Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration

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Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.

To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.

eco^external on Prezi


In our fascinating conversation Indy brought out the distinction between ‘Entity’ and ‘Protocol’. Organizations are entities, with an intrinsic set of structures for working. However as I have long been saying, value is shifting from organizations to give rise to an ‘economy of individuals’.

This means that our protocols for how individuals interact to create value are becoming critical. It is challenging and time-consuming to be always working out ways in which we share value in distributed networks. If we can have pre-defined structures that enable value creation and allocation, that is an enormous enabler.

I have been actively exploring structures for shared value creation for close to two decades now, and much of my book Living Networks (particularly the latter section of Chapter 5 on Distributed Innovation) focused on this issue.

Partly stimulated by my interactions with Indy, I think it is time to come back to the theme of structures for shared value creation. The idea of establishing protocols is very rich, and the ideas emerging at Hub Westminster and its parent organization 00:/ appear to be breaking new ground.

More on this topic coming soon. Please do point me to interesting protocols and initiatives you are seeing in this space.