Smart Swarms vs. Big Funding: how to build a 100 million dollars project as a swarm of grassroots organizations

Edgeryders, funding, collaboration, ecosystems, solutionism, MacArthur-Foundation, 100&Change

Are global solutions impossible? Not at all. But global solutions are not composed of standardised identical units; they are ecosystems, organic mosaics of local solutions. For example, nature has a robust global solution to growing forests. It is not a single very large tree that covers 30% of the planet’s surface. It is not a single species of tree cloned in tens of billions of units across the whole globe. It is diversity: local adaptation, commensalism, some competition. A forest on the Mediterranean coast occupies the same ecological niche as one in Siberia, but the two consist of entirely different species, and are very different along almost any other dimension. Nature gets there by evolution: try many things, more or less at random (variation); then weed out those who do not work (natural selection); iterate.

via https://edgeryders.eu/en/blog/smart-swarms-vs-big-funding-how-to-build-a–100-million-dollars