The Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
The Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a doers manual. A comprehensive and creatively taxonomized wiki cataloguing our collective intelligence around societal transformation toward cooperation. It curates a diversity of resources - articles, media, frameworks, case studies, and other tools that help humanity step into mutual aid, cooperation, equity, and an infinite game dynamic full of mutual benefit.
On the back end, it’s a giant database that catalogues resources on cooperative governance, participatory philanthropy, permaculture, systems thinking, cooperative incentives, intentional communities and many other themes that emphasize a win-for-all paradigm. It will have several front-ends, including a annually published book, media sites and educational tools.
The first front end will be a highly searchable and well curated way to easily access important and necessary knowledge. Through designed themed journeys, natural language search engine interfaces, a friendly and intuitive metatag system and learning journeys created by key stakeholders, the database aims to be your one-stop place to get inspired, learn and plan a regenerative future.
The manual currently is a crowd-sourced resource repository that currently lives on airtable with an extensive system of meta-tagging at different levels. It awakens people to the possibility of the regenerative future by creating a knowledge commons of the organizations, people, patterns, media, art, articles, ideas, manuals, templates and blueprints humanity will need in the following decades in order to design a feature that works for all.
The idea is to create a navigable regenerative hive mind. The database will be co-created, with a core team of curators and volunteers to maintain it, inspired by the Wikipedia model. The members of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, including the Design Science Studio and the hundreds of artists and creators they mentor and fund each year will be the primary stewards of the database. The BFI members will curate and promote it, bringing on board strategic partners and potential users, acting as librarians and strategists of this ambitious planetary undertaking. An interactive platform with a planetary perspective for the crew of Spaceship Earth.
The manual will empower people to cooperate with nature to design a world that works for 100% of life.
For each chapter, spanning a wide variety of topics from ecology, equity and ego, we are naming the main leverage points to intervene for radical systems change.
We are illuminating the leading drivers, base assumptions and root causes of issues so that as we solve them we can also dissolve the circumstances that led to them.
The manual will help us create cascading benefits rather than negative unintended effects. With any intervention in any system, there will always be indirect effects. If we plan for those effects, we can aim to increase the health of every adjacent system, creating cascading cycles of value creation. If we are too myopic or reductionist in our strategy, we risk simply pushing harm to a different system in the name of doing good and ultimately creating more negative results than if we hadn’t intervened in the first place.
2019 is the 50 year anniversary of Fuller’s publication of his seminal work Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. In celebration and continued dedication to making the world work for 100%, BFI is inviting partners to co-author the Cooperating Manual for Spaceship Earth. It will feature a collective perspective on the best leverage points to intervene to increase the health of our world. Each chapter of the manual will be on topics like regenerative materials, ocean stewardship, transit equity, new energy innovations and others. Each topic chapter will also have a chapter of people who are helping continuously evolve the high-integrity sense-making on that topic. It will be a living manual.
The Co-Operating Manual is an online platform to empower people of all ages to think and act synergistically. It will elucidate trimtab interventions, high-integrity recommendations to help move forward comprehensive strategies and anticipatory action toward a healthy future, with an open invitation to cooperatively iterate and improve the collective approaches.
The platform curates and creates educational art and media that shift paradigms of our home planet and re-orient our sense of possibility. The platform will draw on the immense collection of currently available maps, videos, visualizations, courses, reports, and other media that inspire our collective, planetary success. It will provide access to a wealth of scientific and geospatial visualizations that illustrate Earth systems and reveal planetary potentials.
Bringing to life the metaphor of Spaceship Earth, the platform will curate visualizations of planetary trends and patterns. By “making the invisible visible,” the platform will enlarge context and cultivate thinking in wholes. Building on seminal Fuller inventions such as the Dymaxion World Map, World Game and Geoscope, the platform will encourage participants to explore and interpret a world in change.
The Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is under development and we would love your input as we continue to iterate on its design. Please share your thoughts with us on what you like about this page and what you wish was here. Thank you for Co-Operating with us.