Welcome to our weekly update! We’re now in the middle of May and first of all hope that you are well! At Nangu, we currently work fully distributed with Francisco based in Costa Rica, Ruben in France and Nikolai in The Netherlands. Because of Covid, there are things we can not currently do, like exploring potential plots of land. At the same time, it allows us to focus on other areas in our journey towards the first Nangu village, like defining our governance model. In short, we’re adapting to the current reality.
So without further ado, we continued to focus on the following two areas this week:
1. Internet outreach and 2. The Nangu governance model.
Internet outreach
We began our online initiatives about two weeks ago and are really excited to welcome so many people who are interested in Nangu. Let me share the highlights: At the time of writing 328 people 🥳 from all over the world joined our Facebook page and 62 people subscribed to our Instagram profile. It is heart warming to see that so many people are interested in our journey, thank you all for this and welcome to Nangu 🙏.
Francisco posted a video which answers the question “Why Costa Rica?”. Our vision is to create a replicable model to restore degraded land all around the tropics and convert them into productive food forests, conservation areas, an economic powerhouse and the home to millions of people living a fulfilling life. And it turns out, Costa Rica is a really great place to call home. Have a look:
For folks who prefer to read about what makes Costa Rica such a special place, you can dive right into the details here in written form.
The Nangu governance model. Radical Transparency and Clarity as core values
Radical Transparency as a core value has been incredibly important to us since the beginning of Nangu. While we believe that individuals have a right to privacy, we also believe that organizations are different. We think that organizations need to be transparent and accountable for their impact on both people and the planet.
The “Nangu Weekly Update” for instance is one example how we strive to be radically transparent with our progress, thinking and vision.
As we explored the implications of transparency we realized that it is also a tool to provide clarity. Despite being intimately related, transparency and clarity are not the same thing. When our thoughts and ideas are disorganized and messy – and they often are in the early stage of disambiguating a step on our journey – being transparent for the sake of transparency can be counterproductive. It will put the burden of finding clarity in the chaos onto the recipient. This is not good. Clarity without transparency has its own set of drawbacks, scheming would be a great example of this and would ultimately create a toxic organization. So in addition to Radical Transparency, we asked ourselves this week, should we include C_larity_ (or a phrase with such spirit) as a core value?
We also wondered, are we spending too much time on small details like this one? Our response was No. Our values have great implications on the governance systems that will be put in place, the income sharing mechanisms, the terms for early worker owners and the conditions to establish healthy relationships with everybody who will be part of Nangu. How we define Nangu today will have long lasting impact on its future.
What are we reading and watching this week?
Here an overview of what we are currently reading, watching or studying in the context of the Nangu journey:
The Green New Deal, by Jeremy Rifkin.
The Green New Deal describes how the third industrial revolution, renewable energies, pension funds, the sharing economy and cold heart finance are rendering the petrol industry obsolete and opening opportunities to a more ecological, fair and distributed way to organize human life.
https://platformdesigntoolkit.com
Platform Design Toolkit shares great tools, educational videos and links for people interested in creating platforms that serve communities of users. It can help shift an organization’s structure from a top down pyramid to a web of stakeholders.
https://purpose-economy.org/
Purpose Economy is on a mission to shift from shareholder controlled, profit maximizing corporations to stakeholder controlled, purpose driven businesses. Their well tested and practical approach is worth considering as an alternative to more traditional worker owned coops.
For now, this concludes this week’s summary. Please follow us on Instagram if you are interested in our next steps. Take care!