Setting Bioneers Free

photo credit: Noël Zia Lee

I just spent the last few days at the 20th annual Bioneers conference in San Rafael. As every year I found myself enlivened and inspired by the wonderful speakers, who this year included Michael Pollan, Joanna Macy and Annie Leonard, the creator of the Story of Stuff.

Kenny Ausubel, one of the founders of Bioneers, in his opening speech, Value Change for Survival, said:

We all need to build a global movement to put solutions into action.

Because as Gus Speth, founder of the World Resources Institute, says, and many of the speakers echoed, we have to Change Everything Now. As one story I saw today says:

sea levels … are rising twice as fast as projected just a few years ago, expanding from warmth and meltwater

So how can Bioneers help build that global movement?

And how do we connect people with solutions?

We utilize the viral, social, networked nature of the Internet. In What Makes an Idea Viral, Seth Godin lists four things that need to be in place for a person to spread an idea:

a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits

The one other thing that he forgot to mention is:

e. that it is shareable

With Bioneers the first four things are in place. I want to help spread these ideas. But I can’t, and this frustrates me. To create a movement we have to get out of the way of the desire of the ideas to spread, and we do that by letting them be free.

This is a shift in business model that removes one strand of Bioneers’ current revenue. However I think the way to think about this is:

• first: how does Bioneers best serve its mission? Which is to Connect people with solutions by popularizing breakthrough ideas and practices.

I think the answer to this is obviously making all the footage freely available online

• then second: how can they make this financially viable?

Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free contains some great thinking around this. I think the key is to see this as an investment in the future. By sharing the content, and letting it spread, they widen their reach and their audience.

For the sake of comparison, let’s look at another annual conference of inspiring speakers that started around the same time, whose leaders followed a very different strategy. TED – Technology, Entertainment and Design: whose tagline is inspired talks by the world’s leading thinkers and doers.

On Facebook: TED has 155k fans, Bioneers has 1900

On Alexa: TED has Alexa traffic rank 2,840 with 16k linking sites, Bioneers has traffic rank 184,472 with 738 linking sites

In a Google search: TED has about 18 million results, ~Bioneers has 81k

On Twitter: TED has 30k followers, Bioneers 2800

On YouTube: TED has about 2 million views for 537 full videos, Bioneers 1800 for 25 partial videos

So I have one simple question to ask. How many times have you seen and shared a TED video with people in your network, whether that be on your blog, over Twitter, on Facebook or over email?

So what would it mean if Bioneers could increase their audience by a factor of 10? It would seem to be quite possible. That should be convertible into increased revenue, and much more importantly to the mission, it would lead to a larger, more engaged, dynamic community.

Let me leave you with the one full Bioneers video that I have been able to find online, an inspiring talk from Bill McDonough in 2000, talking about Cradle to Cradle product design as a pathway to a sustainable future. I have shared this with many of the people I know, who I wanted to see that there are real alternatives to business as usual. I hope you enjoy it.

Related posts:

1. Becoming Part of Global Mind
2. Kleiwerks International Haiti CoLaboratory
3. Communication Changes Consciousness

Tagged as: Collaboration, complex systems, diffusion, networks, Resilience, Systems thinking