README

What is it about?

Here I describe research projects ideas related to community living inspired by Life itself community. The document aims to document research related to mainly usage of communal co-living space. Initially the README started in December 2021.

Research questions

The main question here is: How can we document, map and analyse community life in general? The more concrete questions: What are common practices, which can be inherited and quantified from the life in monasteries to life in recent communities? We are also generally interested in analysis of intentional communities around the globe and creation of open database for this.

Other groups of questions are related to specific life-time of communities. What is the life expectations for communities based on their type (e.g.anarchy, non-anarchy communities)? Are there selected features or features combination of communities, which are playing an important for long-term existance? (survivability analysis) Can we estimate the average time for sustainability for each existing community based on their features?

Method for mapping community life

We propose an abstract method for creating and mapping community life addressing its evolution in space and time.
Through documenting activities and space of the community life in “Life itself” during Sympoesis #2 we demonstrate how we can use this method as a mapping technique for other communities.

Using this method we propose here, one can also compare various community experiences at the same place and different periods, and understand deeper possible reasons for discomfort within communities connected to general space-time usage. Other questions to be answered here: How to replicate or encapsulate the experience lived by community members to be able to transmit best practices to other community hubs?

The core idea of our method is definition of phase space* of the community. After defining the main axes of phase space we map community activities, how it explores the physical space (living areas). It’s only by understanding the complexity of interactions inside a community one can deeper understand and maybe also improve its activities that we can identify the key community characteristics. How do we define the concept of community phase space, which allows us to dissect and clearly see some tendencies of community life. The term “phase space” is a mathematical concept widely used in complex systems and dynamical systems theory. Axes of phase space are associated with certain properties of a system. For example, for community life phase space we consider two main axes: the first axis spans the range of “discussions vs. contemplation” and the second axis - “individual vs. collective”.

Documentation

The main document with method documentation is located here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wy4fFZ-ympMCR_FeMrWTs_Dz8buWgABRBrVrSj203tE/edit?usp=sharing Feel free to suggest and propose changes to the document.

Surveys

Design of surveys is supported by Penny discussions with Penny Clark with main link here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uQngQENHNLmDELzmflzm_m0nizCyi7uFqhha1P6aPiY/edit?usp=sharing

Data of Communities

Life itself Sympoesis "Contemplative activism" 15 November - 15 December 2021 and "Collective Intelligence" March 2022. Some information about communities is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intentional_communities Another is https://github.com/life-itself/intentional-communities

Outlook

This is the beginning of the research on community living and we plan to consider other research questions and research directions here. M.S. and L.T.B are working on this, please feel free to comment and discuss here and in issues.