Dear all,
one question that I have discussed especially with Caroline is
1. the question of how people could get access to the P2P culture and
2. what it could mean for their lives.
I think it would simply be great to have a more intensive cooperation
between the hub movement and the oekonux/p2p community. The "hosts" of the
hubs (Caroline being one of them) are probably key persons that can
receive, guide and support the people willing to invest their work in a
more supportive and durable environment which feeds back and allows for
unlimited creativity.
It is necessary for the hosts to provide human interaction based on a
"mindmap" of connection points to our emerging economy and culture. This
connection points might be local and global "adresses", includers who can
be helpful in both self-discovery and aplication of ones abilities to
shared tasks. So a key requirement would be to provide the "mindmaps" and
coach the hosts themselves in what access they can facilitate. It should
not just be a workplace what you get in a hub, it should be access to a
culture. People might be overwhelmed by the diversity of available tasks
and endavours, or they simply might be unaware of them. Both challenges
could be met by the function of hubs as connection points. I imagine it
also would be fun to mobilise "collective intelligence" in circles where
we are increasing awareness of each others purposes.
Personal interaction and dynamic growth of personal maturity is a topic
that was quite neglected at the oekonux conference, but which might
constitute some very useful and decisive patterns in the universe of our
activities. That is why I favor the inclusion of the emerging Worknets
culture, and whilst we were in Manchester Andrius Kulikauskas has given a
wonderful proof of concept in London by bringing in and connecting people
with high potential from Africa, Serbia, Lithuania and elsewhere. It was
simply fun to enjoy these people learning and changing and improving
constantly, and I think I learned and changed and improved with them and
the wealth of relations multiplied.
I have written a piece on my particular endavour and why I also
deliberately chose to place this in the Worknets context, but I think
these principles are logical for all of us and they would open further
doors if we would simply consider them other layer of our own work that is
not conflicting with anything we do buut laregely enhancing it.
The second point is that hubs do not only have the potential to open the
door to communities of P2P production; they also can feed back on their
local living environment and transforming them to life maintainance
organisations. This is so important that I have specified the definition
of Global Villages, recognizing the simplicity of the formula more than
ever before. This is the even more important question, unanswered since
May 1968: comment peut-on vraiment changer la vie? how can we really make
a change in our lives happen?
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The following was posted in the GlobalVillages mailing list
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalvillages/message/3921
Dear members of this list,
by Andrius indefatigable collection of participants for our
globalvillages, this list is gradually approaching the threshold of 300
readers - and we still aim at much higher circulation! As Andrius has
pointed out, the Global Villages Network is happy to be organized
alongside "worknets principles" and to be in the business to create a new
culture. I want to give a short account of these principles from a
subjective view - why I think that its important to recognize the Worknets
effort - and then discuss actual goals for the Global Villages Movement -
things that I ask for your contributions.
A
The general features of this new culture that is emerging and finally
might be captured in a Worknets charter seem to be the following for me:
1. All our work is based and focused on the work of creative, dedicated
individuals who follow their deepest values and strive to share their work
with others who do the same. We arrive at a point in history where finally
the individual is really in focus, not as abstract being, but as a special
contributor to a wealth of contributions.
2. We seek the voluntary collaboration and community with those who
encourage us and make us grow in the perseverance of our goals, as much as
we seek to encourage others. This is true in the global and the local
scale, although at the beginning it might be much easier to find such
resonance in the Internet than in our physical surrounding. Without this
resonance we cannot work.
3. We deeply miss in the current educational system a sensitivity for such
individual "calling" and a system of encouragement to reach our highest
possibities and attain answers for our actual questions.
4. We want therefore decide to create a mutual support system to challenge
each other and hold us accountable for what we have declared as our
central personal values - rather than follow abstract belief systems. We
wish everybody to succeed. We think that this will lead us to the "best of
all possible worlds".
5. We value science and competence as elements that are indispensible
steps of mastering our goal. We feel that every goalsetting unveils
questions that we cannot currently answer and things that we cannot yet
do. Knowing and artfulness are universal goals. We want everybody to learn
and know more. We already know that we live far below our possibilities.
6. Our contribution as "Worknets" to the emerging world of peer production
and commons is a network of "embedded mentoring" and constant productive
dialogue. We see the personal relations that help us grow as necessary
contribution; as well as individual responsibility and leadership. We want
everybody to grow into leadership.
7. Our goal is also to reach out to the ones that are hard to reach. The
proof of our concept is a world where nobody is left out.
8. We do not limit ourselves to any particular culture, ideology or
religion, but we appreciate the sense of transcendence that is the base to
all these phenomena: that the human nature is by its very nature bound to
seeking durabilty and meaning beyond our limited individual vanishing
lives. God is no delusion, but a form in which this search for our true
self appears.
