Sunday Open Thread – January 14, 2007

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

• The Role of Art and Artists in Social Change: Was Eminem’s failure to get Kerry elected the beginning of the end?
• Experience-Based Decision Making: It seems an obvious choice, until you understand why the alternatives hold sway.
• Love: Can we be in it, and be activists at the same time?
• Survey Results: The winner of the contest I ran a year ago to predict what would happen during 2006 (on January 18th, when the final US inflation number is announced).
• Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Upside of Down: which is preoccupied not with preventing civilizational collapse but with contingency plans to enable a “healthy renewal” after it.
• Finding & Working With Others to Save the World: Ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world.

What I’m thinking about:

As a result of a message from Don Dwiggins: “I propose one characterization of a community as ‘a group of people who are stakeholders in one or more commons’ “. Don says this harks back to Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons principles, which I wrote about in connection with Peter Brown’s The Commonwealth of Life. The idea here is replacing private property ownership with community stewardship. For this to happen the ‘community’ needs to have shared values and goals and trust and love for each other — it won’t work in the modern ‘community of convenience’ (convenience for the real estate developer, the lawyer, the government and the employer) where there are none of these things. I don’t think virtual communities will get us there either — ultimately we need to ‘get physical’ and find some way to move us all to places where other people we share intentions with are. So my thinking is: Why do people move homes now? What (like ‘love of place’) causes people to dig in their heels and refuse to move, regardless of the incentives? In light of this, what could we do to attract people to move to intentional communities and detract them from moving away from them? What does ‘stewardship’ mean and could we give it legal force that would allow it to replace ‘ownership’ in anevolutionary way?

Over to you: What’s keeping you awake these days? And, what’s holding you back?