Designing Plurality: Pillars for Building Community from Real Experience in LATAM

On the strategic design of the DemocráTICa Community, from my role as Product Owner and Strategic Facilitator.

Virginia Regner

Civil society strengthening has made enormous progress by investing in the capacities of individual organizations: training, resources, professionalization. That work is valuable and essential, and it makes sense to build on it. Alongside that dimension, however, there is another that is just as decisive and often overlooked: the quality of the ties between organizations. As Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze argue from the Berkana Institute, systems don't transform by convincing one person at a time, but when networks of relationships form among those who discover they share a common cause. In other words, alongside critical mass, critical connections matter just as much.

That shift from scale to connection was the starting point for designing the DemocráTICa Community. The diagnosis we built together with the very organizations working on digital democracy across the region described an ecosystem of "islands of excellence": initiatives with strong technical potential and specialized knowledge, but disconnected from one another, duplicating learning curves and competing for the same resources. That's when we realized DemocráTICa could act as a catalyst for a necessary movement: moving past isolated institutional survival and taking a step toward building a community that adds density and resilience to the organizational fabric.

The question in strategic design, then, was how to design the conditions for a community to emerge and sustain itself. To answer it, I drew on three pillars of community work that rarely get put in conversation with one another, yet illuminate the problem from complementary angles.

Three pillars of community work

The first was grounding the work in the communities of practice model, which gave us the anatomy. Not every group is, by definition, a community of practice: a group of neighbors isn't one, while a book club is. To qualify, three things need to be present at once: a community (the relationships and mutual commitment among participants), a domain (the shared field of interest that provides direction), and a practice (the common repertoire built through doing). From this follows an idea that runs through the entire design: in this framework, learning is not a transfer, but a process of situated social participation.

The second was the collaborative network approach from the TejeRedes methodology, which contributed two things the previous model implies but doesn't fully operationalize. On one hand, the craft of the Articulador/a — the person who weaves the network without directing it. On the other, the idea that every network generates three chained types of value: social value (relationships, trust, participation), knowledge value (know-how and experience that circulate), and use or exchange value (the concrete products and transformations the network enables).

The third is the Berkana Institute's two-loop model, which contributed the theory of change. According to this model, a new system emerges when scattered efforts connect into networks, those networks mature into communities of practice, and, over time, end up forming a system of influence stronger than the sum of its parts. The work that catalyzes that progression can be summed up in four gestures: naming those who are already innovating, connecting them to one another, nourishing their exchange, and illuminating their achievements so they become visible and replicable.

The design emerged from the convergence of these three pillars. I translated it into three movements that sustain the community's life and that, far from unfolding as sequential stages, must happen at the same time and reinforce one another — like the three legs of a tripod: getting to know each other, learning, and doing. If one is missing, the community wobbles. In that sense, my work was less theoretical than translational: turning that conceptual convergence into an operational design, with formats, roles, a calendar, and resources. Let's look at how we did it.

Getting to know each other: weaving relational value

Our first decision was to treat "getting to know each other" not as a welcome formality, but as genuine infrastructure. That's why we conceived of it as a connection framework rather than a content agenda: regional gatherings, weaving points (one-on-one and small-group matchmaking sessions, sustained month by month, to connect leaders, organizations, and specialists around shared challenges and opportunities), and a directory that we deliberately left in the hands of the organizations themselves, so they could self-manage their collaborations without depending on us as intermediaries. Along the same lines, we devoted a substantial part of the sessions to working tables focused on real projects. In one of the gatherings, we opened more than eighty simultaneous dialogue tables, where more than one hundred initiatives presented their work and, above all, discovered complementarities that had previously remained invisible.

We designed it this way for a precise reason: in a network, when the system falters, the intervention isn't to add more resources, but to connect it to more of itself. Put another way, what we were building was the network's social value — that relational density that later makes everything else possible.

Learning: putting knowledge into circulation

We started from a finding in the diagnosis: a significant share of organizations reported gaps in advanced technical knowledge, especially around digital security, data protection, and the practical application of AI. In response, we chose not to answer with top-down training, but to design a two-way learning approach. On one hand, we scheduled panels and presentations with leading voices who could raise the conceptual ceiling on topics like technopolitics, new narratives, information integrity, and the care of those working in digital spaces. On the other, and in parallel, we facilitated structured peer-learning dynamics, where knowledge circulates horizontally.

That combination is no accident — it reflects how we understand learning in community: not as transfer, but as situated participation. So while expert input gives direction to the shared domain, peer exchange is what ultimately consolidates the community and makes knowledge truly appropriable. It is, in short, the moment when the network produces knowledge value and the community nourishes itself.

Doing: turning connection into repertoire

The third movement is perhaps the most decisive, because it's what distinguishes a community of practice from mere affinity: without something produced together, there is no shared practice. To address this, we designed a co-production track with a very concrete format: small device-building tables. There, small groups of organizations that were already generating valuable knowledge — though fragmented and with low collective visibility — bring their content together and jointly build advocacy-oriented communication pieces. The deliverable, therefore, is not a report about the community: it's a ready-to-use device meant for dissemination, produced by the coalition and signed as a coalition.

