Citizen Collective is here — and I’d love you to be part of it
Since my book Citizens came out in March 2022, life has been more than a little crazy. I’ve literally been all around the world, sharing stories of citizens coming together to create the future… and everywhere I’ve been, people have responded by telling me more.
Online too, especially on LinkedIn, I have had the deeply joyful experience of becoming a lightning rod for these stories. Not a day goes by without someone tagging me in on something deeply inspirational, a story of a community of place, passion or profession somewhere in the world stepping into their collective power.
Whether it’s the Vogelmorn community in Wellington, New Zealand, or East Marsh United in Grimsby, England; the Reaction Collective reimagining the outdoor industry or the True Athlete Project doing the same for sport; Citizen Network convening organisations focused on the agency of those living with disability or the Global Alliance for Communities connecting the work of locally led development across the Global South… every single day brings some new snapshot of what Ariane and I described in this BBC Future piece as a Citizen Future.
It’s taking shape. It’s so close, I feel like I can almost touch it.
The challenge now
Brian Eno wrote this in the foreword to Citizens:
“This story doesn’t show up on the media radar because that radar is pointed resolutely in the wrong direction. It’s expecting the future to be produced by governments and billionaires and celebrities, so its gaze is riveted on them. But behind their backs, the new story is coming together.”
He’s right, it is coming together. But we need it to happen faster. And we need it to start being seen on a much bigger scale.
Brian’s articulation makes me think of the Two Loops model: a way of describing how fundamental change happens first put forward by Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze of the Berkana Institute. It’s a model that helps define what the next step in the work might be.
Brian’s first insight corresponds to the arc of the Dominant System in this diagram: we are still living in the Consumer Story, and as a result the stories told in our media come from the principle actors in that story — even though we all know it’s in decline.
His second corresponds to the arc of the Emergent System: the Citizen Story. It is coming together, but it’s doing so beneath the surface. The people I’ve met and stories I’ve heard represent the Pioneers of this emergent system popping up all over the world. The language of Citizenship offers a Name to this phenomenon, helping the pioneers to recognise one another as part of the same broad work in the world (and to be clear this name is not something I claim as my unique contribution: it is language being offered not just by me but by many others, from Simon Duffy in Citizen Network, to Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang in their work on the concept of Plurality, to Baratunde Thurston in How To Citizen and Eric Liu through Citizen University, and many more besides). Over recent years, with a little help from me among many many others, on social media platforms and through gatherings and conferences, these pioneers have started noticeably if relatively informally to Connect with one another.
I think the challenge now is those next two steps on the arc of the Emergent System: Nourish and Amplify.
Citizen Collective as a community of practice
The first of these, Nourish, is my hope and aspiration in launching Citizen Collective. I’ve been quietly developing this with a small group of volunteer co-stewards over the last few months. We’re describing it as “a community of practice of those leading and learning for a Citizen Future.”
A community of practice is more than a network: it’s about working together to develop the tools, processes, structures and frameworks we need in order to make this emergent system ready to become the System of Influence in the Berkana model. It’s about building relationships, but it’s also about building something as a result of those relationships: new tools and approaches, ultimately perhaps even new institutions. It’s rooted in a recognition that what we need does not yet exist, and so we have to create it, together. And that we’ll do so by learning from one another: sharing experiences, asking questions, identifying challenges, and getting organised.
That all sounds very serious — and it is, because it’s important work! But it is also joyful, as building community always is. So many of the groups I’ve spoken to over the last couple of years have told me of finding relief and excitement in the book, because they had felt like they were the only ones — and through hearing the stories of others realised that was far from the case. I hope and believe that excitement will only increase when knowing about one another shifts into meeting and collaborating with one another.
Citizen Collective: the plan
The default tools of our time (including both Medium and Substack, for example) are designed from within the Consumer Story, and are not perfectly fit for purpose for a community of practice like this. What we need does not yet exist, and so we have to create it… which makes this work a bit of a challenge!
