(S)warming to collaboration
Something I’ve learnt from designing the festival is how important “permission devices” are – i.e. tools or techniques that make people want to take ownership of a space and feel at home – whether that was our exhibition space where people could relax and meet people while browsing the physical artworks or have a nap in the tent. The most famous “permission device” is probably the watercooler.
As a co-working space, the way the Hub has been designed is a permission device in its own right, from how the coffee area is at the heart of the space, how people can work anywhere and how you need to walk right around the space to get out (joking aside, you’d be amazed at how more likely you meet people that way!).
What tools or methods help you take the initiative in a space?
As a Hub Scholar, we started to find out what motivates each other, through the Scholarship database of skills and through meetups…and no doubt through Mission Mixers too. We’re starting to “swarm” on particular issues – where 1:1 chats over a cuppa turn into groups of people meeting on resilience (and coming up on alternative finance and open source policy making).
The Hub also brings bringing together members working on similar impact areas to think about how it can support us and how we can support each other. From social startups working on very specific needs to organisations working across the continent, I took part in the meetup on the impact area around youth employment.
These behaviours are not dissimilar to bees swarming around a tree, to extend the metaphor of @owenjarvis and @ruthbmarvel report “When Bees meet Trees” around the relationships between small and large social sector organisations. Maybe these informal self-organising groups are the prelude to “swarm cooperatives”, in other words “temporary social structures we create to solve problems, explore new ideas, and make the most of opportunities” or the “mini labs” that Social Spaces are developing in Lambeth around systemic issues.
The RNIB model described in Owen and Ruth’s report wouldn’t necessarily work in this scenario. You wouldn’t want to dilute brands as powerful as @roomfortea and @up_reach as that could dilute their impact in the process.
However, there is an advantage that the nascent network of Hub Impact areas have. By being based at the Hub, we share a similar working culture. It’s why in the “When Bees meet Trees” workshop I took part at @esmeefairbairn, the group I was in proposed that big organisations open up their unused office space for smaller organisations dealing with similar issues to work in.
Would this run the risk of those organisations swallowing up the identity of their new tenants? Would it necessarily create a culture of collaboration and openness just by having different groups in the same space? What other “permission devices” would be needed to get to a stage where it felt natural to collaborate within the space?