How to build a phyle - Indianopedia

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How to build a phyle

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There is not a recipe for phyle's building, but certain stages in community building necessary for developing not just a fraternal conversational community under the logic of abundance but a «demos» able to manage scarcity without fundamental conflicts.

Contenido

1 Usual phases

1.1 Some tools for bulding a real community

1.2 Maturing as a real community

1.3 Starting to build your own economic structure

1.4 The transition

1.5 Becoming a phyle

Usual phases

Do you have a real community? Communities emerge, they are not artificially made. That means interaction and identity. Taking part in someone's blog or having common interests doesn't automatically provide that. So first step is to ask yourself if you really have a community or a list of mail adresses. Size doesn't matter: a community of three persons can grow, a thousand persons spamming each other with Facebook or Twitter status updates are useless even as a starting point.

Some tools for bulding a real community

Build a private conversational space. Deliberation is what really matters in community building, so open a mailing list, a private newsgroup or a closed web forum. Start discussing and learning together.

A blog for each member. Private talking will transform personal blogs: they will be the origin of new proposals for the mailing list and the places where the conclusions will confront the external world. Having personal windows for contrasting with the world what you cook within your network is the best vaccine against narrow thinking or sectarian leaders.

Meet together. Community building is trust building. Meeting all together used to be difficult - especially if there are members on different continents - but meeting with some other members has to be on everyone's task list. Having a beer or lunch will make it easier to discuss virtually later.

A blog aggregator for all. Build an aggregator for all of the community's blogs, show the conversations to the world, expose your community to criticism as well as new ideas and influences. Accept that others talk about your network as "you". Identity emerges not only as an endogenous process but also as a kind of external recognition.

Write periodically a paper with the consensus you reach. Almost once a year, write a paper with your common approach to reality and your visions of the future. The important thing is not the ideas or proposals themselves but the exercise of consensus reaching.

Maturing as a real community

Time is on your side. Time is necessary for maturing, will make it easier for the less interested to leave, will develop connections between closer members, and will allow clusters to form inside the community. Time will let you learn the two key lessons of deliberative communities:

Not everyone goes in the same direction. Plurarchy is the cement of deliberative communities. Not everyone has to agree about everything always. It's not always necessary to achieve consensus, as it's even worse to artificially produce scarcity by voting on differences. Learning to live with plurarchy is the key experience necessary to becoming a phyle. It's not about extreme individualism: on the opposite, it's about sharing and developing a common identity from the everyday practice of complete personal independence.

The goal is not to remain together but to learn more. The nation-state has taught us that a group is more important the more members it has. At the end of the day it produces the thinking of a proselytist sect: easy to become a member, emotional chantage if you want to exit. Be just the opposite! To separate, to go out, to stop being part, or to come back to membership doesn't have to be explained, it has to be as easy as possible. Members' state of mind is not the community's business. You are a conversational, deliberative community: there is no cost for the remaining members when someone leaves, so don't impose costs on the members who want to separate from the group for a while or forever. Becoming a new member on the other hand, has to be approved by the consensus of actual members. Expel proselytism from your mind.

Identity becomes defined by conversation and learning. Independently of group origins you will discover that the important thing about your community is the knowledge and ideas you have discovered together. So even if your community was born as a study group on Swedish stamps of the fifties, you will feel that it's open to Uzbekians who share the same passion and ideas. Real identity is always transnational. Anyway, with time you will discover language as something important too. Fresh chatting, cooperation and real equality in the community's life is limited to speakers of the same language or...