A practice for collective agency

Live experiments to practise the future together

Many of us can see what needs to change. What is hard is knowing where to begin.What if we could try ways of moving together before we have everything figured out?Rooted in place. Remixed everywhere.

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The invitation

First step reveals the next

The questions we're facing today no longer belong to one organisation, one discipline, or one community.They spill across boundaries and keep shifting as we engage with them. And they've become so large that they overwhelm us, our institutions, and the ways we've relied on to make sense of change.We know we need to respond differently.
But where do we begin?With small first moves.
In person, in place, with others.Something changes when people experience acting with others, even briefly, even imperfectly.Not only what they understand, but how they relate to their own capacity. What felt like someone else's problem becomes a shared question. What felt overwhelming becomes something they can begin to influence, even a little, from where they are.The starting point is not despair at the scale of what's happening, but curiosity about what we might discover once we make a first move, before we feel ready.

What practices make beginning easier? That's the question we explore here.

Which path are you curious to follow?

Some people arrive here carrying questions about how change begins.Others, because they want to begin experimenting in their own context. Choose your path, or wander between them.

◎

I'm carrying questions

Explore the questions, principles and practices that shape this work.

Explore the practice

✧

I want to try something

Discover experiments and protocols emerging from this practice.

Try an experiment

⊹

I'm looking for explorers

Find field notes and fellow explorers experimenting in their place.

Find the others

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Ways of seeing

What shapes this practice

The experiments you will find around here are shaped by a particular way of understanding change.Some of these ideas have been tested repeatedly across years of practice, in different places and contexts. Others are newer and still unfolding.Together, they form a living body of practice: part accumulated experience, part ongoing inquiry.Think of these ideas more as cairns than instructions: markers left by previous journeys, offered for orientation, not certainty.

BEFORE WE CONTINUE

Think of a moment when you crossed a threshold.

Perhaps in a project, a gathering, a community, or in your life.

A moment when something shifted: you began to see differently, act differently, or discovered that you could do something you hadn't imagined before.

Looking back, what opened the door?

Collective Futures pays attention to these moments.

Important change often feels surprising, relational, and emergent from the inside.

The principles below are an attempt to understand what kinds of conditions make such moments more likely.

The practice

Designing conditions for emergence

Collective agency can't be delivered, or invoked into being, but it can be experienced. Felt, not discussed. Important change often feels surprising, relational, and emergent from the inside.So the question is not how to engineer change, but how to create conditions in which new possibilities can emerge.Six principles shape how we design, host, and carry experiments. They are a way of paying attention, not a methodology.

① Experience before explanation

Explore ↓

People often discover new possibilities by stepping into them.

Many responses to complexity begin with analysis. Collective Futures also creates opportunities for people to experience, rehearse, and test possibilities together.

Through live experiments, participants often discover insights, capacities, and relationships that could not have been anticipated in advance.

② Start from what already exists

Explore ↓

Most change efforts begin with a gap: what's lacking, what's needed, what has to be brought in.

This practice starts from the opposite end: what is already here, already alive, worth building on. Every place holds histories, different ways of knowing, relationships with memory and texture.

Every group holds skills, imagination, and creativity that have never been invited into this kind of space before. That invitation itself is activating. People bring capacities they didn't know were relevant, and something shifts when those capacities are finally in the room.

③ Work with emergence, not outcomes

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We know what we're designing for, we don't know what the group will find.

We stay genuinely open to where that takes them because what begins in a room can travel far beyond it.

The experiment starts something. Sometimes, the work includes connecting it to whatever can carry it forward – a community of practice, a civic host, a network.

④ Move before you are ready

Explore ↓

Readiness is a moving target.

What keeps most people from starting is the demand, external and internal, to have everything defensible before the first move is allowed: fully costed, properly sequenced, approved in advance.

And underneath that, a deeper belief: that the answers need to exist before the questions have been properly lived.

Moving generates what waiting never can: real information, people invested in what they helped build, and ideas that travel because the people who created them are still behind them.

⑤ Let participants become the carriers

Explore ↓

Scale doesn't come from growing an organisation. It comes from the moment a participant becomes a host, a protocol becomes portable, and what happened in one room becomes possible in another.

Anyone who has lived one of these experiments carries something transferable, not a manual, but a felt sense of how it works and what it makes possible.

The most important thing that leaves the room isn't the output, it's the people, changed in some small way, carrying something they didn't have before, and capable of starting something new from where they are.

⑥ Collective intelligence is embodied

Explore ↓

The experiments use prototypes, scenarios, and immersive formats because thinking together isn't enough.

People need to be in it, moving, making, responding in real time. The entry point isn't a "let's collaborate." It's an unknown situation to navigate together, partly unknown by design.

The design hides the collaboration inside the experience, people are already moving together before they've had a chance to be self-conscious about it. What emerges between them is real precisely because it was never performed.

And it leaves something behind that arguments and frameworks don't: an emotional memory, felt in the body, of having thought and acted together.

What experiments can unlock

New pathways become visible.
The future begins to branch.↓

Why experiments

Experiments are how we learn our way forward in uncertainty.Instead of searching for the right answer, they create opportunities to discover through doing.

