquidityising and unleashing underutilised and undervalued social capital. That, that which is undervalued is under-resourced and that which is under-resourced is where woes pus. (ii) that as bad as hope (aka optimism) is, hopelessness (aka pessimism) is no better. Pessimism is a shameful waste of mindtime. Mindtime that is better spent on precise diagnosis given ambiguity, and prioritised/sequenced greater good/lesser evil of available solutions. We should tax the cancer that pessimism is!
(c) Given that it is not the smartest or the strongest species that prevails but that which is the most adaptive, articulating that the highest priority activity (and the most lucrative) for Mankind today is the destruction of resistance-to-learning architectures -- metrics, resourcing and packaging of change management. And reducing uncertainty of returns in doing so.. Not too dissimilar from that swell of energy and minds that, when it was not common knowledge, convinced financiers and backers, that they would be able to convince folks (and get them to pay for) that brown-sugared water is better than the natural kind. Yes, the TV and promotion guys behind Coca-Cola from about the 50s onwards. The folks who packaged glee. Without the packaging, the brown water it is of little value. Without the promotion it is of little value. Without the resourcing to do the packaging and promotion, it is of little value. But creating happiness with all these ingredients put together increases the value manyfold.
