In this opening segment of Episode 14 of “The Power of Communities,” host Virginie Glaenzer conducts a rapid “tour de table” with five panelists, each offering a concise personal and professional snapshot that frames the episode’s focus on community power. - Rachel runs the Community Roundtable, a research‑focused firm that studies how communities enable individuals to thrive and serve as a better model for collaboration. - Michel is the founder of the P2P Foundation; his work spans open‑source software communities, urban commons such as food and energy co‑ops, and European multi‑craft factories, examining how productive, mutualized networks operate. - Canay describes herself as a conscious‑business‑model and cultural‑innovation designer who has built community initiatives for universities, telcos, and retailers, arguing that communities precede and shape organizational values, a point amplified by the pandemic’s spotlight on communal resilience. - Richard draws on Riane Eisler’s partnership‑vs‑domination framework, moving from engineering decentralized tech to consulting for non‑hierarchical organizations, and now to community development, emphasizing culture—values, communication norms, rituals—as the core obstacle to partnership‑oriented systems. - Janée (moderator) is introduced but not yet spoken. Virginie links these perspectives to a broader thesis: trust is the societal glue, and the erosion of trust in leaders contributes to systemic collapse; therefore, understanding and cultivating community structures offers an alternative pathway for economic and social renewal. The segment sets the stage for a deeper discussion on how organizations can benefit from, and support, thriving communities.
Chapters
Before we start our conversation, let's begin as we, as we always do with what I call the tour de table. And I'm gonna ask each of you to tell your name, what you do, and why you're interested in this topic. Try to be brief and keep it under a minute. So why don't we begin with Rachel?
Hi, well, thank you so much for having me on this podcast, and I couldn't agree more that a wealth of perspectives on anything is very helpful. So, and it's great to meet all of you because you're all new to me. I run a company called the Community Roundtable. We do research about communities and have for the last 11 years. And so that's my interest. And the broader interest in community is I think community is how individuals thrive. And so I think it's a better model for how we come together and work and do all sorts of things. Things.
Wonderful. Thank you, Rachel, for being here. Michel?
Yes, so I'm originally from Belgium. I live in Chiang Mai, Thailand most of the time. And my interest in communities is maybe not communities in general, but I've been studying in particular open source communities, so productive communities, and how that works. And then I've been extending it then to urban commons, so people who try to mutualize, you know, organic food or energy co-ops. And lately I look actually at people who make things, so like we can talk about it later, but there are in Europe 120 multi-factories where craftspeople band together. So I, you know, I look at how that works and everything, and I'm the founder of the P2P Foundation. Which is specialized in these topics.
Fascinating, thank you for being here. Canay?
Thank you, Virginie Glaenzer. So I am Turkish, I live in Ibiza, Spain, and I'm a conscious business model and cultural innovation designer, which both focuses on the individual and communal evolution. My interest in this topic is really, I was always interested in it. Since 2000, I have been building communities all around the world for my university, then for several telco operators, retail companies. Then I understood actually it's vice versa. Communities exist and then organizations can serve to the values of communities. And with this pandemic, the recent events that we see all around the world, we see the importance of communities. And I am so excited to be here with these amazing panelists to deep dive into this topic together. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Jenaye, for leading this conversation, and I'll come back to you. And then finally, Richard.
Hi, yeah, thank you for having me. My interest in communities It takes a few steps. So I really like the work of Riane Eisler, who's a feminist who started publishing in the '80s and is still publishing great work now. And she talks about how relationships can basically either be in the domination mode or in a partnership mode. And I really appreciate that frame for diagnosing what's going wrong in the world. There's too much domination, not enough partnership. And so at first, I've got an engineering background, so I was making technology for decentralized organizations, for organizations that can function without a domination hierarchy. And then I appreciated the limits of technology, and then we created what's essentially a management consultancy for non-hierarchical organizations. And now my work is getting more and more into community development because at least my hypothesis for now is that the obstacle to these more partnership-oriented ways of working. It's a cultural thing more so than it is any specific technological piece or any organizational piece. It's really about the ways that we relate to each other, our values, expectations, behaviors, forms of communication, norms, rituals, language, all this sort of stuff. So it's a culture piece. And that really, community is the space that we cultivate culture, I think. So that's where I'm at now.
Fascinating. You're already giving me some nuggets. Community is where we cultivate culture. Thank you so much, Richard, for being here. So it's really hard to have a conversation. I don't know if you agree with this, but today without talking about the current event and the world crisis. However, it seems to me that understanding the power of communities is actually crucial to finding alternatives to our current economy and system in place. One of our episodes on activism, in which Richard, you participated, we discuss how trust is one of the few forces that holds our world together. It's almost like the glue of our society, and the lack of trust in leaders throughout of the world that we're currently experiencing might be one of the reasons why we're witnessing the collapse of our old systems. During that episode on activism, we also talked about how in order to make real impactful change, individuals must find their kindred communities, not only to become accountable, but also to bring changes in the world. So I'm really excited by this discussion because I'm personally part of a cooperative community powered by women of experience with a new leadership model. So I'm looking for pointers and a better understanding of the structures and processes to support the blooming of communities. So let's begin this conversation, and perhaps, uh, Janée, would you like to start by telling us, in your perspective, how can organizations benefit from communities within their current structure?