What they leave behind

Experiments often create new actors.Participants become hosts. Neighbours become collaborators. Strangers become organisers.An experiment may leave behind:

a relationship
a practice
a protocol
a shared narrative
a group that didn't exist before
a question people decide to keep pursuing

From experiments to ecologies

Many experiments remain modest in scale. They don't need to become programmes or organisations to matter.Sometimes, something begins to travel.People facing similar questions discover one another across places. Practices are adapted, not replicated. What emerges is not a model to scale, but a growing ecology of practice.

Perhaps this is how systemic change happens: not through one scaled solution, but through many rooted experiments, connected across places.

From roots to systems

Big questions,
local starting points

The forces reshaping society, ecological breakdown, wealth concentration, AI feel too big and too distant, beyond influence.Yet people experience them close to home every day: in neighbourhoods, livelihoods, and relationships.Places matter because it's where the stakes are real. Where there is trust, practical knowledge, and willingness to act, the kind of resources no intervention can import.Where people can still gather to make sense of change, get creative, and build things together.No single place has the answer, but when communities connect, patterns and possibilities become contagious.

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Experiments

Experiments in motion

Examples of how real tensions become live prototypes across fields and scales.You might also read these as a progression: from making systems visible, to rehearsing public power, to acting locally, to building shared capacity across places.

🌐

Making sense of AI systems

From opacity to civic leverage

Challenge

AI systems increasingly shape public life, yet citizens and communities rarely have meaningful opportunities to influence how they are designed or governed.

Experiment

Short participatory inquiries that map how AI operates in a local context, where power concentrates, and what alternatives might exist.

Leaves behind

Shared understanding, visible leverage points, and greater public capacity to participate in shaping technological futures.

FEATURED PROTOCOL

🔥

Rehearsing public power over AI

From overwhelm to practised response

Challenge

Institutions, communities, and civic actors often recognise emerging risks, but complexity makes collective action difficult.

Experiment

The Prometheus Protocol invites participants to rehearse action together through fictional but structurally honest scenarios about AI, power, and democratic agency.

Leaves behind

Shared language, practical interventions, new alliances, and first experiences of acting collectively under uncertainty.

Explore Prometheus →

🌱

Mobilising what's already here

From latent assets to visible tools

Challenge

Communities hold relationships, skills, stories, and resources that often remain invisible or disconnected.

Experiment

Asset-mapping labs and collective design processes that surface existing capacities and transform them into practical initiatives.

Leaves behind

New collaborations, stronger local ecosystems, and practical infrastructures rooted in what people already have.

🌾

Building ecosystems of practice

From isolated efforts to learning ecologies

Challenge

Good ideas rarely travel because practitioners often lack spaces for reflection, adaptation, and peer learning.

Experiment

Communities of practice, learning journeys, and open documentation processes that enable experimentation to spread across places.

Leaves behind

Learning ecosystems that continue evolving long after individual projects have ended.

What this practice is exploring

We're interested not only in moments of participation, but in what remains after.

These questions guide the design of the experiments, partnerships and field-building work you'll find here.These questions are approached through practice: by designing experiments, observing what emerges, documenting patterns, and sharing what is learned along the way.

How do participants become new nodes who convene and connect?
How do local experiments become enduring civic practices and rituals?
How do practices travel across places without becoming blueprints?
How to connect the dots between pockets of collective creativity?
And how might today's experiments become part of the civic infrastructure communities need for the future?

In practice

Prometheus Protocol 🔥

Live rehearsal on AI, power, and democratic imagination

A civic rehearsal format where people move from observing systems to stepping into them.The Prometheus Protocol invites participants to experience what it feels like to act together on questions about AI and power that are increasingly shaping public life without meaningful public participation.

Host Prometheus in your community

Join an upcoming session

How it works

Inspired by Forum Theatre, participants enter credible fictional scenarios, freeze the scene at the moment of maximum tension, and test different ways of intervening from inside the situation itself.The point is not to “solve” the scene, but to rehearse participation under real constraints: pressure, uncertainty, conflicting interests, institutional inertia, uneven power.

Read more ↓

As people step into the scenes, new possibilities begin to surface. Shared language emerges. Unexpected alliances appear. New proposals break through deadlocks.

Participants leave not only with analysis from the debrief, but with an embodied experience of how power and constraint operate in practice, and a clearer sense of where leverage, initiative, and collective action might begin from where they are.

They also encounter alternative infrastructures, governance models, and ownership approaches that challenge the idea that the current direction of AI is inevitable.

Previous iterations

Place	Context	Date
Oxford, UK	The Sidebar	April 2026
São Paulo, Brazil	Jornada IA para Impacto	May 2026
Coimbra, Portugal	Public gathering	May 2026

Next iteration

Sibiu, Romania – 9 July 2026, 18:00 EEST

Join this session

This is not about AI as technology.
It asks three questions: Who owns? Who benefits? Who decides?

How might communities, public institutions, and civic actors regain influence over systems shaping society?

