Facilitating Collaboration: A Conversation with AbonoKM0
A conversation and key-takeaways on collaboration and food tech initiatives
Last updated
A conversation and key-takeaways on collaboration and food tech initiatives
Last updated
Collaboration is a key ingredient for effective community and citizen-driven technology, not just with citizens, but with other businesses, too.
We sat down for a talk with AbonoKM0 co-founder, Diego Waehner to better understand collaboration. Specifically:
Why and how and does AbonoKM0 integrate the potential for collaboration--with other actors in the food chain and with similar initiatives-- from the very beginning?
How does collaboration empower an initiative’s community and create food citizenship?
What can new initiatives do to begin their own collaborative journeys?
To facilitate, the interview is divided into three capsules: meet AbonoKM0, Why & How on collaboration & AbonoKM0, and What practical tips innovators like yourself can put into practice.
Key takeaways:
Their challenge? Aside from the bureaucratic part, changing our consciousness that how we've been operating isn't working anymore.
Key takeaways:
Sharing makes stronger foundations for communities and initiatives by creating an emotional collective moment where a change in consciousness can take place. It creates a connection and responsibility for a citizen to do more than take but to participate by giving back in return. Take a cue from nature: everything is about reciprocity.
If you don't have knowledge, if you haven't seen something (i.e. where your food comes from or where your food waste goes), you don't have power. Only by sharing and collaborating at some point in the process can you regain that power. It didn't use to be this way, particularly in original communities, but processes of colonization have cut us away from our food systems and created this gap for lack of information.
It doesn't make sense to send your manure or composters all over the world: send information to new frontiers and empower actors there. This is how scaling should look. Otherwise, one part fails, and all the parts fail.
Share your successes, failures, and findings with your local AND global communities. You will learn and enrich the ecosystem which makes all the parts stronger, especially necessary in disruptive tech.
Key takeaways:
To make changes, start with yourself. And then move on to your neighbor. Share what you're doing, ask what they're doing. Seeing is believing.
Before starting, you need to understand. When replicating an initiative into a new context, make sure to understand the local situation at the government, citizen, and business levels. It especially helps to understand where money is available for funding.