Place4Us aims to be a virtual companion of the real world in which the global society faces the triple challenge of climate change, biodiversity and wildlife loss, and pollution. This challenge constitute a human and planetary existential emergency. A global citizen movement is emerging that aims to tackle this emergency. Place4Us is the virtual companion for this movement. The platform facilitates a global ecosystem of Virtual Community Centers (VCCs) that can collaborate and share resources in many different ways. Place4Us also includes a Town Square for platform-wide activities. The Harbor aims to tackle the challenges resutling from increasing involuntary migration caused by the human emergency.

The governance of the platform Place4Us includes the Plenary of the Place4Us users as the decision making element. The Place4Us Executive Committee takes care of the day-to-day business and connects the five committees. The Ethos Committee ensures that the activities on Place4Us are consistent with the ethos of the Earth Viability Center, which in short is described by justice, equity, diversity and inclusion(JEDI). The Design Committee is responsible for the overall design of Place4Us. This Committee also ensures that the design responds to demands in a changing global environment. The Development Committee takes care of the actual implementation of the platform and the development of functional capabilities. The Mentoring Committee engages in community building and in support for individual VCCs that need help in full exploring the capabilities of the platform. Finally, the Marketing element focuses on outreach that can ensure that Place4Us is known to all groups and communities in the global citizen movement and beyond.

The main decision making entity in the governance of Place4Us is the Participants Plenary. All Place4Us participants are members of this plenary. We are planning to have a first virtual meeting of the Participants Plenary in 2024. The Plenary will be organized over several days during which all participants can discuss, modify, evaluate and rate a number of proposals related to the governance, design, and functionality of Place4Us. More details on this will be made available over the next months. Invitations for participant proposals will come soon.

The Executive Committee takes care of the day-to-day business and provides a link between the other operational committees and the Plenary. It also has the task to provide coordination and communication between the other committees.

Place4Us has two committees that are responsible for the design and development of the platform. We are in the process of establishing these committees. It is expected that the Participants Plenary will endorse the Committees:

• Design Committee: This committee has oversight over the conceptual design of Place4Us. The committee ensures that concepts are aligned to the mission of providing a scalable system for networks and clusters of VCC that can share resources in many different ways. The committee also ensures that Place4Us fits into the rapidly evolving virtual world and responds appropriately to technical, social and legal developments. This committee actively interacts with potential communities and organizes listening sessions to get input and feedback on the design of the platform.
• Development Committee: This committee oversees the developmetnt and implementation of Place4Us. The committee ensures that the technical resources are approriate and the programming is at a high level in terms of efficiency, scalability, reliability, and security. The committee ensures documentation, redundancy, and modularity of the system. This committee also ensures a reliable operation of the system within legal and ethical boundaries.

Place4Us has two more committees related to the activities on the platform:

• Ethos Committee: The Ethos Committee has the important task to monitor the activities on the platform and to ensure that these activities meet the ethical standards of Place4Us and the rules of conduct. The Ethos Committee plays a major role in monitoring the Algedonic Channel that allows all users to flag any conflicting contents, activities or user behavior.
• Mentoring Committee: The committee engages in bringing in communities in the Blessed Unrest into the Place4Us network and provides support to particpants and VCCs as needed. Based on monitoring operations, the Committee provides feedback to the Design and and Development Committees.

VCC are autonomous units that decide on what governance structure they want to utilize. The Governance Floor provides many tools to support a wide range of governance models. There we also provide recommendations and templates for the governance of the individual VCCs.

The development of Place4Us is a community effort and all Place4Us particpants are invited to participate in this development. There are many different levels and activities in which users can engage and contribute. If you are interested in participating actively in the development of the platform, please fill in the Contact form.

All Place4Us participants can open a VCC for their community. Opening a new VCC starts at the [Open New VCC] page. A Place4Us participant can complete the form for a new VCC. The form is checked by an algorithm and if all required information is provided, a button to initialize the VCC is provided.

A new VCC is opened with only the Reception and the Workspace. The initial administrator, i.e., the participant who submitted the form, can then start to build the VCC and decide on many different properties of this VCC. The administrator can also add other community members as co-administrators.

The Place4Us Ethos Committee monitors the VCCs. For newly opened VCCs, the Ethos Committee ensures that the declared Ethos of the VCC is aligned to the Place4Us ethos.

A Note on History: Originally, we started with a different process to request a new VCC. A request for a new VCC had to be prepared and submitted on the [Request VCC] page. Once a request was submitted, it was checked for any formal issues. If there were no such issues, the request was opened for evaluation by all Place4Us participants. This evaluation was one step to ensure that the global ecosystem of VCCs would evolve in line with the Place4Us mission. After the evaluation period, the decision of the Ethos Committee to accept or reject a request or to require a revision was based on the evaluations Place4Us participants had provided.

This demanding process kept the number of new VCCs requested rather samll. Therefore, it was decided to streamline the process to open a new VCC. This requires now a evaluation of new VCCs after they are opened, as well as a more detailed monitoring of the activities in all VCCs.