Principles of Community Design

Attended a great workshop today on Principles of Community design hosted by The Living Systems Institute (LSI).

It was a very open format discussion based day working off of 33 main principles.  Everyone got 2 principles and we rotated around speaking what we thought that principles meant to us and what we were doing in our communities. 

In effect, we became the power point!

Major points that stuck with me:

-The whole format was like a putting together a mosaic.  Unlike in linear thinking where an idea grows from simple to complex, we instead assembled many concepts and let the bigger picture emerge organically.

-Outside of the financial market value system which is based on scarcity, another metric of value is in creating new interactions.  Interactions where people can transfer resources, information, emotional support.  Made me think of entropy.  The natural system favors more interactions.  More possibilities.  More mixing. Just as John Warner said, we need to embrace the chaos.

-We may only need simple things like food and shelter to survive, but we need a few others to THRIVE.  David Braden, facilitator listed 5 elements for human thriving :
        -Food
        -Shelter
        -Clothing
        -Healthcare
        -Education

A lot of these ideas come from the practice of Permaculture:

(From Wikipedia)
Permaculture is a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, environmental design, construction and integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.



I love these workshops because they help me to build new vocabulary to help address limitations in the current scientific paradigm.  So much of facilitating  thought-provoking discussions  is about introducing new language.  It allows us to be more concise in our definitions and more dynamic in our solutions.  Feeling lucky to have the resources of such an insightful community.