Intentional Society: Crew anew
The on-ramp to Season 10 for newcomers is an orientation call Saturday, April 15th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC)
"Crew" is a word I use fairly frequently in most of my circles, and I almost forget that other people don't share the specific technical definition that I'm using. With majority vocab credit going to Microsolidarity for coalescing the term, here's my personal definition:
a crew is a handful of people gathered by a caller toward a purpose for a time with self-awareness.
We've just finished our 9th season of Intentional Society, and in season 10 I'll be excited to once again look to crewing, this time as an integrated (load-bearing, but not dominating) piece of our ecosystem. We did some early exploration in that direction, then focused for quite a while on cultivating and stabilizing the congregational scope, deepening culture, and evolving a membership structure supporting non-coercive belonging and connection.
Meanwhile, some folks have been like "I want a crew" directly and haven't found it here, as the collective energy has focused mostly on the community scope. But these days, I'm sensing the multiplicity of energy, and intend soon to hold (and document) an IS "crew formation market" session with inspiration from Open Space Technology. Not only are we large enough and vital enough to support 3+ crews now, we're also better connected with the aligned meta-network surrounding us and the energy we can tap into across communities.
Good crewing often generates meaningful relationships and profound experiences. But crews often flounder or fall apart out in the wild! So what I hope now for us is that we have the congregational scaffolding in place to support crews in being self-aware, to provide fertile soil for robust ecological health, growth, and recombination. One-to-one, crew-level, and congregational relationships are all necessary parts of the fractal complex system we're growing, a mini-society that can form a stable attractor point in the midst of the unconscious landscape around us.
Cheers,
James