communities of practice
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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
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
... See moreOlivia Oldham • Imagination Infrastructure — What Do We Mean?
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
people who are creating containers for healthy community building. They see solutions to problems through the lens of relationship. They connect people to one another and create and cultivate spaces for people to develop relationships to solve problems. They know these spaces need tending to remain healthy and put in the time and effort to do that
... See moreNew_ Public • Celebrating the labor that holds up our democracy: the community entrepreneur
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
... See moreRichard Kim • From Nothing to Something with R.N.G.
In practice, it is not possible for the technical layer to be resilient while the social layer is not, as the social and technical dynamics of infrastructure are co-constitutive.
Kelsie Nabben • Decentralised Technologies as “Self infrastructuring”
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.