Essays · talks · papers
Essays, talks, and working papers — by SPIRIT team members and by peers we trust — that explain the why and the how behind the work we are doing on the Front Range.
★ about this collection
This is not content marketing. It's a small, carefully tended library of the writing behind this work — essays on caring for place, talks on the moment we're in, working papers on how communities make decisions together, and notes from the Front Range itself.
Many of these pieces live on the writers' own sites — we link out and trust you to follow. Some live here, where we can edit, footnote, and add to them over time. All of them are offered as context — so the work we do on the ground reads in its larger frame.
Featured
omniharmonic
You belong to more places than you have names for. A foundational essay on bioregionalism and what it would mean to build civic infrastructure that actually reflects how communities exist in the world — overlapping, nested, and rooted in place.
omniharmonic
On networks — the kind that already exist in any community of people doing related work — and what it would mean to make them visible and tend them well, so different groups can recognize how their work fits together instead of accidentally competing.
omniharmonic · r3.0 Bioregional Confluence
A talk given for the r3.0 Bioregional Confluence: we are in a moment of profound change. Old institutions are breaking down faster than new ones are being built. In this transition, place-based coordination offers a path forward — but only if we learn to weave together what works in our existing institutions with the new forms of community organization emerging now.
Context is everything. Here, we try to offer more of it.
Also in the library
OpenCivics Labs
A long-form working paper laying out the two-body model behind SPIRIT's design: a small nonprofit that handles the legal and financial work, paired with a larger community body that holds the actual decision-making. Includes Elinor Ostrom's principles for shared resource management and a practical plan for how to build something like this.
omniharmonic
On the slow unraveling of public institutions and why community-led, place-based networks — building real alternatives alongside the systems we still depend on — offer a third path between individual retreat and ideological exit.
Are you a writer in this space?
If you're working in bioregionalism, commons coordination, civic design, or any of the adjacent terrain — and you've written something we should be reading — we'd be honored to consider it for this collection.
✉ Send us a pieceA few terms, plainly
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