NEW CIVILIZATION FOUNDATION
7.5 COMMUNITY & CULTURE
7.5.1 A central strategy for NCF is to establish a worldwide network of
inter-connected communities that serves several purposes:
7.5.1.1 Demonstrating models of empowered, co-operative, sustainable living.
7.5.1.2 Providing an infra-structure that will safely persist in spite of changing economical, political or environmental conditions.
7.5.1.3 Establishing ideal conditions for the development of technologies, models, and approaches that will serve all of humankind.
7.5.1.4 Providing a home base for individuals and teams that are dedicated to building and maintaining a world that works for all of us.
7.5.2 The strategy is essentially to acquire land upon which to establish each community; to build sustainable material infrastructures for necessary energy, water, food, housing, and economic support; to invite people of skill and integrity to populate the community; to foster the development of self-organizing, spiritually oriented social cooperation; and to connect these communities together through a communication, exchange and coordination infra-structure.
7.5.3 The idea is to create New Civilization "pockets" where groups of people can unleash their collective creativity outside the constraints of the economics, politics, monopolies, scarcities and general noise of the surrounding old civilization.
7.5.4 Each community will be largely self-sustainable in terms of energy, food and other basic resources. That is, it could survive totally independent of the surrounding world, if necessary, although New Civilization community's active interactions with local and remote communities will assist in maintaining and improving the existing social systems. The NCF communities will seek to serve where they can in exchanging goods, services or knowledge when appropriate.
7.5.5 The communities will have local internal economic exchange systems or unmeasured sharing and distribution, allowing the majority of the members to work to support the community within the community so the focus is on being useful within the community itself, and in participating in the common projects of the community. Each community will have several community owned businesses to bring in what money is required for external materials and supplies and if necessary, a community can petition the NCF or the community network to grant investment money to establish further community owned businesses.
7.5.6 Beyond covering the basics of living, each community will focus on one or more areas of service to the larger network or the world at large. That is, members of the community, or the whole community, might work on particular technological research or development projects, educational programs, media projects, agricultural development, administration of wider scale projects, or whatever their responsibility is chosen to be.
7.5.7 The communication infrastructure and knowledge sharing network amongst these communities is essential. The aim is to allow teams in individual communities to dedicate themselves thoroughly to their projects, and at the same time to let necessary information be passed on to anybody else in any other community who needs or desires the information, for cooperative or educational purposes. The idea is to both allow a team to specialize and at the same time avoid that situation where the same wheels need to be re-invented in different places.
7.5.8 It should be stressed that the aim is in no way to create isolated communities that hide away from society and mind their own business. On the contrary, the idea is to create communities that promote their activities widely and that produce quality products and services and knowledge for the benefit of society as a whole.
7.5.9 The average starting cost for creating such a community is estimated at around $5 million for a typical community of 100 adult members. This will of course vary depending on the geographical region and the size and purpose of the community. Each member will have a cooperative interest in the activities of the community. That is, the community will to some extent work as a profit-sharing business. The fixed property of each community is initially owned by a separate trust. When the community has demonstrated itself to be viable and self-organizing, the control of the trust is given over to the members of the community. An estimated 100 such communities are envisioned to be founded per year.
7.5.10 A common electronic communication infra-structure is developed for the network of communities. Key to this is that the components aren't controlled by outside monopolies. This will most likely require dedicated communication satellites combined with land based and undersea telco cable networks owned by NCF. Estimated cost of establishment: $5 billion. This network will of course also serve a variety of other NCF supported projects, such as media, education and third world empowerment. Any excess capacity in this network can of course be marketed to other parties.
