A central strategy for The
PHISOLAMA FOUNDATION is to establish a network of inter-connected communities
that serves several purposes:
¨Demonstrating models of empowered, co-operative, sustainable
living.
¨Providing an
infrastructure that will safely persist in spite of changing economical,
political or environmental conditions.
¨Establishing
ideal conditions for the development of technologies, models, and approaches
that will serve all of humankind.
¨Providing a home base for individuals and teams that are
dedicated to building and maintaining a world that works for all of
us.
The strategy is essentially to
acquire land and/or dwellings upon which to establish each community; to build
sustainable material infrastructures for necessary energy, water, food, housing,
and economic support; to invite people of skill and integrity to populate the
community; to foster the development of self-organizing, spiritually oriented
social cooperation; and to connect these communities together through a
communication, exchange and coordination infra-structure.
The idea is to create PHISOLAMA
"pockets" where groups of people can unleash their collective creativity outside
the constraints of the economics, politics, monopolies, scarcities and general
noise of the surrounding old civilization.
Each community will be largely
self-sustainable in terms of energy, food and other basic resources. That is, it
could survive independent of the surrounding world, if necessary, although
PHISOLAMA community's active interactions with local and remote communities will
assist in maintaining and improving the existing social systems. The PHISOLAMA
communities will seek to serve where they can in exchanging goods, services or
knowledge when appropriate.
The communities will have local
internal economic exchange systems or unmeasured sharing and distribution,
allowing the majority of the members to work to support the community within the
community so the focus is on being useful within the community itself, and in
participating in the common projects of the community. Each community will have
several community owned businesses to bring in what money is required for
external materials and supplies and if necessary, a community can petition
PHISOLAMA or the community network to grant investment money to establish
further community owned businesses.
Beyond covering the basics of
living, each community will focus on one or more areas of service to the larger
network or the world at large. That is, members of the community, or the whole
community, might work on particular technological research or development
projects, educational programs, media projects, agricultural development,
administration of wider scale projects, or whatever their responsibility is
chosen to be.
The communication
infrastructure and knowledge-sharing network amongst these communities is
essential. The aim is to allow teams in individual communities to dedicate
themselves thoroughly to their projects, and at the same time to let necessary
information be passed on to anybody else in any other community who needs or
desires the information, for cooperative or educational purposes. The idea is to
both allow a team to specialize and at the same time avoid that situation where
the same wheels need to be re-invented in different
places.
It should be stressed that the
aim is in no way to create isolated communities that hide away from society and
mind their own business. On the contrary, the idea is to create communities that
promote their activities widely and that produce quality products and services
and knowledge for the benefit of society as a whole.
The average starting cost for creating such a community
is estimated at around $5 million for a typical community of 100 adult members.
This will of course vary depending on the geographical region and the size and
purpose of the community. Each member will have a cooperative interest in the
activities of the community. That is, the community will to some extent work as
a profit-sharing business. The fixed property of each community is initially
owned by a separate trust. When the community has demonstrated itself to be
viable and self-organizing, the control of the trust is given over to the
members of the community.
A common electronic
communication infrastructure is developed for the network of communities. Key to
this is that the components aren't controlled by outside monopolies. This
network will of course also serve a variety of other PHISOLAMA supported
projects, such as media, education and third world empowerment. Any excess
capacity in this network can of course be marketed to other parties.