What we do
We are building infrastructure for the future we wish to inhabit
Terran Collective's work is creating tools, systems, and practices that bring us closer together, build trust, and allow us to coordinate bioregional decision making and collective action effectively. All technology encodes the worldview of its authors. What happens if we create technology in service to the greatest good of all beings? We want to create free and open-source software for everyone, to advance the transition to a regenerative economy. We are also experimenting with cooperative human practices of coordination like decentralized governance and gift economics.
SCOPE OF PRACTICE
Community Weaving
We are community builders and weavers, and believe that the best way to coordinate is within the context of healthy relationships. We know that we can only move at the speed of trust, and believe that building trust takes consistent connection and showing up for each other over time.
We host gatherings that foster trust and collaboration and allow participants to imagine a more beautiful future. These include campouts, dinners, trainings and councils to build community as well as bigger convenings like our recent Terran Cospiracy to grow our collective intelligence.
We also participate in and experiment with group processes, including the Way of Council and the Work that Reconnects for facilitating gatherings, deepening relationships, and resolving conflicts without violence.
Current Focus
We host a regular rhythm of Terran gatherings, both simple and small community ones like potlucks and larger convenings like our recent Terran Cospiracy, along with regular community Zoom calls.
We are also committed to participating in as many gatherings and days of action hosted by our bioregional partners and friends as we can.
Find our event calendar and all the ways you can join our community and stay connected on our Community page.
Current Inquiry
How do we build bridges to the many diverse communities living in the Bay Area? How do we ensure that every voice has a seat at the table? How do we ensure that our work is informed by a diverse and inclusive group of people and ideas?
SCOPE OF PRACTICE
Technology for thriving
As technologists, software developers and designers with decades of experience, we see an opportunity for technology to increase interdependence and cooperation without coercion or manipulation.
We create software tools that map relationships, resources, needs, skills and offerings, and that allow people to coordinate collective action, activating them to participate in the regeneration of the world.
We're building these tools on Hylo, a coordination platform that we steward in partnership with Holo, the makers of Holochain.
Current Focus
Launching new coordination features on Hylo in partnership with regenerative communities using the platform
Developing our technology roadmap
Transition Hylo to a platform cooperative, to experiment with tech commons and software utilities for all
Current Inquiry
How can technology bring us closer together, into resilient, trust-based, land-based community? How can it support individual and group thriving, instead of driving us apart, distracting us and extracting our attention?
SCOPE OF PRACTICE
Regenerating the commons
Our land, our resources, and our communities are a commons. How can we return to an understanding that governing our shared resources is a shared responsibility? Rebuilding the commons worldview and our ability to collectively govern is the core of our theory of change.
To refresh our ideas of ownership and governance, we are designing and experimenting with new and remembered ways of working together, sharing resources, group decision making and how to steward commons and common pool resources.
Current Focus
Doing the tough but rewarding relational work required to be in deep coherence as a team
Researching collective governance models: One of the most important changes required right now is for us to learn how to make effective decisions together through collaboration and cooperation instead of competition and dominance. We are exploring governance models like Sociocracy that are dynamic, decentralized and empowering.
Seeding bioregional guilds across many sectors: We see creating modern guilds as an important way to help those already doing regenerative work in our bioregion to coordinate more effectively. These guilds will bring together everyone working in a particular field, for example agriculture, education, technology, governance, etc. into an organizational structure designed to foster collaboration amongst existing projects. Guilds will help make sure work isn’t being duplicated, information and knowledge is being shared, and resources are flowing where they are needed at the right time. We are just beginning the project of helping these guilds form, and see this as an important medium term project we can help steward.
Current Inquiry
How can we create models of leadership, governance and ownership that are effective and can outcompete the market, while enabling each contributor to offer their gifts fully and feel included, supported, empowered, and energized to do the work required?
SCOPE OF PRACTICE
Collaborative ecosystem mapping
We are connectors and weavers that believe in the power of transparency and shared maps to help us collectively navigate the space and time we inhabit. Those who own the maps have the power to dictate where we go and at this moment the most important maps are social/network graphs that are owned by big tech companies like Facebook and Google and used to manipulate, abuse and sell us things.
We create collaborative maps of our ecosystems, the people, organizations, projects, resources, skills, and needs of communities we are a part of. We are particularly focusing on bioregional scale mapping that will allow people anywhere to actively participate in the stewardship of the land and communities around them.
Current Focus
Researching our bioregion: We are studying the ecological and social factors relevant to our Bay Area bioregion. This includes examining the carrying capacity of local watersheds based on food production and water sources, understanding the history of the original peoples of this land and connecting with the indigenous communities still present here, and determining what is needed to bring the most health and resilience to this place.
Identifying Regenerative Players: We seek the key regenerators in our bioregion to build relationships and partnerships with, and to understand their needs. We have a plan for the tools we believe are needed, but we’ll start building those that are most important to our partners in this bioregion.
Prototyping a relationship graph: We collectively maintain a database of our relationships with friends and allies in our bioregion and beyond. We utilize this tool to help us decide which relationships to prioritize, who to invite to our events, and where bridges need to be built.
Current Inquiry
How can transparently mapping resources and relationships across a bioregion generate stronger bonds, build accountability, and accelerate regeneration?
SCOPE OF PRACTICE
Storytelling for cultural evolution
We are storytellers, artists and writers, who know that we will not be able to accomplish our goals without deep cultural shifts. For example, mitigating climate change will require wholesale changes to our economic systems, and that will require new stories about what we value and why.