How it travels

Each iteration is documented openly.The interventions people attempt inside the scenes, the tensions that repeatedly surface, the unexpected framings participants generate, and the practical moves that feel possible afterwards all become part of a growing commons: a living record of civic ingenuity across contexts.The scenes, facilitation materials, and learnings from each edition are shared openly so participants and partners can adapt, remix, and carry the protocol into their own communities and contexts.

Bring Prometheus to your context

Prometheus can be adapted for communities, public institutions, universities, foundations, and civic networks exploring questions of AI, power, and democratic agency.

Book a conversation

What begins as a small experiment can ripple far beyond where it starts.

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Zoom in

Prometheus Protocol 🔥

A civic rehearsal for collective agency in the age of AI.

Most people encounter Al as something already decided. The tools arrive. The systems are adopted. The decisions have already been made.Prometheus creates a different experience.

Participants step into live scenarios where decisions about AI, power, ownership and public value are still unfolding, and rehearse what collective agency feels like before those decisions become inevitable.

Attend a session
Host a session

The question

AI is reshaping public life

Who owns the infrastructure? Who captures the value?
Who decides what enters schools, hospitals, local governments and civic institutions?These choices are often presented as technical decisions. But they are also political, economic and democratic ones. They need public participation.The Prometheus Protocol explores how ordinary people might regain a sense of agency within these systems.

It asks three questions:
Who owns?
Who benefits?
Who decides?

What we explore

AI is not only about technology. It is becoming infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how resources are allocated, how public services operate, how knowledge is produced, and whose interests are prioritised.Yet many of the most consequential decisions about AI are being made without meaningful public participation.Prometheus explores questions such as:

Who owns the data, models, and infrastructure increasingly shaping public life?
How is value created through AI, and who captures it?
What happens when public institutions depend on private technological infrastructures?
What alternative models of ownership, governance, and stewardship might exist?
How can communities, workers, public institutions, and civil society regain influence over technological futures?

The protocol does not seek definitive answers.Instead, it creates spaces where people can collectively explore these questions, surface tensions, rehearse interventions, and imagine alternatives together.

Themes explored so far

Different iterations have explored questions such as:

Community ownership of data
AI in public services
Public procurement and technological dependence
Democratic oversight of AI systems
Alternative ownership and governance models
Civic participation in technological decision-making
Local economic value and digital commons

How it works

A protocol for collective experimentation

A small group of people of different ages and life experiences gathers in a local spot, maybe a park, a library, a museum.They are there for a sort of improv theatre. A scene gets read and some roles are offered, with a few lines to start. The rest is what they make of it. And what happens is always interesting.

Making decisions from inside

Inspired by Forum Theatre, participants enter credible fictional scenarios rooted in real tensions around AI, power, and democratic agency.Together, they freeze the scene at moments of maximum tension and test different ways of intervening from inside the situation itself.The point is not to solve the scene, but to rehearse participation under real constraints: pressure, uncertainty, conflicting interests, institutional inertia, and uneven power.

1. Enter the story

Participants encounter a fictional but plausible situation rooted in real tensions. Some volunteer to play a role. Others observe.

2. Freeze the moment

The facilitator freezes the scene at a point of maximum tension. An invitation is made to the audience: who wants to step in?

3. Step in

Participants replace characters and test different interventions from inside the situation itself. The goal is not to 'solve' the scene, but to discover what else becomes possible.

4. Debrief

Together, participants reflect on what emerged, what constrained action, and what might translate into real life.

What emerges

As people step into the scenes, new possibilities begin to surface. Shared language emerges. Unexpected alliances appear. New proposals break through deadlocks.Participants leave not only with analysis from the debrief, but with an embodied experience of how power and constraint operate in practice, and a clearer sense of where leverage, initiative, and collective action might begin from where they are.They also encounter alternative infrastructures, governance models, and ownership approaches that challenge the idea that the current direction of AI is inevitable.

Naming the stakes

Language for conversations that felt inaccessible. Understanding happens by embodying a role.

Seeing the system

Power dynamics and structures that shape decisions become visible. Acting differently can change the constellation, and open new possibilities within real constraints.

Discovering alternatives

Next to the emergent strategies and the collective intelligence surfaced through the rehearsal, participants also learn about alternatives that exist or are being built.

Taking action

Many leave asking:"What's next?"

And then,
sometimes,
something travels.

The rehearsal is rarely the end of the story.A conversation continues. A relationship forms. A new experiment begins. Someone hosts a session of their own. An idea finds a new context.Sometimes the most important thing is not what happens in the room, but what travels beyond it.

The lineage of this practice

From forum theatre to AI governance

Prometheus draws inspiration from Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre, Paulo Freire's traditions of critical consciousness, participatory futures, democratic innovation, and systems change practice.At its core lies a simple proposition:People develop agency not by discussing change from a distance, but by experiencing it together.

Prometheus adapts these traditions to one of the defining governance challenges of our time: the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence.

Iterations

Prometheus is evolving through successive public experiments across contexts.Each iteration tests new scenes, surfaces different tensions, and contributes to a growing body of collective learning.

