- What are some patterns in large-scale contexts that we didn't address in the Triad of Commoning? - What are key unresolved theoretical issues in how commons interact with political economy and society? - How can we create systems that support or at least accommodate commoning at larger scales or with more diverse players?
# 1. How to catalyze agency at aggregated, societal levels? [Finidori question]
# 2. How to mediate among different power relations and multiple knowledge systems?
Examples to consider: -Bhutan -Rwanda forest governance -Arturo Escobar's book -Ashish Kothari's 'Pluriverse' book -Anna Singh's 'Mushroom at End of the World' book -Potato Park --First Nations & scientists --Suislaw Forest management in Oregon (contrast with UN's approach to trust-building that relies on facts, reports & rational persuasion -- vs. looking to situated knowledge and relationship-building. Questions: How to build trust among diverse players? What sorts of institutional spaces & power are needed?
# 3. How to allow components in complex systems to interact more flexibly and creatively to make the system more adaptive (without undermining or cannibalizing its own basis)?
The point: to design infrastructures and systems that avoid path dependencies that enhance resilience. The pattern must address structural features such as brittle infrastructure or policy rules, and it must be "different by design" from one based on linear, cause-and-effect logic.
# 4. Transpersonal relations: What forms of mediation can actively engage our inner selves and social solidarity at scale, to prevent racism, sexism, classism, and other such Othering from taking root?
Commoning needs a form of mediation among diverse people via law, language, money and institutions -- familiar media for transpersonal interactions. But these forms and means of mediate at scale reproduce racism, inequality, and other structural problems.
Nationalism and patriotism are the state's way of speaking to the inner need for meaning and social solidarity (undifferentiated relational ontology), but it quashes individual agency.
Liberalism asserts a legal and policy neutrality and equality among people, but better-off cohorts of people are able to game the system (lawyers, lobbyists, experts, etc.) to secure private advantages. In effect, liberal jurisprudence, science, and bureaucracy can end up functioning as a meritocratic cover story and justification for structural injustice & unfair results.
In a complex society, can we have forms of mediation at scale that foster a pluriverse or tolerant, non-totalizing polycentric governance?
# 5. How can selfhood and achievement be recognized without money as a universal token of potency, as now reinforced by market norms?
What are commons-friendly forms of cultural and material recognition (which speak to inner needs)? Cf. Stephanie Kazaa, Buddhist author of 'Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire and the Urge to Consunme' html 
: how consumerism speaks to our self-worth in a psychological and perhaps neuro-biological way.
# 6. Is there a practical alternative, at scale, to liberal, democratic representation? Can pyramid-like hierarchies of representation be transcended?
Conceptually, what might this look like? Do "swarms" or "fractal" behaviors based on trust & relationships (e.g. Cecosesola) work among diverse groups of people?
Can there be hierarchy WITH heterarchy? --large-scale Sociocracy examples? --municipal libertarianism -- Murray Bookchin?
# 7. How can governance systems forster radical democratic heterarchy?
It is worth probing how this works in First Nations/ Indigeneous peoples' contexts:
--Potato Park
--First Nations
--Maristella Svampa
--Tatiana Roa, Colombia
--Maori governance, as described by Anne Salmond
--Iroquois Confederacy, as described by David Graeber and David Wengrow
--Haida Gwaii of northwest Canada (Book, 'The Haide Gwaii Lesson: A Strategic Playbook for Ingenous Sovereignty,' by Mark Dowie (Inkshares, 2017) book text
# 8. Are there structures and norms that explicitly enact collective agency (and foster social cohesion)?
Is this too big of a question, and not a pattern?
How to make people WANT to inter-common, or make inter-commoning popular? How to overcome structures and norms that might restrict agency?
# SECONDARY & META QUESTIONS
# A. How to nurture the pace of commoning approaches (and not just outcomes)? # B. What types of interconnections among commons create constructive synergies and enhance affordances for commoning?
# C. How to deal with urgency?
(btw: according to Alexander patterns should be mined and applied in such a way that they help to create living, generative entities and diachronic models - that incorporate the time dimension) (cf: Alexander: 1996 Patterns in Architecture at OOPSLA, San José California)
# D. Is there a way to create societal conditions that allow self-reinforcing commoning? (i.e., to structurally design features that steer agents in the system to want to choose commoning?)
# E. How can we take into account or overcome lock-ins, path dependencies, and unpredictable unintended outcomes?
# F. How do we create a more expansive sense of security for people at a societal level?
Security is not a direct goal, but an outcome that arises from different ways of "doing economy."
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