Learning how to tell these stories of interbeing and abundance in a way that creates a movement and spreads far and wide is a big project. Even though we believe that at the core we need to find deep alignment, different communities will respond to different ways of expressing the same fundamental values. So we are experimenting with various messages and mediums of storytelling through blog posts, meme creation, and events of all kinds.
Current Focus
Sharing our ideas through writing.
Creating new holidays that help people envision what is possible and find their role in the work needed to get there. Our first version of this is Inheritance Day, a holiday every December 12 where we imagine that we are living 150 years in the future when humanity has created paradise on earth, and we are honoring all the ancestors for the hard work they did to get us there. It’s a future seeing mix of Thanksgiving and Passover and has been really impactful since we started celebrating it in 2015.
Current Inquiry
Is All Beings Thriving a story that will resonate with others enough? Is it too utopian? How can we tell stories that are inclusive and inspiring and unifying all at the same time?
2020-2022
How we want to grow
WINTER 2020
Gathering resources, mapping the bioregion and building our network of collaborators
- Continue growing and deepening the Terran community and network through monthly gatherings and Zoom calls.
- Grow stewardship team
- 1 day of direct action per season.
- Fill the Terran Watershed so we are resourced for at least the next year, ideally in an ongoing (monthly contribution) way so we don’t have to keep spending lots of time fundraising.
- Share our tranpsarent budget and operations model so that we can receive resources to support our work. Create an ecosystem that allows us to do our best work as a gift to the bioregion, and ultimately the biosphere. Our initial goal is to feel comfortably resourced for 12 months, We hope to explore [new paradigm] resource models.
- Develop & release technological roadmap in partnership with bioregional allies.
- Announce core platform
- Identify 5-10 actors in the bioregion and interview them to understand their needs and offerings, and how we can best collaborate.
- Nurture development of three initial bioregional Guilds & identify tools needed to help them
- Finalize and share initial membership model for Terran Collective.
- Develop and utilize systems for transparent finances.
- Publishing at least 1 article per month on bioregionalism, community weaving, tech for human thriving...
- Learn from & map bioregional land projects
- Develop structure and templates for our ongoing events and gatherings, both in person and on-line
- Third annual Terran Camp!
- Grow stewardship team
- Develop advisory councils
- Continue fundraising until we have a year of water in the well.
- Release first seasonal report on our resource usage/management.
- Develop regenerative business model for our tools and services
- Start using our technology to improve collaboration and cooperation amongst the regenerative community of the Bay Area.
- Conduct user experience research and testing of our designs
- Continue working with partners to run in-person research.
- Explore how the technology we are building can help with bioregional ecosystem mapping.
- Work with guilds to map their landscape
- Release model for collective ownership & governance of our collective and the technology we are building, and gather feedback
- Implement collective membership agreements
- Build relationships with bioregional land projects
SPRING 2020
Grow the team, conduct research, develop technology and nurture our community, implement collective membership agreements
SUMMER 2020
Implement the first iteration of our collective ownership, governance and resource sharing systems, grow the ecosystem
- Preparing for second annual Cospiracy
- Scaling our robust tools to 5-100 of communities and organizations.
- Still primarily focused on bioregion
- Continue onboarding more bioregional partners
- Convene bioregional Gathering
- Work with guilds to collaborate on sharing resources & offerings.
- Finalize and share initial membership model for Terran Collective.
- Develop and utilize systems for transparent finances.
- Begin streaming and more transparent communication
- Second annual Cospiracy
- Begin to release tech stack tools to global audiences, allow people to begin the process of mapping their own bioregion
- Launch the bioregional regenerative map
- Work with guilds to build tools that allow them to actively support bioregional communities and organizations as groups
- Implement collective ownership & governance system for our tech suite: Creating a technological commons shared by all
FALL 2020
Develop tools for bioregional meta-organizational collaboration via guilds and start looking for other bioregions to release our tools to
2021
Building tools that create commons, make tools that make it possible for anyone to create a collective, deepening community in the bay
- Work with our network to coordinate large-scale actions emergent from small-scale collaboration and coordination
- Expand to two more large yearly events beyond Terran Camp and Cospiracy
- Develop tools that allow for other collectives to form, map, sense, choose and act
- Bioregional handbook
- Guilds meeting regularly, tools released for guild governance and management of productive output: Creating a commons of our labors of passion and love
- Implement collective ownership and governance of the collective during an in person congress with online participation: Create a governance & ownership commons shared by all
- Host gathering for bioregional land projects
- We seek land to steward in the Bay Area to create regenerative and land-integrated communities. Community centers and live-in projects.
- Fill the Terran Watershed so we are resourced for at least the next year, ideally in an ongoing (monthly contribution) way so we don’t have to keep spending lots of time fundraising.
- Share our tranpsarent budget and operations model so that we can receive resources to support our work. Create an ecosystem that allows us to do our best work as a gift to the bioregion, and ultimately the biosphere. Our initial goal is to feel comfortably resourced for 12 months, We hope to explore [new paradigm] resource models.
- Develop tools for local coordination: Neighborhood, city & county level - work with local stakeholders to identify deepest needs
- Develop guild commons
- Begin acquiring land: Create a commons of distributed land projects, shared and stewarded by all. Community centers in various parts of the bioregion, that allow people to collaborate, meet, share space in person. Degraded land -> Reforestation.
2022
Find and secure land for collective stewardship and governance, nurture the commons we have created and release tools for local meta-communities
