Culture Craft 101: Reach Out Globally, Root Down Locally

:: to craft a workable and thriving human culture within and without myself ::

 :: Reach Out Globally

Why

Because I can. Transparency is a foundational feature of NextCulture. If I am transparent online about my identity, I'll connect with the people with whom I share vision. I would describe Venessa Miemis as one of the most significant people with an internet connection, that I've never met, that I resonate with and am influenced by. She describes these people in her post, one of my favourites ever, called 'Intentcasting an epic vision: how to bootstrap creative economy 3.0'

Who is our community?
A global network of systems innovators, cultural bootstrappers, reality hackers, and builders of the commons. We realize our goals through self-organization, and working with innovative and generative models of learning, governance, enterprise, ownership, investment, collaboration, leadership and change.

My heart sings! For we are not all destined to struggle on this journey alone. We do not have to resist the culture that binds us! We can build something else entirely, entirely together! I have spent around 2 years following the global culture crafters and participating in my own local culture crafting. Culture Crafting is just one phrase of many that describes this community. It is a community of practice. And it is moving beyond the formative stages. With Culture Crafting at the heart of my identity, I also recognize that I have many other skills and capacities to offer, in particular, I'm a talented web designer/developer, most recently excited about my Ruby on Rails developments, and I don't think that many of the tools to facilitate optimally the collaboration of this community of practice exist. I literally want to program social change. And given that I have a day job, I madly want to apply my skills off-hours to open-source and creative commons software and website development because I think that's the way of the future (and more importantly the present!) I think that the Heartsongproject.cc that Venessa Miemis proposed could be a good place to start if no one is working on it yet because it would provide an avenue for people to express their connection / related intent and facilitate further connection of the the right people with the right people. I was particularly inspired by Venessa's heartsong video (which can be found here) and intend to create one soon. Also on my to do list is requesting access to collaboratory.cc, which I think will be the starting step for beginning to participate in the work & the community.

There's another particularly powerful post that I rediscovered today that was written by Seb Paquet about 11 months ago. It's about emergent cities:

I think we're about to see the emergence of a new way of conducting innovation that operates quasi-independently of the current money system. 

In other words, where conventional thinking tells us that investing money in research and development is the way to get innovation, we're putting together a means of innovating whose chief requirements are things like time, imagination, knowledge, initiative and trust, with money moving from primary to secondary concern. 

What I see emerging is a set of tools and customs -- cognitive infrastructure, when you think about it -- that will give us the necessary scaffolding to grow a multitude of virtual "cities". These cities will bring together people with shared values and orientations towards the future, and who are in a position to collaborate to bring something new into the world. They are part and parcel of the burgeoning Relationship Economy.

That was from his post What are Emergent Cities?

:: Root Down Locally

That's only one half of the picture. I want to come back to Waterloo, Ontario and reflect on what's going on here. But first, a note about open-source, because I like computer metaphors:

open-source

To release the source code of;

Of, or relating to a product which is licensed to permit modifications and redistribution of its source code

::The following is an excerpt of writing by Jean Robertson::

Humanity 3.0 – a Different Way of Humans.Thinking.Together

Humanity 3.0  thinking is a thinking.together dynamic based in a new human common.sense, such that we humans can actually become collectively as well as personally wise, smart, and powerful in ways that could enable us to effectively care for what we care about, now and into a foreseeable future from tomorrow to 10,000 years from tomorrow.

The Working Assumptions of our conceptual framework:

In our present circumstances, the Humanity 2 thinking.together ‘operating system’, systemically (ie. by its very structure as a system) now actually prevents us from effectively caring for what we care about, and has itself actually largely generated  the multiple crises and challenges to our survival and thrival that we face.

This Humanity 3.0  thinking.together ‘operating system’ is so different in its fundamental assumptions  and resulting dynamics from the cultures of the last 10,000 years and the common sense they were based in, that we become, really, a different kind of thinking.human.being, so different that  it warrants the term Humanity 3.0.  Humanity 1, in this understanding, was the original human hunter-gatherer culture/dynamic in its various flavours, which evolved from our primate ancestors into what we recognize as the first ‘humans’, and continued up to the age of agricultural settlement.

Humanity 3.0  thinking is systemically ‘generative’ and ‘collaborative’, nurturing of human beings as co-intelligent, self-authoring creative learners by nature and nurture, and human communities as self-organizing, wise, smart, and powerful.

Humanity 3.0  thinking.together has been evolving within Humanity 2 culture for a significant length of time-as-we-observe-it, given the length of our lifetimes. We have not had good maps of our situation so that subjectively we have  experienced confusion caused by the presence of the two modes, thinking that what we need is an improvement of  2 rather that an upgrade to 3.0 that will create new dynamics with which to manage the effects of 2.

We already know, individually and collectively, a lot about the generative/collaborative dynamic. We are already sensing our need for basing our actions in it. We already experience ourselves learning and doing aspects of it, and we haven’t yet widely identified that it amounts to a new model, and that while you can ‘transcend and include’ the old, you can’t just improve the old with some new practices.

This new way of thinking.together and the common.sense underlying it – the basic thinking platform, in a computing analogy – is not an ideal. It is learnable. It is liveable. It is recognizable in its presence and absence in oneself and in others and in community processes and dynamics, once one has learned to operate the basic navigating system.

:: end ::

I live in an intentional household which is built on these understandings. Crafting ourselves and each other into a new culture. We have the intention of taking this model of the household, and the framework on which its built - the kernel - open-source. I believe that this, as much as reaching out to others globally, is a huge part of what I am called to do, and what I hope that other culture crafters around the globe are doing.

Root down people. Take place. Occupy Space. Be where you're at. Culture Craft happens with people. In coffee shops.

:: Others at the Heart of Culture Crafting

transform.org

theinfinitegames.org

nextculture.org

Emergent by Design

(image from imaginaryfoundation)