Description of a Community of Care

As I wrote in my post in the thread “Celebration and Mourning,” after the crew disengaged, I let time pass and allowed my own ideas to emerge.

I took Ronen’s generative description of the digital space and used it as a starting point to write a description of a community of care.

I can’t put into words how grateful I am that Ronen shared the description of the digital space with me. I never would have been able to write a description like this before I met him.

I’m grateful to have been introduced to the work of Christopher Alexander.

I have shared the revised description with a few friends who already knew I was part of the crew and had a general idea of what it was about. Now I’d like to be able to share the description more widely.

I am attaching the current version of the description of a community of care. If you read it you will see that currently it begins as follows:

What follows is a description of a community of care that does not exist yet. This description started with a generative description of a digital space, which was authored by Ronen Hirsch with the support of a crew of three other people: Josh Fairchild, Alex Rodriguez and Toni Blanco. Jennifer Damashek took Ronen’s original description and revised it so that it described a community of care that she would like to see exist in the world.

The description that follows is only the current draft. It will transform as the community emerges from idea to reality.

I have four questions.

1.       How would Ronen and everyone else here like me to acknowledge and express how the description of a community care came to be? Is what I wrote above acceptable, or is there a better way?

2.       Are there any objections to licensing the description of a community of care under a Creative Commons license?

3.       If there are no objections, is Ronen willing to also license his description under the same CC license? When sharing my version I could link back to Ronen’s version and identify the changes.

4.       If the answer to questions 2. and 3. is yes, could we please decide together which CC license to choose?

I am also attaching a pdf document with contains the text of Ronen’s description, at least one of the versions. I’m not completely sure if this is the last version. If not, please let me know.

I’d also like to add that Robert and I have progressed in the project of starting a community of care. If anyone here wants to know more about the project, please let me know. If any of you would be interested in participating, we are also interested in exploring how that could work.

Over the past few days I realized that I framed my questions in such a way that the reader may conclude that I was assuming @Ronen Hirsch would give permission for me to share the description of a community of care. I'd like to correct that.

I know Ronen has the right to say no, and of course I will honor his decision. If he wants me to remove the description from this public thread I will do so.

If that is what happens, my friends and I will create different ways to communicate about the idea of the community of care.

@Jennifer Damashek my answer was and continues to be yes ... I am glad you feel inspired and would like you to continue to pursue your inspiration and i do not wish to block you in any way.

I am unable to answer the formal questions you presented.

Thank you, Ronen.

@Ronen Hirsch resigned himself (painfully) to the interruption of our work on the grounds that generative processes do not have to work as nature demonstrates, so he conceived of ours as a failed natural generative process. I saw it more like a turning point in the Mandala we were creating together (following @Josh Fairhead's beautiful metaphor about screwing when drawing). Richard's "dating" metaphor gave Ronen a more social perspective. It is a way of approaching it, from abstraction and universalism.

According to Ronen's reasoning, he could feel the wholeness of the unsituated abstract written process, but not the wholeness of our generative process.

I think @Jennifer Damashek's sensibility brought out more than others in the group the existence of this difference between the wholeness that Ronen maintained in the abstract generative process and our concrete one. Briefly, our generative process became unduly destabilized; as Ronen withdrew as the center of the process, no one was able to offer an alternative to that center. As I understood with my conversation with Ronen, he felt that something "bad" or "detrimental" to wholeness (in the form of non-fertile, non-generative, rather anti-life progressive political discourse) was incorporated that derailed our generative process as Crew. But then, what exactly is evil, is it contextual or absolute? And so we come back to... what wholeness? As @Alex Rodriguez asked: is there only one wholeness? Or if one prefers, does all wholeness refer to a single totalizing global wholeness? To that one does Ronen's sense of wholeness refer or to another? What was the wholeness of our generative process capable of containing? The "evil", that thought or sensibility? And the one that was written as an abstraction?

This brings us to a metaphysical debate that would seem unnecessary, but it is that with Sergio we have realized that there is no major political problem that does not reproduce a metaphysical problem debated at least 2000 (if not 4000 years before). Oh well.

