Of course, the kibbutz, the “sharing it all” the way we Indianos do, is just one form of the “community experience.” Surely, in terms of scope and the breadth of its determination, it’s the most fertile in results and learning, but even so, it’s a long way off from most people who are looking to strengthen the commons in their everyday life—in a large enterprise, in a small team or in their groups of friends or neighbors. People that can’t find what they’re looking for in the “sharing economy.” It’s time to start turning what we’ve learned into “bridges” for those who want to cross over.

What you shouldn’t forget

1. You already have the most important thing: the people you trust and with whom share reflections on life and how to live it. People with whom you learn, and for whom you feel affection. That’s your community. In fact, it’s normal to have several. We all have more than one: the one we form with our partner, our family, friends with whom we share hobbies, or work colleagues with whom we have an understanding. Really, if you think about it, only the hard part is left to do…
2. Never forget that belonging to a community is a shared, active, and voluntary desire, not the passive product of a situation or a common thing that “we are”: communities are not “created,” whether on the basis of abstractions, or because we push others, or because it seems “obvious” to us that it’s for the “common good.” And there are no exceptions: otherwise, it always goes badly.
3. “The common good” and “democracy” are shared political values… but they don’t work in a community.Communities that work are based on consensus and diversity. There is no “common good” that can be defined with a vote; if we try, we will destroy the very base of community. Does that mean that in a community, things can only be done when they are part of a consensus? No, it means that community, as such, only advances on the basis of consensus, and that for it to work, it must give space to the highest individual freedom, the highest abundance, which, in fact, over the long term, is the measure of its success.
4. The importance of consensus means that the basis of every community that works is a conversation–and therefore learning–that are shared and permanent. Community and communication have the same root, and we shouldn’t forget it.

And the two most important:

1. A community is no more than a set of interpersonal relationships, and is organic in the same sense that coral is really a set of autonomous animals, which is why what defines it is its culture, its shared ethos. The rules of a community, its structure, aremechanical, like the mechanical guides that we can put in a coral to condition its growth. In general, the organic must be supported by the mechanical, but the mechanical must be subject to the organic–otherwise, the “guides” would kill what’s alive, or wouldsimply empty out the community.
2. And the most important of all: a community is something we do, not something we are. We don’t share essences, we don’t build essences, there is no learning of essences. What we really share in community is doing. The nucleus of everything is learning and the knowledge developed towards an objective or a common search. It’s the relationships that we establish by struggling together for something that produces fraternity and true recognition of the other, not ecstatic discovery of some essence. Knowledge discovered together is what makes us feel that we really share a common legacy earned together. That mix of struggle and learning is what arises spontaneously in work as a shared challenge. That’s why phenomena like the kibbutz appear, and that’s why “shared income” communities are usually volatile if they don’t share the work that creates that income.

Where to begin

The Club of the Indias continues to surprise us and teach us things. Right now, it’s a true case study. Everything started in the most natural way, a year ago now, with the opening of laMatriz.org. Little by little, a conversation began that grew and flowed. By October, there were small agreements, and thousands of messages exchanged, and with them, enough trust for some matriceros to go ahead and share an apartment during Somero 2015. Following Somero, we had the first seminar: a friend of the club taught others in an in-person workshop. We started a blog, and that blog worked to take a step forward, and from in-person seminars, we will go to our first online course. And from there, we’ll move to our first proposal to do a team research project, “Project Christmas,” which a half-dozen members of the club already have supported with their posts and searches documenting the context of what, if everything goes as planned, will end up being a experiment in the Internet of things and the direct economy.

In just a year, la Matriz/ The Club of the Indias has become a space for fraternity where learning, conversations, and differences in all kinds of things are shared, and which is already starting to think about producing things together.

It wasn’t a spontaneous phenomenon: it’s required conscious willpower from everyone, as well as desire, hours of writing posts and discussing all manner of things on la Matriz. It’s been an organic phenomenon in which the contribution of the Indianos was to provide media, develop a tool, create significant times and spaces, and participate like any other person in the conversations that arose without monopolizing them or putting up artificial borders. Thanks to that, now we have a Indiano community beyond the Indianos of the kibbutz.

Surely, for those who want develop community among their own circle, it’s a good example.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

The post How to build your community experience appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We proudly present you today The Book of Community which you can buy now in Amazon. It was written by the whole team of las Indias and translated by Steve Herrick.

From the introduction

We know that most people who propose to “create” a community don’t want to “live in community.” They are looking for guides to design a way of life for themselves and their circle based on sharing more than what they share so far, even if they feel like it’s excessively risky to have “too much” in common. We believe that this book can serve them to do better without having to reestablish the borders that have been set. It’s not that the different dimensions are independent from each other — not at all — but what we learned in each one of them will be interesting even for those who only want to go deeper into one.

This book, rather than a typical “manual,” should be read as an “advice book.” Its focus is practical, because it was practice that guided our evolution. Like Borges, who “wrote” Quijote in the middle of twentieth century, discovering that “what was coming out of him” was identical to what Cervantes had written, though he had not read him before, we realized little by little that that that we’d learned by trial and error, what defined the lifestyle that we were discovering, followed the steps of a long tradition that began in the garden of Epicurus and which we recognized in our era in the Icarians and the Israeli kibbutz. Still later, we met other communities in the US, Germany and Austria that, with years, sometimes decades, of history, and dozens, if not hundreds of members, that had arrived at very similar lessons and models to ours. They are productive and egalitarian communities that give special importance to conversation, learning, and debate, but also to production in common for the material needs of all.

Because we didn’t start from any concrete model, and because we didn’t have “blueprints” from which to build, we have organically incorporated tools and techniques that go far beyond the scarce current community bibliography. This bibliography is, almost entirely, of North American origin and suffers from the need to “invent” what was invented in South America and Europe long ago: the forms and practices of the housing cooperative. What’s shocking is that by dressing it with new clothes (“ecovillage,” “intentional community”), it can find a market in places like France, Spain, Argentina or Uruguay, where there’s a very long tradition of this kind of cooperativism. In contrast, there is little, by which I mean almost nothing, written half-decently about the topics that we usually share, when we “communards” from different places in the world meet each other: how to create an environment helps everyone to overcome their fears and laziness, how to enter the market, how to integrate new members, how to avoid community self-absorption, etc.

These will be our central topics on the following pages.

We think that communities that share everything have a treasure of valuable experiences for anyone who proposes to strengthen their real community and the people they value and feel close with, by sharing some dimension of life in common, whether it’s the economic dimension, the intellectual, or everyday coexistence. Unfortunately, these experiences are mostly part of the “oral culture” of each community network. They are shared but rarely written down. This book is one of the first attempts to do so in Spanish [originally]. It does not answer to any ideological label in particular, but attempts to collect learning from many communities that do not hide from such labels. It attempts to collect a “communitarian consensus,” but also make its contribution, except that this contribution has more to do with common sense in caring for the people and things around us than with any political or social theory. It is intended for those that are considering joining a community or who want to experience community practices with their friends.

If we’ve done it well, it will save you time and learning that sometimes can be painful. If we made assumptions or left out important things that are not obvious, we hope you’ll write us so we can improve new editions.

The post Book of the Day: «The book of community» in English appeared first on P2P Foundation.