Jean-Daniel Cusin
Bio
"I have 25 years of experience as a Business Management consultant helping organizations select and implement enterprise software, re-engineer their business processes, improve their operations (Lean/Agile) and redress their viability (Viable Systems Model).
I am the founder of e-Deliberation Inc. and the architect of the online e-Deliberation platform (e-Deliberation.com). This platform includes a process which is based on Stafford Beer’s Team Syntegrity protocol for large group deliberation. The e-Deliberation platform can accommodate in-person as well as remote collaboration, and usually a mix of both. My motivation to invest in this was to make Beer’s elegant protocol form high variety deliberation in large teams more generally available to the world. The cost of in-person Syntegrations is so prohibitive that it is beyond the reach of those who need it the most.
In addition to consulting and facilitating E-Deliberation events, my current direction is to work with communities to help them bootstrap themselves into a better quality of life. The vehicle of choice to do this is to constitute neighbourhood Cooperatives where the residents are the owners, beneficiaries and managers.
The purpose of the Coop is to incubate projects and initiatives that meet the needs of the neighbourhood, and to create and retain wealth within the neighbourhood. The Coop is designed using the precepts of the Viable System Model, uses Sociocratic consent-based decision making.
The Coop also aims to redress the structural causes of poverty and dependency, replacing these by tapping into the resourcefulness, skills, ideals and hopes of the people who live there. The Coop tracks against a triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental goodness.
Two Coops are currently in formation: in Haiti and in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many more are expected, leveraging the learnings resulting from these first two."