Communities::Professions

Descripion: This schematic is intended to show how a community could grow from 1 to n people (here 144) in a systematic fashion. The various sizes and colors are intended to show the “next most important” profession, skill or discipline to emphasize. A person could be skilled in more than one field. Each person would have a job description and, in the beginning stages, there would be no or little overlap to ensure the most skills were represented as each additional person was added. Not only has careful thought been put into the design of the community, but thought has also been put into the growth of the community.

For this schematic we started arbitrarily with a six sided figure. From there we radiated outwards, making the roles more specific as we went. The colors are intended to show differences in roles. In general, those above the wavy line starting from bottom left to top right (and proceeding through the center of the diagram), have to do with the thinking skills, and those below the wavy line have to do with the doing skills. As work progressed on this schematic, it was noticed that the skill sets could be divided by one more into the speaking skills. It was interesting that the speaking skills bridged the line drawn previously between the thinking and doing. This in fact is exactly what speaking our thoughts allows us to do: communicate with others in the physical, 3D world.

At first it was thought that the number forty would be a good number to aim for in terms of the number of roles that could be defined for active, engaged people. However, when looking at the actual number of roles defined and at how the thinking professions were under represented and the doing professions over represented, further reflection showed that, in the real world, it is always handy if any one main person (such as a physicist or an engineer) has some helpers or people in training working for them. This would allow them practical day to day help on the one hand, and would provide an avenue for the younger people to be trained by the older in a planned and systematic fashion. When this was done, the total number of active, engaged people worked out to 72, not 40. With 72 active, engaged people in mind, we double that number to obtain a new rough total of 144.

As this schematic developed, it was noticed that it might be nice to have the opposite spokes of the "wheel" reflect each other, across the thinking/doing divide. For example, though not equi-distant, the professor and doctor are opposite and are relatively the same calibre of profession. Likewise the carpenter, mechanic (or machinist) and electrician take what the engineer and architect design (roughly speaking). In this way it might be possible to develop these radiating spokes following the principles of harmonic growth.