To make that possible, we structured the process into six phases: launch, exploration, construction, consolidation, dissemination, and closing — all with continuous support and resources that enabled real, not merely nominal, participation. We designed the dissemination phase, in particular, with a specific intention: for what was produced to circulate beyond those who created it. It is, at the same time, what generates use or exchange value in the network and what, in the language of emergence, is called illuminating: making the alternative visible so it can be replicated.

The second loop: community as the cradle of a paradigm

Looking at the whole, what we designed was, strictly speaking, a second loop. It's worth recalling that the two-loop model (Berkana) describes two coexisting systems: on one hand, a dominant one that rises and then declines; on the other, one born at the margins, driven by innovators who break away from the exhausted paradigm and begin testing alternatives. The problem is that these pioneers tend to work in isolation and, precisely because of that, are often vulnerable to their context.

In our field, moreover, the first loop is clearly identifiable: the concentration of technological and data power in large platforms — something some projects in the community call technofeudalism — accompanied by disinformation, the closing of civic space, and the capture of public debate. In response, Latin America is full of people already creating alternatives, such as digital sovereignty, information integrity, territorially grounded AI frameworks, and participatory governance of technology. But they're doing it as islands: pioneers without a network.

Our design bet was precisely that: to create the space where these people could come together, share, build, and go deeper together, so that the set of scattered alternatives could start behaving like a system with its own identity. Seen this way, the three movements are the mechanics of that maturation: getting to know each other connects them as a network, learning together constitutes them as a community of practice, and doing together turns the connection into repertoire and product. In this way, every co-produced device, every collective manual, and every conceptual framework built among peers becomes a piece of the paradigm the community wants to see born — whether that's the shift from ego-system to eco-system, decolonial perspectives on AI, or grammars of digital sovereignty and care. And in every case, that piece is formulated so it can circulate. That's why, in this logic, designing dissemination is not about closing a process: it's about giving the emerging paradigm the visibility it needs to scale.

The evidence

Still, the design left measurable traces. Over six regional gatherings held between November 2025 and June 2026, there were 479 participations, more than one hundred projects shared, and fourteen expert contributors who brought tools and experience. That said, the indicator that matters most to us isn't attendance volume, but the emergence of critical connections: every time two organizations that didn't know each other discover they're facing the same challenge and decide to produce something together, the network climbs a rung — from a network of relationships to a community of practice, and from there, toward a system with the capacity for regional impact.

Ultimately, designing plurality isn't about organizing events or accumulating participants. It's about building, with strategic intention and operational rigor, the three movements — getting to know each other, learning, and doing — through which an archipelago of bright islands can stop competing with itself and start behaving like a fabric. And a fabric of people who recognize each other, learn together, and produce together is precisely the shape a paradigm takes when it stops being an isolated intuition and begins to be born.

Conclusions and recommendations

If I had to distill this process into principles transferable to anyone designing a community to strengthen an ecosystem, they would be these:

1. Design for connection, not scale. The goal isn't to accumulate participants, but to increase the density of ties, since a well-consolidated network has greater impact.

2. Sustain the three movements at once. Getting to know each other, learning, and doing aren't stages but the legs of a single tripod; a community that only learns, or only meets, fails to produce anything together and ends up dissolving.

3. Treat "getting to know each other" as infrastructure. Mutual recognition isn't a welcome protocol but the condition that makes everything else possible; hence the value of investing in self-managed directories, working tables around real projects, and spaces where complementarities become visible.

4. Anchor the community in concrete production. Without something built together, there's no shared practice, just affinity; co-produced devices, by contrast, are learning, connection, and outcome all at once.

5. Design dissemination from the start, not as a closing step. Since what the community produces only has impact if it circulates, making the alternative visible must be part of the design, not a final exercise.

6. Facilitate, don't direct — and measure what matters. The most useful role is that of catalyst: creating the conditions for connection to happen. Accordingly, the indicator to track isn't attendance, but the emergence of critical connections — the collaborations that arise from the network itself.

7. At bottom, all of this points to a single idea: a well-designed community of practice is the place where people proposing a new paradigm stop doing so alone. And it is there, in the density of their ties, their knowledge, and their shared practice, that a possible future finally finds the conditions to begin to exist.

References

• Wenger, E. (2001). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Paidós. (Spanish-language introduction available via FLACSO PENT: Comunidades de práctica, una breve introducción).

• Figueroa, C. tejeRedes: trabajo en red y sistemas de articulación colaborativos / El arte de facilitar y articular organizaciones en red. tejeredes.net.

• Wheatley, M. and Frieze, D. Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale (The Life-Cycle of Emergence) and the Two Loops model. The Berkana Institute.