A tool to self-organize & jump-start open source regenerative ruban communities.
A tool to self-organize & jump-start open source regenerative ruban communities.
Rubania is a web based tool under development designed to enable collaborative modeling and self-organizing of open source regenerative settlements from scratch. It is an open platform where people can join strengths to jump start and develop their own community once it's critical mass and self-governance targets are agreed upon.
The worldwide intentional communities movement begs for a people system to ease their development and facilitate the creation of new sustainable human settlements. Rubanisation, Tay Kheng Soon's concept of an urban and rural integrated landscape, provides the vision, while Permaculture, the design science initiated by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, gives us the tools and pattern language necessary to realize that vision.
Designing and establishing ruban permacultural communities aided by a holacratic and transparent open source government is Rubania's purpose.
The essence of any utopia is actually pretty simple when narrowed down to the emotions we feel. It's nothing more and nothing less than a happy state. A place where being in sweet harmony with one and other is the bottom line. Have you ever been to such a place? I have yet to go there but in fantasy and dreams.
To be truthful, quite a few mysteries popped up in my mind when I intently began to visualize and conceive such a realm. What would the population distribution be like? What kind of ethics and social dynamics should be fostered? What would the resource base be to build it? Could tasks and jobs be distributed collectively while making it fair for all? It blurred away into a fuzzy dream soon enough, and left me with nothing more than a headache.
We generally feel helpless and just sadly acquiescent over the various symptoms our world experiences. The everyone-for-themselves free-trade growth-on-steroids paradigm is over. Arguably, identifying the problem is the path towards its solution, but the way seems mostly unclear, copious with hardship and rigidly opposing structures. At many times, a quintessential utopian dream.
Paradise isn't meant to be planned, at least not by any one person. But what if a distributed application assisted us in such a task? What if it was done collectively? An idea certainly interesting to entertain. A trans-modern community of creative commons powered by a direct holacracy. Democracy in its truest sense. Social order in the most spontaneous of possible scenarios while engulfed in diversity and abundance of cultures, food and resources, but above all, abundance of time. Time to read, time to think, to talk and build. Time to love, to create, to sing and dance. Time to enjoy ourselves and others. Time for bliss to manifest itself.
Technically, all the necessary resources are within our reach to pull this off. So, what if a network of thriving sustainable human settlements could be self-organized by an operating system? A social application that is both just and transparent while being open for audit and improvement. An open source government. Would you make the leap of faith, leave the urban agenda behind and face the uncharted panorama of a ruban world?
The legal support implemented will conform to the Community Land Trust model, in accordance with each country's legal subtleties. Obtaining real commitment from its participants while providing them with right livelihoods is our goal.
A cooperative would be responsible for development and maintenance of the infrastructure, food production and commercialization, education, and health care.
With a low density land base to population ratio the cell's maximum potential is not realized at an early stage, allowing additional value to be created in time, once the community is established, through the sale of emergent land spots and niche occupations.
Bank loans would help finance the development, while the remainder of the capital is invested in earthworks, housing, infrastructure, tools and machinery. A considerable amount of the trust's capital would go towards rigorously securing and implementing a multi-layered and distributed renewable energy system.
The green school and the community center would provide the bulk of revenue streams at the start, while high quality produce, specialty goods, events and ecotourism would soon follow.
"We need to set about, in an orderly, sensible, and cooperative way, a system of replacing power-centred politics and political hierarchies with a far more flexible, practical, and information-centred system responsive to research and feedback, and with long-term goals of stability. And we need to do this in an ethical and non-threatening way, so that the transition to a cooperative (versus conflicting) global society is creative (not destructive)."
— Bill Mollison
Information centered, but distributed. A Community Operating System. All matters; past, present and future shall be part of a governance system where every person has a vote. On a daily basis, just like any other household chore, issues to be voted on would concern individuals, families, guilds, working groups, and the entire cell.
The "State" would be a collection of information states and daily processes that are modulated and moderated by user-feedback. Tasks would be both chosen and assigned. Though random in principle, the assignments would correlate to assignee's skills, handicaps and schedules.
If a person can't or won't do the task presented, nobody shall force him to do it. If there's no one willing to address a certain task, we would eventually push ourselves to do it, for every refusal inputed in the system would raise the task's value, rendering it attractive to its previously reluctant assignees. Tasks that can't be handled by the community would obviously be solved by external contractors.
As the community becomes established and starts generating revenue streams through its organic products and holistic forms of education, the profits generated are distributed to all contributors through an internal gift economy in a sensible way. Sensible towards the efforts and time invested by each person while paying tribute to commitment and responsibility without the need for static pyramidal structures or power-centred politics. Information transparency and availability to all.
The incentive to excel and prosper has never been money or power, but the chance of being a co-creator and catalyzer of our advancement. Within a context of abundance instead of scarcity, a truly remarkable and self balancing economic system based on reputation and value would emerge. One that might need little tweaking on our behalf while tending to the needs of the community as a whole. A spontaneous and comprehensive approach, where everyone's voice and ideas are heard and voted upon accordingly.
A digital currency could act as the medium for this order to emerge at larger scales. Being able to mutually keep track and manage our credit internationally with no intermediaries or centralized control is becoming possible, thanks to the crypto-currency phenomenon, an emergent open source internet technology better known as Bitcoin.
