Fundamental to the concept of New Power is the communities that drive it. Their success or failure is highly dependent on how the community interactions are designed, which is detailed in a book I'm reading called New Power. I also previously wrote about the power of doing together and how it inseparably relates to the mind.
As described in the book, a New Power community has three parts:
Owner or steward - company or entity that controls or fundamentally influences the community
Super participants - these are the equivalent of the service providers, e.g. site moderators, drivers, hosts, editors. The main driving force
Participants - Content creators, users
The chapter begins by describing an example of how the Reddit community - in particular the moderators as the super participants, were starting to rebel against Reddit Inc as the owner. It even had a name - #RedditRevolt. Reddit Inc were enforcing new rules that the moderators did not like and so the moderators rebelled and even started to split off into their own sites. This example highlighted the importance of getting the relationships between people right, in this case conducting proper community consultation, so the community doesn't collapse.
Another example was a comparison between Uber and Lyft. Uber use a very competitive model to try and get prices down while Lyft adopt more of a community-between-drivers also inclusive of customers to a degree. Lyft even go as far as offering mentoring programs to new drivers and picnics to build a community feel.
In designing a New Power community there are several considerations:
Who gets rewarded and who pays
Who gets recognised and who has status
What creates stickiness, i.e. makes contributors stay
How do you establish trust
Who calls the shots
If you think this looks a bit tricky, you're absolutely right! With such a challenging exercise it helps to know how the mind works through self reflection, like the one I do.
Love that car image Chris 👍🙂
Sounds like Truth !