Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

NOTE NOTE NOTE: THIS NEEDS TO GO INTO MY WHY NEPAL BLOG, BUT STAYS HERE UNTIL THAT BLOG COMES OUT!

Earlier today, in a call with my sister, I was talking about future leadership and aspirations. And the older I get, the more I think, the more potential I see for myself. It’s just that I haven’t actually acted any leadership role out. From what Renasha told me, I was trying to connect the dots. It seems a lot of community building and leadership involves convincing other people that what you want them to do is the right thing. Even if they don’t, at that point, want to do it or do it well, necessarily.

I actually wanted this to be turned into a different topic, but I can talk about it right now. Turns out that the relationship between and how you get powerful can lead to corruption. The reason is: to have power, to become powerful, you need to convince other people to do things. And often, not just traditional broken societies, but in all societies, that can end up becoming transactional. A quid pro quo situation.

When you have gathered up so many quid pro quos, you become powerful on one hand because many people owe you a lot of favors. But on the flip side, you also owe a lot of people a lot of favors. What then happens is that you often have to undermine the system you’re working within. Because the need of your patronage network 72is different from the needs of the institutionalized system that you are on paper.

My question then becomes: how do you create an institutionalized power structure from the internet system? How can you avoid the corruption that must necessarily come up with patronage networks?

One way to do that potentially is work with everybody towards the vision. And convince everybody that what they’re working for is towards a higher cause. Or that you need to have earned a lot of honest trust. And be clean and have proven yourself in some way. You must be clean and accountable that way.

This can influence things and go beyond controls of the system. Because people are not working on a quid pro quo basis, but for a higher end. Not transactionally, but do people care for a cause? Isn’t a shared vision, a really shared vision of a future, really challenging to create for a society that’s so diverse 84and divergent in the direction it’s going? How do you bring together such wide groups of people without bringing them together on mass 86and going beyond tribal leadership groups? How do you unite a people for a common cause without compromising on your fundamental vision and principles?

Something that might be interesting. One approach is to establish or enforce a shared identity. Establish enemies and pretend to work towards the furthering of that shared identity. For example, what Modi is doing in India 92, or what Erdogan is doing with Islamist identity in Turkey, or what K.P. Oli tried to do with Nepali nationalistic identity in Nepal. The definition of nationalism itself is such a narrow vision. Though he did find a reasonably broad-based way to win the elections 96, it was transparently corrupt.

So, it’s not just about having a vision of the future and sharing it. It’s also about committing to it and working towards it, even reaching power. The goal of power is not to gather more power. It is to accomplish a particular goal using existing means and tools available after power is achieved.

So, if I tell people, “These are the things I’m going to do explicitly when I have power. And this is the end. And I need power because, right now, I don’t have the resources to execute these things”, that’s the way forward. One thing to be mindful of and be careful about is, there’s going to be a lot of opposition to these ideas, and we need to be careful about that. We need to get a buy-in from the major stakeholders. And rise organically. And organic growth means that people are bought into the idea, and they don’t have a lot of these sheets.

So, that’s my with high-level leadership. How does it build? How does it relate to community building? You need to tie it together with community building goals. Because you need somewhere to get started. And your initial community is where you start. I wanted to talk about it in my other recordings. I’ll hopefully be talking about them in the next few weeks.

How does it work? Which is, with community building, what are the things that bind people? The two things that I’ve identified are food, beyond common interest, because everybody loves to eat and everybody has trouble eating. And some sort of entertainment. Which is a movie, going on a dance, even drinking, and so forth. A shared activity, which is a form of entertainment, even if you run in a running club.

So, what’s the goal then? To create a community of people interested, invested in something. To coming together for food and entertainment and/or shared activity. But that alone is not enough. That brings together people once or twice, but won’t help you create a long-lasting one. What do you need for that? Is fulfilling the needs of their age group, which is a super big statement. But let me explain that.

If it’s young people, young single people, they need a place to meet similar-thinking people of the other gender so they can get married. If it’s married people, professional people, they need a place for professional good. If it’s people who are married, they need resources for childcare. And they need a place for childcare and other things such as friendly outings with people. And so forth. Or maybe dates for their children, library activities, and so forth. Once they’re older, they need a place to make friends for their kids and themselves. And find people for similar familiar activities. People who are younger, we need places to go to summer camps and so forth to engage people. And when people are, you know, teenagers or late teens, they need a place to go to classes and so forth.

So, yeah, that’s all I got at the moment. In high level, I know I talked about two completely different things. It’s fine. This is a framework for me to get started on. The idea for me is to keep expanding on these and start filling in the gaps. So that I have a vision of where I’m going. A working group is warranted. Open source working committee, a working group. A working group that can identify the scope of what the potential is. It doesn’t need to explicitly work anything. But the idea is to get people meeting and talking and generally sharing an understanding of what the future looks like.