The more people try to “game” systems with low barriers to entry, the more those systems will revert to old structural rules. Where as 4 years ago, I would suggest to a small business owner to attempt to work at SEO strategies, I now just sit down and calculate how much he can spend on AdWords.

Bravo!

Sounds like you need a combination of social capital development, participatory action research, and some insight gathering. A local person might definitely be a good idea, though off the top of my head, I don’t know anyone who would fit that bill.

Best of luck!

I am a forester, land use planner, and community organizer. I facilitate informal collaborations/groups/partnerships of people to improve their success in the field of land protection and land planning at the regional and landscape scale. Think groups of 30 towns, several counties, thousands of square miles, a couple of states, etc.

Many participants are excited about the possibility of achieving great things from working together and the innovation that will follow. They are also focusing on how to achieve a really big and bold vision: half of Massachusetts (as an example) in protected forest as both large wildland reserves on mostly public land nested within a matrix of protected woodlands on private lands managed for all the services and values we get from forests like clean air and water, carbon storage, recreation, fuelwood, timber, etc. The vision and effort is described at http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org

So in a sense we have a design to follow, to shoot for, but we believe to succeed we need innovation. Because we believe the vision will be realized from grassroots efforts not by government regulation, the team for making this happen is made of citizens as well as conservation non-profits and academics. In this informal effort, where people are encouraged to hook their dreams to the W&W wagon, innovation is both our fuel and the bricks upon which we will build the foundation for the solutions to follow. This is a 30 year vision I am talking about. Solutions for how to achieve the vision are being designed and cultivated by practitioners in the fields of conservation, finance, community organizing, policy, etc. We are learning through practice and sharing our lessons to evolve faster, or at least that’s the idea.

I am interested in learning how might we inject the capacity for design thinking into our effort. One idea I had was to locate someone in the Massachusetts area that might be interested in helping to not only shake up our thinking but bring a whole other community of people to the “partnership” to innovate in order to protect society’s green infrastructure.