2025-05-25

This was a piece that we were asked to prepare for the Imaginary Institute meeting in May 2025. At that same meeting (yesterday as I write) we tried out my “protocol” 90-minute exercise in Ontological Commoning, which was really helpful — I will be making plenty of modifications over the next few days to reflect the feedback and tips I was kindly given.

Words below in italics represent the rubric prompts for the exercise. “ii” stands for the Imaginary Institute.

Take a few minutes to quietly imagine a possible Department of the Imaginary Institute (ii) You can write in prose, bullet points, fragments — however your ideas come. You can answer or not to these prompts. This is your space to imagine freely.

1. Can you imagine and name a real, fictional, or hyperstitional department within the Institute? What would it be called?

2. What topic might it explore? A theme, a force, a question, a fascination…

The department would explore the commons and commoning aspects of the imaginal and through the imaginal.

3. What kind of imagination would it cultivate? Speculative? Practical? Poetic? Absurd? Experimental? Ancestral?

It would focus on any kind of imagination that can be held in common, or that can contribute to commoning in other fields. Practical, experimental and ancestral are more likely to be able to be held in common; speculative, poetic and absurd imagination might play a role in helping commoning in other fields.

All the work of this department of the institute would be oriented towards setting up, maintaining and developing knowledge commons (or “wisdom commons”) which would support the work of the ii and provide learning resources for students, apprentices, and other learners.

4. How would it operate — beyond the current two-day format? Would it meet at night? Work in cycles? Act through rituals, codes, or gardens?

The department would have two arms: a research arm; and an arm offering services to other parts of the ii and the wider world. (Ontological Commoning is “O C” hereafter.)

The service arm would offer an O C service, initially designed for two people, extending to two groups, who work or anticipate working together on any project, where there are grounds to believe that the two people or groups have divergent approaches to their common aim or work. It is intended to help them find sufficient common ground to enable working together with minimal misunderstanding and at minimal cross-purposes.

This would be distinct from other kinds of mediation or conciliation service in its methodology. It takes the imaginal material (in whatever form) and unpacks both stories and belief systems to reveal the underlying “hidden maps of reality”: the common ground to enable co-create ongoing “theories of change” or other imaginative visionary scenarios that underpin and motivate meaningful collaboration towards imagining new games and other creative activities that open minds and creative ways forward for the world.

The intention would be for the services offered to generate income and make this department not only self-sustaining, but also funding some of the research work.

The research arm would find any necessary funding for, and execute, research around commons and commoning concerning ii. What could an imaginary or imaginal commons be? What can be “commoned” in the imaginal realm, and how can all kinds of imagination help commoning in other areas of life, particularly including the practical? This includes revising and extending O C and related topics.

One focus may be to research into the application of O C in business and politics, including such areas as: interoperability (O C between established stakeholders); new business creation (O C between potential co-founders); non-hierarchical governance; citizens' assemblies; and, in particular, exploratory, revolutionary, disruptive ventures, with O C being a vital aspect of relating highly divergent ontologies – as is likely in the imaginations of radical out-of-the-mainstream players.

The research arm would be reaching out to other related bodies — instigating collaborative research; as well as doing feasibility studies aimed at exploring the potential for creative consultancy projects for the service arm. So the whole would be building on the heritage of a research consultancy, but shedding the constricting patterns of consultancy as it has been in the current business world.

6. Who might be involved? People, non-human agents, entities, roles…

People who have rich imaginations.

Possible roles for people include:

• researcher
• knowledge architect
• administrator
• creator (poet, artist, novelist, playwright, etc.)
• performer / communicator
• sales/marketing/advertising

7. What tools, spaces, or support would it need? Objects, infrastructures, permissions, technologies, environments…

As dedicated to the commons, the department would share resources as much as possible with other organisations, and between the people involved. The resource needed would thus be less than a normal institute.

• ontological commoning