Hosting the Commons by Samantha Slade

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With our P2P Summer School on the Art of Commoning taking place next week at the Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland I want to share with you this article by Samantha Slade co-organiser of the first Art of Commoning event which took place in Montreal in 2014. The article offers some reflections on the relationship between the Commons movement and the Art of Hosting process.

Originally published – http://www.percolab.com/hosting-the-commons/

High expectations

When I received an invitation to attend the Economics and the Commons conference (Berlin, 2013), I was delighted. The commons is alive in me. It is a new/old paradigm that reconnects with, and brings innovative thinking to, the social and ecological issues important to our collective well-being. I was certain that if ever a conference exemplified cutting-edge group processes, this would be it.

It is true that I have become more and more demanding about the design and wisdom that we accord to group processes. There has been an explosion of methodologies, practice and research around collective intelligence, participatory leadership, genuine dialogue and self-organizing approaches to enhance and transform how we think, learn and meet together. It befuddles me how conferences, panels and public consultations hold on to a conventional, top-down way of functioning. I am actively engaged in the international Art of Hosting and Harvesting network: a community working to develop our capacity in group process to work in service of the common good. As a result, for the past few years I have been deliberately avoiding academic conferences that didn’t seem too concerned with group process.

I was keen to break my self-imposed conference fast, and join the 200 or so other advocates, practitioners and researchers from around the world. After all, since the commons is about people coming together to reclaim, create, share and self-govern resources that belong to everyone for responsible use based on principles of equity and sustainability, I was certain this would be reflected in how people would be gathered and invited to participate. And so, myself and a few fellow Montreal commoners made our way to Berlin.

Surprise

On the first day of the conference, I was surprised to discover that we were to sit in rows of chairs, looking up at a stage where the “important people” would be talking at us with their slideshows. I had assumed that a topic that dealt with the shift from the “I” to the “we” would manifest that ideal in how it would be presented. I had imagined that we would begin by taking time to arrive as a democratic group of equals, nourish the community, and connect with experts (and their important contribution) in participatory and egalitarian ways.

The content of the many keynotes was rigorous and thought provoking – we were looking at the commons from five perspectives: (i) land and nature, (ii) working and caring, (iii) knowledge, culture and science, (iv) money, markets and value, and (v) infrastructures for commoning (See keynote videos: http://commonsandeconomics.org/). We were exploring the commons as a way to advance human well-being, beyond the current economic and political paradigms.  This was exciting, but I could not help but feel that we were not tapping into the incredible collective intelligence that abounded in the room, and we were certainly not “holding space” for connections and community.

The keynotes were followed by thematic break-out sessions where participants would have an opportunity to share and discuss. These were run with still more presentations and with little process design or skilled facilitation. My experience was disappointingly sterile: I witnessed discussion and debates dominated by the more strongly opinionated and extroverted personalities – resulting in what I call “broken circles”. We were not engaged in generative conversation or in developing shared meaning. As a processes designer and group process host, I felt that we were not tapping into our potential as a group; that something was missing. Through chatting with others that evening I discovered I was not alone in my disappointment.

Finding George

I was hungry to discover how fellow collective intelligence practitioners were experiencing the event and so I sought out conference attendee George Por, from the School of Commoning in London, UK, (http://www.schoolofcommoning.com/) who I knew was also a member of the Art of Hosting community. We sat in the lobby of the venue and got to know each other. We talked about this connection between the commons and collective intelligence. We commiserated around what George states is the commoners

“relatively low level of process literacy in group technologies of freedom and co-creation which leaves us commoners vulnerable to fall back (particularly, under stress) to patterns of debating and discussing (that means « cutting to pieces » in Latin), when what we need is emphatic and generative conversations about what matters to all of us1.”

We arrived at a shared desire to act constructively: to create a small space within the event to continue this conversation with others.