Oxford, UK

Friendly co-option proved harder to resist than open conflict.

Sao Paulo, Brazil

Power dynamics and structures that shape decisions become visible. Acting differently can change the constellation, and open new possibilities within real constraints.

Coimbra, Portugal

Next to the emergent strategies and the collective intelligence surfaced through the rehearsal, participants also learn about alternatives that exist or are being built.

Sibiu, Romania

Many leave asking:"What's next?"

Field notes from the commons

A living commons of civic ingenuity

Every iteration leaves traces.The interventions people attempt. The tensions that repeatedly surface. The unexpected framings participants generate. The practical moves that feel possible afterwards.

These become part of a growing commons: a living record of civic ingenuity across contexts.Scenes, facilitation materials, and learnings are documented openly so that participants and partners can adapt, remix, and carry the protocol into their own communities and institutions.

Explore documentation

Ways to engage

Experience

Join an upcoming public session and experience the protocol first-hand.

Join a session

Host

Bring a facilitated Prometheus experience to your organisation, network, conference, or community.Together, we adapt the experience to your context and questions.

Book a conversation

Adapt

Interested in carrying Prometheus into your own context?Practitioners interested in hosting local iterations can receive support to adapt scenes, prepare facilitation, and contribute learnings back into the commons.

Explore stewardship

Stewarding the commons

Rooted in place. Remixed everywhere.

Prometheus is held as an evolving commons.The protocol is designed to be adapted, remixed, and rooted in different places. Many materials, learnings, and field notes are shared openly.People interested in carrying the protocol into their own communities are invited into a growing steward ecology.

Stewards contribute in different ways:• adapting the protocol to local realities
• documenting what emerges
• sharing learnings back into the commons
• supporting future iterationsFinancial contributions, when possible, help sustain the continued development, documentation, and accessibility of the practice.

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Finding the others

An ecology of experimenters

Across different places and fields, people are searching for ways to act under conditions of uncertainty.Some are building community wealth. Others are exploring democratic innovation, local resilience, alternative infrastructures, and new forms of collective life.Collective Futures is one small node in this wider ecology.Part of this practice is helping experimenters find one another so that practices, protocols, and possibilities can move and evolve, and inspire new experiments elsewhere.The ambition is not to build a single organisation, but to contribute to a distributed field of collective experimentation.If you are exploring related questions, I'd love to connect.

Join in

Ways to participate

This practice is an invitation to discover ways forward by imagining, making, and trying things together.

◌ Experience a live experiment

Step into an immersive experience and see where it takes you. [Learn more ↓]

No expertise required, no preparation needed.

Each activation starts from a tension people don't know how to start unpacking. Through rehearsal, games, worldbuilding, or other immersive formats, participants explore possibilities by enacting them, not just discussing them.

The goal is not certainty or consensus. People often leave with new relationships, fresh questions, ideas worth testing, and a renewed sense of what might be possible.

See upcoming sessions ↗

◇ Bring an experiment to your community

Host a participatory experience on a challenge that matters. [Learn more ↓]

Every community has people who care, resources that go unnoticed, and good questions waiting for a place to surface.

Whether you're part of a community foundation, library, school, municipality, cultural centre, or informal network, we can co-design an experiment rooted in your context.

Many collaborations begin with a single gathering and evolve from there.

Explore what this could look like in your community ↗

✧ Explore a challenge together

Use experimentation to start acting on complex questions. [Learn more ↓]

You may be navigating uncertainty, facing a challenge that resists easy solutions, or sensing an opportunity that is difficult to articulate.

Rather than beginning with a strategy, we begin with an experiment: a structured way of generating information through participation.

The goal is not to predict the future, but to discover what changes when people engage with it directly.

Start a conversation ↗

✩ Co-design new protocols

Develop formats and practices that others can build on. [Learn more↓]

You have expertise in a field, a practice, or a question that feels worth exploring collectively.

Together we can develop new scenes, protocols, facilitation formats, or learning experiences that others can adapt and build upon.

Everything created becomes part of a growing commons of approaches, with contributors acknowledged and credited.

Explore collaboration possibilities ↗

⬡ Resource the practice

Support open experimentation, documentation, and field building. [Learn more ↓]

Collective Futures combines commissioned work with open experiments, shared learning, and ongoing research and development.

The practices, infrastructures, and commons that make this possible also need care and resourcing.

If you're a funder, institution, or ally interested in what it would take to grow this work, we'd love to explore what a partnership might look like.

Explore partnership possibilities ↗

Field notes

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

About Collective Futures

A practice for collective experimentation

Collective Futures designs repeatable practices where communities, networks, and institutions discover new ways of acting together.Rather than delivering answers, the work creates opportunities for people to experience, test, and adapt new ways forward, starting from what already exists: relationships, local knowledge, and a willingness to try.Each practice is designed to travel. It begins in a particular place and evolves as others make it their own.Over time, people begin to experience themselves as capable of shaping the futures they share.

Who this practice is for

Different contexts, shared question

This work is for groups, communities, networks, institutions and individuals who bring others together around a question that matters, and are looking for ways to move beyond conversation into shared experimentation.

