Community FairWays Introduction

We are currently editing most of the texts for the start-up version of this site!.. but decided to be on-line anyway, so to enhance the discussion about content and structure.

A Platform For Community Decision-Making

Community FairWays (cfw) was started by ArtSourceLab (ASL) in March 2004 on the occasion of the exhibition-competition Shrinking Cities (www.shrinkingcities.com). While not admitted into the second competition round the concept (cfw-#1) met a response among invited Experts Stakeholders and others in the ArtSourceLab Open Community convincing the cfw editor-group to move the project in direction of a continual platform for innovation in the field of Community Decision-Making. cfw-#1 disclosed a need for interdisciplinary conceptual spaces at the academic borderline, where intervention strategies, ToolSets and case-reports can be monitored, exercised and discussed - with or without commissions at hand.

Training Intervention Strategies

Many good psychosocial ideas fail in practice because of the way they are implemented. Community Decision-making ToolSets are not meant to be projected onto case scenarios but to train ourselves, our partners and facilitators to target and anticipate the needs of new cases. The core of the work is the intervention strategy and its sequences, often starting long before the first approach of On-site Stakeholders. Different ASL projects in progress had led to the term Social Meta-Structure in 2003. With cfw-#1 we realized that a number of terms make sense if we want to address different sequences preceding on-site intervention. So the cfw-ToolSet-#1 operates with five intervention sequences taking place before the process settles on-site with the Social Meta-Structure.

New Community Decision-Making Tools = New Democracy Tools

The cfw project features the thesis that community building originates beyond the action frames of typical democratic decision-making tools; beyond parliamentary processes as well as basis-democratic processes. In this perspective neither individual client wishes nor political perspectives do qualify as objective for community building interventions.

Un-final ToolSets And Dual Terminology

We do not imagine the compilations of ideas in this or future cfw-ToolSets to be final. Specific cases will often cause us to update or conceive new ToolSets and thus remind us about the principle of Dual Terminology: The language with which we discuss our intervention is not the language with which we intervene! A language constituted within action frames (behavioural code of conduct) is different from but equal to verbal languages (conceptual code of conduct).

Per Traasdahl, Leading Editor, ArtSourceLab