Community Memory

A Framework for Building Resilient Communities
Anchored in Relationship and Empowered by Collaborative Technology

This six-part series will examine how new organizational and technological approaches to collaborative coordination can support a ‘community memory’ grounded in affectionate relationship to each other and our places over generations. These locally derived traditions of placemaking can help build more resilient communities and reduce our reliance on disempowering institutions.

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Each essay is linked below. If they resonate with you, I’d love for you to collect a memento here.
Additional context regarding my approach to this project and general philosophy of writing can be found here.

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1. Relationship

Despite the proliferation of impersonal organizational structures and abstract global economies, only the mutual extension of trust—grounded in affection for our home places—can foster traditions of placemaking strong enough to steward our communities sustainably through generations. →

2. Agency

Life-giving agency must be established through the kind of spontaneous, trust-filled relationship that distant institutions are incapable of. Innovative organizational structures, in rhythm with natural ecologies, can scaffold these relationships into a more resilient organizational mycelium in support of our home places. →

3. Limits

As globalized economies accumulate hidden existential debts, institutions seeking to control for risk instead reinforce our trajectory. Affectionate and empathetic relationship with the people and places around us can help more effectively build resilience and diffuse these risks. →

4. Time

Agency and limits both are strongly supported by traditions of generational knowledge transfer, rooted in specific place. Equilibrial investment and draw from local resources over generations grounds a community in time and place, giving joy in the present and assurance of the future. →

5. Tools

Our tools and technologies amplify our habits of relating to each other, our places, our organizational systems, and even time. More collaborative computing architectures can help us shed the prosthesis of institutional control and rebuild the locally-derived competency necessary to steward our places through generations. →

6. Action

Capable new tools for collaborative action are poised to shift sovereignty back to small communities at more appropriate fidelity of empowered placemaking. Together, these tools can help us build a persistent community memory capable of carrying our places forward with vitality. →