Making CommunitySense | For working communities

Society consists of a web of interconnected communities. A large body of research and practice exists on how to make communities work. Still, the intersection and interaction of multiple communities – the development and use of their inter-communal commons – is ill-understood. Social innovation is the process in which relevant stakeholders jointly develop solutions to wicked problems that none of them can solve on their own. As such, it is a prime example of the need for multiple stakeholder communities collaborating. We propose a process for building a networked community-commons called knowledge weaving. This is a reflective sensemaking effort in which existing communal knowledge sharing practices, initiatives, and resources are tied together into coherent commons-based knowledge fabrics that support intercommunal collaboration, such as for social innovation. We illustrate the approach with the case of the European Social Innovation Week 2015 pre-events.