communities of practice
Critical connections between future-builders matter more than critical mass in long-term transformative work: without these, nothing new can emerge. Networks are the lifeblood of emergence, and yet so much of the way life is organised gets in the way of pioneers connecting
Sophia Parker • Emerging Futures at JRF - Two Years In, the Story So Far
Campus provides a low-stakes way to “try on a new way of being”, learn with social accountability, and experiment without hard committing. Each quarter we ask our members for classes, events, bookclubs, or circles they want to host. Many use this opportunity as a chance to engage with an interest more deeply - both as a leader, constructing the... See more
Infrastructure for sense-making because what gets imagined needs collectively interpreting and translating. […]
Infrastructure for sites of practice. We have town halls and community centres and forests and public parks — how can our social infrastructures and our natural world infrastructures be used for collective imagination activities. […]
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... See morePatrick Tanguay (Sentiers) • No.249 — ‘If You Win the Popular Imagination, You Change the Game’: Why We Need New Stories on Climate ⊗ Imagination Infrastructures ⊗ AI and the Big Five
What counts as social infrastructure? I define it capaciously. Public institutions, such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools, are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community
... See moreEric Klinenberg • Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
People are an essential ingredient of social infrastructure.
New_ Public • 🤔 Revisiting Discord, libraries, and Somewhere Good
This infrastructure will be more than a set of foundations or a scaffold. It will look, in fact, more like a playground: which exists, not subordinate to or below some other, more important work, but as a structure in its own right, one which supports, co-creates, and constantly re-produces play, creativity, imagination. Not something which can be
... See moreOlivia Oldham • Imagination Infrastructure — What Do We Mean?
And if communities are spaces for belonging, cohorts are spaces for becoming.
Brian Dell • LF11 - Cohort Futures
If we want a better democracy, we need the same for community entrepreneurs. For too long now, these people have done this work without being paid, recognized, or even acknowledged. On Facebook, they are called group admins; on Reddit, they are moderators. But they aren’t just admins or moderators. They are leaders. They are entrepreneurs - forging
... See moreNew_ Public • Celebrating the labor that holds up our democracy: the community entrepreneur
the best ways to imagine may be the ones that position this work as a collaboration—done with people rather than to or for them—giving people and communities the freedom to learn by doing and to adapt the general into the particular.