Second Renaissance Ecosystem Map

Let’s talk about the map! Second Renaissance

Making this a reference thread for ideas, improvements, opinions, etc

Current/first edition of the map was released June 2024: Map of Second Renaissance Changemaking Ecosystem

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Michael G wrote: “it’s useful up to a point but this particular landscape undergoes a lot of continental drift, and this render misses a lot of islands”
(to which I opine, yes of course, of course)

@rufuspollock how do people contribute islands/suggestions? I think Renaissance Art Movement used to have a “Contribute” function, but I don’t see it now (though there’s a non-functional “get started” button)

I’ve had a few long conversations about this map…like all of them, it’s useful up to a point but this particular landscape undergoes a lot of continental drift, and this render misses a lot of islands and doesn’t show the “traffic” of people and projects that migrate between locations at all.

I have multiple friends working on adaptive maps of similar spaces that automatically update. Maybe I can patch you all together?

And I have an approach to mapping the idea-space in my own work that could be easily expanded to present something more comprehensive and inclusive.

If y’all are in “collective intelligence map update” mode count me in. Right now my main concern with this is that it is going to drive “rich get richer” traffic to established (and in some cases deceased) entities, and could use some counterweighting to surface emergent entities, long-range relationships, and more of a data-based, rather than folk taxonomy that reveals shifts along a time axis, scales in resolution, shows hot spots, and identifies bridge agents and active partnerships rather than implying a static landscape of mainly institutional actors.

There’s also an opportunity to discover features that weren’t present at the outset…to identify latent relationships. Letting people get under the hood with this and understand (and alter!) the underlying rule set for how it was generated would be really fruitful, in terms of proposing new collaborations, etc.

If y’all are committed to resolution at institutional scale, consider adding “species range”/“habitat” overlays that show how key individuals flock between these domains (like the invisible diaspora from Integral Institute to several of these other orgs).

And I’d like to see “trade networks” of idea flow/citation/influence.

All of this is possible with available public records and not much human labor, at least to first approximation.

(Caveat that I don’t know much about how much effort by how many people went into that first map, or how much input from mapped entities was solicited. It’s definitely cool, and necessary work. My above remarks are geared toward how to make a tool like this as useful as possible and how to ensure each update duplicates as little assumed-scarce work as possible.)

I’ll try to follow this forum thread but I’m definitely in to talk real-time on calls or play a part in email threads as this evolves.

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First, great to have you sharing this feedback here :+1::pray:

I’ve had a few long conversations about this map…like all of them, it’s useful up to a point but this particular landscape undergoes a lot of continental drift, and this render misses a lot of islands and doesn’t show the “traffic” of people and projects that migrate between locations at all.

Totally and i think it would be great both/and a) update the map b) make multiple maps.

I have multiple friends working on adaptive maps of similar spaces that automatically update. Maybe I can patch you all together?

that would be great IMO. I imagine @JamesBaker is :+1: too.

And I have an approach to mapping the idea-space in my own work that could be easily expanded to present something more comprehensive and inclusive.

If y’all are in “collective intelligence map update” mode count me in. Right now my main concern with this is that it is going to drive “rich get richer” traffic to established (and in some cases deceased) entities, and could use some counterweighting to surface emergent entities, long-range relationships, and more of a data-based, rather than folk taxonomy that reveals shifts along a time axis, scales in resolution, shows hot spots, and identifies bridge agents and active partnerships rather than implying a static landscape of mainly institutional actors.

:+1::+1:

There’s also an opportunity to discover features that weren’t present at the outset…to identify latent relationships. Letting people get under the hood with this and understand (and alter!) the underlying rule set for how it was generated would be really fruitful, in terms of proposing new collaborations, etc.

If y’all are committed to resolution at institutional scale, consider adding “species range”/“habitat” overlays that show how key individuals flock between these domains (like the invisible diaspora from Integral Institute to several of these other orgs).

This kind of mapping / visualization would be a lot of fun and is definitely something “we” would like to do more of.

I’ll try to follow this forum thread but I’m definitely in to talk real-time on calls or play a part in email threads as this evolves.

:+1: I think we could both do a real-time call and maybe focus a next barn-raising at the second renaissance on this topic.

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hi @michaelgarfield , i am rather new to this community, but am intrigued by the map that @JamesBaker created and your mentioning of other people working on ecosystem maps. I explored this field in my master’s project with my local community, taking a less dynamic approach. I wish i had known all of you during that time. You are far ahead of me!

I am wondering if you are bringing people together, if you’d be open to keeping me in the loop as well. A friend and I are working on eco-system/organism metaphor-based visualizations that a particular community can create to capture a certain moment of relations.

here are some visuals that resemble parts of my explorative journey

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Feedback: make it co-creative & interactive! You don’t have to make it visual/part of the map, just so people can click on fx each island to see other related subcommunities (which can be added by other users - and even better if those suggestions can be rated by others).

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I shared these with @rufuspollock a while back but doesn’t seem as if they’ve been incorporated:

I noticed there’s one key “island” that is missing on the map, which is the STAGES International network, including Pacific Integral, Lower Lights and Constructing Consciousness.

While there’s a decent overlap of STAGES people that also exist in the Integral and Metamodern worlds, the STAGES network has its own unique culture, practices, lineages and worldviews, and is home to some of the most beloved elders in the network.

In short…

Terri O’Fallon and her brother Kim Barta created the STAGES model of ego development, which not only has its own robust global community but also has become one of the central lineage models that many organizations in the larger network have rallied around, including Pacific Integral which has been running programs for over 20 years around the globe, Lower Lights which is an amazing Mormon-based integral spiritual community started by Thomas McConkie, who also runs Integral Polarity Practice with John Kesler. And there’s BeLight run by Venita Ramirez.

