Market Activism

For the Futurespotters International event in Tbilisi

What about having a chat and a workshop on Market Activism?

What is Market Activism?

(From Indianopedia) Market activism is our term for the design and trade of products with the goal of spreading values and ideas. The name was coined in 2012 by Juanjo Pina from “aesirs,” based on a previous debate on entrepreneuralism held by “las Indias Group of Cooperatives” since 2009, linking the idea of the phyle to the medieval arts and guilds: We believe the kind of knowledge that enables us to make beautiful and socially useful things cannot be reduced to technical knowledge. It must contain a social meaning, a work ethic and a worldview. Goods offered in the marketplace carry with them a vision of the world, of social projects and a moral points of view. Some examples

  • In 2007 the indianos combatted «rankism», a narrative on the blogsphere spread by the media that we saw as a danger to its distributed structure. As a response, we developed feevy, the first dynamic blog-roll for blogs. It not only made it easy to link and share audiences between blogs, it made it obvious that the “star blogger system” was just a media myth. Feevy had soon 60,000 users/blogs, making it possible to map hundred of thousands of blogs in Spanish and how they were connected. We called this map the map of flowers, and was, itself, a refutation of the narrative imposed by the mainstream media. Feevy, carefully developed not to use personal data, was programmed as free software, and its platform sold later to a a big firm.
  • Since 2001, the whole “neovenetianist milieu” did its best to transform its knowledge into useful tools to combat the European unemployment crisis:
  • In 2010, Alain de Botton launched his atheism 2.0. His main tool would be “The School of life,” an international chain of stores supplying consumer goods, courses and motivational seminars for businesses

Questions

  • Is market activism a way to resilience or a way of getting lost?
  • Is it the ultimate alternative to the enclosure of fresh ideas into the dependence of public money or a way for converting activist into established business people?
  • Is it a vital alternative? A new way of thinking about changing the world or just the opposite?

Goals

  • Learning how to link your goals with market
  • Define business as an activist's language and market as a global agora


Date: 2014-06-23 20:00:00 - 2014-06-26 20:00:00, Asia/Tbilisi Time.

4 Likes

Is there some good way to prepare for this session?

Hi and thank you for this! so looking forward to learning from and with you guys.

The description has set off alot of ideas and thoughts! I think to would be great to explore how market activism could work in the context of some of the initiatives and issues that have been presented by participants in the futurespotters conversation. And some kind of facilitated process by which we are getting deeper into exploring the questions you pose in the different contexts. I for one would love to use Edgeryders as a case study. If you like this idea, maybe help me get thinking by asking a few questions?

Then we can ping others we know are coming with the same questions and start thinking about this from now?

2 Likes

I dont know enough probably

Hi Nadia!

Probably I don’t know enough about Edgeryders strategic foresight. From a newcomer point of view, probably market would’t seem to be its main «interface» for encouraging changes. Anyway I think the corporate side of Edgeryders as a consultancy is a good example of the simplest way of market activism: selling the knowledge gained making distributed networks and communities and then transferring the values implicit in any distributed network to new environments. So Edgeryders’ market activism is “pollinating”.

Let me suggest «The School of Life» as a better example as their kind of market activism involves material objects they have to design according to the values they want to transmit. This kind of market activism where every new product has to be thought as a “Trojan horse” probably will show better the kind of previous intellectual work and questions that easily keep veiled by technology when you sell intelligence and procedure making.

(David from las Indias)

1 Like

Mindblown!

To be honest, mind blown! I was not sure what to expect prior to the session, but I want to thank you so much for coming and explaining who you are, what you do, and why. It was inspiring, thought provoking and exciting. I am very happy you taught me about this and made me think approaching the world in a different way. Very, very inspiring.

2 Likes

Great stuff

I concur with @Inge, the session was really really good. Does anybody have good notes?

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Notes, please!

Really sorry I couldn’t make it this morning - would love to see a video or get some notes, please.

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I think…

… there is no notes or video, but we are gonna try to write something to follow the conversation. Something beautifull about this is that its easy for everybody to participate with casuistry. In fact, there was MA in Futurespotters :slight_smile:

Appreciated

Much appreciated, @Juanjo Pina. This was a popular session, and I myself would really like it documented. If you start a wiki or something, I commit to going through it and contribute to it as best I can.

1 Like

Sorry

Casuistry -> Case load :slight_smile:

It’s almost ready

Estamos ultimando los preparativos para poder ofrecer algo serio a cualquier nivel, desde el más pequeño activista o grupo de activistas hasta la institución más grande de cualquier tipo (empresas, ONGs, etc).

Habrán dos pequeños equipos dedicados a esto:

- El primero, el equipo de investigación y blogueo que trabajará tanto en activismodemercado.com como en marketactivism.com, será el que intervendrá por aquí informando de cómo se va desarrollando el estudio de casuística y las fórmulas de AdM más efectivas para cada cual. También se encargarán de publicar aquí resúmenes de lo publicado en los blogs de trabajo (aunque todo el contenido estará como Dominio Público, nada de Creative Commons, que para eso somos devolucionistas).

- El segundo será el equipo de consultoría que, directamente, ofrecerá el servicio y llevará a cabo los proyectos: yo mismo, un publicista y analista de medios (tremendo fichaje, un vanir), y un tecnólogo (un aesir, concretamente).

La ayuda que necesitaríamos sería, básicamente, el boca a boca de posibles contactos interesados en este servicio. Espero que, de esta forma, podamos empezar a ser realmente útiles para toda la comunidad de Edgeryders y ayudar a que crezca y florezca.

Un abrazo.

P.D.: Todo el mundo tiene clientes soñados, ¿no? Uno de los míos es Sea Sepherd, nos pondremos en contacto con ellos mediante un descuento infernal, y si alguien tiene un contacto útil con ellos, se agradece :slight_smile: