Today I interview outgoing BFI chief of staff Felicia Chavez about her experience participating in her first Trimtab Spacecamp and the mission she hosted to clarify the vision of the Cooperating Manual for Spaceship Earth (https://spaceshipearth.live) which aims to be “A comprehensive and creatively taxonomized wiki cataloguing our collective intelligence around societal transformation toward cooperation.”
Curating a diversity of resources, articles, media, frameworks, case studies and tools, the Cooperating Manual is a curated database linking to many resources and projects that align with the ideals of helping humanity step into mutual cooperation, aid, equity, and mutual benefit. The Cooperating Manual is a reference to R. Buckminster Fuller’s book The Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, and bears similarities to the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog.
But does it work? Felicia and her team grappled with this important question, as well as addressing questions of message effectiveness, website usability, current platform limitations, and well, who goes through and curates all those entries?
Felicia has her PhD in Philosophy, a Green MBA, and just published a book called “Dear Marin: Can Marin County reach the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of 2030? A Systems-Thinking Perspective.” We talk about the underlying drivers that motivate a system and how what a system does is often not what people think it does. We talk about how many systems we think are optimized to maximize profit may actually be optimized to increase the feeling of certainty. What is so alluring about the illusion of certainty? And how a more wholistic perspective help us design better systems.
…Does anyone want to help Felicia develop a 3-dimensional database?
Felicia’s Links:
http://www.systemsthinkingmarin.org/
http://www.lifelikehoney.net/
http://pacifica.academia.edu/FeliciaChavez
Mentioned in this episode:
http://www.unamarin.org/
https://donellameadows.org/ Academy for Systems Change
Every year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute (https://www.bfi.org) hosts a dynamic event called Trimtab Space Camp, and each event encourages participants to join or host a Mission, the collaborative learning component of this 8-week online event. This year's Space Camp: Towards Climate Stabilization hosted 20 Missions with over 150 participants. At the end of the eight-week journey, crew-members from each Mission have 5 minutes to share their results with the group and the wider BFI community of over 100,000 people.
The Spaceship Earth Mission Log project will be interviewing leaders from each of the 20 Missions over the next 8 weeks beyond the close of this Space Camp. Subscribe to make deeper connections and be notified when each Mission Log comes out!
Steven Leavitt hosts this series, and is the host of The Language of Creativity podcast, https://www.thelanguageofcreativity.com. He has attended four Space Camps since 2020 and is inspired by Buckminster Fuller's quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
tags: Marin county California, community organizing, organizations, information architecture, Theory U, the air quality in Pennsylvania, Bono’s Memoir, oneness, interconnections, sustainability, unity, spirituality, Echkart Tolle, eco-friendly, UN Sustainable Development Goals, systems-thinking, mythology, mysticism, Donella Meadows
Felicia Chavez: Cooperating Manual for Spaceship Earth