2025-11-04

During last year, 2024, I was from time to time exploring an overall category structure for the Second Renaissance (2R) wiki. This is a list of how they ended up, at the time of writing this …

• Concepts Define and explore key ideas, link them to related writings and works.
• People Highlight contributors, visionaries, and voices connected to 2R.
• Practices Share methods, tools, and rituals aligned with Second Renaissance values.
• Organizations Map out groups and initiatives working in resonance with 2R.
• Questions Add and refine live questions that move the conversation forward.
• Works Document articles, essays, art, or anything created within or about 2R.
• Events Chronicle gatherings, salons, and key moments in the 2R timeline.
• About Help others navigate and co-create this space by improving guides and how-tos.

But when I was reconsidering the list of types of page for Growing the Commons (and Bioregional KC) I wasn't looking back at that page. After writing the new piece on types of page, on 2025-10-20 I remembered about the old one, but I'm glad I hadn't looked recently, as this allowed me to compare two separate attempts, and to see how alike or different they were.

So now, to repeat the list of old ideas, mapped roughly onto the new ones from 2025-10-20.

• Concepts: just like Concept (also closely related to the terms on my personal wiki.)
• People: just like Person
• Organizations: just like Group
• Questions: just like Question
• Works: one kind of Resource
• Events: with the same intention as Gathering

I've left out Practices and About from that list of last year's 2R thinking, because I wasn't sure how to map them. And, what have I seen recently that I didn't last year? That would be both Pattern, and other kinds of Resource.

Let's look at all these now.

2R and Life Itself don't focus around physical resources. They have their hubs, where people can meet, to learn, to exchange ideas, to be deliberately developmental. These could now be represented as places, even though I didn't notice the need last year. Material resources more generally aren't part of their focus, whereas they clearly are for us in Growing the Commons and in Bioregional Knowledge Commons. Thus, I'm simply happy to add these to the new ontology, and not worry too much about the 2R wiki ontology.

Conversely, experience with starting to set up the 2R knowledge commons wiki brought up the need for introduction to or guidance around the wiki itself. This is probably something I would have noticed as we got into the task of populating the new wikis, but I'm glad to have been reminded of it now.

As well as general introductions, we have already recognised the need for pages introducing the wiki to different readerships, in terms closer to their own language. These could be called “about” or alternatively “intro” or something similar. I'll see what resonates with others, and when we've agreed on a term, I'll add it back in to the recent list.

This one is much more challenging, and I puzzled over this apparent mismatch for a few days. Do patterns and practices have the same essence, but just different aspects? However, just as I prefer separating “person” from “group” for common sense reasons, I didn't want to merge together two kinds of entity just because they have a few attributes in common, when their relationships are actually different.

My first thought was that any practice could be seen as a pattern of human behaviour. So perhaps practices were just a special case of pattern? It was all a bit confusing, so I decided yesterday 2025-11-03 to consult Claude.ai. See the unreconstructed dialogue there. The following is what I take from that …

Here I see both patterns and practices. Following the tendency of patterns to nouns and practices to verbs, I see patterns, for instance, in governing commons. Elinor Ostrom's principles can be seen as a key, well-researched set of patterns which recur in successful, well-governed commons. As with patterns in architecture or permaculture, these patterns may need to be adapted, and details filled out, to apply them to particular instances of commons. Useful patterns of commons governance emerge from governance practices that are handed on, repeated, modified and codified over time, by groups of people who share and transmit culture.

Commons patterns contrast with extractive, exploitative, depleting patterns of use which are still sadly the norm in capitalist and neo-liberal economics.

Complementarily, commoning is naturally seen in terms of practices, as mentioned above, transmitted through group culture.

I come back to the influential book, Patterns of Commoning, where there's an interesting quote at the end of Silke Helfrich's chapter:

As a way to cultivate a greater self-awareness of the realities of commoning, pattern languages can significantly accelerate the cultural transformation now underway, helping embryonic forms of commoning become new social norms and expanding the practices of commoning so that a commons-based society can emerge.

Perhaps the book could have been called “Practices of Commoning”? The Helfrich chapter (and the one by Helmut Leitner) does talk explicitly about patterns, but the rest of the collection seems to be more a collection of practices — very interesting and worthwhile accounts of a wide variety of commons around the world. But patterns? The distinction between patterns and practices is becoming clearer to me …

For me, it's the “bio” in bioregional that gives a strong hint. If we are looking at naturally occurring biological ecosystems, we aren't practicing anything, but we can observe and investigate patterns that occur in nature. In my limited understanding, that one of the first principles of permaculture.¹⁾ Another theme that is strong in bioregional thought is to look at the patterns inherent in indigenous culture. Again here, it's not us, the observers, doing the practice, though the practices may have been carried out for centuries. We, as observers, are looking at the stable patterns that have emerged from cultures that have evolved a stable symbiosis with their natural environment.

We can, naturally, go on to put these patterns into practice in new ways. Our bioregional practice can be one of applying observed patterns in new ways – or maybe just forgotten or neglected ways – with the intention of regenerating the ecosystems in which we find ourselves — and here of course I am talking about the cultural as well as biological ecosystems. From a simple reading, I see this as what Pattern Languages are about, as well.

As Claude.ai came up with:

“Council Process” would be a Practice (you do it repeatedly to develop listening capacity), while “Speaking Circle” might be a Pattern (a structural arrangement that works). They’re related but the relationships they form are different. […] if someone is creating a page about a bioregional gathering, they’d want to link to practices they used (watershed walking, consensus process) differently than patterns they noticed (seasonal timing, elder-youth pairings). The link semantics are different enough to warrant distinction.

My conclusion has to be that both Patterns and Practices are important features of the kinds of knowledge commons that I am helping to set up. Yes, from a logical point of view, both could be represented as variants of just “Concepts”. But, from a practical point of view, it makes more sense to me that patterns and practices are more specific and more complex, and we leave mere concepts to be more like the general vocabulary.

Thus, when we come to dividing up a knowledge commons into separate areas, in the case of commons, the type of commons, and in the case of bioregions, the geographical bioregion,²⁾ then the patterns and practices can belong to the area, while most of the base concepts (or just “terms” as I have them) can be in the common space, not only part of one area. We will need to take considerable care in trying to make all these easily navigable, learnable, discoverable.

Let's practice that, and see what patterns emerge for doing knowledge commons well.

• 2025-10-20 where I set out the types of page I am currently envisaging.
• 2025-11-03 recording my Claude.ai interaction.

• knowledge serving commons
• knowledge commons