Evaluative Communities

Description

Neil Cummings, Marsha Bradfield et al.:

"We learnt to value other kinds of values, like care and generosity and began to prioritise cooperation over individuation and attention seeking; we learnt to overwrite scarcity with creative abundance; to value peer-networks, and conflictual and complex evaluative communities were also things we came to value. We set about building a commons of creative resources, and to distribute decision making.

We learnt to appreciate that all values and evaluation take place through social processes that bring actors together into communities of varying scales; from intimate personal exchanges – lovers gifts, to terrifying global scales - international trade sanctions. Communities of evaluation give values their emotional, monetary or material texture, and simultaneously enable these communities and the values they value to be visible. Values, especially abstract values are not qualities of things or people, but momentary judgements – value judgements – given a ‘sensible’, meaning apprehensible form, that can be transacted.

Evaluative communities choreograph the exchange of values within any given group, culture or society. These communities are scalable in number, distributed in space - near or far - and variously durational - they can be fleeting, or durable enough to aggregate institutions. As the values they value persist, the communities themselves become more resilient.

We set about identifying the values we valued and making them resilient. " (http://www.neilcummings.com/content/communities-evaluation)