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Evolution does not happen evenly. It may be gradual, but it goes step to step. Sometimes a small change opens up a whole new range of possibilities.

• the opposable thumb

• fire

• alphabet

• law

• printing

• Internet

• next?

I’ve left out a few, but you get the idea, some things change everything.

Ways of organising ourselves into groups to educate and heal have evolved over centuries. There are modalities like psychoanalysis, and TA and Alcoholics Anonymous and the Red Cross and so on, that all have methodologies and the persist with a sort of DNA that allows these ideas to hold together and spread. My hunch is that one of the big changes coming up, and needed, is that there will be a new way to speed up the process that has been working in an ad hoc way. Imagine there were ways to find tool kits online for running groups that were freely available and could be edited by their users (Wikipedia style). Imagine that these could be classified and rated, and they each had their advocates and practitioners who beleived their group could make the world a better place.

I can imagine such a social network emerging from the need to change on the one hand , and our ability to learn from Wikipedia, Facebook and Linux on the other as well as the fact there are already thousands of thriving forms that each in their own way work towards major social change. Could there be one network that transforms all of this into something new? I say one network because some things tend to towards there being only one, and one works best, for example Google, Amazon and the Internet itself is the best example.

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