True to its roots on decades of experience with collaborative initiatives, semente is fundamentally focused on communities. We do acknowledge, however, the ambiguity of that word. Communities can, after all, be considered places of safety as much as sites of homogeneity and constraint. Inclusion and care, as well as exclusion and prejudice. Of course, there is no precise and universal definition of what communities are. To clarify its meaning to us, we share some practice-based reflections.
Firstly, healthy communities are dynamic assemblages of multiple commonalities. Understanding that vision requires one to go beyond the overly simplistic perspective according to which a community is constituted by people who live in a given locality. That confusion appears to be more pronounced in countries that use words with similar roots to describe community and local administration — communes, comunas, Gemeinde, etc.
Obviously, geographic proximity enables commonalities to emerge more easily. Take for instance shared living conditions, language and accent, access to (or lack thereof) public spaces, similar challenges and/or adversaries. All of those elements might be conducive of strong communities. But to the way we see, believing that people who live in a neighbourhood should always and necessarily be called a community is assuming too much.
In developing semente, we’re interested in community not as a thing, but a way of acting. That is, we want to help promote practices of commoning. As Arturo Escobar puts it, “every community practices the design of itself”. The tools that compose semente are being created to help the self-design of communities along those lines.
In addition to thinking of community as a dynamic composition of commonalities, it’s also important to point out what lies outside the understanding of community that we adopt for semente. We are quite suspicious of projects that see communities merely as target audiences, with no say on the purposes and methods, no real agency. When we are approached by potential partners and notice that kind of bias, we address it as openly as possible. If there’s no willingness to change such a position, we see no real possibility of working together as semente.
The broader understanding that we’re referring to may be surprising to those used to a more limited view of communities. We sustain that such perspectives sometimes border on instrumentalisation, and frequently echo colonial practices. For instance, many digital companies establish their own “online communities” structured on rather exploitative mechanisms. In such settings, “community” often describes the people willing to contribute to improving products, but who have no real power to make decisions. They can of course exert influence, but will typically give more than they can get in return, and don’t notice.
Even when such “communities” offer rewards for members, the whole system is designed with one goal: a growing profit base over time and the sustenance of unbalanced power structures. It is common to find examples of communities formed around startups that at some point feel betrayed by the companies they once supported. In such cases, dissent and deeper challenges about the purposes of the collective effort are frequently silenced and excluded. In building semente, we are conscious of the need to recognise differences as constitutive of communities, and to create caring ways of handling them over time.
Different positions can sometimes block advancements, as we all know. On the other hand, handling such blockages in inclusive and patient ways is arguably more sustainable over time than potentially easier alternatives that remove agency from community members. If we see communities as being constituted of multiple commonalities, it follows that their members will have diverse reasons to participate, or not. Centralising decision-making and imposing a single version of the collective goals never works for a long time. And the passing of time is a crucial aspect of communities.
In community settings, the role of leadership should be considered as a position in flux. Some indigenous groups in Brazil are said to be structured in such a way that their tuxauas (tribal leaders) hold power only commensurate with their generosity. In such particular settings, power is explicitly social and relational, instead of imposed by force or violence. And for that reason, it is fundamentally time-bound.
At the current development stage, we’re trying to add a more spiralled shape to the semente toolkit than we had in previous versions. The idea is to embody the ancient wisdom that posits the spiral as a progressive combination of linearity and circularity. It is a reminder that in community settings, it’s often challenging to define when things will start (or have started) and when (or whether) they will end. Exploring the spiral also enables us to think in terms of cycles of creation, sustenance, and regeneration.
Departing from the image of a straight timeline to a cyclical one that however never returns to the same point is also an exercise in decoupling the outputs generated by community projects from the more profound purposes of the community. We do that to avoid the frequent movement of reshaping collective goals into formats recognisable by funding bodies and institutional realities. Even in the cases that communities depend on external resources for their maintenance, it’s important to safeguard goals collectively agreed upon against the usual reshaping of the community following formats and vocabularies external to it. Every project description should be seen as a map, never the territory itself.
The reflections above result from ongoing development of semente. Over the coming months, we will experiment with new methods that embody those experiences, and expect to create easily replicable versions of the toolkit. If you are interested in learning more about semente, reach out to us via email: info (at) semente.de.