The Community Memeplex

Much of my work is often described as community building, time co-ops, social capital, trust economies, mutual aid, mutual support, human capital, or social infrastructure. And those descriptions are certainly all true. But, they’re also incomplete.

What I’m really interested in is something larger: a memeplex; a set of interconnected ideas that reinforce one another and gradually change how people understand value, belonging, and society itself.

At the center of this memeplex is a simple belief: people are the source of value and community is the environment where that value plays out. Money has utility. Markets have utility. Institutions have utility. But value originates in people. In their skills, relationships, labor, creativity, compassion, judgment, and willingness to contribute to one another. From that central idea, a number of related concepts emerge.

• Community is the foundation upon which society is built.

• Trust is a form of capital.

• Reputation matters.

• Everyone has something to contribute.

• Relationships are assets.

• Contribution should be visible.

• Human beings flourish through reciprocity and belonging.

• Social infrastructure is every bit as important as physical infrastructure.

• Healthy communities reduce the burden on larger systems by addressing problems upstream.

Taken individually, these are each very good ideas. Together, they form a coherent worldview. And this worldview challenges the assumption that society is primarily an economic machine. It suggests that society is first a network of human relationships, with economic systems existing to support human flourishing rather than the other way around.

This is why my work spans seemingly unrelated projects. KommunityKoin, Kula.today, community health initiatives, local social media, volunteerism, social determinants of health, and human capital development – they are all expressions of the same underlying memeplex. They’re attempts to make visible what has always existed but is rarely measured. The invisible economy of trust. The invisible infrastructure of relationships. The invisible value created every day when people choose to invest in one another.

The goal is not simply to build better programs or platforms. The goal is to cultivate a culture in which people once again recognize that they belong to one another, and that the strength of any society is ultimately determined by the strength of the communities from which it is built.

My real work has been trying to introduce a new way of understanding value, community, and human flourishing… and helping enough people adopt that lens that it eventually begins shaping culture itself.

Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did. Cheers, friends.