The Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy

A new salon series to find the ideas for the future of our commons spaces and democracy and to activate change-makers toward them

"'Flourishing' is an unfolding, a process, not a thing and certainly not static" were opening lines from the latest salon in our collaborative effort with the Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS): the “Wonder Workshops.” This was the inaugural gathering in a new theme titled The Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy. In the last post I wrote about salons and how they are an integral part of flourishing commons. This new series will explore that centrality on the grandest scale: in our new shared spaces of global distributed information and the implications to how we relate to one another and govern ourselves.

The vision of the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salons is to create a conversation that is generative of community to identify, articulate, or create the ideas that are required for a healthier public sphere/information exchange/relationality that underpins a more civic, participatory, co-created society (a flourishing democracy).

Jonathan Haidt writes, “There are at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.” By ‘strong’ institutions we suggest a definition in the ethos of Alexis de Tocqueville as those representative institutions that focus on the long-term health and well-being of the people. These institutions support associations that build democratic habits of the heart. There are dynamics in our society weakening all three of Haidt’s forces. When social capital and trust are weakened, people stop believing in the stories institutions tell. We may need to revitalize or even tell completely new stories. 

What sort of stories do we need to tell as a society to address our grand challenges? 

New stories, and the changes they bring, unfold in the long-view of time. A great witness and chronicler of change in our time, Rebecca Solnit, writes that coexistence with difference is the beautiful basis for a truly democratic spirit. She also stresses that democracy depends on the integrity of its institutions and that systemic change happens over the long arc of time, “Actions ripple far beyond their immediate objective, and remembering this is reason to live by principle and act in the hope that what you do matters, even when results are unlikely to be immediate or obvious.” 

We will take up this spirit in these salons. They will be a collective scratch space for the exploration of: 

• Social media, how we gather, how we digest information together

• The knowledge sphere/commons

• Trust

• Becoming comfortable with nuance and ambiguity

• Epistemic humility

• Making sense in community 

• Healthy ‘institutions’ of our society

Ultimately, they will be an invitation to artists, scientists, engineers, designers, makers of any ilk and anyone in between to talk about flourishing (and simply a place to share beautiful, revitalizing resources and thoughts). We need to write a new story for the age we find ourselves in, and that story must be authored by all voices.

The ultimate purpose of these salons is to find the ideas for the future of our commons spaces and democracy and to activate change-makers toward them. To heed Octavia Butler’s oracular words:

“Belief will not save you.

Only actions

Guided and shaped

By belief and knowledge

Will save you.

Belief

Initiates and guides action —

Or it does nothing.”

-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

On November 10, 2022 we ignited the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salon series and community. You can watch the recording of the gathering here.

From this inaugural conversation and ongoing asynchronous and multiscale interactions, potent questions have emerged that are animating this collective. We will use the Flourishing Commons newsletter as a place for those questions to evolve, as a digital space for ongoing conversation, and to support different scales of interactions between salons.

The next post will share those potent questions as generative grounds for idea flow and to animate interaction in this substack space that carries momentum between full salons, but in the meantime I want to learn from and listen to you about what a digital space for the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy could look like. How would you like to interact?

How will we interact moving forward? How do we maintain attention to and momentum for the ideas swirling around the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy? How do we not look away from these ideas vital to our flourishing? Please help us define what the digital space that you prefer and would like to be a part of looks like. 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 where we hold discussions among smaller groups between the larger salons, which will occur on a monthly basis? Please let us know.