Kylie Stedman Gomes (Australian) and Manuel Gomes (Portuguese) married in 2010, and spent the first two years of their married lives in an apartment in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
During this initial intense merging of their lives, books, and interests, they quickly discovered common themes in the problem patterns they had each observed in their different cultures and lived experiences prior to meeting. Manuel had been working as a software engineer and architect, and had special interests in complex adaptive systems, agility, and open source software. Kylie’s career background was more chequered, but through bringing her abiding passions for psychology and philosophy to the challenge of managing business and IT transformation projects, she’d developed a knack for discerning and setting up conditions that enabled human choice and systems change.
Bringing their perspectives together, while observing the continuing fallout from the Global Financial Crisis, as well as the Arab Spring, Occupy movement, and differences in Dutch culture compared to their home cultures, started generating some interesting insights regarding the systemic aspects of social issues and the roles played by various actors and ideologies. Conversations about fictional worlds didn’t hurt, either.
Building their relationship required questioning some already-formed ideas about how the world worked – ideas that had been generated by the cultural waters each had been previously swimming in. Kylie, for example, had a (common in Australia) view of what “socialism” and “communism” were about, that didn’t accord with Manuel’s European understanding of them. Such points of difference might have generated conflict, but in practice, that rarely happened. Instead, they tended to probe around areas of dissonance until underlying commonalities emerged.
And they found that when one of these commonalities emerged, the old organising form (ideology) in which it had been packaged usually faded into the background and lost relevance and importance. It soon became obvious to both that while the common underlying principles they were discovering were timeless, the packages or mental boxes they had previously been contained within were mostly outdated, and so got in the way of applying those principles to resolving current problems.
In 2012, Manuel and Kylie moved to Australia. Amid much moving around, trying to find suitable places to work and settle, they learned in 2016 that Manuel is an Aspie (Aspergers, now referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 1) and ADHD. Both viewed this as a new understanding to integrate and work with, rather than a disability, and Manuel dove in to learn more about neurodiversity and neurodivergence, and find and support his ‘tribe’.
In 2017, realising that she was no longer interested in doing project management or being an employee, Kylie left her 9-5 job to focus on building a business designed to help address some of the global problems that were of increasing concern to both her and Manuel. While in the design process, in early 2018, she unexpectedly had a ‘vision’ for a Global Commons Trust (GCT) – bringing together concepts of subsidiarity, commons governance, universal basic income, and the legal structure of trusts in a framework to manage commons pool resources of all types through a qualitative balancing of costs and benefits across groups of stakeholders with common interests.
Unable to ignore the GCT ‘vision’, but with no interest in managing such a project herself (and still wanting to build a business), Kylie spent several months engaged in intensive research of the international changemaker scene, looking for an organisation to take it on. None emerged. Meanwhile, Manuel was engaging with a few like-minded people on starting to build a Commons Computing Platform.
In early 2019, Manuel and Kylie founded Praxorium as a virtual, vital space for people to come together, without organisational affiliations, to work on global “wicked problems” and existential risk.
As of 2024, both continue to explore, with other interested and motivated people, the possibilities of applying Commons governance principles to help address our common, global predicaments.
The work is informal and collective, coming together in areas of common interest, sharing information and resources as needed, and when appropriate, drifting apart again. There is no requirement for people to ‘join’ Praxorium. It remains an informal association or loose network, rather than a formal organisation.
Ongoing projects include:
Praxorium gratefully accepts no-strings-attached donations of all sizes from organisations and people who support our mission, initially via our founder's Patreon page.
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