The object of distributed peer to peer software is to create an information cloud that is, by definition, freed from centralized control. Being open source frees its users from copyright dilemmas, while providing a fertile ground for further development and scalability.
The open governance software would nonetheless be dependent on the stability of its network and constituent hardware. Fortunately, with the advent of solid state storage technologies, free of moving parts and increasingly easy to fabricate, deploying a peer to peer network, where each node is both a client and a server, would mean lower costs, simpler setup and a longer lifespan for the hardware. The outgoing connection to the global Internet may be severed, but the internal network would still function normally. A peer to peer approach is the logical path if network resilience is desired.
An interplay of our sun's light and radiant heat together with wind's energy and solid biomass fuel can comfortably cover all our needs. If energy failures occur, they will be isolated, for there is no "grid" that can fail. Instead, there will be a mesh of cross-connected energy stations that deliver stability and energy storage in abundance. Information technology is essential for self-organization and its energy supply must therefore be rock solid.
"Urbanism has been blind to the plight of the countryside for too long, and the tide is turning as we face the global financial crisis and climate change. And so the dominance of urbanism as an ideology must give way to a new economy of distributed happiness for all, to be found through social justice and a change in culture, in which an appreciation of community and knowledge for their own sakes and love of nature are prime."
— Tay Kheng Soon
There surely are lots of spoken and written words about the emergent transition culture and the energy descent future that awaits us, but still not much in the way of implementation at large scale. Permaculture, Biodynamic Agriculture and the "Organic way" are growing and concrete examples of this new paradigm that sees the environment and our communities as one integrated system, begging to be managed holistically in order to attain sustainable abundance.
The Urban-Rural split renders a dysfunctional pattern that seems to be at the root of countless difficulties faced by our civilization. Having our food travel hundreds of kilometers per day, car commuting to and from suburbia while pushing massive amounts of electricity through a grid for thousands of kilometers makes no sense at all, at least not anymore.
Rubanisation, a portmanteau of the words "urban" and "rural", is a concept envisioned by architect Tay Kheng Soon that portrays the countryside and the city as one integrated space. Designers, architects and futurists like Ebenezer Howard, Buckminster Fuller and Isaac Asimov have visualized such cells of people distributed across the landscape in a harmonious and productive way, and they all share a similar vision. They are circular, about the size of a CBD and can cope with most of the community's needs while being intertwined and surrounded by wilderness corridors, main crops, water features, vegetable gardens and food forests.
Intricate and harmonious patterns emerge every time a sincere survey of human needs and desires is made by a designer. Seemingly fractal cells within cells would allow the landscape to cope with increasing densities of population in a sustainable and resilient way, ensuring a healthy and prosperous community that is immersed in nature.
Inside these rubanised cells, community centers would integrate health, education, research, art, social events and other critical elements of support such as information technology systems. A cell's DNA is at its core, and so the operating system to support human self-organization would be at the core of a ruban settlement.
From the individual to the extended family, complexity emerges. Similarly, from the household to the neighborhood even more complexity arises. By aggregating patterns that harmonize and represent all these structural levels within an efficient and resilient infrastructure that symbiotically connects us, we can become more than the sum of our parts.
Each level has its own governance and affects the community at large while being governed by it. Households would be grouped in clusters or guilds, so as to provide dynamic working groups that share a common support infrastructure. An extended family of ten, for example, would cluster into neighborhoods of one hundred. Several of these neighborhoods would then be established around a community center where the countless aspects of a ruban cell would take place.
While it is true that there already are pattern designs that would, in principle, facilitate and support the functions of a modest community, the final design used for the cell shall emerge from a collaborative collage of all these, by voting amongst them. The website would thus allow the design and patterning to be meta-solved collaboratively and creatively. We must find the pattern language collectively and facilitate its manifestation, so that an internet assisted rubanisation may be achieved in a sensible way.
Being as hard as it is for an extended family to manage and keep the peace of a typical household, it would apparently follow that it should be very hard for a cluster of family groups to cooperate in a community peacefully and indefinitely. However, this has been attained throughout thousands of years in tribal societies and it still is, albeit sparingly.
Intentional communities and Eco-Villes are usually composed of a rather small group of people doing a lot of work where just a few members end up making all important decisions, thus becoming Ego-Villes, which don't sound as happy villes at all. Of course, pyramidal social structures shall persist, but they might do so only in specific contexts, and not as fixed roles or positions.
Our current aggregate of culture and technology creates a much more complex reality and calls for a system that integrates our manifold expressions in a harmonious way without romantically regressing to previous manifestations of human civilization.
Disagreement and dispute are a vital part of society, and rightly so, for without chaos, there can be no order. Creativity and opportunity sprout from crisis and chaos. The final strokes are always realized through human emotional realms that can't be categorized or put in a database. From agreed-upon patterns to daily challenges and emotions, the big picture that can't be predicted eventually emerges.
Rubania shall initially act as a web social application with the goal of modelling ruban cells of sustainable communities before any land purchases or earthworks even begin, through education, workshops and the establishment of working groups. Comprehensively and democratically self-organizing an interconnected human settlement is the ultimate goal. Crowdsourcing is the name of the game. Harvesting collective intelligence through the social application is the first step towards the realization of rubanised communities.