As such, the plan is to work with the spirit of prototyping. We’ve defined the period for the first phase of Citizen Collective starting from now, the beginning of September, until the end of 2024. We’ll bootstrap this phase, just like all the Citizen organisations I know have had to bootstrap. We’ll use the best of the tools we know about, demonstrating them and learning about them so we practice what we preach — and so Collective members can learn from our experiences too. We’ll learn about what works and doesn’t, and then we’ll go again.
In practice, that means we’re going to build this first phase around four key elements:
- Regular introductory calls: opportunities to find out more about Citizen Collective, meet other new members and get an update on other upcoming calls and tips on how to make the most of the community.
- The Citizen Collective Discord: a collaborative online workspace, with threads for sharing inspiration and questions, and the opportunity to start or join discussion forums on any topic related to the work of building a Citizen Future.
- Monthly Citizen Spotlight Calls: opportunities to hear from one of the members of the Collective about what they’re up to, and explore what we can all learn from them.
- Monthly Citizen Workshop calls: a space to share live challenges and questions with other members of the Collective.
The plan will be for the Citizen Spotlight calls to be made open to wider participation, so those will be advertised via my mailing list, which you can join via my website here. Beyond that, we want to test the model of having the Discord be the connecting point the conversation — so signing upfor the introductory and Citizen Workshop calls will happen via the Discord. We’ve got a simple registration form to come into the Collective, which will allow us both to understand a little more about who’s coming in and what they need, and to make the shift to another tool or space easier should that be the right thing to do in future.
To be clear, the plan here is to create something that is as open and inclusive as possible. It is and will remain free to be part of (though the intention is to explore crowdfunding from the membership if and when it feels right). And you don’t have to be or think of yourself as leading an obviously pioneering community initiative to join… indeed, most of the people who I would describe as Citizen pioneers would never describe themselves in that way anyway, and just think of themselves as interested in the work! So if that’s you, come on in — and bring your friends :)
One last thing on the Citizen Collective plan for now… As I say, we’re going to bootstrap this, and we’re going to use the best of the tools available. We’re going to start running our budget and operations through Open Collective, under the fiscal sponsorship of the Social Change Nest. This is a format that allows communities to organise, take action, and raise and spend money without having to incorporate formally, making big decisions about the structures they want to adopt before they’re ready. I’m especially excited by this as a tool: it’s one I think could be useful to many.
A final note: from Nourish to Amplify
Citizen Collective is intended as a community of practice, corresponding to the Nourish step of the Two Loops model. But as above, we also need to Amplify: we need more people to be able to see the reality of this emerging future — to retune the media radar Brian refers to — and soon. This is starting to happen, I think, but there is much more work to be done.
I think I have a part to play in this too, as a storyteller, but I’m not exactly sure on the shape of that yet. Hosting Audrey Tang in London in July was an important learning experience: as well as an event I hosted directly, we managed to get her in some good prominent spaces, from a feature interview in The Guardian to an episode of the Leading podcast with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (due for release on 9th September). I’m thinking and reflecting on the role I was able to play in that, and how I might do more like it going forward.
For this phase, through to the end of 2024, my intention is to keep showing up, speaking and sharing these stories where I am invited, to keep experimenting with the opportunity of hosting events at the Conduit Club in London, and one or two other opportunities I’ll post more about soon. I’m planning to work with the frame of Adventures in Democracy for the Conduit events, and see how that might build. I used the same language to frame a conversation with Baratunde Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart, the team behind the How To Citizen podcast, and I’m using it again with Simon Duffy and Martyn Sibley, pioneering Citizens in the world of disability and inclusion, at the end of October. But if you have any thoughts on how I might best play my role in this work of amplifying the Citizen Story, I’d love to hear them.
For now, though, the key focus is Citizen Collective, and the work of nourishing a community of Citizen practice — and I’d love you to be part of it. You can stay posted on the upcoming Citizen Spotlight calls by signing up to my mailing list here, or if you’re ready to dive into the community, you can find the registration form here!
