Jon Alexander har inspirert oss og en hel verden med boken sin Citizens. I april fikk vi gleden av å ha ham på besøk, og benyttet anledningen til å snakke om hva som skjer når vi går fra å se på oss selv som forbukere til aktive pådrivere!
I en tid med globale kriser trenger vi ikke bare nye løsninger – vi trenger et nytt tankesett. Forfatteren av boka Citizens, Jon Alexander, lanserer en idé vi mener flere bør høre: Hva skjer når vi begynner å se på oss selv – og hverandre – som aktive medborgere/pådrivere fremfor passive forbrukere?
Vi fikk Jon på besøk til Socentral mens han var i Oslo våren 2025. Sammen med Pådriv Oslo inviterte vi til en samtale om hvordan vi kan bygge samfunn basert på tillit, handlekraft og samarbeid.
Du finner lenke til opptaket av samtalen her
Etter besøket skrev Jon dette på sin LinkedIn side: "SoCentral is a co-working / incubator community rooted in the idea of people as hashtag#citizensnotconsumers.
They’ve done SO much over the last decade or so, and right now they’re up to something especially exciting…When Russia invaded Ukraine, oil prices went through the roof. That made Norway a LOT richer, because of its sovereign wealth fund, rooted in North Sea oil. A lot of people across Norway felt (and feel) very uncomfortable about that.
But no one in government was holding the space for a conversation about how to respond.
The SoCentral crew got a group of civil society organisations together, and decided to just run a Citizens’ Assembly themselves, from outside of government.They’re coming towards the end of the process now – and the challenge is to make it famous and unignorable."
Les mer om Framtidspanelet her.
Jon fortsatte innlegget sitt med å forklare Pådriv, og den forklaringen er det virkelig verdt å lese:
AND then there was a whole other thing too! Padriv, which translates as something like frontrunner or driving force, is an initiative I actually can’t quite explain yet but I genuinely think could be transformative for cities all over the world.
Let me try…
I think of it as a kind of city-scale collaboration platform organisation thingy.
Businesses, charities, and other organisations can join alongside municipal government AND individual citizens.
And then anyone (and I mean ANYONE) can post a challenge or an opportunity that they’ve spotted and want to work on - but can’t provide the answer on their own.
The Padriv team put this question in the middle, and crowd the members in to find answers together - as citizen orgs looking to collaborate, not consumer orgs competing for contracts - building new collaborations, fixing market failures, and transforming institutions as they go.
Just one example: an entrepreneur called Martin spotted an opportunity for a circular economy solution in the construction industry. His business was too small to take it. But Padriv crowded in national and city government, a whole range of other construction industry cos, and even an insurance co… and a new enterprise was born that’s saved a LOAD of waste AND generated millions of euros for the city already…
Les mer om Pådriv her, og bli med!
Jon avsluttet hele innlegget sitt med:
This is THREE DAYS IN ONE CITY people.
We can do this.
