Attention sanctuaries require explicit written community agreements

Evidence

With this in mind, it becomes newly necessary to get way more explicit, more self-aware and communally committed to making and maintaining our sanctuary spaces. And our approach to this important new work reaches back to the deep traditions of self-government and constitutionalism: deliberative community agreements. Which is to say, if you want to have an “attention sanctuary” these days, you are going to have to CREATE it, and the only way to do that, really, is to gather with others and take the time to think, and talk, and actually write down how you want that sanctuary to work. We’ve done a TON of this kind of work in lots of different spaces. From families to coffee shops, from friend-hangouts to academic conferences. Groups have to gather and take the time to ask the basic questions: How are we going to bring our attention to this occasion? Why? For how long? What will happen here, attentionally speaking? And what won’t? And who will take care of all this, so that it becomes real? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 354

Categorization

• XREF: The deliberative-constitutional framing connects to the reader’s prior extractive/trade-institution work on how formal agreements substitute reputational enforcement.
• QUESTION: The bet under test: is written communal agreement actually sufficient to create sustainable attention sanctuaries, or does it founder on free-rider and enforcement problems like other commons?