I’m glad this calls you matey because I hope you’ll join us! ❤

Enspiral does already provide this for me, when I am in NZ. I plan to spend the next couple years at least oscillating between NZ and EU. And I plan to deepen my membership in both Congregations.

The Enspiral mission ‘more people working on stuff that matters’ depends on scale. The whole time I’ve been participating, our community has fluctuated between 100–300 people. I’m happy to treat that as a kind of ‘natural limit’, as if this is the size Enspiral ‘wants to be’.

Of course we could build new architecture to extend this limit, e.g. maybe I am starting Enspiral Europe. But my intuition guides me strongly to say it is good to have distinct names for distinct cells. It’s the same reason that The Hum and Loomio and Enspiral are all distinct things, even though Nati and I are members of all of them. A shared identity is a precious thing, I don’t want to risk it with too many experimental uses. And it can be slow: I don’t want it impeding my learning process.

Right now I want to learn about starting Congregations. Enspiral can’t teach me that, it’s too mature. I want to pull together a different set of people around a different crystal seed, and see what happens. I hope we share a lot of encouragement, insights, and mutual aid between the Congregations. But also I don’t want to have to consult with a bunch of New Zealanders when we are confronting a decision in Europe.

This is part intuition, part experience. We used to have a lot of Crews that shared the Enspiral name, e.g. Enspiral Space, Enspiral Accounting, etc. What I learned there was 1) it is super confusing for people outside the network and 2) a Crew that uses the Enspiral name comes under extra scrutiny because of the brand risk. The tradeoff doesn’t seem worth it to me. It seems cleaner to say, here are 5 Crews with different focal points and different names, and the thing they have in common is their membership in this bigger thing called Congregation X.