In my opinion, Jennifer's GP suffers from another kind of problem (the lack of what Ronen called "rigor") that Ronen's GP suffered from (the masking of starting decisions, more on this later) but I am very glad that you were encouraged to write your own version of the generative process. Why? Because it seems to me a more inclusive wholeness (let's put it that way for now) than Ronen's and generative of more inclusive groups. Isn't Richard's dating a path to groupthink and lack of diversity?

This to me is the biggest problem (the original sin, so to speak) of Richard's approach to the problem. I can understand the lack of some kind of diversity in a crew, but not at any higher level of aggregation.

All these questions make me think that an approach for collaborative work could have been not to work all in the same GP but to give each other support to work in different GPs. I always end up in the debate that Alex raised and that we did not initiate about whether we should talk about a singular wholeness or a plurality of them.

Ronen defined a GP that included (or excluded the rest by design) a particular economic model. Maintaining the wholeness of that GP did not allow for modifications to make it, for example, more inclusive or funded differently, because it also had to provide a source of revenue for its drivers by design. My biggest discomfort in this approach is the denial of the political dimension of these design decisions, and its masking in the discourse of maintaining a wholeness that according to Ronen could only be felt by him as a result of his long personal work with Yoga, meditation and practice with Alexander's principles, etc. This discomfort was a feature for me, but a bug for Ronen.

With these months I have come to the conclusion that the main problem is in the definition of the target. When we say "Japanese Teahouse" the borders and the context are better defined than a "remote space of microsolidarity". Therefore it would have been necessary to make the characteristics explicit as an a priori (for example, how it is financed) rather than pretending that the wholeness will define the constructs of how it will be financed.

Jennifer: about your exercise, I think that although you have followed some of the keys to the "literary genre" (as Alex called it) that Ronen has created, it is noticeable that you do not have Ronen's years of practice of thinking in terms of generative processes, so you fail to develop those properties that give the "nature of order". Ronen called it "rigor." I think, though, that your GP has the virtue of being more transparent about the values that underlie design decisions, and that it is more inclusive. This seems important to me, and forgive me for insisting again and again on some ideas, because of the dimension of "social engineering" to which a space that seeks to promote micro-solidarity aspires. I say this because, unlike building a space (physical or virtual) from transformations in space (physical or virtual) as we did in the example following the GP of the Japanese Teahouse, we also introduce some principles that refer to people, or how these transformations in space (physical or virtual) are financed. At the beginning of the exercise I thought that talking about money was more interesting if it was in the sense, for example, that paying the therapist is also part of the therapy. On the other hand, making some ideas explicit helps (as it did in our case) to make it more explicit to whom the space is addressed, and therefore, that game of inclusion and exclusion.

That is to say, perhaps I find this step acceptable, as long as it is not masked in a discourse of maintaining a wholeness in a certain arbitrary, absolute and totalitarian sense. If not, that exercise of persuasion in which the GP becomes falls into the risk of this moment in the series "Yes, Minister" (the first two minutes of this video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLm2X6sFa48

My invitation is to Jennifer, and if it's OK with her, extensive to whomever will be interested. Let's do an exercise to work on the wholeness and rigor of your GP, through the approaches for collaborative work of the Japanese author that I shared with you, and with which I have been experimenting this last year. Even if we don't use it exactly like him (we won't), it is a very good starting point. We will add some simple and very intuitive "topological geometrization" rules to look for the famous rigor, which will also make it easier for us to think with the famous "15 properties of living structures" of Christopher Alexander.

What do you think, Jennifer? What about the rest?

@Toni Blanco , I’m surprised and grateful for your invitation. Thank you!

I’m interested in getting more clarity on the process you are proposing to work on the description of a community of care so it could become a generative description.

I didn’t call the description that I wrote a generative description or a generative process, and I don’t think of it that way. I don’t know how to write a generative description or a generative process.

