The college has two features that bear specifically on the skilful production of capability in activist formations. The first is a fundamental working mode of ‘pods’. The second is several families of patterns that are stewarded by particular Schools of the college, which make reflexive contributions to college practice itself.
**Pods and podding** Pods have a function roughly equivalent to seminar series, design groups, ‘studios & crits’, ‘labs’ and other practical collectives for investigation and learning, where members of the college’s schools collaborate with partner organisations in the living economy, to develop pattern-language responses to significant challenges that the partners are facing.
Pods - as a co-working ‘space’ - are where the rubber hits the road. The practice in pods derives from ‘circle’ methodologies of various kinds that have evolved over half a century and more: study circles, design circles, reading groups, consciousness-raising groups, action-learning groups, action-research collaborations, and so on; reaching back even to the Corresponding Societies of the 1790s.
The role of the partners is to make sure that the pattern-weave is ‘danceable’ in their community of practice, and engages what they recognise as the practical issues. The role of the school-members is to facilitate that, and also to derive, refine and curate patterns which become apparent in the practices ‘out-there’ which are brought into focus in the circles.
Schools and their members are responsible for curating the *pattern commons*, and the capability to mobilise the pattern language in partner-collaborations, and weave patterns across schools and faculties.
This is the second feature of the college as regards producing capable activist formations: their stewardship and conduct of *pattern language(ing)* as a commons.
**Pattern language(ing)** Both pattern language(ing) and ‘podding’ each have a school - that is, a family of patterns - in the Faculty of formaciòn work. Both families of pattern articulate the weave of altered relations of production in the §2 cultural landscape: organic intellectual practice, free association and self-organising, commoning, facilitation, and participatory design of infrastructure.
The ‘performance’ mode of Robin’s which we noted earlier - the work that he tagged ‘networking’ - is present within this college choreography in several families of pattern. Among these, the Faculty of stewarding work (work that lies over the horizon) contains a school of ‘News from elsewhere’ . . - skills, genres and modes of narrative involved in storytelling (and curating) of good or significant paradigm practice in other locations . . - within the uneven development of global and regional economy . . under other relations of production; or at other historical times.
And the Faculty of formaciòn work contains a school of ‘Commons festival and visiting’ which is the home of patterns of plurality that enable commoners to see and feel how what they are doing in their various particular commons looks and feels; and to cultivate mutual regard, hospitality and grounded recognition towards each other.
It goes without saying, that the patterns curated in these schools are reflexive, mobilised within the practice of the college itself as well as taught.