World Evolution Learning Tribe
The World Evolutionary Learning Tribe is a living case of systemic sustainability (aka, thrivability) using a System of Systems (SoS) approach. It is a constantly evolving example of an exploration of ways in which emerging technologies in the domain of social networking can serve to augment synergies among and between disparate initiatives seeking to foster conditions for a thrivable planet.
Initial background information on the World Evolutionary Learning Tribe (WELTribe) can be found here -
http://weltribe.weebly.com, though this is just a shell given that the past five years of preparation have only begun to be consolidated in a web presence as of November 2013. A nice summary (with some already outdated links) was presented at the 22nd European Meetings of Cybernetics & Systems Research (EMCSR) and is available here -
http://emcsr.net/programme-2014/world-evolutionary-learning-tribe/). The words that comprise the name of this initiative grew out of work on Evolutionary Learning Community (
http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resources.html#elearncomm) and Evolutionary Systems Design (
http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resources.html#sysdesign), begun in 1985, as well as more recent efforts in collaboration with Ockie Bosch and Nam Nguyen on the Global Learning Lab Network (originally, the name for the project that I suggested to Ockie was the Global Evolutionary Learning Lab (GELL), but that has now grown into something else, so we re-branded the initiative as the WELTribe). This has now become a global initiative to learn from and with thrivability efforts in communities of all kinds by bringing them into connection with each other. Today a total of seven Regional Evolutionary Learning Tribes (
http://weltribe.weebly.com/reltribes.html) world wide are curated, thus completing global coverage of the major geo-cultural areas represented in the World Evolutionary Learning Tribe.
While in any given RELTribe (regional), there will definitely be a great degree of cultural diversity, there is still a distinct Weltanschauung shared among the peoples of each region of the world — a cosmo-vision that is different from that found in the six other RELTribes. The Thrive Tribes that are forming here amount to a “system of systems”, though in this case it is specifically a community of communities, organized according to a fractal, embedded, emergent and recursive design, as illustrated by the following diagram:
The focus of everything is the Specific Initiatives in systemic sustainability (glocal thrivability) all over the world. When a local collection of these initiatives begins to interact and explore how they can benefit each other (through confluence and synergy), there emerges the first meta-level community: the Local Evolutionary Learning Tribe (LELTribe). The collection of LELTribes that comprise a given geo-cultural region forms the next level up as a community of communities; the RELTribe, which is a community of LELTribes. The RELTribes form the highest level community of communities, and together, comprise the WELTribe (global).
We have local catalyst coordinators who curate learning conversations at the LELTribe level. They create a profile of the Specific Initiatives in their local area and share the “offers and needs” of these initiatives as a basic description of the thrivability profile of their area. The coordinator of each RELTribe collects this information and stimulates exchanges that link offers with needs and at the same time provides a broader thrivability profile of the geo-cultural region. The general coordinator of all the RELTribes receives this information and brings it to the Core Coordinating Circle (CCC) as well as helping coordinate lessons learned and best practices among and between the seven RELTribes.
The CCC serves to facilitate all of the above through the various communities of the WELTribe Organizing Community (WELToc), as represented by the following diagram:
As presented at the EMCSR, there are three phases to this project, represented in this diagram:
The workshop that I helped Dino Karabeg run at the EMCSR was inspired by the project area of the WELTribe known as the WELTools project (see
http://emcsr.net/calls-2014/calls-for-papers-2014/impacts-for-sustainability-epistemology-research-activism/). This project focuses specifically on the Second Stage of the WELTribe initiative in that it seeks to consolidate a platform of platforms as an open source socio-technical system that responds to and evolves with the needs of the WELTribe. In this regard, the WELTools project is directly related to the interests of this Community of Communities represented here on KARL.