Welcome to the first post of “This week in Nangu”. The goal of this and future posts is to give you a transparent view of what is happening on our journey towards the first Nangu village in Costa Rica. So let me share what happened this week.

This week, we were focussing on two areas:

1. Internet outreach and 2. The Nangu governance model.

Internet outreach

Francisco posted a 3 minute introduction to Nangu, “Welcome to Nangu“. If you wonder what Nangu is and how we envision a future with Nangu, please have a look – and if you have any questions, ideas, after watching the video, please reach out.

We have launched the Nangu homepage at https://nangu.eco and also set up the Nangu Blog at https://nangu:8890/. If you are interested in staying up to date on the blog, head over there, you can subscribe to a newsletter which we will send out when new posts go live.

Next to our homepage, we also created social media profiles on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. You might wonder, why so many channels? We want to make it easy for you to join our journey, no matter where you are on the internet. Follow this link if you are curious about how we are tracking and planning our outreach on those platforms here.

The Nangu governance model

We are spending a lot of time on defining the governance model for Nangu. This is a topic with a lot of depth and many moving parts. We’ll cover more details on this blog, but for now, here is where we are: Our vision is, that Nangu will be a democratically governed network of co-operatives. Why democratically governed? Because we believe that everybody at Nangu should have a voice to influence the direction of Nangu. Why a network of co-operatives? Because the model of the co-operative allows everybody involved in Nangu to have a stake and ownership in their venture.

Over the past weeks we have reviewed several examples, from Haier to the Dutch “Buurtzorg”, to Italian co-operatives. It is incredible to see that there are so many organizations experimenting outside of the traditional hierarchical, venture funded shareholder model. We are fortunate that we can work with Paul Bernstein and Bram van der Leqc who have extensive experience in the governance space.

Here is a snapshot of our current thinking around how Nangu will operate on a high level. Please note, that this can and likely will change a lot.


What are we reading this week?

If there is one thing which is important at the current stage of building Nangu it is this: we are reading a lot! This because there are so many great people out there thinking about similar challenges/ideas. Here a short list of what we are currently reading / reviewing:

Pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freira
This book is a fascinating read about how Paulo Freira thinks that education can transform oppressive structures by engaging marginalized groups of people.

Solving Organizational Complexity With Simplicity
This article by Corporate Rebels analyzes why the Dutch organization “Buurtzorg” is successful with a self-driven system of small cells.

Essential Components in Workplace Democracy
This article by Paul Bernstein, who we are lucky to work with, dives into how organizations can ensure and nurture workers participation.

For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!