Beneath the differences, the same curiosity:
What kinds of practices help people discover new ways of acting together?

CommunitiesLocal groups & communitiesMutual aid groups

Networks &
communities of practicePeer networksCross-sector coalitions

Grassroots movementsSolidarity networksCooperatives

Public institutions &
municipalitiesLocal government teamsPublic participation units

Cultural organisations &
civic initiativesArtists & collectivesLibraries

Universities &
research centresResearchers & labsStudent initiatives

Foundations &
philanthropy infrastructureCommunity foundationsPlace-based philanthropy

Intermediaries &
backbone organisationsConvening bodiesNetwork stewards

When is this useful

Perhaps you're here because...

🌊 A question is gathering people.Maybe the question is about AI, housing, climate, economic democracy. People care, conversations are happening, and new people keep joining.The opportunity is to create a shared way of exploring what comes after conversation.

🕸 Your network is ready for more than connection.The relationships already exist, and so do the knowledge, trust, and willingness to contribute.But collaboration still depends on the same handful of people and the same kinds of meetings.You're looking for a practice to help ideas travel and new initiative and leadership to emerge and move across the network.

🏛 You're helping others respond to change.You might work in a foundation, university, municipality, intermediary organisation, or membership network.Your role isn't to solve every challenge yourself, but to create conditions where others can respond, contribute, and lead.The question is how to create that momentum without prescribing the outcome.

🌱 A question keeps returning.It might be an idea you can't stop thinking about, or a conversation that refuses to end. Or the feeling that waiting for a better moment no longer makes sense.You're not looking for a blueprint, but for a place to begin.

How small beginnings grow

We start with a question, not a programme

Some experiments remain small. Others grow into longer collaborations, new practices, or new infrastructure.

✦

First Experience

90 minutes to ½ day

An immersive experience that surfaces what is already in the room and identifies one concrete next move.

Builds toward

Shared understanding, trust, and a first experience of collective agency.

Read more ↓

No preparation required. No prior knowledge. Just a real question, challenge, or tension, and a group willing to spend some time with it together.

First experiences create a shared reference point: helping people see one another differently, surface overlooked assets and possibilities, and discover where energy for action already exists.

Many collaborations begin here.

↯

Sprint

1 day to 1 week

Focused bursts of experimentation designed around a shared challenge, opportunity, or moment of transition.

Builds toward

Visible action, early prototypes, and the confidence to continue.

Read more ↓

Sprints often happen when people sense that something needs to move, but aren't yet sure how.

They can take place inside existing gatherings, organisations, or networks, creating a temporary space to move quickly from conversation into experimentation.

The goal is not a finished solution, but a first signal that something new is possible, and a clearer sense of what might come next.

⟳

Practice Cycle

3 to 9 weeks

Structured loops of testing, reflection, and adaptation that allow insight to become repeated practice.

Builds toward

New habits, stronger relationships, and capacities that remain within the community or network.

Read more ↓

Practice cycles create enough time for people to try something, learn from what happens, and try again.

Rather than searching for the perfect approach in advance, participants develop confidence through repeated rounds of action and reflection.

This is often where new habits, relationships, and ways of working begin to take root.

❈

Field Lab

6 to 18 months

A sustained space where experimentation generates collective capacity, new ways of organising, and long-term change.

Builds toward

New infrastructures, civic arrangements, and enduring patterns of collaboration.

Read more ↓

Field Labs bring together people who share a long-term challenge, opportunity, or ambition and are willing to explore it together over time.

Experiments accumulate, relationships deepen, and participants begin to recognise emerging patterns across their work and contexts.

What emerges cannot be fully designed in advance. New practices, collaborations, and forms of infrastructure are discovered through the work itself.

What begins as a small experiment can ripple far beyond where it starts.

Stewarding the practice

About Alexandra

I'm Alexandra Stef, steward and designer of Collective Futures.Over the past fifteen years, I've worked across community organising, philanthropy infrastructure, collective learning and participatory futures, collaborating with communities, foundations, universities, networks, and public institutions in Europe and beyond.Collective Futures brings those experiences into one evolving practice, developed through experiments, partnerships, and collaborations with people exploring similar questions in different places.Based in Madrid, working internationally.

Selected collaborations

FUTURES · LEARNING · COMMUNITY PHILANTHROPY

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

A six-month global learning journey bringing together practitioners from 12 countries to explore the future roles of community foundations.

Explore →

Context

A global learning community created to explore how community foundations might evolve amidst accelerating social, ecological and democratic change.

What we did

Designed and facilitated a participatory learning ecology combining futures inquiry, peer exchange, experimentation and collective sensemaking.

What emerged

New narratives, practical experiments, stronger relationships across the field, and renewed imagination about the future of civic infrastructure.

FUTURES · LEARNING · COMMUNITY PHILANTHROPY

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

A six-month global learning journey bringing together practitioners from 12 countries to explore the future roles of community foundations.

Explore →

Context

A global learning community created to explore how community foundations might evolve amidst accelerating social, ecological and democratic change.

