Design Online Learning Community

Survey of permies.com forum topics

• growies
• critters
• building
• homesteading
• energy (conservation, heaters, stoves)
• monies (frugality, income streams, strategy)
• living
• kitchen (preparation, preservation, medicine)
• purity (care)
• ungarbage (repair, upcycle)
• community
• wilderness
• fiber arts
• art
• permaculture artisans
• regional (zones, countries)
• education (pdc, conferences, convergences)
• experiences (wooff, volunteering, jobs, offers)
• global resources
• cider press (social)
• projects
• digital market
• this site

Who?

• participants: people who have completed a PDC, sociocracy course, community building experience or forest garden course with Rakesh or any of the Roots n Permaculture School Teachers
• local circles of participants also benefit
• teachers or facilitators

Why?

• personal development
• people sharing their gifts and challenges with the wider world
• give or receive support: knowledge and emotional
• create more connections (via-via) both in real life and online
• motivating in the real world: affirmation of what you're doing

What?

• online platform for learning
• organize meetings in real life
• share designs
• web platform to share ideas and ask questions in between the online sessions
• regular online cross skilling sessions
• teachers support the learners and vice versa
• utilising and practicing collaborative decision making
• tryout and practice for teaching / facilitation / organizing skills
• deepen permaculture knowledge

When?

• regularly - every 6 months, scale up if enough interest

Where?

• in general: online and avoid commercial interests
• share documents
• forum
• voice support
• share screens
• moving images support

Note: items are in order of increasing use of bandwidth.

Communities

• participants of RnP PDC and other courses
• teachers of RnP
• communities of participants

Limits

• it's online - need internet and electricity
• real life takes precedence
• impersonal
• lacks non-verbal communication: looks, touch, smell
• fleeting - little remains after the connection is severed

Energy

• create a good mood, positive energy
• needs people to put in energy to make it happen
• giving supporting energy and receiving it back
• sharing what you know gives energy
• supporting energy going up during meeting - energy going down further after meeting
• direct feedback helps maintain energy
• social connection is strong / feeling responsible for community - energy / motivation is strong (and vice versa)
• negative energy - to watch out for and deal with appropriately
• online presence is draining of energy (because(?) only using head, not muscles)

Edge

• edge between learning in online world and applying it in the real world
• sharpen edge of knowledge to work easier (like sharpening axe)
• increase diversity by combining people edges in knowledge, language, location, cultural / social / emotional background
• online context limits you to benefit from edges (for example, showing how to make soap, creating ferments, ...)

Patterns

• wave
  • energy going up / down during / after meetings
  • recurring meetings with same setup
• hook
  • reason for people to join the community
  • reason to attend
• web
  • we form a network of people / locations
  • catching more people
  • filter for people to become teachers
• branching
  • growing from one stem (RnP) with different branches (meeting rooms)
• spiral
  • create spirals of abundance
  • evaluating / tweaking meetings each time to make small improvements / changes
• scattering
  • we are scattered across the landscape
• sheet
  • looking at a screen
  • interaction is flat
• cloud
  • come together for a short time, disperse again when done
• other
  • Open Spaces pattern

I wonder...

• ... how far the community can grow
• ... what topics people are interested in
• ... how to make it a real community, not just an online one
• ... how to make the community less dependent on Rakesh
• ... how this design will look like in the end
• ... how much people can harvest from this: quantity and quality of learning

Flow

• subjects flowing from one session to the next, deepening, meandering
• time is flowing when topics are interesting, loosing a sense of time
• refreshing flow of new people, new topics, interesting ideas
• like a river taking on more depth with more diverse sources, so would a learning community
• viewpoint changes as you change direction along a flow
• a learning community can be like a splash of water in your face: refreshing and shocking at the same time

Past & Future

• Past (learning) communities
  • knowledge transfer: more experienced teach the younger, less experienced ones
  • aboriginal song lines: young ones add additional knowledge to the songs of the old
  • they had a culture with boundaries and limitations they grew up with
• Future
  • see I wonder...

Principles of Open Space Technology

From: Wikipedia

While the mechanics of Open Space provide a simple means to self-organize, it is the underlying principles that make it effective both for meetings and as a guidepost for individual and collective effectiveness.

The Law of Two Feet — a foot of passion and a foot of responsibility — expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love. In practical terms, the law says that if you’re neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet (or available form of mobility) and go somewhere where you can. It is also a reminder to stand up for your passion.

From the law flow four principles:

• Whoever comes is the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

The open space rallying cry is: prepare to be surprised

Open Space Mechanics

Since the meeting is supposed to be self-organizing, the conveners put their energy not in running the meeting but creating a setting that gets everyone’s creative energy flowing.

Opening:

• Show the timeline, how the event breaks down into Opening, Marketplace of ideas, Break-out sessions, Closing.
• Sponsor introduces the theme. Briefly. One or two minutes max. Long openings drain the energy of the meeting quickly. Get participants to work ASAP.
• Facilitators introduce the principles and the format. Explain how the marketplace of ideas works.

Marketplace of ideas:

• Participants write ‘issues’ on pieces of paper. Preferably with bold markers, so they are easy to read from a distance.
• Participants choose a timeslot for their topic on the agenda wall.
• One by one, participants explain their issue to the others, with the aim of drawing the right people to their break-out-session.

Break-out sessions:

Once people do not come up with new issues (wait a little bit, and ask ‘are we done?’. I find the silence that often happens at the beginning and end of the marketplace the scariest. However, this silence seems to be very productive.

You may ask people to put their name on sessions they want to attend. More than one session per slot is OK… (law of two feet :)). This gives conveners an idea of how busy their session is going to be. It gives participants an image of how the break-out session is going.

People may shuffle sessions around, or merge sessions as they are deciding where to go. Have a place (e.g. a wiki) where people can record outcomes of sessions, or provide paper forms for note-taking during sessions (recording who attended, a summary of the session and outcomes/questions for further work) that you can collect into a ‘book of proceedings’.

The facilitators’ role in this bit of the conference is to answer questions, and make sure everyone has the materials they need to run their break-out session. They do not (in principle) intervene in the sessions - the participants are supposed to self-organize.

Closing:

Have everyone back in the circle. A simple and effective way to close is to have the participants pass a ‘talking stick’ around, and let them (briefly, e.g. in a sentence or a word) say what they feel about the day.

Bumblebees and butterflies:

Bumblebees internalize the law of two feet quickly, and constantly flit from meeting to meeting, pollinating, cross-fertilizing, and adding richness and variety.

Butterflies may never get into any meeting. They are focal points of quiet and beauty. If you watch them, every once in a while you’ll see them engage in conversation. Those conversations often are significant.