“We have staff whose title is Community Animation. Their job is to get to know what you are working on and to weave connections…”
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Eli Malinsky is Executive Director, New York City of the Centre For Social Innovation. We interviewed Eli at the newly opened New York City location for insight into the business model for the Centre, one that works hard to first get the right people/resources together, but then to provide both a fluid medium and a visible effort to create and unlock the knowledge that can only travel on information pathways that we build …and animate.
(Pictured: One of the open areas, with canoe – just in case.)
We are well versed in the stuff of crowds – a diversity of minds working out complex and/or big problems. However; in light of the dominance of the web as medium, we wouldn’t want to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, to borrow a phrase. In this clip we gain a glimpse into how to convert the physical environment into one that yields collective intelligence and impact – person-to-person, organization-to-organization. Hint: It doesn’t just “happen” by being in the same place, even on the web.
Animating a community as an input to decision-making (defining and collecting info among organizations) can greatly increase the quality of the information underlying our decisions. We can then make better ones.