What would Platform do? A way of being
A number of years ago now, Tessy Britton and her associates made the observation that participation culture is growing worldwide when they were developing https://www.communityloversguide.org/. More and more, all sorts of people are getting together in peer to peer ways to cocreate their streets, neighbourhoods, and cities. But they also noticed that there are barriers to people engaging in participation culture. So they envisaged, developed, and tested a platform to make it easier, quicker, more supported, etc. The platform consists of skilled staff, flexible funding, inclusive communications that inspire and raise community awareness, inclusive spaces to shape ideas and do practical things like cooking, making, gardening, and more.
Meanwhile, I was training librarians in co-design, having learnt about it myself from my old friend Mark Buntzen. But while we were getting better at designing services with the community, we were generally still delivering the services at the end of the process. I started to wonder, if the community got more and more used to co-designing, might they start cocreating the things that happened in the library? In fact, this was already happening, like when I was a Children’s and Youth librarian and a boy asked if he could teach other children origami during the school holidays.
Now, in a team called Community Innovation, my work programme is based on supporting, encouraging, promoting the creation of platforms to grow participation culture. And I’ve been thinking about how my job is to be a platform, to support those who’d like to develop platforms. To be a platform of platforms. And I started thinking about, what does it mean to be a platform? This type of platform is:
- Stable, so that those coming on the platform can experience greater stability and support for them to reach their aspirations
- Patient, because people, groups, orgs, develop at the speed that they are ready to develop at (and holding the platform of platforms = patience x patience!)
- Flexible; people groups and orgs will have a variety of ways of applying the principles of developing a platform in their context
- Proactive, making people aware of the opportunity and regularly inviting (inclusive communications)
- Inspiring, to help people see a new possibility, a new journey, a new narrative (or a new iteration of a submerged old one)
The first two are real learning edges for me, as a gifted, sensitive, and intense person. But I am lucky to be working with Maree Beaven, and we’ve been talking about how 1+1=3 when we work together. We make a better platform of platforms together than either would alone.
I’m also thinking about how to become a better platform inside myself. I’m developing a new heuristic to live, asking myself “what would platform do”? Having the more generous, accomodating, empathic, patient response in any given situation. Asking for others to platform me when I need it. I’m thinking about how to be a platform for myself, my emotions, and my own well being. Thich Nhat Hanh died a couple of years ago at the age of 95, but his teachings on mindfulness, and how it can be a platform for us inside of us are still so present.
“The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch” tells the story of how the Fifth Patriarch Hongren held an “enligthenment contest” to find his dharma successor, in which monks were invited to write poems to demonstrate their level of enlightenment. Shenxiu wrote a poem that went:
The body is the bodhi tree.
The mind is like a bright mirror’s stand.
At all times we must strive to polish it
and must not let dust collect.
But the Patriarch wasn’t satisfied, as he didn’t feel it demonstrated “[his] own fundamental nature and essence of mind.”
But another monk, Huineng, who was illiterate, got someone to read the first poem out, and then got them to write another in response:
Bodhi originally has no tree.
The mirror has no stand.
The Buddha-nature is
always clear and pure.
Where is there room for dust?
How could we be as spacious, as clear, as generous, as patient, as this poem from the platform sutra describes? What do you think it means to be a platform? I will continue to discover the meaning as I live and work with good friends.