What we did

Designed and facilitated a participatory learning ecology combining futures inquiry, peer exchange, experimentation and collective sensemaking.

What emerged

New narratives, practical experiments, stronger relationships across the field, and renewed imagination about the future of civic infrastructure.

FUTURES · LEARNING · COMMUNITY PHILANTHROPY

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

A six-month global learning journey bringing together practitioners from 12 countries to explore the future roles of community foundations.

Explore →

Context

A global learning community created to explore how community foundations might evolve amidst accelerating social, ecological and democratic change.

What we did

Designed and facilitated a participatory learning ecology combining futures inquiry, peer exchange, experimentation and collective sensemaking.

What emerged

New narratives, practical experiments, stronger relationships across the field, and renewed imagination about the future of civic infrastructure.

Let's continue the conversation

Carrying a question, a transition, or the beginning of an idea?

Let's think together about a first experiment.

Book a conversation

Send a note

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Stewarding the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Why this work exists

Many of the challenges shaping our time arrive without instructions.Ecological breakdown, wealth concentration, democratic erosion, artificial intelligence, loneliness.We are entering territories for which no institution, expert, or roadmap is prepared.And yet decisions are being made every day.About what children learn.
About who benefits from technology.
About what is automated.
About whose voices count.
About how we live together.Collective Futures begins from a simple observation:People discover what they can do together only after they begin.Not after another report, perfect alignment, or ideal conditions, but after they begin.This practice exists to create conditions for that beginning.Places where people can rehearse the future, test possibilities, improvise together, and learn in public.Because futures are not only anticipated, but practised into being.

Why rehearse the future?

Many of the capacities this moment asks of us cannot be acquired through analysis alone.Trust. Imagination. Courage. Collective agency. The ability to move through uncertainty together.These capacities grow through practice.By trying something.
By noticing what happens.
By adapting.
By beginning again.Collective Futures treats experimentation as a form of civic practice: a way of learning with others, under real conditions, before certainty arrives.

What working together can look like

Questions evolve.
So do collaborations.

Some begin with a single gathering. Others continue over weeks or months. There is no fixed pathway.These are some of the forms collective experimentation can take as it deepens.

First experience
90 minutes to ½ day
An immersive experience that surfaces what is already in the room and one meaningful next move.

Read more ↓

No preparation needed. No prior knowledge of AI, community resilience, or civic innovation. Just a real tension and a group willing to spend some time on it together.

The seed protocol, the most portable version of this, can travel without facilitation support. Anyone who has lived it once can run an informal version.

Sprint
1 day to 1 week
Focused bursts of experimentation designed around a shared challenge or opportunity. Turns overlooked assets, relationships, and ideas into visible action: a first signal that something new is possible.

Read more ↓

Sprints can take place inside existing convenings – a network gathering, a federation meeting, a conference – where people are already assembled but need a designed space to move from conversation to experimentation, first moves, and early prototypes.

Practice Cycle
3 to 9 weeks
Structured loops of testing, reflection, and adaptation that allow learning to become repeated practice.

Read more ↓

A practice cycle generates something tangible: a group that has practised how to act together, and a prototype worth developing further.

This is often where organisations shift from being hosts to becoming anchor institutions, as the capacity generated through the experiment stays within the network or the community.

Field Lab
6 to 12 months
A sustained space where experimentation builds working relationships, shared capacity, and new ways of organising.

Read more ↓

A field lab starts with a shared question, a design logic, and enough committed people to generate something genuinely new.

What emerges – new civic arrangements, funding flows, or ways of organising – is discovered through the work, not designed in advance.

This is the layer where individual experiments become a pattern, and where that pattern begins to reshape the institutions and networks that hosted them.

How the work unfolds

From first experience to new infrastructure

Questions evolve. So do collaborations.Some begin with a single gathering. Others continue over months or years. There is no fixed pathway.These are some of the forms collective experimentation can take as it deepens.

First experience
90 minutes to ½ day
A participatory experience that surfaces what is already in the room and one concrete next move.

Read more ↓

No preparation needed. No prior knowledge of AI, community resilience, or civic innovation. Just a real tension and a group willing to spend some time on it together.

The seed protocol, the most portable version of this, can travel without facilitation support. Anyone who has lived it once can run an informal version.

Sprint
1 day to 1 week
Turns overlooked assets, relationships, and ideas into visible action: a first signal that something new is possible.

Read more ↓

Practice Cycle
3 to 9 weeks
Structured loops of testing, reflection, and adaptation until insight becomes repeated practice.

Read more ↓

A practice cycle generates something tangible: a group that has practised how to act together, and a prototype worth developing further.

This is often where organisations shift from being hosts to becoming anchor institutions, as the capacity generated through the experiment stays within the network or the community.

Field Lab
6 to 12 months
A sustained space where experimentation builds working relationships, collective capacity, and new ways of organising.

Read more ↓

A field lab starts with a shared question, a design logic, and enough committed people to generate something genuinely new.

What emerges – new civic arrangements, funding flows, or ways of organising – is discovered through the work, not designed in advance.

