The liberating energy of reframing objections as concerns motivated by care and starting to create a culture of storytelling has given our very politically minded group more of a human flavour. It’s very handy for groups to have somewhere to go where these elements are explicitly stated!
On a more personal note I feel like the more I delve into the pattern language the more it develops my democratic intelligence and vocabulary. Concepts like Capacitance “the ability to tolerate disturbance without attempting premature resolution” make skills and experiences I’ve known at an intuitive level into something much more explicit. There are also patterns that introduce me to political concepts that I have simply been ignorant of until now like Subsidiarity, and others that expand pre-existing notions like Power into larger spectrums, e.g. Multi-Modal Power.
In a call with Tom recently as he was talking me through the website and patterns, I felt like I was reconfiguring my brain. I told him it was like a “psychedelic experience!” The more you journey deeply into the patterns and their interconnections, the more you have a sense of a whole coherent big picture, a new DNA of Democracy waiting to be born.
My sense is that if there are enough of us wanting to play in this space, we could further develop the pattern language, deepen the collective knowledge and wisdom in this field and make it easier to build the systems and institutions of this new relational paradigm of democracy. If you are game to explore what a Community of Practice around this resource might look like, or if you’d like to be a part of that, then by all means contact me here!

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