IS: What IS is
Upcoming events:
- Saturday Oct 4: IS Connection Call
- Sunday Oct 5: Season 20 Community kickoff
- Tuesday Oct 7: The Oasis
Last week's newsletter was "getting on a new plane" and the Community was on its seasonal rest week.
Season 20 Community kickoff is this Sunday, where we'll assemble the shape of the season of what have been called "community hub calls". People often like to start attending at the beginning of a season, so this is your chance to join in with that timing.
As I wrote last week, "Intentional Society is a big name." And what's in a name? Let me point at the pointer to clarify the pointing.
"Intentional Society" is a two-word name, a proper noun, to be pedantic about the 'pointer' part. What does that name point to? It points to an instantiation of a vision. The vision goes by many names: intentional society, the more beautiful world, the great turning, second renaissance, regenaissance, third horizon, conscious evolution, collaborative culture... many fingers pointing at the moon. I could wax poetic about that vision, but I'll keep moving today.
Intentional Society is one (not 'the'!) attempt to instantiate that vision — a bringing-into-being process, an ecosystem of a particular set of people doing a particular set of things under the banner of this particular name. This name shouldn't be confused with the parts inside the ecosystem:
- IS is not a community of weekly video calls — though it has one of those.
- IS is not a dojo of developmental-relational practices — though it has one of those.
- IS is not an economic incubator of values-aligned livelihoods — though, you guessed it, it has one of those.
That first one in particular has been tricky. The community effectively was Intentional Society back when IS had only one part to it. I've said a lot of stuff like "now starting IS Season X!" in the past and only slowly in the last couple years has that become an incorrect conflation (as in that example the 'season' structure belongs to the Community Hub and not to the IS ecosystem).
As we work on developing "the IS org" it will be tempting to confuse that with Intentional Society as well. "Oh, it's not the community at the core, now it's this org at the core, so that's the 'real' Intentional Society." That's totally the way that all companies work, after all: We say "Apple did this" or "Nike did that" and those names point directly at the orgs.
But sports teams provide a contrast: Everyone knows that "The Toronto Blue Jays" points mostly at the baseball players on the field wearing those uniforms, so writers carefully write "the Blue Jays organization" when referring to the legal entity that employs the players and all the back-office workers as well.
Intentional Society is not, and will not be, a pointer to a legal organization. It's too big for that. It's a meme, an idea, a vision, a scene. It's not a commons (or open source), and usage of the name indeed will be "managed by" the org. IS is more like a baseball team, and the 'players' are all the actors in the scene, all the people trying to bring about a more intentional society by living more intentionally and serving the future flourishing of society.
This has implications (not fully fleshed out) for the future of IS 'membership' concepts and new ways to 'join' IS, for intentionality of 'scene' cultivation and management, and for finding a name for the org. Cool, glad we have that cleared up now.
Want to build a better society through being who you want to be? Connection call Saturday, Community call (season kickoff) Sunday, and onward we go in our collective unfolding...
James