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What is it about?

Here we plan to describe some research projects ideas related to community living inspired by Life itself community.

Research questions

The first question we start with is: How can we document, map and analyse community life?

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”.

Method 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.

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.