This is the layer where individual experiments become a pattern, and where that pattern begins to reshape the institutions and networks that hosted them.

First experience
90 minutes to ½ day
An immersive experience that surfaces what is already in the room and one meaningful next move.

Read more ↓

No preparation needed. No prior knowledge of AI, community resilience, or civic innovation. Just a real tension and a group willing to spend some time on it together.

The seed protocol, the most portable version of this, can travel without facilitation support. Anyone who has lived it once can run an informal version.

Read more ↓

Practice Cycle
3 to 9 weeks
Structured loops of testing, reflection, and adaptation that allow learning to become repeated practice.

Read more ↓

A practice cycle generates something tangible: a group that has practised how to act together, and a prototype worth developing further.

This is often where organisations shift from being hosts to becoming anchor institutions, as the capacity generated through the experiment stays within the network or the community.

Field Lab
6 to 18 months
A sustained space where experimentation builds working relationships, shared capacity, and new ways of organising.

Read more ↓

A field lab starts with a shared question, a design logic, and enough committed people to generate something genuinely new.

What emerges – new civic arrangements, funding flows, or ways of organising – is discovered through the work, not designed in advance.

This is the layer where individual experiments become a pattern, and where that pattern begins to reshape the institutions and networks that hosted them.

Ways of working together

Field Lab

Multiple experiments, actors,
and places learning across
a wider ecology.

Expand +

Sprint

Focused bursts of experimentation
designed around a shared challenge.

Expand +

Practice Cycle

Longer cycles of inquiry,
experimentation, reflection,
and adaptation.

Expand +

First Experience

Immersive experiences that invite
people to rehearse possibilities together.

Expand +

Many ways in.

Different contexts call for different rhythms of experimentation.

There is no fixed sequence. People enter this work from many directions.

First Experience

90 minutes to ½ day

Sprint

1 day to 1 week

Practice Cycle

3 to 9 weeks

Field Lab

6 to 12 months

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First Experience

90 minutes to ½ day

No preparation needed. No prior knowledge required. Just a real tension and a group willing to spend some time on it together.

The seed protocol can travel without facilitation support. Anyone who has lived it once can host an informal version.

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Sprint

1 day to 1 week

Turns overlooked assets, relationships, and ideas into visible action.

Sprints often happen inside existing gatherings where people are already assembled but need space to move from conversation to experimentation.

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Practice Cycle

3 to 9 weeks

Structured loops of experimentation, reflection, and adaptation.

A practice cycle generates something tangible: a group that has practised acting together and a prototype worth developing further.

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Field Lab

6 to 12 months

A sustained space where multiple experiments, actors, and places learn together.

This is often where individual experiments begin to form patterns capable of reshaping institutions and networks.

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Ways of working together

How this work is held

Stewarding a living practice

I'm Alexandra Stef, designer and steward of Collective Futures.Collective Futures is both a personal practice and an emerging commons.My role is to design, host, document, and steward conditions in which people, communities, and institutions can discover new possibilities together.Sometimes this means designing an experiment. Sometimes accompanying a longer inquiry. Sometimes supporting communities, foundations, or networks interested in cultivating their own capacity for collective experimentation.The practice grows through participation and stewardship. Hosts bring experiments into their communities. Participants carry experiences into future conversations and initiatives. Contributors adapt, document, and extend the work.If you're wondering what this could look like in your context, let's talk.

Collective Sensemaking & ForesightFor communities, networks, and organisations navigating uncertainty.When old assumptions no longer hold, people need spaces to make sense of what is changing together.Collective Futures designs participatory processes that help groups surface diverse perspectives, explore emerging signals, develop shared understanding, and identify meaningful next moves.This may involve:→ participatory foresight
→ ecosystem inquiry
→ collective reflection
→ community listening
→ facilitated sensemaking processes🌊 We need to make sense of change together
When old assumptions no longer hold.Notice what is changing. Surface different perspectives. Develop shared understanding in conditions of uncertainty.This may involve participatory foresight, ecosystem inquiry, community listening, or facilitated collective sensemaking.

🔥 We want to rehearse possible futures
When decisions need to be experienced, not only discussed.Step into possible futures. Explore tensions. Experience alternatives before decisions become irreversible.This may involve simulations, civic rehearsals, role-play, forum theatre, games, experiential learning or live future scenarios.

🕸 Strengthen relationships for action / 🕸 We want to strengthen our capacity to act togetherWhen relationships, trust, and collaboration need to deepen.Discover existing strengths, connect people, and create the conditions for sustained collaboration.This may involve learning journeys, communities of practice, experimentation cycles, network weaving, or collective inquiry.

🌱 We want to try something newWhen emerging challenges require experimentation rather than predetermined solutions.Move from ideas to action through small, concrete experiments that generate learning.This may involve sprints, prototyping processes, civic experiments, rapid learning cycles, or participatory design.

🌾 We want learning to travelWhen isolated initiatives need to become shared practice.Document what emerges, connect experiments across places, and help practices travel without becoming blueprints.This may involve convening, documentation, field-building, convening practitioners, developing open protocols or shared learning infrastructure.

