The Friday Group and the Emergence of Middle-Out Change

The conversations did not begin with energy. They began the way many meaningful changes do — with a small group of people meeting regularly out of curiosity, care, and a shared desire to understand the world more deeply.

They were not activists or technologists by training — simply people who had reached a stage of life where experience, time, and concern converged into a desire to give back. 

For more than three years, from across the country, they gathered on Zoom — sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly — at first simply because they enjoyed learning from one another. There was no funding behind it. No institutional mandate. Just relationship.

Among them was Bob Ferguson, who would later be elected to the Fairfield City Council in Iowa — someone embedded in civic life who had no programming background at all, yet used accessible AI tools to make city information easier for citizens to navigate.

What mattered was not technical expertise, but willingness to learn, adapt, and apply new capacity in service of shared responsibility.

Over time, trust formed.
Ideas connected across experience.
Patterns emerged.

This pattern did not appear all at once. It formed through practice—through people working within institutions, across communities, and in relationship with one another over time.

Through repeated participation, people themselves began changing—learning to see systems relationally rather than in isolation.

In these middle layers, coordination became possible. Not through centralized control, but through shared attention, trust, and the gradual alignment of effort.

What changed was not only what people did, but how they began to perceive relationship, consequence, and responsibility across systems that had previously remained disconnected.

This is how patterns begin to take shape in real places—through practice, relationship, and time.

Again and again, one realization resurfaced. Energy was not simply a technical problem. It was a systemic one. Modern civilization had built extraordinary technological power atop an energy architecture designed for a different era — now increasingly strained by climate instability, rising demand, and accelerating digital infrastructure.

It was through these conversations that Dr. Marc Weiss began sharing work he had been involved in abroad — places where innovation succeeded not through command, but through coordination across institutions and communities.

Universities, he noted, do more than produce knowledge. They function as crossroads — where ideas, relationships, and innovations move between worlds that would otherwise remain disconnected.

Through these networks, Marc had come to know a technologist who had already rewritten a global system once before.

In the late 1990s, when the internet strained under dial-up traffic, a Swedish entrepreneur named Jonas Birgersson built decentralized local networks that allowed homes to connect directly to one another. That architecture reshaped how the world accessed information.

Now he was applying the same logic to electricity.

Jonas was not offering charity. He was building a system that had to work — technically, socially, and economically — to survive in the marketplace. Stewardship and innovation were not opposed. They were aligned.

Through his company ViaEuropa, a functioning system was already operating in Lund — buildings sharing power locally, coordinated through smart routing, treating energy the way modern networks treat data.

Not centralized control.
Not isolated self-sufficiency.
But coordinated local abundance inside existing grids.

When this work entered the Friday Group conversations, something shifted.

This was not a future theory. It was already alive.

The question moved from could energy systems change?
to where might such change take root?

This story depends on a rare convergence of trust, experience, and timing — and it would be easy to treat it as exceptional. But what matters is not the uniqueness of the people. It is the pattern: relationships that deepen over time, a shared problem named in systems terms, and a middle layer of institutions willing to coordinate rather than control. Those elements are transferable — trust built over time, institutions willing to coordinate, and problems framed systemically rather than politically. They can be cultivated across contexts.

Similar middle-out dynamics show up wherever shared-resource governance is practiced—watershed councils, community energy transitions, and local food resilience networks—where trust, rules, and shared measurement convert relationship into capacity.

Bob, now embedded in local government, began thinking in practical civic terms.

Cities and universities weren’t abstractions — they were living systems with budgets, infrastructure, political realities, and people depending on them.

At the same time, my own experience working in municipal sustainability pointed toward another kind of living system: large campuses that function like small cities, with massive energy demand and complex infrastructure.

One natural possibility was The Ohio State University.

What made the idea tangible was relationship. Years earlier, sustainability work had connected me with Aparna Dial — someone responsible for the very systems that would carry energy across campus. Not vision statements. Actual infrastructure.

Conversations about stewardship slowly became conversations about what might be possible if energy itself were reorganized. Outreach followed — including to university leadership — whose strategic priorities reflected the era’s accelerating focus on artificial intelligence and digital capacity. The irony was clear. Institutions forged to train responsibility, discipline, and service now found themselves racing to expand cognitive power faster than the energy systems that sustain it.

Some doors did not open. 

So the system adapted.

“No” rarely arrives as a single decision. It arrives as process: budgets already committed, risk committees protecting reputations, procurement rules built for old architectures, jurisdictional boundaries, competing priorities, and the simple scarcity of attention inside overburdened institutions.

Inertia is not evil.
It is structural.

And learning to work with it — without surrendering to it — is part of middle-out practice. 

Institutions, like people, often learn gradually through relationship, experimentation, and trust built over time.

Rather than forcing transformation where institutional gravity was strongest, attention shifted toward places with the capacity to experiment.

One of the most promising emerged through Bob’s civic networks: Cedar Falls, home of the University of Northern Iowa — a connected community where municipal systems and university infrastructure intertwine.

Smaller.
More agile.
More relational.

Fertile ground.

Like living ecosystems, new patterns of stewardship did not force themselves where resistance was highest. It flowed toward where new patterns could take root.

And then something quietly powerful happened.

Instead of choosing one site over another, the conversation widened.

In an email between Bob and me, a new possibility emerged:

Wouldn’t it be nice if Ohio State could collaborate with the University of Northern Iowa in the pilot and implementation phases?

Not competition.
Not replacement.
Connection.

A large research university linking with a smaller, agile campus — institutional gravity paired with institutional flexibility.

Learning flowing both directions.

This is how living systems scale.

Not by simple replication.
By networked diffusion.

Like ecosystems spreading through connected habitats, innovation finds multiple footholds — each strengthening the whole.

What made the collaboration possible was not the promise of immediate profit, but the presence of long-term responsibility.

Jonas was building a company that would succeed only if the system worked — technically, socially, and economically — in real markets. EnergyNet was not a charity project. It was a regenerative innovation designed to scale through commerce.

But what moved Bob, Marc, and me — and many others in the Friday Group — was not financial return. None of us stood to gain economically from its success. We were motivated by something simpler and deeper: a shared sense that reorganizing energy toward resilience, abundance, and stewardship was the right thing to do for humanity.

Beauty — in systems that harmonize rather than extract.
Truth — in architectures that mirror how living networks function.
Goodness — in choices that widen care across generations.

Responsibility was not imposed.
It was chosen.

And as perception widened, coordination followed naturally.

Over time, participation itself became formative—shaping how people understood responsibility, relationship, and stewardship.

Stewardship means gradually designing responsibility into systems so care does not rely on heroism. What was unfolding was not a rejection of existing systems, but a reorganization of them — civic responsibility guiding innovation, institutions sharing capacity, and markets carrying regenerative solutions into scale. 

Relationships became infrastructure.
Trust became momentum.
Values became the organizing force.

Scaling this kind of transformation requires more than goodwill. It requires institutions, markets, and policies aligned with stewardship rather than extraction.

This is the pattern living systems follow.
Not through command from above.
Not through isolated action below.
But through relationship-driven coordination in the middle layers of society — where people embedded in institutions align around stewardship.

This is middle-out participation. 

What emerged was not only a technical possibility, but a learning process through which relationships, institutions, and shared responsibility slowly reorganized around stewardship.

It is what Evolutionary Orientation looks like in practice:
when widened awareness becomes shared responsibility,
and shared responsibility begins reorganizing the systems that shape our future.

Whether this effort ultimately succeeds remains uncertain. Like many middle-out initiatives, success depends on whether institutions, markets, and communities align around shared responsibility.