communities of practice

And if communities are spaces for belonging, cohorts are spaces for becoming.

Brian Dell • LF11 - Cohort Futures

Theorists commonly identify two forms. There is “bonding” social capital created within existing social groups and “bridging” social capital created by relationships between existing social groups or across conventional lines of social segregation.

The Relationship Is the Richness

How can we build up an infrastructure, both physical and metaphysical, tangible and intangible, to enable the development, the practices and use of collective imagination? We’re particularly interested in how the collective works here — what it means for us to imagine together, how the grouping of intelligence progresses our ability to envisage and

Olivia Oldham • Imagination Infrastructure — What Do We Mean?

People are an essential ingredient of social infrastructure.

New_ Public • 🤔 Revisiting Discord, libraries, and Somewhere Good

Relationships are the energetic core of communities. They are the glue. They are the reason people keep showing up. They are the biggest (and yet ironically the most intangible) value that communities create. Relationships are the community’s soul and source of life. Without relationships, the community is an empty shell.

Fabian Pfortmüller • Community = relationships

Those relationships can have intrinsic value for the individual members, creating a sense of belonging or being connected to others. But it can also have value fo r the larger society for three reasons: first, because one can draw on it as a resource for accomplishing some objective , such as partnering with other parents to improve the local... See more

Isabel V. Sawhill • Social Capital: Why We Need It and How We Can Create More of It

While we might use these spaces, open communities have particular needs. They are formed not from shared identity but from entwined attention and collaborative work on shared resources. They thrive on diversity and so require the creation of an environment that is proactively inclusive and welcoming. They need fluidity, iterativity, and a... See more

Creative Communities

In this place of transition - a place that feels disorienting, confusing, messy - we need to be learning from each other, plural in the possibilities we generate, and willing to let go of those mental frameworks that are no longer serving us well.

Sophia Parker • Emerging Futures at JRF - Two Years In, the Story So Far

Social scalability is the ability of an institution –- a relationship or shared endeavor, in which multiple people repeatedly participate, and featuring customs, rules, or other features which constrain or motivate participants’ behaviors -- to overcome shortcomings in human minds and in the motivating or constraining aspects of said institution