Dave Pollard posting some guiding principles for Next-Society Models. Among a nice round list of 11 principle characteristics, I especially like his suggestion that new social models should be replicable but not necessarily scalable:
If the model only works in special rare circumstances, it’s probably not a very useful model. But there is some evidence that small is beautiful, and some of the best models in the world just don’t scale. In that case, don’t make ’em bigger, just make more of ’em. The Waldorf schools might never scale to a centralized global system, but they seem to work very well as a replicable, tweakable model.
Was surprised to see that Dave had eluded the net of my blogroll. That’s been fixed, under Blogs. See also a whole new blogroll section called Gifts. Many of the things listed there are indeed replicable, if not scalable. Remarkable, as well.