Tell us about your congregation

Hello @Toni Blanco - thanks for answering; but you never need to have not enough sleep to answer me!

No problem Ria. It was for all the gang. I do want to share about my microsolidarity crew and learn from yours. And I do not want to look like that guy that promoted one day his LinkedIn profile and disappeared. I find that kind of behavior very disrespectful.

Thanks Toni! appreciated!

our congregation is called Open Atlas , in reunion Island but the people are all over France and Europe, we try to think society in a way that corresponds to an approach respecting humans, nature and the finite planet, we only build opensource, digital tools and animation methods for collective intelligence like communecter.org, whihch in french means connecting the commons. We build tools to help communities in many different way , with a territorial, local and geographical approach, a sort of territorial wikipedia. The same engine allows us to build no brand interfaces for communities with innovative approaches.

We set up a third place model that we experiment, adapt and apply here in Reunion Island called KiltirLab (multi locations localy) where we coCreate, coWork, Collaborate and interconnect with many other Third places here and all over Europe. We help Third places interconnect.
The KiltirLab is also a wholesale distribution point where we experiment tools and processes for autonomy, with farmers and consumer, to optimise short circuits. We tried to write a utopic society program called Smarterre, that creates smartTerritories with a community creating sectorial approach and lot's of interoperability. We build territorial thematic observatories that in turn produces communities.
We are currently building OCECO (Open Collab Tools for a cooperative economy), a ressource and proposal (project) management interface, integrating reciprocity rules for Organization, it's based on a new tech stack called COForms (Collaborative Open Forms) which allows us to translate any workflow or process magically , we working with ValueFlows and REA semantics.
We strat the POC, and manage to find financing and currently connecting partners to think, build, use and experiment the tool and the processes.

When we talk about our congregation, we talk about little boats with crews, collaborating on moving ports , we go from port to port , the congregation or ecosystem is like a bigger boat, and all this in the open ocean ready to meet many more boats !!!

I am involved in a dynamic that "looks like" a congregation formation, so I guess I can put it here.

Le'ts call it the Uncongregation Congregation. It is based in Barcelona. It has no name nor explicit purpose to become a congregation, which at this stage I think that -paradoxically- is important to let that door open.

I tried to start a congregation in the local chapter of an open collective of purposeful freelancers, but it did not work. Great learning. In short, the problem as I see it was the scarcity mentality of the group that prevented open sharing and collaboration (derived from the precarious income situation in which the members were), and the panic of any kind of commitment and mutualization that could make them less "free" (lots to say about that). I was told that my leaving was a wake-up call for the group so things are changing since then in the right direction.

Paying attention to what I learned (and I learned a lot) from my dearest friends of Las Indias Electronicas, I have taken a completely different approach. First I co-created a livelihood pot called Pantheon. After a year, it has been a terrific experience at all levels. Now I have contacted 3 micro-companies (2-3 people in each) participated by people I loved work with in the past, be it in the same company, be it in a collaborative project. I acted as the "source", sharing a "commons" (a very simple workshop I created that works really well) and offered them to freely sell it and run it, alone or together, and then make this commons grow with the learnings and contributions of everyone. It has been for a month now, we had two meetings, the first workshops have been sold in a new improved version. Also, we got emotional support during this crazy times (meeting friendly faces, speak openly and relax has been one of the most expressed gains), business opportunities emerged from being in the radar of each other and sharing ideas, and also a conversation of mutualization of costs of on-line collaboration tools.

I'll keep you posted about its organic evolution.

Thanks for your story @Toni Blanco - sharing, and in that way building trust, is what it is all about! building the net of open, trusted relationships... can seem to catch some paid projects.