Upcoming events:

• Sunday Feb 1: Community Hub call 22.5
• Tuesday Feb 3: The Oasis
• Friday Feb 6: IS Connection Call
• Friday March 6: Limicon 2026 begins!

Last week's newsletter was Thank you for reading, and the Community Hub call was originally set to be "Playful Games" but was changed to "What Can We See?" processing and sensemaking session.

Intentional Society is made of people and purpose. "We are a collection of friends" says our website. It has an ecosystem of what you might call spaces, some things you might call programs, a community of practice for becoming who we want to be, and even a legal entity. But setting aside all the common handles, what it is is a society, literally the dictionary definition of "an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another ... that is a unit distinguishable by particular aims or standards of living or conduct" okay words words (good words, read the quote again, but) enough setup.

Groups could call themselves organizations, associations, societies, clubs, webs, networks, collectives, I don't care. I want to zoom in on the aspect of collaborative groups. I want to claim that the key enabler of a "collaborative group" (to be defined later) is a non-exclusive purpose. What I mean by that is: could another group of different people share your purpose, like the exact same purpose, and you'd feel happy about it?

In business, that (same purpose, different people) is called your competition. In sports, those groups are your rivals. But in collaborative domains, those are called your... allies? Seems to fit.

Now, everything is contextual and almost no two groups on the planet have the exact same purpose. But it's the "aligned enough" or "allied enough" judgement call that basically determines who you can collaborate with, right?

Every group is making that judgement call left and right, so what makes a group a "collaborative group" versus just a group with collaborators? It wouldn't make sense to call a group an "allied group" without a specific referent, right? But I claim that a group can be collaborative as a part of their nature, their stance. It's a philosophical orientation that says, "we are collaborating with anyone who is serving this shared purpose" even if you don't know who you're collaborating with.

It's like an open protocol, versus a closed consortium. It's like acausal trade, versus negotiated contracts. It's like dependent origination even, versus linear cause and effect. Rich metaphors, but anyway.

Being collaborative, as a group, in the above sense means that there's a way in which you're cooperating "with the universe", or with the field, the space, the cause. It frees you from possessiveness and territoriality, though you can still care about effectiveness and coordination. Intentional Society just doesn't care, as a group, if a person joins IS or goes and associates with a different group in the web. In the concrete world we can still have feelings about different groups' effectiveness and/or alignment, but we know deeply that it's not our job to save the world, solve the world, or "be the best" in the world — our job is to do our part, in service to the whole, including the parts of the whole that we're not even in contact with.

We're a collaborative group because our care extends beyond our control. We live in service of a more beautiful world that our hearts have already tasted, and we know that's a really super freakin' huge vision at the scale of life-in-this-universe (or future-of-humanity at least) that it would be ridiculous to claim causal control or ownership ambition.

So the membrane separating "in" from "out" in terms of purpose alignment fades in importance... and the inclusion/exclusion question reduced to (assuming alignment), "are these people that I want to hang with?"

Let's hang. Or don't — but go find your tribe to be in community with and grow and serve with, don't just sit there alone! And here we are, we're doing it. That doesn't mean others aren't also! We don't own the true thing underneath all the things that can be named, and you can sense that thing for yourself and be guided by your sense of truth and rightness. May we meet along the path, and collaborate as we are able, maybe even join forces as groups, for the fun of it! And to be bigger than the simple sum of our parts, as big as we can be, along with the humility of being vastly smaller than the true thing of wholeness.

Cheers,
James

P.S. Limicon tickets just opened up — you have one month to get yours and join in the co-creation stream of lead-up events before the convention launches its stream of scene evolution and emergence! If you know, you know, and if you don't, I'll tell you more again soon.