There’s also Constructing Consciousness gatherings, which I run. We’ve had seven gatherings around the globe for the past 1.5 years which are curated events for those who share and embody later stages or Integral/Metamodern/MetAware worldviews. A number of your advisors have attended including Daniel Thorson, Joe Lightfoot, Naryan, Phil Chen, etc.

If the map is still open to revisions, I’d suggest creating a new island perhaps called STAGES and placing it in between Inner Development, Spiritual & Contemplative Traditions and Integral, as all these communities are overlapping with those nodes. Or they could be added to existing islands, in which case I’d recommend:

-STAGES International in Inner Development

-Kim Barta in personal healing

-Lower Lights in Spiritual & Contemplative Traditions

-Integral Polarity Practice in Integral

-Pacific Integral on the border of Relational Practices and Spiritual/Contemplative

-Constructing Consciousness in Relational Practices close to Pacific Integral

-BeLight in Spiritual & Contemplate on the border with Relational

-Ridgzin (Dustin DiPerna’s integral Mahamudra community) in Spiritual/Contemplative

Thank you so much for considering these additions!

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@JonasSovik Did you see how the map now has a clickable layer, which it didn’t before? I think it could be a lot better still, but you’re right in line with the project vision that connects the map to the (still theoretical) “travel guide brochures” for the regions, to the postcards and wiki and other personal experience stories.

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Hi Tucker, first so great to have you share here - and this is a much better process (i…e on the forum)

I shared these with @rufuspollock a while back but doesn’t seem as if they’ve been incorporated:

Yes … and really valuable. And so you know these were totally logged along with other feedback we got … and we are wanting to incorporate it …

So why hasn’t it been you may ask?

Perhaps is that we don’t want to or something? That is absolutely not the case I can assure you. There’s definitely a bunch of stuff missing mapping including much more integral related stuff (I even had early design versions of the map that only had integral stuff!)

So why is it? Let me explain in a bit of detail as it talks to some useful ideas in this thread about we may move forward.

There are several related reasons, but in a nutshell

  • Creating and updating a map like this isn’t as simple as it seems. In particular there is:
    • A fair amount of nuanced cognitive/social effort in deciding what goes in or not (if we include everything it gets overwhelming)
    • A fair amount of design effort to get it to be useful and look good (which interacts with previous point)
    • More detail on this below
  • “We” haven’t had much resource to work on this since last May – quite a bit of the work here was resourced by an EU project. (BTW: We would love more resource here :wink:)

Solutions

Now there are solutions, some already proposed in this thread

  • Start having multiple maps
    • These can be both alternatives: e.g. different versions of the same overall area …
    • Complements: e.g. “zoom-ins” i.e. more detailed versions of a given area or “neighbors” i.e. maps of related areas. All of this can even be linked together so we have a massive map. A bit more like an “Atlas” where we have maps of different areas with an overall “meta-map”
  • Implement a better way to edit this map so that we can kind of wiki-fy it (this is related to point (1)
  • Distinguish a map and a directory (a directory is much easier to edit than a conceptual map like this). We already have several directories e.g. Second Renaissance and Second Renaissance
  • Find more resource(s) :smile: (that can be both money and people’s time/energy)

Why is a map like this not straightforward

Updating the map like this isn’t entirely trivial. Here’s a few reasons, some minor, some more significant:

  • It was designed with a collaborator and the result was done in adobe illustrator. No-one on team at the moment is expert with that. BTW we look at alternative ways to do the map that would be easier to update but it is struggle to get them to look as good …
  • But that’s trivial compared to the cognitive effort. Getting to the current map was quite an effort with lots of debate about what to include and what not (we could include everything – and we have other projects with many more items) but then the map is a lot less useful and visually accessible. When you update you open up those debates :wink: So rather than just being “Hey let’s add X” it becomes “Hey let’s add X, Y, Z …” and then “Woah if we do that there we should this in this other place” and then “Woah the map looks really unbalanced now …” etc.

Getting to this map was a multi-month process (and which came out of a multi-year process). It may seem simple but there is quite a bit behind it (perhaps i can share some of the alternatives we discarded …)

While there’s a decent overlap of STAGES people that also exist in the Integral and Metamodern worlds, the STAGES network has its own unique culture, practices, lineages and worldviews, and is home to some of the most beloved elders in the network.

This is awesome list and we should collect this kind of info and also find a way to integrate it.

Mapping party(s) - who’s interested?

There seems some interest in improving / extending this map and creating new (better/different) maps …

Shall we organize a first collab-othon/hack-athon to work on this? Who’s interested?

This “mapping” can be more than creating a “map” in the visual sense - it can include “mapping” the actors e.g. creating databases/directories, tracing links of connection and influence and much more.

yooo that’s cool! Yeah would love to see it evolve even more

Hi @rufuspollock, thanks for this! I hope my original message didn’t come off as “come on dude why isn’t it updated yet” haha as I simply meant it more in a straightforward way that I had emailed the same notes a while back and was reposting on this forum. I certainly understand not every request can be made and that it takes time :slight_smile:

The simplest revision would be to add STAGES International to the Integral island. That would seem like a good “catch-all” minimal edit.

Excited to see how it evolves.

Not at all - it was very straightforward and open :slightly_smiling_face:

It just prompted me to walk through a bit both for you and others (and myself) why it takes time … and more importantly how we could move this forward – especially if others wish to participate :tada: