Transition Culture

This sentence struck me as being particularly poignant and multi-layered, in discussing the wholesale changes necessary to humanity’s ways:

“Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

Aesop would be impressed!

Greg
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

I’ve just started reading the document although I’m only on page 10 I can thoroughly recommend others read it too - its good stuff!

Wow.

I’m very excited.

I mean, I was excited as soon as I read about the Knowledge Management position back on page 4.

It may sound sad, but I manage knowledge for fun

Anyway, I started to think about what I’d do given the opportunity.

Then, I read:

“* Host the collaborative rewrite of ‘The Transition Handbook’ using a wiki approach, with the original book serving as the basis for a gathering of tools, stories, experience and insight from across the Transition

“* The new web platform will be designed with this as a central aspiration”

This really made me smile

(in part because I think its something I can claim partial credit for and therefore can sleep well at night knowing I’m contributing something useful!)

Anyway, as I thought about what I’d do if I were the Transition Network Knowledge Manager I thought about doing it in two stages, firstly to scope the possibilities, identifying the best way of achieving the goals - something I spend A LOT of my time doing anyway - and secondly to put together a detailed Request for Proposals and put it out to tender.

Then, on page 29 I read “thinking at this stage is that the funding for this post might be used in two stages, firstly for someone to scope the
possibilities, identifying the best way of achieving what is set out below, and secondly for someone to implement what they have come up with.”

I was pretty much flabagasted.

How does one apply for the Knowledge Management position?

PS - I already work part-time as part of an impressive technical team at The Hub (lead by co-directors of United Diversity, incidentally) working to an pretty much identical web platform brief.

We’re starting with all the standard knowledge sharing basics but part of our plan is to make online collaborative meetings a reality with drag and drop audio/ video conferences coupled with real-time versions of stuff like thinkature and gliffy!

Some of our short terms plans can be seen here.

We’re currently using plone 3 and a moving towards pure zope 3 like our friends at http://alpha.green.tv.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Drupal (and my friend at Code Positive are leaders of the Drupal UK community.

But, as Angie Byron aka webchick (a leading light of the Drupal world) points out here php is not really a “proper language” like python (what most coders at google prefer to use).

Joerg (currently leading plone 3 development for The Hub and also working with Gary Alexander, co-founder of The Open Co-op on http://dissconnected.net spent 8+ years as a PHP coder and did lots of Drupal work for http://www.metamute.org (whose work on “Network Distribution Services” and Web2POD (Print on Demand) could really help with plans for “Transition Times”) but now only likes to code in python.

Many others and doing the feel the same, and for good reasons.

Hi Josef,
Thanks for that…. struck me reading it how fast things change in our world. Imagine if 4 years ago you had told someone that a friend of yours “coupled with real-time versions of stuff like thinkature and gliffy” and “now only likes to code in python”. Well actually I confess I still have no idea what you are talking about, but presumably some people do…I still talk to older people for whom spam is a processed meat that comes in tins.
Thanks for that, I’ll make sure Ben has a look at it (he understands that thinkature and gliffy are…I think.)

Hehe, Thanks Rob,

I couldn’t help but notice that the role has lots of overlap with Ben’s existing job description so I guess whoever gets it will be working with him very closely (don’t want to step on his toes!)

FYI, thinkature and gliffy allow people to collaboratively draw mind maps and the like on the web, and python is a very powerful programming language.

/me keeps his eyes peeled for details of application procedure…

Josef.

I can’t help thinking the appropriate approach for a transition network would be to have 3 or 4 part-time geographically distributed knowledge managers. We don’t want a single point of failure especailly when we talk so much about resilience in the rest of Transition Culture. Same goes for the infrastructure and hardware.

I can understand why someone to take care of knowledge management is a priority:so many ideas! so important not to reinvent wheels!

May one sound a cautionary note? Companies spent tens of millions of dollars on ‘knowledge management’ a few years back. They filled up huge databases (including, yes, wikis and the like) with priceless stories, cases and and models. But their money and work was mostly wasted because they ended up with just too much knowledge for people to cope with. Their knowledge ended up managed, tagged, and stored - but not used.

You might consider looking for a a web-savvy journalist (rather than someone formally trained as a knowledge manager) when filling the positions. Journos care mainly about stuff being read, not about it being stored. After that, you might think about looking for a trained librarian with a lot of front line experience working face-to-face with citizens: they’re great at interpreting imprecise requests; they can link divergent sources that metatags don’t; and above all librarians nurture the social relationships which are surely what Transition is all about.

I’m inclined to agree with Mark above.

I think someone needs to lead the effort and take overall responsibility of making sure key stuff gets done, but a distributed team of expert knowledge managers all working together would be ideal (and what I’d hope to get established were I to get the opportunity )

Indeed, I’ve got a few people in mind who I think would be excellent for the job (assuming they are interested)…

It is so important that those who say (or tell their community)they are working towards becoming a Transition Town thoroughly know the full depth and scope of that action. It would be a shame if the name was used but not the full and properly developed successful model put in place. In that case the movement could be measured by slow and laboured success or even failure.

The Transition Town concept is brilliant and very effective. Watered down half hearted copies will lessen the take up by other towns.

I see your thinking is really clear and I like the organic model. Sonya and I haven’t had time to take it in or even talk yet and think through application in several senarios in our context. That will take quite some time. And things are moving exponentially here. They change and grow daily so many of the possible scenarios are only just showing some early potential.

What I want to say now is that I am so proud to be involved and that although our situations are very different that the principles are the same.

My concern in Australia is that when a Transition innitiative starts how do we ensure it adheres to the principles which are flexible enough to cater for many different situations? This may best be done by access to support. How do we ensure we are all acting in accord under the same banner? How do we support any innitiatives at risk of failing?

The last thing you need IMHO is a Transition “organisation” because what you will invariably get as development takes place is “capture” by the competent managers necessary for scalable and cross border development.

This is inherent in the nature of the “Company” legal form, whether or not it is “For Profit”, and is known as the “Principal/Agency” problem.

This conflict is exacerbated by another conflict with finaciers such as banks whenever development funding is necessary because of the inherent conflicts between interests of lenders and borrowers.

These conflicts are inherent in conventional “enterprise models”.

I have been working with a Scottish charity - Nordic Enterprise Trust - with a little funding from the Norwegian government agency Innovation Norway.

We have been developing the “partnership-based” solutions I was working on with Josef and Gary Alexander a few years ago (ie the “Open Coop”).

I believe that it is quite straightforward to create a “Transition Partnership” - using a UK Limited Liability Partnership (”LLP”) as a framework - within which the various stakeholders cooperate (possibly across borders) to achieve Transition Aims.

The existing Transition company - probably converted to a Community Interest Company purely for the “asset lock” - would be what I call a “Custodian” member which would “own” as “steward” whatever intellectual property there is in the Transition concept.

Other stakeholders could then invest either money or “money’s worth” of (say) intellectual property, and receieve an agreed revenue share alongside the “Operating members” who actually do the work and put this capital to work.

Hi, A hot, humid, muggy night in a suburb of Tokyo - I try not to use the air conditioner to save energy - the temperature at 3am inside my room is 29 degrees C - I wake up in a sweat with a slight headache at 3am and can’t get back to sleep so I start thinking about Transition stuff in preparation for next Tuesday and Wednesday when we’ll have an all-Japan gathering of Transition Initiators (about 10 people will meet for a 2 days of discussion on how best to introduce the Transition Town concept to local communities in Japan and to create alignment around a shared sense of purpose).

I thought the Proposal for Structure document is really good but I was not really satisfied with the Purpose of Transition statement or Mission statement. For me the essence of Transition is moving step by step from A to B - moving from vulnerability and negative consequences to local resilience and a positive future vision.

I think we need a statement of purpose
that includes the day to day concerns that the
‘the man in the street’ can relate to
ie. the end of cheap oil & food,
climate change and global economic contraction.

In the early hours of this morning I came up with the following statement of purpose
- it is a bit long but see what you think:

The purpose of Transition Network Ltd.is:

to help communities and organizations around the world
to unleash their own creative, innovative and collaborative potential

thereby enabling communities
to move from the vulnerability and negative consequences
associated with the end of cheap oil & food, climate change
and global economic contraction

to living a positive of vision of
a more resilient, self-reliant, enjoyable,
practically-skilled, community-spirited future
based on a vibrant, low-carbon, post cheap-oil, re-localized economy.

PS. magically the room temperature is now (7am) a more comfortable 26 degrees C and my headache has gone.

Thanks, Paul

Hi all, I’m flattered that my name has been mentioned twice above. Great stuff from Josef and Chris Cook. I hope his ideas about legal structures are taken seriously. He’s the man who knows about this.

Paul’s statement of purpose is long, but really begins to capture the essence of the vision a lot better than the current one.

I’ve made longer comments (about 2 A4 pages worth) on the Model, Purpose, Principles and Snapshot in 2011 which I’ve posted on Diss Connected .

I’ll make comments on the Knowledge Management post and spec very soon. By the way, I am hoping that Diss Connected will soon become a prototype for much of what is planned.

For those of us who can’t always get along to the big national meetings but want to keep updated with the wider UK Transition Movement, could we have an e-newsletter (like PAB send out) with events, news, weblinks etc, direct to our inbox?

Mari
Steering Group
Transition Whitstable, Kent