The Future is Collaborative, but we (certainly myself) have some hurdles to go until utopia.

i’ve never been a team player in the corporate cubicle.

i’ve never known where to put my hand up or suggest things, when i have i’ve always been either shut down over a variety of approaches from who i was thought to be (geek), what i looked like i conformed too (fashion) or if i was considered to be overwhelming (more knowledgable on the subject) and this was before we even got on with the task at hand.

i’ve found many meetings and ‘business’ to be like this. many times over, the truth is very rarely have i been into contact with someone that could manage (manager) or direct (director) they are often just words to attach a more powerful roles, that can demand more money and seem in control over a project or people.

if not stated some of my photos are from unsplash a free site for images, also you can grab some cool images from nomad.pictures a site i run with @dayleeo to get pictures out of the camera roll and onto the web — Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash

it’s the people under these people that actually deliver the process or product with the director driving the flashy car and wearing the suit. the interface if you like between the data and the blockchain. i’ve always seen them as the middleware or middleman (or woman) who upsets the idea to someone higher that doesn’t give a fuck about the process just the end result they can eventually gloat about.

decentralised ownership

I really thought that 2017 was gonna be the year that someone like youtube pushed some kind of decentralised collaborative working tool — think about it, a system where your fans could get involved on your projects, feed back videos in, work on video projects together, debate stuff, add in live hangouts, go interactive, stream like on twitch in our downtime, all of that stuff is being slowly joined together.

When I first saw steemit I felt this was part of the glue that would make all that stuff happen. What better way to motivate someone for their time by paying them a little slice of crypto juice to be involved, actually track that time and pay out accordingly, many hands globally make light work and all that, especially in a twenty four seven economy where someone is awake and is ready for the next stage of activation. I’m waiting with baited breath for decentralised ownership where our egos and needs get out the way and we can work together on good stuff in our own time and pace yet have the cloud do the heavy lifting part that often slows these things down.

true collaboration needs end goals

When I started my simple expression of collaboration via the internet doing the steemit video I really was saying ‘hey, let’s find a way to connect and talk to each other outside of the blogs, pictures and videos we post’ — let’s have steemit as the master node and we are all activated social collaboration people on the periphery of it, what time do we have, what are our skills, how can we learn from each other, enable each other, round table our free time together to help the life of another, and keep going around the table to the next person the next week. It can end up just being a conversation of we should rather we have done.

Recently I’ve realise that I need to set achievable and realistic end goals, my issue has been stuck in survival headstone mode not looking passed the near term, I’m slowly moving passed it, I’m starting to see upswings in my residual incomes from online course making that it’s making me realise I can do a little bit more now to improve things for the later I’m always thinking is getting away from me — financial, emotion and mental security is important for everyone to do their best work and to set realistic end goals, I’m slowly waking up to setting them.

I recently went through something like this myself, I had to splinter my 2 hour sprint times (where I try and get as much online work done as possible) into different work styles, switch from video editing to data entry, it did’nt work, I got a lot of things wrong and it total overwhelmed me and frustrated me and made me feel pretty damn pathetic actually that I could not delivery a quality outcome.

I had set myself a financial goal per hour rather than an end result goal and not in a collaborative sense as part of a team, especially when that team is spread out and global. I realise now that urgency is a factor that needs to be instilled early on because otherwise things just drag and the momentum of the excitement of a project falls away and is replaced with the latest news, the latest shiny shiny or worse a better expression of what you were originally trying to build — bottom line, in this world, we need a realistic roadmap, and I don’t mean those ICO see ya in five years type of things something you can sign off and hand over in a few years time.

time based rewards and cryptos great fit

i experienced this recently, it was awesome, working the hours, getting paid effectively the same day, real time, instance and just the charges of the network fee (it was ether so really low cost) and it really hit me that this was the future of everything that came down to accountability - charity work, workers in the field, local geo located jobs, people scanning a qr code for payment to fix a leaking pipe, dropping the kids at day care, removing those barriers of access to something so fundamental as payments for time and not having an added complication of a bank trying to upsell you, scamming phone calls, paper statements — just a whole bunch of mental admin time some of us don’t need, I personally know my brain doesn’t need it, it’s a time suck.

I don’t want to have stacks of paper statements, I don’t want to waste my time on a phone call for something I never requested, I don’t need additional products on my account, i just wanna get in, get done, log the time, get paid for the time and be on my way, fast, accountable, public, transparent, easily global information that mashup services can tap into and be suggestive on top of that with their AI code.

Imagine Fitbit 5.0 - tracking health correlated with computer project time depending on what apps you are using and for how long, who you worked with and how long for, what other styles of jobs are available right now that fit what you are already working on, maybe ten other clients want similar assets to what you are making, imagine if they were lined up ready to go instead of having to switch gears into a different side of your brain, you could effectively double your output and income at the same time — smart blockchain accounting for your whole life balancing work time, play time and hobby time with AI notifications being suggestive when the best times might be for optimal life balance — that shit excites me.

putting our egos aside

It’s a tough one, we all grew up somewhere, on whatever sides of the tracks and we got here today. You are reading this right now, you’ve done a bunch of stuff you are super not proud of and a bunch of stuff you are. How does that work in a decentralised drop in world, we wanna work now, this is the way we would do it, we have the tools, we know what one version of the end result would look like, but it might not be someone else — I guess that’s why we have wonderful things like GitHub, we can fork the initial idea and add our flavour on to it.

that’s great for engineers and coders but what about creative and art people, what about community collaborative growing projects, how do they function do they have software and resources that allow people to jump in to a diary and tend to a plot somewhere and share decentralised updates about the plot of land you have collaboratively bought together? Does that exist? Because it needs too.

is art fundamentally flawed in experimentation

if everyone has access to 3d printers and we all print something just because we can is that damaging to the overall idea of optimising, are we making a situation worse regarding the pollution of the planet? who decides what art is art for legacy and what is fun, what is the dust to dust ratio of our experiments, will collaborative experimentation allows us to optimise quick or leave a trail of left over examples in it’s wake.

is it the collaborative connection between humans that is just as important as well as the output. do we really learn from the group input or are we fighting for our own artist license of vanity between the connections. do we truly surrender our own ideals and egos at the door when we work together, are you helping or hindering, how do we truly take part as a decentralised unit of helpers to achieve the greater good, especially if the greater good is a target that potentially is always moving in a resources hungry world of power, connection, shelter. how do we work on the thing collaborative things that are important on a local level.

Just some thoughts, I’d love to expand this conversation bigger if your interested in throwing in your 2 cents below. Ready? GO!