Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy: Questions we are living
Sharing the most potent questions that emerged from the inaugural 'Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy' salon (November 2022) and shaping future directions of these events
On November 10, 2022 we ignited a new series of Flourishing Salons in partnership with the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) "Wonder Workshops": Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy.
We began with a framing for these salons, which we share here with excitement and hope:
As you are reading this post, help define both the directions these salons will follow and the digital space that you prefer and would like to be a part of. Do you want to interact in the comments to these posts? On some social media platform? On some group chat platform? Perhaps through regular virtual conversations for sub-groups in between full salons? Please let us know.
One digital space to sustain discourse will certainly be these newsletters--a place for the questions we are living to evolve, for ongoing conversation, and for different scales of interactions between salons.
The questions we are living
From the inaugural conversation and subsequent asynchronous and multiscale interactions (from big groups to person-to-person), potent questions have emerged that are animating this collective.
What is the role of institutions? A creative tension emerged around the focus on institutions in the future of democracy.
Some argued that institutions are always imperfect and often harmful realizations of ideas. Others defended institutions as the vehicles for embodying new ideas and changing society.
How do groups of people gather and make sense together?
This was discussed at two levels. First, in the role and practice of participation and co-creation in our democracy; our civic functions. Second, at a meta-level in how we are gathering here in these salons, how we might understand these as an example for creating flourishing networks and the commons spaces that support them.
How do we maintain attention to and momentum for the ideas swirling around the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy?
How will we interact moving forward? What are the in-person and digital spaces that will support robust idea generation, exchange, and evolution?
What is the 'real work' of these salons? What will be their purpose?
One outcome of these salons is a set of frameworks for online/digital spaces/commons conducive of healthy relationality and civics and a network to test and provide feedback and participate in living conversation to evolve them.
Looking ahead
These questions and those that have yet to emerge reveal activities we will undertake in 2023.
We will explore different ways to sustain the idea flow of these conversations. How do we not look away from these ideas vital to our flourishing? We will experiment with different forms of interacting across mediums. Additionally, idea flow only flourishes across scales of interaction, so we will explore conversations with different number of participants as well as personal reflection and contemplation to augment the larger salon gatherings. We will also bring artistic and scientific capacities to make sense of our discussions. We will place specific emphasis on connecting the sensemaking to the actions they inspire.
Please help us define the digital space that you prefer and would like to be a part of.
How might we understand our own salon group and its flourishing? We will use concepts from complexity science, network analysis and the study of collective intelligence and ecosystems, to understand our own group's flourishing and abstract what we learn to the flourishing of groups as a guide to our society. We have wonderful scientists and complexity thinkers involved already, but are looking for more people to help with these analyses.
We will explore the languages of flourishing. We use the terms flourishing and resilience deliberately--using words that go beyond our existing lexicon. 'Flourishing' and 'resilience' can reorient us toward new thinking and experience. Indeed, words make worlds [On Being; Wittgenstein]. Part of the role this community will play is to explore this new language, to collectively write the ontologies and epistemologies of flourishing and resilience. Ontologies our democracy and our society need now. Some of the transformations that need more exploration are:
From 'progress' to 'muscular Becoming'
From 'bliss' to 'vitality'
Not fearful or resistant to discomfort, but curious about it and understanding of its role in Becoming and Being
From metrics to a cross-ways-of-knowing understanding
From intellectual knowing to a fuller spectrum of knowing (sensorial, emotional, intuitive, imaginative, relational, bodily, experiential)
From 'what is made verbal is all that is real' to cross-medium and cross-communication knowing
From short to long views of time
How these transformations construct together is a grand challenge for these salons. The concept we will be defining is 'collective composition.' Let's write the ontology of flourishing and resilience together. How we do this will be determined by all participants, in the salons as in the digital spaces for these commons.
Our ontology and epistemology will not be satisfying in the small way that we are used to: things having clear and incontrovertible boundaries and definitions. For issues beyond any individual mind, the clarity we seek belongs to the collective. The crystallization is held at the collective level, beyond the capacity of any individual, and that is uncomfortable to us, but it is a part of flourishing and resilience, just like no bee in a flourishing hive holds the entire knowledge of the hive. There is a Jewish tradition, and most spiritual traditions I am aware of have some parallel teaching, that "It is not upon you to finish the job, nor are you free to desist from it." Our curiosity will be generative of a more capacious imagination, that will bring us closer to understanding and be full of exhilarating moments along the way, periods where we get a glimpse of the broader brilliance; a strange nearness.
Finally, focus is emerging on institutions that might arise from these ideas. The question this leads to is how to be mindful of what might happen? What might these institutions mean? What would be their impact? Can we think along more steps than merely the immediate and the first-order? Two concepts are invoked in these questions:
The role of governance to define the practices through which an institution will evolve and the participation in determining what that evolution will be; and
Stuart Kauffman's adjacent possible.
Both will be a part of future salons discussions.
Building the network
Our goal is to make these salons richer forums. That means building a capable network that can muscularly hold and assess these ideas.
Who else, individuals or groups or organizations, might we involve that is not yet here? Please help us make connections through who you know and admire that needs to be a part of these salons and these commons.
Imagination and Worldbuilding
Finally, worldbuilding is an irrepressible part of activities to cultivate personal and cultural imagination. How might we more robustly and rigorously build the worlds our ideas would create so that we can run thought experiments in them (sound trajectories across those imagined worlds) and understand the implications of actions we might take? We can and should learn from numerous groups who have defined the practice to become more skillful worldbuilders, including artists, philosophers, and physicists. Fiction writers and novelists (storytellers, in general) have been creating worlds coherent enough to ask questions of them. Philosophers have created the frameworks for assesing potential changes to an imagined world (thought experiments and counterfactuals). Physicists have created practices for meaningful critique.
Together, these elements of worldbuilding and critique are part of the framework of more muscular thought experiments, which we sorely need.
Democracy itself requires this imagination…
"Full engagement in the movement called democracy requires no less of us than full engagement in the living of our own lives...We can see the future only in imagination, so we must continue to dream of freedom, peace, and justice for everyone." -Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy.