Valuing What Matters
Lessons from a Month-Long Experiment in Collective Value Mapping
What do we value?
It’s a simple question — but answering it together is anything but.
Over the last month, the Open Heart Mind (OHM) community came together to explore this question with open hearts, curious minds, and a shared intention: to articulate the values that will guide our collective journey.
We used WisdOHM — our participatory tool for valuing what matters — to run a month-long experiment that helped us reconnect, surface diverse perspectives, and co-create our first shared Value Map: a set of ten core values now embedded into OHM’s living governance document.
This post is both a celebration and an invitation — to learn from what we discovered, and to join us for the next step in our year-long journey, beginning Wednesday 28 May. 🌿
🔁 The Journey in Four Stages:
Over the past four weeks, we invited our community to:
1. Reconnect — We launched the OHM Council Series and reconnected with 37 members of our broader community after a year of quiet building, outlining a year-long program of participatory experiments to shape OHM’s future.
2. Express — At our second Council, community members nominated values they felt should guide our mission — from Care to Consent, Regeneration to Creativity.
3. Value — Using the WisdOHM prototype, participants reviewed pairs of values and selected which they felt better aligned with OHM’s mission. Each reviewer earned “OHMnoms” — tokens of recognition for their contributions. Two distinct groups — our broader cOHMunity and the OHMcore team — completed the experiment, each generating their own ranked Value Map.
4. Embody — In our final session, we reflected on the results and discussed how to merge them. From this process emerged a shared Top 10, now written into the OHM Covenant — grounding our governance in values chosen together. 🌿
🌿 Our Shared Top 10 Values
After merging the results from both complete prototypes (cOHMunity + OHMcore), these ten values emerged as our shared priorities:
1. Integrity
2. Consent
3. Regeneration
4. Care
5. Respect
6. Transparency
7. Decentralization
8. Community
9. Creativity
10. Gifting
🔍 View the merged results
👀 Compare OHMcore and cOHMunity rankings.
💡 What We Learned
This was more than a values exercise — it was a real-time experiment in participatory governance. A few things we took away:
• Diversity strengthens insight. The wide range of lived experience deepened our shared Value Map.
• Participation follows patterns. Live sessions drove more engagement than async tools, highlighting the power of presence.
• Different groups, different priorities. The two prototypes revealed distinct emphases, showing WisdOHM’s ability to capture local nuance.
• People care deeply. The thought and care brought to every stage affirmed the integrity of the process.
🔬 Want to dive deeper?
Our technical report details the full methodology, results, and implications — including how this experiment fits within OHM’s broader vision for progressive decentralisation and participatory governance.
⏭️ What’s Next?
This was just the beginning. Each month, we’ll prototype a new use case for WisdOHM — from resource allocation and fair recognition to community curation and collective decision-making.
Next up: OHM Root Council: Democracy
A four-part exploration of participatory democracy — beginning with a guest talk by former Greens councillor Jonathan Sri on his work at the frontlines of democratic organising, and flowing into a month-long experiment to elect our incoming charity board.
📅 Wednesday 28 May
🕗 8pm AEST / 10am UTC
👉 Register here
📣 Stay Connected
Want to follow along, contribute, or shape what’s next?
• 💬 Join us on Telegram
• 🌐 Explore our website
• 💻 Vote in the live value mapping prototype
• 📩 Invite others by sharing this post 👇
Let’s keep building the roots of a regenerative future — together. 🌱
With gratitude,
The OHM team 🙏