Hello and—on our 3rd birthday—welcome to the new Alternative UK . As in the past two weeks, we are only running an Editorial today (full blogging begins again this week). But with it comes a refurbished website that marks a new beginning for all of us.

On the one hand, nothing much has changed: The Alternative UK still does the same three things. Firstly, telling a new story about the future through the Daily Alternative. Secondly, collaborating with others to make a new socio-economic system visible and viable. And thirdly, building the architecture for a new democracy.

On the other hand, everything is changing. Because from today, the A/UK website offers an entry point into the spirit of participation and collaboration we know adds up to a genuinely new politics.

Our stats tell us that there are 52,000 unique visitors to the site each year, who hang for several pages but then leave. It’s time to give them a reason to stay.

After three years of reporting, engaging and co-creating with you all, we’ve seen six ways to focus energy and give rise to a future we can all look forward to.

If you’re already a co-creator, click here. And if you can, please contribute!

1. Telling the story – let’s generate new media, narrative, myth making

2. Shaping the system– for over a decade, people have been developing a new socio-economic-political system that makes the old one obsolete. Whether we call it the Well-Being or Regenerative or Transformative System, how do we work better together to make it visible and effective? Make it the system of choice?

3. Design democracy – we’re living in a new era of democracy. Community assemblies and juries, flatpack democracy, citizen action networks – there are so many new mechanisms and structures available for deliberation, decision making and good governance. Let’s build the architecture for the age of people power.

4. Share learning – what do we need to know to make ourselves capable of a better life? How do we upgrade ourselves – individually and collectively?

5. Build economies – when does caring, volunteering and activism become paid work? How does the ingenuity of people working together, responding to the problems in their environment, give rise to a new economy? Welcome to the 4thsector.

6. Create the feel – if the old politics was smoke-filled rooms, with a top table of career politicians telling the rest of us what to think, what does the new politics look and feel like? Viscerally, energetically, aesthetically?

Each one of the six groups is what we call mutually inclusive – meaning, each contains the other five, as fuel and content. For example, telling a new story about the future implies a new socio-economic-political system – though you might not call it that immediately. It implies wholly new ways of being and doing democracy and so on. Story telling is also vital for generating new ways of thinking about economy and vice versa.

Sharing learning would be a framework for developing an ideology – even a belief system - for this future we are all pointing at. In return, would our newly designed democracy include the importance of learning clubs, to nourish and build capacity in citizens?

When you click on any of these entry points on the site, you’ll see a brief summary of where AUK has arrived at after three years of observing what’s exciting; there’s also feeds to the many blogs we’ve published on each subject.

Then you can take the chance to share your own work in the field, or join the inquiry into how it could develop, by joining the group.

To enable these groups, we’re thrilled to be partnering with Loomio, whose generative platform supports the A/UK Action Forum (accessible if you are, or become, a co-creator). It’s a zone where you can:

· Find your peers: share your vision and plot

· Create strategy through polls and decision making

· Borrow the genius of other groups, share your own

· Launch initiatives, check progress, share the news locally and globally

What could happen in this next phase is exciting to think about. We could see the start of new Citizen Action Networks, as people from the same town or city meet online in the Action Forum—somewhere to start plotting. We also certainly hope that there will be plenty more stories generated for publication.

Or maybe a group will start their own regional Daily Alternative (we’ll help). We further hope that artists will share their work here and offer new tools and practices for creative activism.

In addition to these six entry points, we’re highlighting two core practices of the new politics. Firstly, the patient construction of Citizen Action Networks, connecting every kind of person to the cosmo-local solutions already available.

CANs (a generic term) are already taking shape in many different shapes and sizes around the country. Observing the unique way they draw in people of all different political tribes, they may have the potential to become new socio-political units in the era of post-party-politics. Let’s build!

Secondly, the importance of equipping ourselves, personally, for the very different future that lies ahead. That includes learning how to take back our own minds from the incessant and pervasive trance of the mainstream news, advertising and even social media. That doesn’t mean becoming a monk. But it does suggest actively developing our capacities for more autonomy and creativity.

Another aspect would be developing all the skills for reconnecting with the community we live in as well as our natural environment. Connection of all kinds is the very counteraction to the atomisation and alienation of the 20th century which made us dependent on consumerism to get our emotional needs met. In this space you will find tools, practices and all the new thinking behind the concept of individual and social development.

Our new website is not perfect and, in many ways, it’s only a trial. For now, alongside the co-creators, only newsletter readers will be invited in. We want to see how everyone responds, what the limitations are and what else is really needed to help accelerate change.

But mostly we want you to join our move from what we call the map – the observation of things changing – to the territory: taking part in making change happen.

What that means to any one of us reading, will be unique. We are all doing so much already in the ways that come most naturally to us. Yet the moment is calling for us to work better with each other and those around us. To take the next step in collaborating with those outside our ‘first’ tribe.

Are you ready to come and play? Enter into the new world of The Alternative UK here.

Alternative Editorial: Come And Play