Commoning and bootstrapping local to global economy redesign by REconomy practitioners
Announcing Popping Bubbles workshop series and our first online Open Space event, part 2 (part 1, part 3, part 4, part 5)
This is an invitation and action call for you personally — just “observing” and “consuming” content will not do…
REconomy practitioners is virtual community of practice (CoP) of and for regenerative entrepreneurs and community organisers. We care about planetary health and regeneration.
We are all over the world.
We do stuff where we live, and we connect translocally, transnationally and globally to benefit from peer-to-peer support, social learning and coordinated action. We do that primarily virtually, travelling to meet only when really necessary or when possible (most of the time we don’t have budgets to travel anyway, and if we would have that we would prefer to spend the money for something more useful). That’s also one more way to reduce our personal carbon footprint — we like to make that point to ourselves and others.
After emerging as transnationally distributed project team within Transition movement (in 2013, our timeline is shared here) we recently kicked off our own transition towards self-organised community of practice. To keep being useful for our members and the Earth we NOW need to do two things: we need to move on with the process of commoning and we need to do some good ol’ bootstrapping to finance our 2019 activities.
What do I mean by commoning?
Some of us understand commoning as something obvious and natural, and some of us are still rather confused about how this is done in business, or in our virtual community of practice. Recent TEDxTalk by Samantha Slade, co-founder of Percolab, might clarify some practicalities.
In our context commoning is this: whatever is done in our virtual community of practice belongs to humanity and life on Earth as a whole. It does not belong to any of us individually or to any of legal entities we are associated with. We are evolving our virtual community of practice as digital commons, in a way — because online platforms and tools we use are not commons, our network is —but that is so only if we keep having conversations that build our relationships of learning and action.
Now… whatever we do is created by somebody’s individual or by team contributions, and facilitating virtual community of practice requires quite a lot of skills and time, both with backend and frontend tasks (above the line, below the line — use whatever jargon works for you). The simple truth is: to achieve anything meaningful in the context of our work (planet Earth ecosystem regeneration during times of climate tragedy, remember?) a coordinated, sustained, daily team effort is needed. To move forward we need to create and fund this team (myself included). Monthly budget of €1,250 seems to be good starting point and we don’t want chicken or egg situation: once funds are in place, we move on. Some grants or awards for what we do might manifest eventually, but we are not in a position to rely on that. As self-organised and high-trust network for systemic change we better rely on ourselves.
And we are quite good at bootstrapping :)
Bootstrapping is native to REconomy approach — as it really is for every true entrepreneur. Different languages have different words for that (anybody knows what stands for bootstrapping in French or Swedish?).
REconomy enterprises are normally community-led and often started with community-only support (which is not exactly the same as crowdsourcing, because community is not a crowd, and not exactly the same as tripple F financing because no fools are involved and everything is very deliberate). There is evolving practice among REconomy practitioners of convening Local Entrepreneur Forums where Community of Dragons is looking into ways to support new regenerative enterprises locally. We now need to replicate that for our virtual community of practice, using fiat currency (Euro in our case), a medium that enables transnational collaboration, on Open Collective platform — click here:
If what I wrote above makes sense, here is my invitation to you:
- visit our Open Collective page and set up your recurring monthly donation: to reach our bootstrapping budget of €15,000 per year we need 250 monthly donations of €5 or more; you can start supporting REconomy commons personally or as an organisation (there are other ways to contribute, of course, but what we need now is regular monthly income)
- if you have not done that already, join REconomy practitioners on online platform of your choice and meet with us on video soon, see here. Our video calls are meant to be shared experience that we don’t record (we don’t want to make a “content” to be “consumed” later… normally never). Next three REconomy online events are scheduled: for 25 October with Beatrice Ungard, for 15 November with Alanna Irving and for 6 December 2018 with Daniel Christian Wahl. I hope to meet you there.
- Join us on Thursday, 6 December 2018 at 5pm GMT / 18:00 CET for 2-hour online workshop on Regenerative Cultures: Living the Questions Together with Daniel Christian Wahl. Attending our video conferences is the best way to connect and meet with REconomistas and Transitioners worldwide.
If you liked what you just read and you would like to help spread the word, I encourage you to click the 👏 button and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help invitations and calls to action above get more exposure. Also, please share this widely in your social media channels… Thank you in advance! :)
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