9. We want to build an infrastructure to facilitate not only the
communicative process, but the process of living out or goals. The
infrastructure will be informational, but it will also be physical. An
important part of this infrastructure will be Global Villages.
B
Having said this, I want to focus on the special goals of the Global
Villages Network based on the following underlying assumptions:
1. We think that the biggest requirement of our time is to rebalance our
lifestyle with the planet we are living with; in particular this means a
physical transformation from a world of large industrial and
administrative centers to a cellular-fractal world of highly sophisticated
villages.
2. We do not want to loose the achievements of science and technology, of
culture and art; rather we want to manifest them in physical spaces that
represent more and more perfect encounters of the cultural and the
underlying natural. By going deeper into the nature of things we have
discovered that nature is nothing that we can just leave behind us, but in
itself an incredibly complex technological system, a web of life that
transcends many of our highest technological and artistic abilities in
ingenuity, sustainability, perfection and usefulness. The village is an
environment in which these two layers - nature and culture - can coexist
and influence each other in the best possible way. Aligning ourselves with
nature is the best and most productive way we can overcome boundaries; it
is not the boundaries of nature that are hindering us but our limited
understanding of nature and its creativity. Whilst the dominating monetary
economies have led to narrow-scaled costly battles for shrinking buying
power in the short-term cyclical consumption game and abandoned and
exploited everything which could be made productive in the long run,
Global Villages are directly linked to the constant long-term regeneration
of natural environments. Permaculture has proven hat humans can largely
enhance and support natural systems instead of distorting or destroying
them, an activity which results in the creation of really sustainable
abundance.
3. By the very same means the village is also the perfect environment to
represent our diverse cultural designs; it allows people to live and
breathe locally alongside shared values, whilst not hindering other people
in other villages in realizing theirs. An unprecedented culture of
reconciliation and coesistence between formerly hostile cultures can
result out of this, but also a positive competition of entirely different
solutions to common problems. Moving out of each others way will not
require heavy migration, just maybe a little relocation. Many cities have
successfully drawn their strength from this pattern, as Christopher
Alexander describes in "a network of subcultures".
C
So there result some intermediary goals:
1. Make the concept of a Global Village clearer and operationalize it in
the most simplest way. So the proposed formula is: a Global Village is
simply and basically the synergetic relationship between a local learning
center with access to global knowledge (Telecenter, Hub, Library, ...) on
one side with a local environment in which this knowledge can be applied,
tested, enhanced on the other side. A Global Village needs to be
resourceful in access to the world of information and culture, as well as
it needs to be resourceful in access to local resources, material -
energetical cycles, inhabitants, processes, biotopes etc. The purpose of a
Global Village is to provide a high quality, healthy, satisfactory, secure
and sustainable lifestyle to its inhabitants and improve and densify the
local life process.
2. Paradoxically, the main means to accelerate this process is to increase
the number of likeminded places around the world. Because of the enormous
knowledge and ingenuity needed to fulfill their task, Global Villages have
a strong positive interest in the growth of partner villages around the
world, a positive virtuos cycle that we see eventually ending in their
becoming the dominant form of human community of this planet - something
which seems almost crazy to predict today when we are still hardly at the
end of a self-supporting depopulation wave towards and in favor of big
cities. It is therefore very important especially today to start creating
and showing more and more examples of this reversal trend. It is not
important to focus on quantity today, but on the quality of design and the
scope of cooperative and generative activities. Global Villages of today
are "pioneer plants" .
3. Creating the infrastructure and the technology to make these villages
co-developing and co-producing. We need virtual design boards for machines
and devices that can be assembled locally, we need the tools and the
regenerative skills to obtain local materials for assembly and production,
as we need design languages to facilitate effective cooperation on complex
issues. We need ways to quickly and effectively assign tasks in a virtual
division of labour, and we need basic life maintainance agreements to free
our designing ingenuity from the individual struggle for survival. We need
to exchange and evaluate different forms of local economic organisation,
be it monetary or non-monetary. We need to empower people who have not yet
discovered this potential to cross the digital divide in their
own,special, particular way. The healer, the baker, the shoemaker, the
artist, the thinker, the singer, the resource broker .... everyone has the
opportunity and the challenge to develop their individual talent and
contribution in allignment with global cultural communities that support
competence and passion.
D
So the immediate goals could be
1. to identify learning centers that have the potential to feed into a
village and on the other hand villages that have the potential to generate
a learning center. We might want to make a difference between these two
approaches, because the first one is more focussed on "germs" and smaller
institutions (or even single people!) that bring a larger potential to a
locality, whilst the second one is focusing on communities and large,
official institutions, regional features, achievements etc.
2. to develop and deliver a criteria catalogue for BOTH appoaches without
confusing them.
3. To turn this into a questionaire because the potential GlobalVillages
all over the world are lining up!
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see also: http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?GlobalVillages/Principles
Franz
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http://www.oekonux-conference.org/