# "Creativity" means doing--creating, making.
# "Local" means in your neighborhood.
All text in this graphic above are hyperlinks.
Icon of Relocalize Governance
**Two Examples of Specified Domains to be ReLocalized** Double click to enlarge.
Icon of ReLocalize Farming
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# What is ReLocalize Creativity?
**We provide an open platform for tool sharing and for access to skills and methods training.**
> We intend to provide a practical beacon of hope in increasingly desperate times. Hope founded in every increasing self sufficiency AND collaboration.
ReLocalize Creativity has the potential to hold and grow the local **knowledge** needed to support self-development. ReLocalize Creativity is intended to become a living **global pattern repository** for neighborhood development and survival.
Metaphorically, patterns languages (networks) provide a trelliswork helpful for every neighborhood on earth. One can grow any climbing plant on it. Your choice, your soil, your needs, your readiness, your sense of beauty. Peas or roses. It is modular. Put one trellis here, another there. Different people can grow different "plants" on the ReLocalize Creativity frame.
The trelliswork's structure contains almost everything about business and creativity that we know how to share. I had the good fortune of having the creative support and funding of my community in healthcare design for 20 years. Kerry had the good fortune of working in companies that were extremely effective consulting to governments and multinational corporations. Everything we have learned we learned from others and refined our knowledge in practice with others. We gratefully **pay it forward**. We request that you too pay it forward.
> *See Kerry Turner CV and Marc Pierson CV*
We have come to believe that our society has become **unbalanced in a specific way**. We see that big business and big government no longer have a generative relationship with neighborhoods. So, we have **devoted** ourselves to providing support to neighborhoods through their own self-styled **community organizers**. Everything we learned in business we are trying to make available in a **vernacular** form for neighborhood and community organizers and activists.
Kerry and I have created a simple enough framework in which this kind of knowledge can be organized and shared locally and beyond. In a very practical way, we are developing **a pattern language for social architecture** inspired by Christopher Alexander and his pattern language.
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Let’s go over the framework before we go into any details. The framework is meant to realize **One Idea** and provide a way to realize that idea in every neighborhood on earth—of which we estimate there are about **One Million Neighborhoods**.
The goal of **ReLocalize Creativity** is to provide tools and methods such that local activists can take more successful local action. In the illustration, all the tools and methods are sandwiched between the concept of **Re Localize** and the concept of **Creativity**. The next key feature in the framework is the foundational program --learning to **See the Systems** that one is a part of. See the Systems is the foundational program because none of the rest of it would make much sense without self-created models of the systems to be changed. Kerry can teach 12-year-olds to do this in eight hours; however, the art and practice of seeing systems can be extended indefinitely. Our initial goal is for people to visualize their systems and make desired changes within those systems. We find that noticeable changes may take about a year if the change is intended to affect a neighborhood or community.
Our current thinking is that numerous projects and **Programs** will result from local activists and their associates visualizing the systems that they’re most interested in. We anticipate that they will find many willing **Partners** who will benefit from the changes and who may actively support the changes.
As any successful executive can tell you, there are certain ideas, methods, tools, and people that make it possible to lead and support ongoing change. In this framework we refer to the critical people as **Mentors**. We collect and explain useful **Tools** and **Methods**. Then we try to tak experiences with using these tools and methods and present them as **Patterns** and pattern languages (here referred to as **Pathways**) as introduced by Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, and Takashi Iba.
Now, we have listed every term in the framework except **Communication Platform**.
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Here I am going to share a story before delving into the communication platform itself.
I had the great privilege of working with a county in southern Oregon and subsequently five counties in Eastern Washington. They were able to do great work using the methods and tools that I had become familiar with in my home county over twenty-five years. Unfortunately, they were not able to repeat that experience on their own. This was a disappointment to me because I had imagined ongoing improvements at a faster rate than currently occurs.
I spent the next few years looking for a platform that would leave the methods, tools, and even their record of accomplishments behind for anyone in their communities to build upon. There was no such platform to be found.
At that time, I had 20 years’ experience building, improving, and implementing large software platforms in my community. So, I attempted to build one with the support of some impressive companies and people. To no avail.
Happily, a friend introduced me to Ward Cunningham, the originator of the wiki and a key player in developing object-oriented programming and agile methodologies. He had been working with some of his close friends for over a decade building an open source platform that had great potential for the tasks I had in mind.
The platform needed to present all the ReLocalize Creativity information in ways that support neighborhood and community level change. It had to be able to do a lot of things well enough and it had to be open-source software capable of continuous innovation. This platform had to be complex enough to change the world and simple enough to be used in every neighborhood. It had to be vernacular, and it had to make business tools and practices fit the language and needs of people and neighborhoods across the world.
Ward and his friends have supported me consistently, almost relentlessly, for three years—everyone working on a voluntary basis.
Before we go on let me add another word about patterns and pattern languages. The plan for ReLocalize Creativity is to develop and share a large set of patterns—organized and reusable knowledge. Patterns allow us to collect and convert what has been proprietary or tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge for use in neighborhoods.
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The **Communication Platform** for neighborhood relocalization of creativity is Ward Cunningham's **Open-Source** Federated Wiki (FedWiki). The FedWiki is well suited for creating and sharing patterns and pattern languages.
There are a few critical features of the platform. Unlike wikis it is **Federated**--each person has their own instance that they have total control over. It is **Public** and all the content is **Shared** under Community Commons BY-SA 4.0. It is not an application, it is a platform that integrates a large number of applications (called plugins and scripts). All of the code is on GitHub 
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The most important point is that it can continue to evolve as the people who are using it desire. There is no company to sunset it or begin charging for it. Once there is enough usage I anticipate the need and opportunity to create a foundation to support it, much like Wikimedia and Wikipedia foundations.
# We anticipate a growing set of domain based instances of ReLocalize, such as:
**ReLocalize Governance**
_All the tools and methods and mentors and communication platforms in the world will to help much unless we get the governance structure to support the whole community (nesting communities). Otherwise the powerful will harm the weaker and things will continue to fall apart._
See Robin Asby on cybernetic governance
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