Plane 3 — Community

A participant-facing guide to the Community plane, knowledge stewardship, and the Knowledge Bank in o42.

Community in the Four Planes

In o42, Community is the plane concerned with the relationships, practices, and shared knowledge that connect people beyond their immediate circles. It asks how we participate in collective life, strengthen the places we belong to, and contribute to a future that others can build on.

At a time when AI can produce information at extraordinary speed, one of the most important contributions people can make is to become custodians of knowledge: people who preserve what a community has learned, give it context, and pass it on with care.

Philosophical foundation

Knowledge is more than information. Books, records, and language can carry knowledge forward, but wisdom is formed through lived experience: through practice, memory, observation, conversation, and responsibility.

Every community holds forms of knowledge that may not be visible in formal systems: local traditions, ways of caring for a place, practical skills, stories, relationships, and hard-won lessons. These forms of knowledge are valuable because they are situated in real lives and real places.

Plane 3 invites participants to treat that knowledge as a shared inheritance. By documenting it carefully and respectfully, we can help ensure that it remains useful to the people and communities from which it comes.

The challenge ahead

AI is changing how society creates, evaluates, and distributes knowledge. This creates an epistemological challenge — how we know what is trustworthy — and a deontological challenge — how we decide what we ought to preserve, share, use, or protect.

Our social structures will need to meet both challenges. This means choosing practices that value provenance, context, consent, and responsibility alongside speed and convenience.

Humans have a vital role in this work. We can become wardens of local knowledge and traditions: attentive to what matters, careful about what should be shared, and committed to keeping living knowledge connected to the people who give it meaning.

The Knowledge Bank: the first stage

The Knowledge Bank is the first stage of o42’s work in this area. It gives participants a place to research, document, organize, and revisit the knowledge that matters to them and their communities. Participants can use it to:

• Gather research and reference material
• Capture observations, lessons, and reflections
• Document local practices, traditions, and stories
• Connect related ideas and sources
• Build a durable record that can be reviewed and developed over time

The purpose is not simply to collect more information. It is to create a thoughtful, living body of knowledge that retains its context and remains connected to experience.

Research with care

Knowledge stewardship begins with attention to how information is gathered and recorded. When contributing to a Knowledge Bank, consider:

• Where did this knowledge come from?
• Whose experience or perspective does it represent?
• What context is needed to understand it responsibly?
• Is it appropriate to preserve or share this material?
• What uncertainty, disagreement, or limitation should be noted?

These questions help participants build records that are more trustworthy, respectful, and useful.

Knowledge as community currency

Shared knowledge can become a community’s most valuable currency. It enables people to solve problems together, recognize local opportunities, support one another, and make decisions that are grounded in their own reality.

When knowledge remains in the hands of the people who understand its context, it can strengthen local capacity rather than being extracted or forgotten. A well-tended Knowledge Bank can help a community remember what it knows and make that knowledge available when it is needed.

Philosophical roots

For Roy Bhaskar, a community is not a collection of individuals who happen to live nearby. It is a position-practice system: social structures — a marketplace, a neighborhood, a platform — are relational, not substantial. They don’t exist inside the individuals who occupy them, but in the relations between positions (supplier–customer, neighbor–neighbor, custodian–community). And those structures are simultaneously enabling and constraining: a language limits what you can grammatically say, and at the same time makes communication possible at all. The same is true of a community’s structures.

This is also where Bhaskar’s concept of ubuntu — “I am because you are” — comes from: the flourishing of each person is the relational condition for the flourishing of all. It isn’t a utopian aspiration; it’s a claim about what human social being actually is. Plane 3 translates this into a concrete design question: does this way of sharing knowledge strengthen the position of whoever contributed it, or extract it from its context?

What comes next

The next phase of this work will explore responsible human–machine collaboration. The aim is to help people work with o42 to turn the knowledge they steward into sustainable opportunities for livelihood and community development.

This future work will remain grounded in human judgment and community benefit. AI should help people organize, explore, and apply knowledge without separating it from its origins, context, or responsibilities.

Connection with the other planes

Community knowledge is sustained through the other three planes:

Together, the four planes help participants build a future in which knowledge serves human flourishing.

Try this

Choose one piece of knowledge that matters to your community and reflect on it:

1. What experience, place, or tradition gives this knowledge its meaning?
2. Who should be recognized as a source or steward?
3. What context would someone need to use it responsibly?
4. How could documenting it help others now or in the future?

Use the answers to create a thoughtful first entry in your Knowledge Bank.