What is special about the "Global Villages"?

We go to villages as tourists, but we want some comfort and we want access to the global cultural wealth. Imagine this would be possible everywhere on this planet; a globe of villages connecting and interacting with each other and yet each of them living their authentic local circumstance to the fullest and having their special contribution in the world. No two villages in this world are equal. But villages that have this ambition to be connected, they share being GlobalVillages. And it is natural that "Global Villages" also serve as informational resorts and nodes for cultural creative people. Maybe these villages are not just places to live but could also be repositories of knowledge.

So this raises our curiosity: what is common and what is special to the many GlobalVillages emerging on this planet? Here is where many questions and communities can meet. Both of this should be dealt with in this wiki.

• What is common to most or all Global Villages we want to explore in an endeavour called the pattern language of the Global Villages.
• And what is special to each single one or some of them we want to learn in a sort of Global Villages Directory.

We could also well imagine similar communities on cohousing, ecovillages, sustainable transportation, open source fabrication etc. Our core idea about "GlobalVillages"is not a special type of architecture or lifestyle or technology, but the care and culture of relations between a relatively small settlement and the rest of the world. We focus on the empowering and enabling function of networks and look on the local achievements made possible by this.

Paradoxically, the main means to accelerate this process is to increase the number of likeminded places around the world. Because of the enormous knowledge and ingenuity needed to fulfill their task, Global Villages have a strong positive interest in the growth of partner villages around the world, a positive virtuos cycle that we see eventually ending in their becoming the dominant form of human community of this planet - something which seems almost crazy to predict today when we are still hardly at the end of a self-supporting depopulation wave towards and in favor of big cities. It is therefore very important especially today to start creating and showing more and more examples of this reversal trend. It is not important to focus on quantity today, but on the quality of design and the scope of cooperative and generative activities. Global Villages of today are "pioneer plants" .

One condition that is largely unmet is reating the infrastructure and the technology to make these villages co-developing and co-producing. We need virtual design boards for machines and devices that can be assembled locally, we need the tools and the regenerative skills to obtain local materials for assembly and production, as we need design languages to facilitate effective cooperation on complex issues. We need ways to quickly and effectively assign tasks in a virtual division of labour, and we need basic life maintainance agreements to free our designing ingenuity from the individual struggle for survival. We need to exchange and evaluate different forms of local economic organisation, be it monetary or non-monetary. We need to empower people who have not yet discovered this potential to cross the digital divide in their own,special, particular way. The healer, the baker, the shoemaker, the artist, the thinker, the singer, the resource broker .... everyone has the opportunity and the challenge to develop their individual talent and contribution in allignment with global cultural communities that support competence and passion.

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