One of the general barriers to doing the kind of ‘work’ we wished to be doing at DIYNGO has been the apparent sloth-like progression of institutional reform currently inherent in British society at least (and I suspect this is even worse elsewhere?)
The following serve to illustrate the kinds of issues we have had to deal with:
1. Dominant economic system (Capitalism) – has no notion of ‘social value’, tending instead to commodify all aspects of the ‘human experience’. It doesn’t work for anything like the kind of thing we have been trying to do. Noble people are attempting to rectify this but we have a long way to go yet…
2. (Related) banking system – pretty much collapsed over here and didn’t do so well elsewhere, having been propped up by the tax payer. Again, we found it impossible to open a bank account. Not sure why but people ‘in the know’ told me that the banks fear “money laundering” as we are international. Also my personal ‘credit rating’ could have been better. Whatever. Not really open for doing business with anyone other than those with loads of money already.
3. Intellectual Property – no offence to the good people at the IP Office in the UK but that whole system – indeed, the very notion of this form of ‘property’ – is archaic? The current system stymies progress, witness the many technological lawsuits consuming valuable R & D time around the planet. I guess its a good time to be an IP lawyer but not a great one to be an ‘innovator’…
Depending upon one’s definition of what an ‘institution’ actually is – e.g. do we have time to consider the family unit an institution – then this list could be endless. However, that will do for now. You hopefully get the point. We were attempting to point out that there are some real solutions to the kinds of problems people all over the planet are now experiencing. On the plus side we did do this hopefully – we championed these ideas which was our raison d’etre – sadly though the times and the status quo were kind of ‘against’ us. Its quite simple, we either begin to reform some of these institutions at a far faster rate than we can currently manage or we start to demise as a nation state/region/world populace. 