And so, on the evening of the second day George and I met again, this time as a group of four, each having brought a colleague. We took some time to share our wish for conferences and to design an invitation and a process for the conversation we would offer to host the following day. We talked about the real challenge in coaxing commoning processes and initiatives to reflect a shift from the “I” to the “we”. We discussed how a personal practice, to continuously develop skills for new ways of being together, is essential. I was reminded of what Toke Moeller, Art of Hosting co-founder says:

“We must realize that this is the time to work together like never before. It is the beginning of a more participatory democracy. We are rising up to become conscious citizens. Again. But we need practices to allow that to happen.”2

This is what Art of Hosting offers. Together we designed a 90 minute session for the next day intended to help us actively practice both hosting and commoning.

Co-creation

We entered day three with a bit of trepidation. At the venue entrance we posted this invitation on the wall:

The London School of Commoning and the Montréal Commoners

invite you to Group process technologies to empower commoning

10:30-12:00

After the morning keynote, I asked if I could make an announcement to the group. The organizers squeezed me into the mornings proceedings and handed me the mic. I announced our conversation and invited all participants to attend: explaining that this will be a playful exploration of our collective intelligence and how we can make use of it for commoning. There was some hesitation – would this distract from the day’s activities? I reminded the organisers that according to the conference’s program a space for self-organising events had been foreseen. But is seemed no physical space was available to us. Finally, we invited participants to meet by our sign and ten of us gathered outside in the chilly May air.

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Our time together was very simple. We began by each sharing our response to the question: ‘What was your latest experience of commoning, and why did it touch you?’. We played a game that helped us think about how we could better communicate the commons to people we know. We discussed actions we want to commit to. The session was enlivening. There was a desire among participants to feed something from our experience back to the conference

berlin strategies

Alain, a participant from Belgium says it beautifully:

Several proposals fused around the table for doing and talking, and Lara proposed a twenty second looking into the eyes moment in a pair format, followed with the two participants saying at the same time the word that came to their heart. We tried the idea on and Lara and myself ended up with the same word: depth. Amazing, no? I bet that this could have well happened with any of us.

We agreed that we would do just that as our “report” on our collective intelligence and commoning session. We would invite people to look into each others eyes and at the end, simultaneously speak the first word that came to mind. The power of a single minute.

I sought out the event technician who agreed to be in charge of ringing the bell to mark the time and asked the organisers to give us one minute to report back. I then found myself on stage, mic in hand, inviting everyone to find a partner. I myself found a partner. The bell rang. The silence was strong – the gaze deep. Sixty seconds passed. The bell rang again. The room resonated with two hundred people uttering a single word at the same time. After three days of keynote presentation, break-out groups and slideshows, the room exploded into conversation and human connection. This is the feeling of commoning. If the real challenge is the internal shift from the “I” to the “we”, then this moment is symbolic of that shift

From where I stand today, one of the challenges of advancing an emerging movement such as the commons lies in how we build the community and how we meet in ways that embody the values of commoning. This involves the thorny question: How can we honour the vast experience and expertise on the commons and come together inclusively and equitably in a participatory commoning fashion? The Art of Hosting certainly has something to offer here, but also, and most importantly, those that are consciously living and doing the daily work of commoning, in all its complexity, have deep learnings to share to the benefit of building our collective capacity.

Epilogue:

In October 2013, Toke Moeller, Art of Hosting co-founder, was in Montreal for an Art of Hosting training where Alain Ambrosi from Remix the Commons was a participant. We took advantage of this unique opportunity to interview Toke on the topic of commons and the link with Art of Hosting. This interview is offered as a gift to both Art of Hosting and commoning networks with a big thanks to Communautique for producing the video.

Toke Moeller, Art of Hosting co-founder talking about the Commons

toke

Interview by Samantha Slade and Alain Ambrosi, held at the Art of Hosting training in Montréal Canada, October 2013,
a Villes en biens communs (Commoning cities) event.

 

Interested in learning more about the Art of Hosting and the Commons?

Art of Hosting and Harvesting conversations that matter

Commons and Commoning

1 http://commonsandeconomics.org/groups/group-process-technologies-to-empower-commoning/forum/topic/co-evolving-the-art-of-hosting-and-the-commons/

2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPimdjSEh0Q

By Samantha Slade, co-founder percolab and Coop ECTO, commoner and Art of Hosting practitioner

percolab thanks  the The Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind (fph) for supporting our participation at the 2013 Economics and the Commons Conference.

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