00 — About
What is the RAF?
The Re-appropriation Framework (RAF) is a practical and ethical reference designed to help organizations, institutions, and communities regain agency over the key dimensions of their activities, environments, and their lives more broadly.
It provides a shared language and a coordination structure that support both established organizations and emerging initiatives in aligning around a common purpose, strengthening human autonomy within fair, sustainable, and resilient systems.
The RAF presents itself as a tool for collective transition: a framework that enables individuals, groups, and institutions to navigate necessary change together towards more autonomous, more resilient, and more just systems, starting at the local level.
RAF aims to
- Reconnect people with their ability to act meaningfully in their local environment.
- Identify and bring together positive actors of change.
- Encourage collaboration across organizations, disciplines, and territories.
- Build shared capacity, collective intelligence, and concrete pathways for positive transformation.
- Develop distributed and resilient systems that empower without concentrating power.
- Restore balance between autonomy and mutual support.
- Ensure that groups can replicate, adapt, and expand the framework while preserving its integrity.
01 — Foundations
Foundational Principles
RAF supports change through two complementary approaches developing concrete local alternatives, and improving existing institutions where possible. These principles aim to ensure that transformation remains ambitious, fair, adaptive, and beneficial for organizations, communities, and society as a whole. The RAF is intended as an instrument for shared evolution rather than a simple organizational framework.
1. Federation
Federation allows autonomous groups to cooperate without losing their independence.
It works through voluntary, distributed and non-hierarchical coordination.
It expands collective capacity while preserving the autonomy of each group.
2. Subsidiarity and Democracy
Subsidiarity ensures that decisions are made as close as possible to the people directly concerned.
It functions by involving higher levels only when issues exceed local capacity.
It protects democratic integrity by preventing power capture and ensuring meaningful participation.
3. Stewardship of the Commons
Commons stewardship protects essential shared resources on which communities depend.
It works through clear rules and collective governance adapted to local contexts.
It ensures resilience, prevents enclosure, and preserves these resources for the future.
4. Solidarity, Care and Human Dignity
This principle places wellbeing, time and human relationships at the heart of collective action.
It functions through mechanisms of mutual support and non-dependent redistribution.
It ensures that transformation remains fair, humane and oriented toward the common good.
02 — Map
The Seven Domains of Re-appropriation
These seven domains represent key areas where re-appropriation needs to take place. They provide a general map rather than an exhaustive checklist. Each group or initiative can focus on the domains most relevant to its mission, context, and capacity. The goal is clarity and coherence, not completeness.
The seven domains and their scope
| # |
Domain |
Scope |
| 01 |
Existential & Cultural |
Defending human dignity, fundamental freedoms, care, health, wellbeing, time, attention, meaning, and cultural plurality. |
| 02 |
Ecological |
Protecting and regenerating ecosystems, food systems, soil, water, and biodiversity through sober, regenerative, and circular practices that respect planetary boundaries. |
| 03 |
Governance & Decision-Making |
Preserving, strengthening, and revitalizing democracy, political and institutional legitimacy, subsidiarity, participation, and public accountability. |
| 04 |
Economic & Mutual Exchange |
Fostering fair, local, and circular value creation, shared ownership, cooperative finance, and community resilience beyond extractive capitalism. |
| 05 |
Scientific, Knowledge & Education |
Ensuring reliable information, shared knowledge, education, skills transmission, literacy, and responsible innovation as common goods. |
| 06 |
Digital & Technology |
Promoting sustainable digital practices and strengthening digital sovereignty, transparency, trust, shared infrastructures, and responsible use of emerging technologies, including AI. |
| 07 |
Energy & Infrastructure |
Ensuring resilient, low-impact, and democratically governed energy and infrastructure systems that communities can understand, maintain, and adapt. |
03 — Governance
Governance License and Openness
RAF is published under the RAF Open Governance License (RAGL 0.1), a governance license designed to keep the framework open, widely usable, and protected against abuse or capture.
Free use & adaptation
Any organization may use or adapt the RAF, provided it cites the source and republishes under the same license.
Framework integrity
The purpose, foundational principles, and seven domains must remain intact. The RAF and its derivatives must remain open and non-privatizable.
No capture or extraction
The framework cannot be appropriated, monetized in extractive ways, or turned into a proprietary system.
RAF constitutes a voluntary federation based on cooperation, interoperability, and mutual learning between autonomous groups.
Source repositories on Codeberg
04 — Purpose
Why embrace RAF?
Faced with fragmentation, overload, and distrust, the RAF offers a neutral, human-centered and structuring architecture capable of reconnecting people, disciplines, and causes.
It turns dispersed efforts into a coherent movement of renewal and provides a shared framework for navigating together a necessary transition towards more autonomous, resilient and just systems. It also offers a concrete alternative to the growing polarization that fragments our societies.
In this sense, the RAF is not just a conceptual framework but a tool that anyone can adopt, whether individuals, collectives, institutions or territories. It offers a constructive alternative and helps clarify where to act, with whom to collaborate, and how to align existing initiatives to foster a genuinely shared evolution.
Wherever you are, and with the means you have: one place, one system, one collective commitment at a time.
05 — Get involved
Start using the RAF
The RAF is free to adopt, adapt, and build upon. There is no registration, no membership fee, and no central authority. You can start today.
Read the framework
The full canonical text (principles, domains, and license) is available on Codeberg.
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Adopt it
Use the RAF in your organization, initiative, or territory. Cite the source, republish under RAGL, and preserve the foundational principles.
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Contribute
The RAF is a living document. Propose improvements, translations, or adaptations via the Codeberg repository.
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