Hello there.
Abdul Semakula here. I'm a Regenerative Systems Innovator. I've committed to developing an eye for holistic thinking, and a heart for meaningful systems change towards co-evolution with nature. I'm doing this through the learning-by-doing initiative https://opencollective.com/nvc and a Regenerative Placemaking Collective that aims to instigate and support place-based initiatives.
As an entrepreneur, I ran a web agency, and then as a civic innovator, I built platforms for citizen-state transparency and accountability. However, questioning my role in the digital space led me towards social innovation – working on uplifting groups of women out of poverty and climate finance.
That’s before it dawned on me that;
1) All global injustices are symptoms of a colonial-founded development system designed to perpetuate its existence and thus injustices.
2) One such colonial pattern is the top-down strategy of scaling tech innovation that has been a key enabler in dis-membering our world into multiple crises.
Further learning pushed me towards systems innovation and lately regenerative development and design.
3) Regeneration invites us to re-member our world starting from developing a place’s essence and potential to thrive as a whole.
4) and only through a bottom-up approach bring in technology to coordinate citizens to play a valued and value-adding role in co-evolving with nature.
I look forward to spending more time tending to soil, nature, and community than on my computer.
_________________________________________________ Here is what I'm working on at the moment.
Unbuild & Rebuild
UN Secretary-General declared a transition from the era of ‘global warming’ to a new era of ‘global boiling’. However, climate change isn't an isolated issue. As Donella Meadows says, "Spend part of your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system." In the same way, headaches and vomiting provide feedback to us about a deeper disease, inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, and all other systemic injustices are telling us that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we inhabit our earth.
There's hardly a modern challenge that is not a direct outcome of the disconnected, disempowered, and degenerating communities we’ve built. In this model the only we care about is individual material success, which institutes a competitive race to the top -- extracting the whole (into private property) without regenerating its vitality.
So, to match the new era of global boiling, we need to transition to a new era of systems change - where we unbuild degenerating communities built on colonial principles of separation and domination and rebuild regenerative ones - that are not just low carbon but also co-evolve with nature.
This is an experiment to learn whether and how it's possible to generate the collective will needed to reverse the degeneration of an urban bioregion. We’ll learn the specifics of a potential pathway to urban development that is rooted in living systems design.
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In the meantime, I’m available for Regeneration consultancy.
Here’s what I can do.
Regenerative Development and Design
I’ve been learning/unlearning about glocal injustices and systems thinking, I’ve gained systems doing skills and frameworks to design regenerative projects from the ‘Regenerative Development & Design’ course by Regenesis. I’m now taking ‘Finance for a Regenerative Economy’ at Capital Institute to learn how we can redirect finance toward regeneration.
I learned to use regenerative frameworks to research and unveil patterns that define a place's unique potential and its vocation, and then iteratively design a project coming into that place to shift the will of stakeholders to contribute towards a shared end state.
I can help the team with reviewing and optimising the regenerative potential of projects, designing regenerative project scenarios, strategic advice that positions a project to play a valued and value-adding role in a place, mapping out stakeholders and the value they bring in and take out, concrete imaging of the project through a trajectory of states from the first interim state to the end state and developing implementation strategies of each state.
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I'm off Social Media
The movie The Social Dilemma might have inspired the decision, but I had long been pondering the hard choice to deactivate my social media accounts because;
- The distraction by design philosophy makes it hard to concentrate on the many ideas you get off of these platforms - at least for me, at least for now. Less is more - so, I rather remain with email and a few others.
- There is more value in meaningful connections - than the very weak connections offered by social media. I engage with other subject-specific online groups where I learn and contribute more meaningfully. These include;
- Design Activism Group for Regenerative Futures.
- Climate Action Tech
- Systems Innovation, and other web3 discord groups.
So, please reach out via the contacts below - I would love to connect or simply chat. Email: asemakula@gmail.com | Mobile: +256 772 523328
