Brave Debates. Between sail and soil.

We imagine this Community of Practice not just as a platform, but as a boat we share in the middle of the sea, carrying with it a patch of fertile soil. The boat sails because we imagine together. The soil sustains us because we care for it together. The two are inseparable.

We navigate storms and stillness, but also know that the sea is not empty, and the soil is not silent. Oceans carry memory, messages, and minerals that reach the land. Soil, in turn, filters, holds, and returns life to the waters. Our platform—both digital and relational—must learn from this: everything we do has ripples. Every structure we build must breathe with the ecosystems around and within it.

Brave Debates is the space where we make this interdependence explicit. Where we don’t just manage a platform, but cultivate a living commons that grows with intention, care, and responsibility. It’s where we co-write our social contract, draft and redraft a code of conduct, and debate foundational questions about ownership, accountability, sustainability, and power.

To hold this space, we propose a percentage-based ethic—not as a rigid measure, but as a way to keep balance between different energies that sustain us:

• 20% sail – the forward motion: experimentation, vision, collective imagination.

• 20% soil – the care work: maintenance of tools, relationships, and agreements.

• 20% wind – the external conditions: funding, policies, climate, technologies.

• 20% ballast – the weight we carry: conflict, trauma, historical exclusions, slow time.

• 20% convergence – the moments we realign: assemblies, rituals, shared decisions.

We know these elements bleed into each other, like silt into current, like rain into ground. But the metaphor keeps us honest: we cannot sail far if the soil cracks. We cannot grow roots if the waters are poisoned.

In this space, we will ask questions that matter:

• Who owns this platform, and how can it be held in common?

• What do we do when our values are tested by urgency or fatigue?

• How do we plan for continuity across political, technological, and ecological crises?

• What is our platform’s energy footprint, and how does it reflect our ethics?

• How do we include the unheard—youth, elders, other species, future generations?

This is not an appendix. It is the keel of the boat, the porous membrane between land and sea, the conscience of the community.

Brave Debates is where we become what we say we are. Check the debate Section: https://soiltribes.platoniq.net/assemblies/communityofpractice/f/21/debates