What's in a name
Continuing exploration of the shapes that want to exist.
The "intentional way of unfolding life and love" is the ideal that finds its expression in inner, relational, and outer work. (outer, toward "intentional world" vs "intentional way"?) It's bigger than any brand or name, and many groups and people see it, practice it, and point to it in similar-but-different ways. This is the way (cue Mandalorian ref).
The IS Community is: a MiSo-congregational-sized container of relationality that supports individuals in their unfolding. Developmental+relational practice-based TOC, post-conventional/integral/metamodern "center of gravity", "awareness, acceptance, integrity" recipe/mantra. A place to keep growing, keep developing, and to be anchored in a deliberately developmental culture with compatible values.
Intentional Society is: a locally-connected mesh of people and groups, connected by trust and relationship, who all identify with one particular articulation of the values/skills/strategies aligning our contributions towards the world of that intentional way. It's a banner, it's a brand, it's a flag, it's a shibboleth. It's also mayyyybe an org doing comms and coordination? (Or evolving into something like that.) Plus some infrastructure supporting the nodes, like "here's our standard interaction agreements" and tech scaffolding.
IS currently is also, I imagine, a personal brand. There are a lot of these around the space: "mutations" is J.J., "future thinkers" is E.&M., "great simplification" is N.H., "reinventing organizations" became F.L.'s, etc. I didn't really know 4 years ago that I was creating one of them, but it's probably perceived that way by many. There are other brands that are not so personal: "life itself" and "global bildung network" are maybe barely across that line and are regarded as organizations, while "emergent commons" has a lineage but definitely not a leader. None of these are bad or good, just a different range of perceptions.
To the extent that a label points to a person rather than a concept though, that person retains control and the thing remains "person sized" in some important way. "Integral" was associated (rightly) so much with Ken Wilber that when he stumbled personally, the ideas fell out of favor and suffered some discredit. And that's despite a large number of people being involved in "the Integral movement"! The label "Circling" is also a good bad example here, where it represented a whole movement of people, and now Guy Sengstock (actually, his personal brand of The Circling Institute) is clawing it back using legal mechanisms and IMHO is destroying most of the value the label has accumulated by forcing everyone else off that island. That's a "shrinking to person sized" and there's something undesirable about person-bounded brand. Reeks of "cult of personality" if the thing can't be defined independently of the person - kinda SD-red coded.
More random case studies: "cultivating leadership" has 80 great consultants and a lot of organizational regard, while still probably being "JGB's thing" to some people. AD concept frame, some amount of celebrity, it's a mix. Same with "new republic of the heart" - niche celebrity founder, and in this case the non-profit org is struggling after Terry passed away. There were definitely good ideas in that book/philosophy/way! But not articulated well enough to be easily carried on by the org?
A moniker can point to a person, a group, org, an alliance, a scene, or a meme. Those are the people and control scopes - yes concepts and ideas are also involved, but always in relation to power-holding (or not) people. One person can be in control as the source and avatar of the label, or it could be attached to a specific few-or-crew of people together. An org is still central control of a brand label, regardless of who the leadership is it is that leadership that has control. An alliance gets into "distributed control" territory while having some governance still, while a scene relies purely on popularity/influence, and a meme just evolves out in the unconscious wilds.
So which would I like to happen in the perception of Intentional Society? Or rather, what does it want to be? I acknowledge that it equates mostly to "James's thing" now, both externally and to a large extent internally too. I think it wants to shift, to and probably through org phase, ultimately into something of a mesh-alliance shape. (As a part of the larger mesh, it should be a fractal example of the whole.) Maybe the word "network" gets thrown in there (as I think that's the closest readily-available label in common usage).
I want it to make space for lots of leaders, and I want it to stand for something clear and understandable to outsiders. That means the distribution of sourceship (and structure that supports that in the organizing dimension) for the former, and for the latter it needs defining and clarifying. Maybe that's something I can take a swing at next.
What then of the IS Community? What identity or label does it want to have, that would let it be what it wants to be within the IS umbrella? I've resisted the confusion of stringing the words "society community" together, but still that's about where we're at presently. (Intentional Ventures got around this by having its own top-level name that elides "society", but... "intentional community" is hardcore taken already in meaning-space.) It could give itself a name, a unique and new name, if that felt good. Or it could adopt a slightly different functional name like "Hub". (similar to how Denizen has "the Den")
The collection/portfolio nature needs to show up in the IS brand update (oh, I guess that's a thing now, isn't it) alongside the "what it stands for" vision/way.
(ran out of thoughts and time for the day)