Community "The principles of good communication are the basic principles of community-building. --- The rules of communication and community-building can be simply taught and learned with relative ease. This conscious learning allows people to remember the rules and practice them at a later date. --- The vast majority of people are capable of learning the rules of communication and community-building and are willing to follow them. In other words, if they know what they are doing, virtually any group of people can form themselves into a genuine community." (P 83-84 M. Scott Peck - The Different Drum) COMMUNITY - WHAT IS IT? As M. Scott in The Different Drum (Simon & Schuster 1988, p.58) first defined it, community may be described as "a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant committment to 'rejoice together, mourn together,' and to 'delight in each other, make each others' conditions [their] own.'" From “The Tao of Democracy” Using Co-Intelligence to create a world that works for all. by Tom Atlee “The conversations that happen in citizen deliberative councils arise out of and feed back into the eternally flowing river of public and private conversation that wends its way through every nook and cranny of society. Conversations are not just a tool for change. They are the medium through which all of us, together, understand and create the realities we live in. The more high-quality conversation a culture supports, the more vibrantly co-creative it will be. There is a significant side effect of all this. The task of building a co-intelligent culture is different from many other kinds of social change and utopian vision because there is no arrival, not even in our dreams. The ‘final’ result is a culture that can keep going – a sustainable, co-evolving culture that can learn from its experience and adapt and create in harmony with its circumstances. Such a culture will always be changing. It will never arrive at utopian ‘perfection,’ and none of us can predict how it will proceed. Of course, our culture is already changing, faster and faster. But from the perspective of co-intelligence, we want that change to be accompanied with, and consciously co created by, people who are learning and visioning together as a whole – as whole communities, whole states, whole societies.” Quotes "You don't just
build community; you rebuild it and rebuild it and
rebuild it for as long as you have reason to continue to
be together." M. Scott Peck |