1.0 — Introduction

Welcome to the Commons Hub Brussels, a cooperative co-working and event space.  When entering the space either as a visitor or member, you agree to the following arrangements as the basis for sharing and using the space, cultivating our community and respecting our values.

Overall, this charter is intended to support coordination of members by creating clear guidelines, boundaries, roles, and processes to take care of this common space.

2.0 — Purpose

The purpose of the Commons Hub Brussels is to contribute to redeveloping the commons in our city. We do this by offering a physical space that we can use to work from and to organize events.

The space is managed as a common, a shared resource, for a committed community of members. All members contribute to making the space and the community thrive, so we can all benefit from it and tap it into its resources.

In the Commons Hub we welcome anyone who is holding the questions of our time and context high and alive through experiments, conversation and reflection. We dream of a space that is buzzing with creativity while at the same time offering time and space for stillness and focussed work.

These are the questions we are holding high while building the space:

• How do we move from private ownership to collective ownership: the space will be our common resource, how do we steward and manage this shared space together? How do we all become crew in making this space thrive? How do we all take responsibility? How do we keep each other accountable?
• How do we move from ephemeral transactions to lasting relationships: how do we nurture healthy relationships? How do we develop a culture of care, within the community, but also with its environment, being deeply aware of how interconnected we are with the outside world?
• How do we move from monoculture to permaculture : how can we welcome professional, educational as well as informal and fun activities in the space and develop close relationships with the neigbourhood and with the city of Brussels?

The Commons Hub positions itself within the wider ecosystem of builders, thinkers, story tellers, creators, facilitators, active citizens, teachers and artists that ask the question: what else is possible?

3.0 - Values

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• Participation: Building a commons is not a spectator sport. We need everyone to make this space work, so we set in place and experiment with various tools online and offline, to make participating and contributing to our commons accessible and fun. We honour the uniqueness of all members, acknowledge different ways of participating, and contributing to the whole. We are all crew.
• Democracy: No one knows as much as everyone and we acknowledge that by hearing different voices we come to better understanding and better decisions. We honour rational arguments as well as intuition and feelings, we welcome masculine and feminine voices, and bring in the human and more than human perspectives into our conversations.
• Transparency: Open communication and accessible information ****about successes, challenges, decisions, data, numbers and processes, is a way to embrace conversation and invite people to contribute. It creates trust and shows respect for mutual interests.
• Experiment: You can not dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools. We strive to experiment with new coordination mechanisms and welcome new technologies if they serve the purpose of the CHB. We integrate short feedback loops in our processes and are eager to learn.