Here follows an excerpt from a coming novel with the working title “Common man”, which is a novel about a journalist who sets out to come up with an alternative form of world governance. The novel is a product of imagestreaming, a technique of invention and creativity developed in the 80s by Dr. Win Wenger. Read more about Chapter five: Oh my God![…]

Here follows an excerpt from a coming novel with the working title “Common man” which is a novel about a journalist who sets out to come up with an alternative form of world governance. The novel is a product of imagestreaming, a technique of invention and creativity developed in the 80s by Dr. Win Wenger. For more information about imagestreaming, and about other imagestreamed novels and stories, visit this link. If you’d like to be kept up to date as new chapters get published, sign up using the form in the right-hand column. More chapters are here.

I was told in the last imagestream to spread the word about the Dunbar number. I had met it before, but never seen it as useful for a model of political representation. I went back over the first transcript of that imagestream and found the phrase ‘the lecturer had drawn the Dunbar circles at the side of the whiteboard’. I took out powerpoint and started experimenting and came up with the following:

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Here follows an excerpt from a coming novel with the working title “Common man” which is a novel about a journalist who sets out to come up with an alternative form of world governance. The novel is a product of imagestreaming, a technique of invention and creativity developed in the 80s by Dr. Win Wenger. For more information about imagestreaming, and about other imagestreamed novels and stories, visit this link. If you’d like to be kept up to date as new chapters get published, sign up using the form in the right-hand column. More chapters are here.

Before I asked to return to the centre of global Commons governance I sat down to take stock. My last visit gave me sense of foreboding that something was wrong.

Two things stuck with me: The first was the concept of the world as a library of molecules. Organisations check the molecules out, use them to provide essential services and then put them back. This is a basic commons pattern – originally villager grazed their animals on the common land, all sharing and managing the resource equally. Today, some neighbourhoods have developed tool libraries with things like drills, lawnmowers, snowblowers etc. To extend the concept to molecules feels right.

The other thing that is with me is the idea emerging of moral direction where decisions are rooted in the legacy of the past, looking forward to providing a legacy for coming generations taking into account the limited choices ahead which are predicated by the current situation.

In terms of using the imagestream technique I had a feeling I have been too cavalier with the insights. There is so much theory to learn about governance and I have hardly the first clue; I maybe should have done more homework on the verification side.

I was floundering. How did it all hang together? Law, policy, how are decisions enacted? And what about sovereignty? In my request I’d asked to get some gaps filled in. Anyway, it probably explains the brusque reception I got when I arrived at the terminus in my Imagestream.

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The following is an excerpt from a coming book “Common man” which is a novel about a journalist who sets out to come up with an alternative form of world governance. The novel is a product of imagestreaming, a technique of invention and creativity developed in the 80s by Dr. Win Wenger. For more information about imagestreaming, and about other imagestreamed novels and stories, visit this link. If you’d like to be kept up to date as new chapters get published, sign up using the form in the right-hand column. If you haven’t read the first chapter you might want to here. The video below explains why a story is needed and gives some of the motivation behind the book project.

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