darksoil applied research
in support of biological relating
At darksoil we support what we like to think of as local first biological relating.
What we mean by this is that we are doing efforts that support local organising, based on working directly with local organisers (like Viktor in Röstånga). The kinds of organising that we support are things that primarily increase biological relating. This can be increased connections between human beings through enabling more local events. It can also be efforts that increase complexity and interrelationships of organisms in the soil. Sometimes like in the work with food coops it is both.
Our theory of change is that if we focus on supporting these local conditions we are also moving towards an eventual coherent and bioregional regeneration.
What we mean by that statement is that we focus on local biological relating, in the flesh, through the food, with the bodies, on the ground, that this will lead to a planet where people are able to coordinate and collaborate on healing the place they live in. The particular organ of the planetary organism that they inhabit.
To us, healing a place might mean:
revitalising the soils with all of the micro and macro-biology that we have wiped out.
recreating spaces for people to commune and enjoy each others individuality
reviving an understanding of exactly where the food you eat come from and how your eating is interacting with your immediate landscape
We are approaching this work as applied research, we don’t have the answers on how to do things. We are aware of the extreme importance of local adaptation and that applying some mental model from the outside around what these activities should look like often make us unable to see local nuance.
So in the work we do with software we make sure that it is adaptable. We don’t want to become a big platform that is the home for a million local groups and try to cater for their need in one place. We want to build little tools that can be adapted and incorporated where there is benefit in ways that are determined by the groups that use them. We build tools that groups can just take and run with on their own.
Applied research
We are approaching our work from a lens of applied research. For us that means that we are continuously holding some inquiry and working with groups to test ways of practice that seek to illustrate useful patterns and understanding.
Inquiries that we are working with right now in the Röstånga village context include:
How can a village come into mutual support relationships with its local producers?
How can a local mushroom farm provide nourishment and life to a village?
How can a group of people provide space for a whole village to commune?
Activities that we have been doing to explore these questions in context are:
Creating support software for an up and running buyers club in Röstånga that is buying food from local producers. (see our piece on Plenty)
We have been exploring what the needs for organization a mushroom farm has through working with the local mushroom and microgreens business Mycogreens. Especially interested in how this business can also become a player in compost production.
On creating spaces for a village to come together, darksoil has been building the gather application which we have trialed with people in the village to explore how the village can see what it wants to do together better in a digital space that is fully held and operated by the village itself.
Another venture that darksoil is supporting in a budding ecovillage, R:ekobyn, is efforts towards creating a greenhouse agora that is going to be a membership based common space that will host leisure activities for teenagers, elderly and other villagers as well as group dinners and conversations on what people in the village want to see unfold.
In the coming months and years, darksoil hopes to be able to keep exploring these questions by co-creating tools with the local groups as well as hosting gatherings and workshops where we use our competencies for group facilitation to help these communities understand what they want to do together and how they want to go about doing it.