Re:place Academy
Quick Summary
Astralship is a renovated chapel operating as a systemic innovation lab, nestled among the hillsides of north Wales. We call it the ship. We organise voyages. Voyages are multi-week co-living, co-working hackathons. We try to make them holistic: will, being and function. The theme for this voyage is: knowledge commoning and p2p learning. We have AMAZING people coming through. We've partnered with AMAZING organisations whose work inspires us: Wada, Regenesis Institute, Hypha and more. We're trying to be regenerative: discerning paradigms, nested among THRIVING webs of relations, and gesturing toward life-affirming futures. And we've been busy! If you're hooked already, feel free to browse our wiki, wander in to this voyage's orientation chat, or even book a quick call with us!
Let's begin...
How would it look for learning to be sourced by the knowing of land?
In what ways would innovation be different if deeply aligned with how a place wants to be?
How would research look if it started with participatory theatre?...
In the opening act of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), the ongoing spectacle is interrupted unexpectedly by six brave agents of transformation, seeking to co-create a new script. They claim their author abandoned them, leaving their narratives unresolved. As the characters interact with the director and actors, they delve into questions about the nature of identity, truth, and the role of the artist.
Pirandello's meta-theatre is known for its innovative structure, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, audience and performance. It's a profound exploration of the human condition and the complexities of storytelling.
What does theatre have to do with a place-based tech collective? Theatre is enactment: self-making: autopoiesis: ontological shift. [1] We aim to do exactly the same, creating situations that others would tell us are madness in order for them to become plausible, blurring the lines between what is and what could be. We'll be a crew of pirates living aboard an Astralship, improvising the script of our play as we voyage toward our destination.
Re:place Academy
This is the first voyage of our Prisma Season, and we invite you to join us on the stage of our ship to enact...
Regenerative knowledge commoning and peer-to-peer learning.
As props on our set-in-becoming, we'll be drawing upon knowledge graphing, distributed data technologies, sociocratic decision-making, and of course our very own voyaging methodology.
We'll be leading ourselves to grow the capabilities needed to inspire a provocation: poetry from the future. [2] We'll practice remembering first principles of collectively making a social, learning organism together, where together includes all those inhabiting the peopled landscapes in which Astralship resides. Friends we'll be inviting along for the journey include acclaimed learners and practitioners of:
Evolutionary biology
Integrative psychology
Druidry
Epistemology
Forest ecosystems and living governing systems
Bioregional learning
Software development
In summary, we're aiming to create a digital Story of Place. [3, 4] You can find the full Re:place Academy voyage brief here.
Minimum Viable Structure
We've tried to introduce just enough design and hopefully not too much to unlock flow, radical participation and emergence.
The full 18-day period is punctuated by 3 weekend intensives:
❤ WILL (7-9): connecting with place, sleeping on the land, visiting local farms and eco-villages - projects emanating regeneration. A relevant question might be: would this bioregion like to make itself known to us, and how is it expressing its next stage of thriving?
💫 BEING (14-16): embodiment, governance, play, trust. A relevant question might be: how are we needed to con-figure our capacities to grow, in order to be able to realise a contribution in this bioregional learning journey?
🤖 FUNCTION (21-23): hack, build, and deliver, in right relationship. Converging all the systemic alignment generated during the first half into producing a knowledge commoning and p2p learning provocation, presented to relevant stakeholders on the final day of the voyage.
Between these intensives, ship-flow will be sustained by voyaging crew diligently working toward the voyage destination.
Tickets
Our ticket types reflect three degrees of engagement. Future voyagers are encouraged to select the ticket type that best reflects their level of commitment and calling. Greater engagement in co-creating this event with us entrusts you with greater access, responsibility and potential. Ticket costs are a pledge to be present. If you feel called to come and these costs are a deal-breaker, significant reductions will be arranged on a pirate-by-pirate basis, no questions asked.
Find out more about what each ticket means here.
Beautiful. So, what's this actually about?
Astralship is trialling a new form of organisation incubation called voyaging. We're aiming to create conditions in which collaboration can thrive:
Creative environment: an old chapel that's been renovated over the last 14 years. We call it our ship. Why? Because if you have an amazing group of people with capacity to co-create, you can voyage to anywhere.
Real relational bonds: convening interdisciplinary cohorts of people that have been potentialising working together for several months, sometimes years.
Grounded purpose: local on-the-ground work (farmers, non-profits, cooperatives, retreat centres, mountains, rivers, forests, sea) are the context that informs the voyage direction.
Trustful leaderfulness: sociocratic governance and several weeks of co-design calls before the voyage even begins, complemented by network mutuality mapping and an initiating network agreements ceremony.
Transversal continuity: static site publishing to engage others with what emerged during voyaging, DAO activation, voyaging alumni network, and network hub on-boarding (see federating).