permaculture

[andylang <andylang@gn.apc.org>]

Here at Gaia U we are having a lot of success (and delight) with our online 
Orientation course. We set about generating this largely to avoid the 
transportation issues we all wrestle with when making face-to-face gatherings 
and, as well, to make it easier for people to attend at times that suited 
them (not all have to be at the same place at the same time - although we do 
do one live call for each 2 week element at two different times on the same 
day to cover the time zones).  

The results are a big surprise - over the 4 months we've been operating this 
(one 'block' every two weeks) we've had really good participation, great 
forum discussions, worked through some materials that have stretched us all 
(including how to do all this online stuff), made some lovely connections, 
supported each other in extreme circumstances (one of us is living in Syria 
right now) and we all (about 20 of us) look forward to each session.

Now, I am not proposing that this should replace face-to-face entirely but, I 
am suggesting that a combination of ongoing online (look at the power of this 
LL forum for example) with strategic face-to-face could work very well 
indeed. Those folk who can make it to face-to-face without a horrible 
footprint (and who have the time) could do that and be really well prepared 
to move on those things that can only be done by being together (discharging 
white racism?) whilst, meanwhile the online community is working out how to 
do things like participatory designs with one or two people on site and a 
bunch of online supporters, doing social network analysis of local watersheds 
(I don't mean Facebook), mentoring permaculture diploma students, generating 
online learning materials and more, much more. 

The IT pieces takes a bunch of practice and some good access to the right 
sort of platforms with appropriate tech support (we have some of these skills 
now) and it requires that users have the patience to work across dropped 
connections, learn some new software and so on (it also requires that those 
of us out there who always know better (as in "my favorite platform is better 
than yours") need to keep quiet and learn to use what's on offer(!). See 
below.

Our sense is that this is really worthwhile capacity building work. Gaia U is 
up for working (gifted for modest amounts of time) with regional, local, 
national, international networks (worknets as Bill Mollison called them) to 
use our platforms to advance this capacity building. We'll host the software 
for the prototyping, provide tuition on how to use it at the tech level, the 
facilitator level, the author level and the participant level - and assist 
with creative thinking about how all this could get used to move PC 
organization forward. Once there is a strategy designed and some operating 
capacity in place the collective worknets could buy access to their own 
platforms for long term use as required or share ours if that works better.

We'd like most of all to work with a handful of strategic visionaries in any 
of the PC worknets who are in good standing and who share Cory's thinking 
that increased collaboration can only be good and who would like to realize 
Bop's ideas of online working-together capacity.

Ok - andrew at gaiauniversity dot org gets to me. Be pleased to hear from you.