c.Figallo

I’ve been thinking about where we’re headed, what with the approaching climate changes and the irreconcilable balance sheets for national debt, health care costs, aging population, deteriorating infrastructure…the list goes on.

For years I’ve agreed with those who see the necessity of greater localization – more interdependency and collaboration among people living in the same place. There is a trend in this direction, fueled by undeniable evidence that we can no longer rely on national government or even state government to fill the social service and infrastructure gaps. At the same time, we face rising fuel prices and limits on carbon emissions that make transportation less affordable.

Where we live is becoming less trivial to our lives. How we live together in our home locales is becoming more vital. But we are out of practice.

Having been part of two fairly revolutionary experiments in community, I have some rare perspective on how bootstrapped communities form and mature. I can’t say that The Farm and The WELL were successes in terms of their original planning. But they did demonstrate characteristics of what I call extreme community as compared the norm - heightened mutual interdependency and super practical communications.

I’m going to be exploring this concept here in the blog, and I’ll soon have up a site for x-community.org (Yes, extremecommunity.com is taken, by whom and for what purpose, I don’t know.)

I’ll be describing what distinguishes my Versions 1, 2 and 3 of extreme community and make the case that Version 3.0 is going to be developing fast over the next decade.