Place4Us Primer

Place4Us is the platform that supports the Virtual Community Centers, the Town Square and the Harbor. Place4Us is a a collaborative platform hosting Virtual Community Centers (VCCs) and a number of common spaces. A VCC is a place for a community to have a virtual presence, develop a wide range of community activities, and engage with other communities and the public at large. Place4Us is designed for ecosystems of VCCs and enables easy sharing of resources between pairs of VCCs or within groups and clusters of VCCs.

To benefit from Place4Us, your community can join and establish a VCC, can connect with other VCCs and then collaborate to achieve your goals.

The Place4Us home page gives access to activities outside of individual VCCs, such as requesting a new VCC or platform-wide searches for items and people in the individual VCCs. The home page also provides access to the common spaces.

Virtual Community Centers (VCCs) are similar to real community centers in that they provide a wide range of functions and tools in support of progressive activist groups and, crucially, include strong incentives for groups to collaborate. We envision a vast network of VCCs that constitute a global commons in support of a global citizens movement to deal with the multi-crisis currently facing humankind. The VCC Primer provides further details.

Place4Us has a number of common areas. The Town Square provides five spaces that are relevant to the entire network of VCCs. These space are:

• Bark: The place for publishing EVC journals, newsletters, newspapers, magazines, videos, or other material of interest across Place4Us and beyond. 
• Roar: The Roar corner is a place for groups of VCCs or groups of Place4Us participants who want to organize actions in the physical world that emphasize aspects of the global emergency and aim to bring these aspects to the attention of a wide range of people.
• Scream: The Scream corner is the place for alert screams about issues related to the planetary emergency, injustices, atrocities, ecocides and other events that require immediate attention by many
• Heal: In this corner, communities can flag an emergency and interact with other communities who have been going through similar emergencies in the past and found ways to recover from them.
• Stage: On stage, groups can demonstrate their successful projects and discuss with the audience the next steps

Another common area is the Harbor: The Place4Us Harbor is a safe space for involuntary migrants, e.g., those fleeing violence or catastrophes caused by global warming, and for people at risk of being pushed into involuntary migration to meet others in similar situations or interact with help organizations.

Place4Us governance: Place4Us is owned by Earth Viability Center (EVC), a 501(C)3 chartered in Virginia, USA. The governing body for EVC is a consortium made up of the participating organizations where each organization gets one vote. The bylaws specify that all products, including software, produced by EVC shall be in the creative commons and neither EVC itself nor any of these products can ever be sold to a profit-making entity.
Created on Jun. 14, 2024 by Hans-Peter Plag; last updated on Feb. 28, 2025 by Hans-Peter Plag.