Samara Starter Kits
Samara Starter Kits represent the next stage in our journey to transfer our knowledge and blueprints to a much wider audience (the next generation) so that the next wave can continue to hand their knowledge over to their own descendants (a process called autopoiesis). It is also a process to continuously refine our thinking (the next iteration) and include the experience of other people using the Starter Kits (a process called Social Design created by Cheryl Heller, the Founding Chair of the first MFA program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts).
None of us have practical experience setting an autopoietic process in motion and knowing what will happen if it starts to replicate itself. However, we believe that by combining the above processes, we have the necessary ingredients to set a larger movement in motion, maybe even scratching the surface of creating a new civilization. Let's return to one of Hilma af Klint's paintings (The Swan No 9 from Group IX) that seems to have an encoded message for us (over 100 years ago!) about Samara and the Starter Kits.. we leave it up to the astute reader to interpret it for us.
As we dive deeper into the Samara Starter Kits, you will notice that they blur the line between the digital and the physical - this is on purpose, and we intend to offer these kits both as digital and physical artifacts - print your deck of cards, pin your wall canvas, flip though your game guides and gather with people in both virtual and physical spaces to start playing & learning! But there's more. As we package our knowledge into "boxes" and as you undergo the "unboxing", you will quickly notice that the contents of the box will affect your personal surroundings and actually have an impact on your livelihood (is this really a Pandora Box in a good, more complex sense?). Once you've entered into this "serious game", you will recognize the possibilities that are opening up in front of you. That space is incredibly large and will open new doors to higher and higher "sense-making plateaus" that simply weren't visible to you before and now become plausible and indeed preferable! So, without further ado, let's take a look at these magic boxes:
- The Organization-in-a-Box
- The Marketplace-in-a-Box
- Other boxes and Shared Services for all boxes
The Organization-in-a-Box
Imagine you receive a box that contains everything you need to set up your organization. Imagine you open this box and inside you see a "Quick Guide" that gives you and your team a quick way to launch your own organization without the inertia and pain of following the old paradigm of slowly setting up an HR function to hire and to pay the "right" people, getting managers to control those people, and building an org chart to put these people into tiny squares. Opening the Organization-in-a-Box follows an entirely different kind of paradigm - one in which you can bring your genesis team together, agree on the initial allocation of tokens, download and configure your organization's DNA and then launch it within a much shorter timeframe and with much less startup cost.
The foundation to build this new kind of organization is trust and the key to unlock it is self-organization. The Organization-in-a-Box contains everything you need to establish these two pillars from which everything else will evolve more naturally and joyfully (like a game).
The Marketplace-in-a-Box
People will only adopt a new currency if they can use it to buy goods and services. Thus, establishing cooperative market platforms where Seeds are accepted as a preferred means of payment for regenerative products and services is key. At the same time, it increases visibility and accessibility to these regenerative products and services and increases collaboration and knowledge sharing among the stakeholders.
With the Marketplace-in-a-Box concept, Samara wants to provide a toolkit that will help to establish a platform that allows and incentivizes aligned organizations to trade with each other and support each other through sharing knowledge and resources. Similar to the Organization-in-a-box, this is not a one-size-fits-all manual, but rather a set of questions, principles and toolsets that support the configuration and evolution of a locally adapted solution.
Other boxes
The concept of a tangible box can be extended into many other areas. For example, Rieki has introduced the concept of eco-villages, resorts, or retreats that can benefit from the implementation of a specific village DHO. From there, we can collect all necessary artifacts and put them in a box to be delivered to the village elder. Hypha has received many a positive response from the deck and we are eager to prepare for this transition of villages into an new generative and co-evolving ecosystem. We believe this sets this stage for new "bioregional DHOs" -a kind of conglomerate of hundreds if not thousands of local eco-villages, resorts, or retreat DHOs becoming active all over the planet.
Last but not least, Samara has operationalized an impressive array of Shared Services, such as group collaboration and messaging, wiki gardening and knowledge sharing, document and file management or video conferencing, that can be offered as an additional managed service to partners or stakeholders. We are constantly improving and adding to the set of shared services, so that any new node in the network can immediately benefit from the additional service offerings. This saves clients significant expenses of cost and time and allows them to deploy valuable resources for different areas of concern.
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