A meshwork is multi-faceted as a community, a movement, a collaboration, a knowledge hub, a market-place and a work space.  A meshwork finds the people and resources and develops the media and communications to fulfill on its purpose, consistent with its values and principles.  The meshwork naturally develops the facets required to fulfill on its purpose while other facets may be latent and undeveloped only emerging when required.

A meshwork is a field of purpose, possibility, values and intention, with the agility to reconfigure and realign itself as does a flock of birds or a shoal of fish.  Paying attention to and nurturing the core purpose, principles and intentionality of a meshwork kindles and sustains its life-force from which the meshwork self-organizes its parts and itself develops appropriate expressions to meet its own needs.

Ultimately a meshwork is an emergent behavior of the human system faced with complex challenges which exceed the convening power, resources and individual strengths of any single person or group.

Meshwork Leadership: The potency of traditional leadership is subsiding in the face of complex and systemic challenges which undermine the very instruments of traditional wealth and power.  A new leadership is being called forth; a leadership which focuses on quality before scale.  This is a leadership which propagates and scales through resonance and coherence, in turn calling forth leadership and creating human and cultural conditions for success.  With the human conditions in place, new structures and stable systems naturally emerge.

The previously effective paradigm used hierarchical and competitive structures of organization, systems of communications, power and implementation.  The emerging paradigm of leadership seamlessly collaborates across silos, departments, sectors and different kinds of organizations, seeding, catalyzing and building meshworks - networked movements with complex local and global structures - achieving sustainable systemic change. This change creates highly effective, flexible adaptive structures within and between groups and organizations.  Born of, emerging from and responding to complex challenges, these new meshworked structures naturally work and are fit for an ever more complex economic, social and cultural environment.

Facilitation: Meshwork facilitation, practices, organizing structures and software are emerging as a natural complement to meshwork leadership, together creating a human and systems ecology to facilitate large scale change - rapidly, efficiently and with the dynamics of a tipping point.

Resilience: A meshwork is naturally resilient, responding and realigning to achieve its purpose in changing conditions.  Meshworked organization creates resilient systems.

Lifecycle: Meshworks develop through a lifecycle.  Each network or convened gathering which aims to harness collective wisdom and energy has the potentiality of a meshwork.  Each network for local development or global challenge is pregnant with meshwork potential.  From this perspective the fractal landscape of human networks, challenges and aspirations is a fractal landscape of meshworks waiting to be born.  Some meshworks are functionally the same at different locations or scales.  Others are different in function and may operate in some of the same places and involve some of the same people.  Over time, we expect meshworks to grow, develop and interpenetrate sometimes merging and sometimes functionally aligning.

Global Emergence: As ecosystems mature and transition from competitive to collaborative, so we are experiencing a transition.  The global human, economic and environmental system is in transition. A higher level order and organism is emerging.  Together, the intersecting structure of emerging meshworks – the meshwork of meshworks is replacing or repurposing the old governance and organization systems and developing the new.  Meshworks are the stirring of new order, the early development of organs of the emerging global organism.  A new whole is emerging.  Its field is already present.  Its structure is unfolding.  As we catalyze and develop meshworks and supporting systems, we are amplifying this field and unfolding its structures.

Gaiasoft exists to create structures and processes for local and global transition.  Gaiasoft works with a growing network of facilitators, consultants and partners supporting meshwork leaders, catalysts and networks.   Our clients are movements, governments, businesses and global agencies.  We provide simple, teachable processes to create meshworks and fractal collaboration, management and governance systems.

Morel Fourman, Tewit Cote, February 13^th, 2009