The Center for Human Emergence (Netherlands)—CHE (NL)—exists to facilitate a break-through to a higher level of being and organization, adequate to the complexity of the challenges we are facing today.
The concept of a pattern language was created in the late 1960's by the architect Christopher Alexander. His pattern language for designing cities, towns, buildings, houses, and parks was intended to be a set of patterns that worked together to evolve over time these known things in the built world in such a way that they had an extra component which can be called life or wholeness-- something he called "The Quality Without a Name."
Pattern languages have proven to be an excellent form in which to talk about how a set of principles and forces in a constructed artifact--a house, a city, a software system, or a development organization--combine to create an effective and livable instance of that artifact. In a pattern, you can talk about how a set of existing forces can be resolved according to a rule (or pattern) that becomes a principle in the organization.
In the patterns that follow, you will see a set of principles explained in pattern format. Some of the patterns will talk about specific organizational entities. This does not mean that such entities are required to exist in the organization, but the pattern explains what forces would give rise to the need for such an entity.
Thus, the pattern language is a sort of handbook for those creating the CHE Community to refer to while building and evolving the community, just as Christopher Alexander's book, A Pattern Language, is used every day by people working with architects and builders to make their homes or remodel them.
The concept of a pattern language is hard to grasp in the abstract, but any example is quite easy to understand. We recommend that you just start reading these patterns, and you'll see how they relate to each other, what they mean in isolation, and how they relate to the task of designing the CHE Community.