See these in practice >

Which path are you curious to enter?

Some people arrive here because they are searching for a different way of thinking about change.Others, because they want to begin experimenting in their own context. Choose your path, or wander between them.

◎

I'm carrying questions

Explore a way of thinking about sparking collective agency in uncertain times.

Enter the practice →

✧

I want to try something

Discover experiments, protocols, and ways to start moving with others.

Try an experiment →

✢

I'm looking for experimenters

Find field notes, live sessions, and join people testing new possibilities.

Find the others →

The Commons

Carrying the practice together

Collective Futures is interested in creating practices that can be carried, adapted, and recreated.Some protocols are openly shared. Others are developed collaboratively and continue evolving through use.The intention is not replication, but recreation: carrying principles into new contexts and making them your own.The commons is still emerging. Some parts already exist. Others are being built together.

If you're wondering...

What happens in one of your sessions?

Participants step into a powerful question and explore it together.

Depending on the format, this might involve role-play, rehearsal, worldbuilding, storytelling, games, prototyping, or collective sensemaking.

The specific format matters less than the embodied experience: people rehearse changing outcomes through the moves they make.

The intention is not to reach consensus or produce a perfect solution. It's to make new possibilities visible, experience what collective intelligence feels like, even temporarily, and become inspired to name something worth trying next.

How does it work in practice?

The work starts from a real tension, something people can actually feel.

It builds from the relationships, capacities, constraints, creativity, and energy people already have.

The first moves are small enough to try, even if they're incomplete.

Every experiment includes reflection, so that learning can travel beyond a single moment or place.

There is enough structure to help people begin, and enough openness for something unexpected to emerge.

Can I adapt these experiments?

Yes. Collective Futures is interested in creating practices that can travel, so experiments are designed to evolve through use.

Most experiments are openly shared. Others are co-developed with hosts and adapted to specific contexts.

The intention is not replication, but remix: carrying principles into new places and making them your own.

Live experiments for collective agency. Rooted in place, remixed everywhere.

Behind the practice

Stewarded by Alexandra Stef, based in Madrid and working internationally.Working languages: English, Spanish, Romanian.

Writing

Notes to surface patterns, ask better questions, and share learnings beyond single initiatives.

Live experiments to practise the future together

What practices make beginning easier? That's the question we explore here.

I'm carrying questions

I want to try something

I'm looking for explorers

What shapes this practice

Designing conditions for emergence

What experiments can unlock

New pathways become visible. The future begins to branch.↓

Big questions, local starting points

Experiments in motion

Examples of how real tensions become live prototypes across fields and scales.You might also read these as a progression: from making systems visible, to rehearsing public power, to acting locally, to building shared capacity across places.

Making sense of AI systems

Rehearsing public power over AI

Mobilising what's already here

Building ecosystems of practice

Prometheus Protocol 🔥

A civic rehearsal format where people move from observing systems to stepping into them.The Prometheus Protocol invites participants to experience what it feels like to act together on questions about AI and power that are increasingly shaping public life without meaningful public participation.

Sibiu, Romania – 9 July 2026, 18:00 EEST

Prometheus Protocol 🔥

A civic rehearsal for collective agency in the age of AI.

Most people encounter Al as something already decided. The tools arrive. The systems are adopted. The decisions have already been made.Prometheus creates a different experience.

Participants step into live scenarios where decisions about AI, power, ownership and public value are still unfolding, and rehearse what collective agency feels like before those decisions become inevitable.

The protocol does not seek definitive answers.Instead, it creates spaces where people can collectively explore these questions, surface tensions, rehearse interventions, and imagine alternatives together.

Different iterations have explored questions such as:

The rehearsal is rarely the end of the story.A conversation continues. A relationship forms. A new experiment begins. Someone hosts a session of their own. An idea finds a new context.Sometimes the most important thing is not what happens in the room, but what travels beyond it.

Prometheus is evolving through successive public experiments across contexts.Each iteration tests new scenes, surfaces different tensions, and contributes to a growing body of collective learning.

Prometheus is held as an evolving commons.The protocol is designed to be adapted, remixed, and rooted in different places. Many materials, learnings, and field notes are shared openly.People interested in carrying the protocol into their own communities are invited into a growing steward ecology.

An ecology of experimenters

Ways to participate

Field notes

A practice for collective experimentation

Different contexts, shared question

Perhaps you're here because...

First Experience

Sprint

Practice Cycle

Field Lab

About Alexandra

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

Context

What we did

What emerged

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

Context

What we did

What emerged

Evolution of Community Foundations Huddle

Context

What we did

What emerged

Questions evolve. So do collaborations.

From first experience to new infrastructure

Many ways in.

First Experience

Sprint

Practice Cycle

Field Lab

First Experience

Sprint

Practice Cycle

Field Lab

Stewarding a living practice

I'm carrying questions

I want to try something

I'm looking for experimenters

The Commons

If you're wondering...

New pathways become visible.
The future begins to branch.↓

Big questions,
local starting points

Questions evolve.
So do collaborations.