Generalizing Ostrom’s Core Design Principles and Putting Them to Use: An Interactive “Practitioner Webinar”

In 2013, David Sloan Wilson, Elinor Ostrom, and Michael Cox published an article titled Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups. Using generalized Darwinism as the theoretical framework, the article showed that the core design principles are needed for almost all cooperative endeavors, not just the management of common-pool resources.

Given their generality, the core design principles can be used as a practical method for increasing the efficacy of groups across all scales and contexts. That is the objective of the nonprofit organization ProSocial World, founded by Wilson and Paul Atkins, along with their book Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.  The ProSocial method has been applied to building the commons in contexts as diverse as schools, organizations, the United Nations, disease control and bioregional sustainability groups.

During the 90-minute webinar, David and Paul will provide an overview of their work including theory, evidence, examples and interactive discussion.

While webinar attendees are welcome to attend as individuals, we highly recommend that they attend with a group in mind — and with one or more other collaborators from that group — with the expectation of creating a framework for continuing interactions with and among the groups.

To make the webinar interactive, a survey will be given to attendees who register beforehand, and results will be presented during the webinar. Our past survey research is reported in this article titled Core Design Principles for Nurturing Organization-Level Selection.

The webinar will conclude with a poll to gauge attendees in their interest in a future “Prosocial World – IASC Practitioner Workshop” where participants can learn practices around the Core Design Principles.

We plan to run this webinar three times in different global time zones, so that people from all IASC regions have the opportunity to attend at least one of the three offerings.

‍