Basecamp's strategy for creating the missing space will be to:

• Attract "social experiments" to set up tent,
• Draw a diversity of people into those experiments (to accelerate the experience base and improve methods), and
• Support and help spread whichever social experiments prove effective at restoring social habitat.

We don't yet know exactly what effective social experiments look like, but from our first attempts we already know three of their most important shared features:

First, they all aim to manifest something that's missing (or endangered) from our usual social habitat, e.g.:

• The aspects of ourselves that we are not expressing into society,
• The important, unsettling questions we're not asking,
• The uncomfortable conversations we're not having,
• The mixing of people that is not happening,
• The learning from one another that is not occurring, and/or
• The pathways of action we're not seeing.

Second, they all theorize an explicit connection between personal change and public change. Social experiments do not include, for example:

• "Self development" or "leadership development" for personal gain or for its own sake, nor
• "Solutioneering" - solving a quantifiable problem (say, food waste) in a way (say, a new app) that fails to grapple with the hard-to-quantify personal and social dimensions of the situation

Third, to be a social experiment, the actors, the actions, and the acted-upon must all be integral parts of it.

A few of the first social experiments that have been developed at, or attracted to, Basecamp include:

• Scouting Parties: Vigorous, 12-week journeys championed by a compelling provocateur, who sets an unsettling question and draws together 7-12 improbable people with radically diverse experiences of that question. They set off virtually, meet at the midpoint physically, and publish a joint Discovery Paper that may form the basis for a specific Expedition
• The Artist@Work: Coaching for anyone who'd like to explore "What does it mean to be artful at work?" and get better at finding fruitful paths forward in situations of contradiction and ambiguity at work.
• The Questions That Matter Most: Conversations that begin when an "Invitator" sets "a question that matters but isn't being asked" and continue, in open-space fashion, for however long as those who join the conversation need it to continue. At the end (or at regular intervals), the participants publish a joint Discovery Piece, to share any insights they've arrived at to help them live a full life.
• The Pause Project: A facilitated experience in creating social change by pausing instead of acting, so that problems untangle themselves and fresh ideas rise to the surface.

The Map Room: Self-described "mapmakers", who are actively leading efforts to reshape entire societal systems (e.g., public education, finance), gather regularly to: compare mapmaking tools and methods; bring decisions and their consequences together for reflection; and deepen their understanding of what they are doing, why, who else needs to be involved, and the personal dimensions of change.