Deep and powerful sense of belonging is a key component of human happiness – this is an indisputable fact. Which means that to become and stay genuinely happy, you MUST be tightly integrated into your local community, your city/village, your region, your state/province, your nation, your country, the European Union (if you happen to be a European)… and, yes, your race (race IS a vital component of human identity).
Your relationship with your local community (as well as with other entities that you belong to) must be fundamentally the same as your relationships with your environment.
Which means that in this relationship you must both generate and receive the maximum possible amount of aggregate value – financial, functional, emotional and spiritual. I give – I receive; I receive, I give – in perfect balance.
In other words, you must make sure that you satisfy aggregate needs of your neighbors (in a very real sense) to the maximum extent possible – and they satisfy yours. And of your community as a whole, because it is alive, it is a living being (intangible, invisible, but still a living being). It even has a soul (“collective soul”) called the egregore.
It is obvious that you can be genuinely happy only in a happy environment; consequently, you MUST transform your local community into a genuinely happy one. By definition, a genuinely happy community is (of course) the one that makes all of its residents genuinely happy.
In practice it means that the community must help its residents (1) identify their genuine aggregate needs – financial, functional, emotional and spiritual; and (2) satisfy their needs to the maximum extent possible. Which is the fundamental objective of self-governance at the lowest – community – level. Actually, at any level.
To help each other satisfy aggregate needs (community, like God, has no other hands but ours), members/residents of the community need an appropriate – and highly efficient – tool.
In our “electronic age” and “electronic society”, such a tool can only take the form of an Internet/Web portal. CHP- Community Happiness Portal (or Community/Local Democracy/Governance Portal, if you prefer).
Obviously, CHP must provide its users with valuable community news (not all news are valuable – most aren’t); knowledge about the community (by definition, knowledge is information that has value); free services (i.e. online education); questions-and-answers section – not just FAQ and community social network for building and maintaining valuable online and offline relationships.
As well as two other vitally important tools – for project and process management. Aggregate value is created ultimately in projects (one-time endeavors such as building children’s playground or a local gym) and processes (such as crime prevention).
Consequently, CHP needs tools for initiating, planning, structuring, executing, monitoring and evaluating community projects and for visualizing, structuring, monitoring, executing and evaluating community processes. Both processes and projects – like all other public activities in the community, of course – must be totally and completely transparent to all its members/residents.