I revised Ronen’s description so I could get clear in my own mind about what I wanted to help create. Once I wrote it, I used it to share with others. I did that to see if anyone would be interested in creating communities of care with me.

I also made a short video presentation that summarizes the description and used that to introduce the idea to friends of mine. Every person I’ve directly invited so far has said yes, they want to co-create communities of care. So we have formed what we are calling a Seed COC and are working on integrating others.

I don’t understand how a “whole” or “complete” or “correct” generative process or description could be written unless it is of something that already exists and the author(s) of the GP know(s) exactly how to create it again and again, in different contexts.

My friends and I would like to get there with communities and care. I would be very interested in learning how to write generative processes/descriptions, because I think it would be extremely helpful in supporting others to create communities of care.

Your point about the main problem being the identification of the target resonates with me. It makes me think of Alan Savory and Holistic Management.

Savory talks about the first step in managing a system for wholeness being the definition of a holistic context. Robert and I have a holistic context in mind for our life in 20 years, for example. It helps us in making decisions. I also have a holistic context in mind for communities of care.

Here’s an article about articulating a holistic context. https://www.permaculturenews.org/2014/05/10/holistic-management-veg-part-two-articulating-holistic-context/

However, when I looked closely at HM, and also at permaculture, I realized there seems to be a lot missing in the process of designing whole systems. HM is pretty good at a very specific context, which is managing grazing animals and pasture. But how to go from a holistic context to designing or describing a repeatable, teachable way to create a holistic system or process that works in other contexts is not addressed well, in my opinion. That’s why I decided to start reading Christopher Alexander. 😊

Oh cool! Your description was not intended to be a GP but it is already generative of something you want, so maybe you are just fine! Maybe just ping me anytime if it feels stuck or derailed?

I think that Christopher Alexander uses the word wholeness in a very particular way, which is cool because as someone said (maybe Castoriadis?) any innovative thinker proposes an original ontology.

"Alexander calls wholeness, which, whether in nature or humanmade, is the “source of the coherence which exists in any part of the world” (NO, vol. 1, p. 90). Wholeness, he says, is integrally related to other lived qualities like beauty, eloquence, good health, well being and—most integrally—vitality and life"

Since his quest for reproducing this "source of coherence" is also metaphysical, it opens the door to plenty of interpretations out there.

I have read the article on holistic management and although it is different from Christopher Alexander's ideas, it is similar to my proposal that before embarking on such a social design it is important to establish and make explicit ex-ante some decisions about what is intended to be built. We have already talked about this on another occasion: the generative design of an existing model that has been born from an iterative process of years or centuries (Japanese TeaHouse) or the pretension of the GP design for the construction of the first Japanese Teahouse ever (which is what we seem to have considered in our crew).

In this way we can maintain - with all the precautions - that idea of unique wholeness as a principle in that which is "coherent". In that sense, our objections to Ronen's GP were not so much that it did not preserve wholeness as that it preserved the wholeness of something we were not interested in building.

The key, after all, is to work with different centers through transformations that reinforce and expand that wholeness. CA wrote it himself:

"...what really matters is the person's ability to see the centers, to make more and more centers, and to make them come to life...This is the whole ball game in the end" (NO, vol. 1, 242).

In my opinion, in order to work collaboratively, it was not a good decision to put the weight on wholeness and not to talk explicitly about centers and the fifteen properties of wholeness.

@Toni Blanco, thank you for explaining Christopher Alexander's definition of wholeness. It is very helpful for my understanding.

It is more clear to me now why @Ronen Hirsch's generative description of the digital space can be called whole. All by itself, it is something beautiful and alive.

I think your points here truly get to the heart of the matter. However, I would like to clarify that I never said I wasn't interested in building the digital space as @Ronen Hirsch described it. When I asked questions, it was to obtain clarity on what was in his mind and everyone else's mind in the crew. I was sensing that the direction we were headed was not the way I would have chosen to go, but I saw value in going there anyway. I know Ronen took my questions as coming from criticism, but that isn't what I intended. I just wanted to understand what was happening. I wanted to know how I could contribute.