A Global Ecosystem for Individuals and Communities to Build a Better World

Collaborating VCCs

Bring your community into a VCC. Collaborate with other VCCs to understand the threats we face. Collaborate to create and bring to scale the actions needed to mitigate those threats. Collaborate to create a viable civilization, a civilization based upon justice, equity, tolerance, love, peace and reverence for nature - because all of these are necessary.

A key feature of Place4Us is the fact that VCCs have many ways to collaborate with other VCCs in groups, clusters or whole ecosystems. The VCCs have a rich suite of tools that support collaboration locally, regionally, and globally.

As a vision-focused and mission-based social collaboration platform, Place4Us facilitates a global network of VCCs as autonomous teams that jointly aim to make progress towards the shared vision. The vision is a future where the global citizen movement through self governance maintains an open, inclusive and just society that meets the basic needs of every human being and ensures the health of the Earth's life-support system on which the welfare of all human and non-human life depends.

Place4Us supports self-governance of the platform and the VCCs via lessons learned from Sociocracry¹, Holacracy², Polycentrism³, the Viable Systems Model⁴ and group decision methods such as participatory modeling and syntegration⁵. Further, the New Democracy Foundation has pioneered truly effective methods for citizens to design laws and policies that benefit all rather than only the elites. Several floors in the VCCs provide guidelines and instruction in all of these approaches and tools for VCCs to develop and maintain their governance system.

1 "Sociocracy is a theory of governance that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organizations. It draws on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared goal or work process."

2: "Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy."

3: Polycentrism is a political or cultural system that contains many different centres, especially centres of authority or control.

4: The viable system model is a model of the organizational structure of any autonomous system capable of producing itself. A viable system is any adaptable system organised in such a way as to meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment.

5: Syntegration is a form of non-hierarchical problem solving that can be used in a small team of 10 to 42 people. It was introduced by Stafford Beer in the 1990s.