The vision is to bring all the villagers out of their houses and to connect, inspire & empower them to make miraculous creations with one another. If you’ve never heard the story of stone soup it’s a parable that has cropped up across many cultures in different variants. I told my own version two years ago in Lisbon when I was first starting Problemattic:

The problem

For all of the connective technology we have today, we live in a world that’s more disconnected than ever. So many of us work silo’d in our 9-to-5 day jobs monopolized by work that fails to leverage our highest and best talents. Perhaps you are lucky enough to perform a role consistent with your values that allows you to earn good money pursuing something you care about and all while exercising your natural gifts in the process. If so, congrats. You won the occupational lottery. For everyone else, read on…

How would life look if you had a reliable system to find other talented individuals who shared your passions, values and aspirations?  What if you could filter this pool to the people who had the availability, proximity, cause affinities and missing skillsets you lack to pull off world-changing projects?  What if there were a sensible means of collaboration across a universe of these folks scattered around the globe that enabled you to engage your ideal missing counterparts in pursuit of building the impossible? What if the value of your work were measured not by the hours you put in nor the deliverables you shipped but by the outcomes you attained? What if you could gradually develop a portfolio of side projects with these people and share compensation in perpetuity proportionate to the value your contributions delivered over time? You would achieve the ultimate trifecta of doing well by doing good and maximizing the expression of your unique talents in the process.

The epiphany

The Stone Soup system is a platform that emerged from my work attempting to build this movement. At its core it is a coordination tool for galvanizing a community around specific outcomes and then solving the challenges how do you connect & incentivize people effectively, facilitate effective collaboration, track contributions and reward people according to true value delivered.

My vision in building Problemattic was to get all the world’s problems and solvers under one unified roof and to create a giant, citizen-powered problem-solving engine. My goal was to mobilize a population of knowledge workers and give a sensible method for people to work together in-person and remotely to try and tackle large, wicked problems. Frankly, this movement never took off under its own propulsion as I had hoped but the process of building and running it has given me the unique vantage point to have a key epiphany: the movement I was trying to jumpstart is independent from the tech platform I created to support it. And that tech (with a bit more work) has the potential to be spun off and made to support other communities. Enabling intra and inter collaboration within and across intentional communities: THAT is the tribe of tribes and the way to bootstrap the movement.

The road ahead

AI is a relatively recent unforeseen curveball that’s quickly altering the terrain of work eroding some jobs and empowering others who are early to figure out how to leverage it effectively. What “work” will look like years from now once autonomous AI has advanced sufficiently to replace most jobs, nobody knows. Perhaps universal basic income will be pervasive by then but even with guaranteed unconditional income, people will still need meaning and purposeful work to thrive. I believe more so now than ever it’s critical to establish the scaffolding that can support this transition and give people a way to coordinate effectively in groups towards a greater goal.

If this resonates the single best thing you can do now is to add yourself below so I can keep you in the loop as this platform evolves. The new best thing you can do is to refer a friend to this project. If you know someone who organizes a community with a good cause, share this post with them, leave a comment here or have them get in touch via the contact form at the bottom of the homepage. I’ve spent the past two years developing this platform byte-by-byte and I firmly believe it is the unique alignment fabric that can amplify and cross-connect intentional communities for good. You can read about its capabilities or engage via the demo on our homepage to understand how it works.

We all bring a fundamentally unique set of skills and experiences to the table and with the right coordination fabric, these can be assembled like a jigsaw puzzle to enable us to do well by doing good. We just need the village leaders to call us from our respective houses to the town squares and help us realize we’ve had this capability all along. The Stone Soup Vision is how can begin to do this at scale.

Thanks for reading. Could you answer a few questions below? This is incredibly helpful for understanding my readers and helps me create better content. thanks so much. -Sean