I think behind each is the offer to connect (have I said it enough) to the greater movement. Yes, that can be done without becoming “official” but how much more noticed, powerful, remarkable, countable, influential could we be if we connect the dots? Yes, we don’t have to become “official” in order to find each other (although it really does make it easier) and we don’t have to become “official” to do the work of building localized resilience, but what is the downside? After all, isn’t all of this about working together? Maybe I am missing a hot button about independence but again, speaking from the culture of the US were we have probably gone to the farthest reaches of independence I see that we have a profoundly deep urge to experience community again.

Can’t we retain the creativity and autonomy of chaos yet give ourselves enough structure so we can be seen as a significant global pattern?

I was dismayed by Juanita’s post that the news reported there were only 6 Transition Initiatives while she indicated there were 40 at the time. I don’t know, but “40” sounds significant, “6” could be easily dismissed. I suppose there are advantages to keeping under the radar of mainstream news but I think we need to be found. There are a lot of people who are looking for what Transition Initiatives have to offer.

I agree with Mark and will not repeat his thoughtful remarks here about the somewhat prickly texture of the USA. I think that through this discussion I can see that the MOU (or MOU-type of thing) may be different in different countries based on different needs, the timing, and the people involved. But for what I see would help in the US, at this time, with the people I have come to know who are involved in Transition work here on the ground the MOU as is serves us well.

From experience here in Australia I can see there is a need for a process that supports and maintains the integrity of the Transition concept and those who wish to adopt the general approaches.

At present I am not feeling a strong sense of cohesion among Transition initiatives across Australia. The commitment of established groups to supporting others is not clearly reflected in action.

I am seeing a number of groups that initially subscribe to the transition approach, recognising the need and urgency of addressing peak oil and climate change, but have evolved to become ‘transition’ garden clubs or similar. Andy’s comment of “If in doubt, garden” seems to be a default option within groups that are not supported with strong leadership and lose touch with the underpinning awareness and principles from which the movement was born. (I know this wasn’t the meaning in Andy’s post)

Would an MoU improve this? probably here.
Taking responsibility for what is developed in the name of Transition is important.
Regional leadership and support, at least in the formative stages, seems very valuable.

I appreciate the MoU is an attempt to define a mechanism for ensuring that national Transition Networks have developed their own processes for maintaining the integrity of Transition initiatives, and offer vital support keep the potential ‘transition garden clubs’ on track. Perhaps not all countries will buy into the MoU but a mutually agreed process still seems very valid.

Thanks for initiating the discussion.
Yours for the future, Nick T

This seems to me one of many serious ‘scale’ discussions going on in the world of permaculture and TT at the moment, which I think is a healthy sign of our advancement.

Our experience here in NZ has been almost amusing, and may be informative. It seems to me that at

I have a few thoughts to offer:

Keep it Chaos:
It seems to me that at almost every stage of development in NZTT we have sat back and almost said: “okay, the fun’s over, we are so big now that we have to get ‘properly organised’”. Then, with James’ guidance and the wisdom of others involved we have really looked at it and decided it wasn’t necessary after all, and the fun has very much continued. It’s as if we are have been programmed by the status quo world to think “well, all this self forming stuff is all very well, but…” and that MoU’s, funding applications, staff etc are ‘the right way to do things’ at larger scales. I think part of the deeper magic of TT is this very way of self-forming – it is a way of exploring new ways of doing things, without bureaucracy.

Co-option by ‘getting serious’:
I would question whether producing this kind of MoU in response to govt and big business interest is not in fact just another form of ‘co-option’. Okay, it may make it harder for them to steal the ‘brand’, but they will have prompted us to think of it as a brand in the first place and respond on that basis, and maybe altered something fundamental about it in the process. I would say it is now time to hold our nerve, and keep to what TT has become in all its rolling chaotic glory, if big business and govt find this hard to understand, pigeonhole or deal with then so much the better. It is time for them to move towards us, not the other way around.

Big business is small change
Would ‘Transition Cola’ or ‘the McTT burger’ really change what we are doing in any meaningful way? TT is not set up to oppose big business so much as replace it, in a way what corporations choose to do at this stage is not especially relevant to us.

Greenwash is better than not washing at all:
It’s easy to be entirely negative about ‘greenwash’ but it is also a reflection of the enormous achievements which have been made in the ethical and environmental movement that business have to even pretend to care. There was a time when they didn’t have to. The very term greenwash has also been co-opted by those who would slow up progress – it feeds cynicism and mistrust. There are a lot of businesses out there who are making genuine moves towards sustainability, even those who could have been accused of greenwash in the past. I know in my own life I have talked about the way I should be living long before I started living it – the talking it up was just part of the process of stepping up.
The core terms are not co-optable:
I am concerned about the idea of trying to ‘protect’ the term Transition – surely every person or community has their own transition to make? Peak Oil and Climate Change are the key terms – and they are protected by science, not by MoU’s. Our work is defined by what we do, not what we say we do.

Participation, not membership:
I don’t think TT would lose momentum or struggle to get participants in any case – the reasons for participating are practical, immediate, and interpersonal. They don’t have much to do with perception about the terms used. I would question the value of anyone’s involvement if it was largely on the basis of how ‘cool’ or righteous the term/brand was. But I personally don’t think anybody’s real involvement in TT is based on that.

Best wishes

Andy
If in doubt, garden

I have been supporting TT Aotearoa since it was taken up here and am so thankful for the work Rob and his team has done in the UK. You guys rock and are so inspiring. I lived in the UK for a few years and it is such a different country.

Some will love the MoU and enagage with it, some will go along with it because its there and everyone does that in the TT movement and some will oppose it and most in Aotearoa that I have shown it to have disengaged with it and got on to setting up the Farmers Market, planting out another community garden, fixed up the old bikes around town and given them out, cleaned up the streams and rivers, swapped food, used their time banking credits to have a hair cut, presented another film ……..

Lets see what happens, by pushing this through, continuing to dialouge,re writing it, disengaging from it and doing your own thing – all is possible (and more) Blessings to you all for the fantastic work you do, in your minds, on the ground and in the world. Rock on the next evolution.

Aorhanui Daring Donna

I will repeat what Grifen has written above…

“So my suggestion…take the MOU as a first draft, throw it away and go back to the drawing board in confidence that good things take time. We are co-creating something powerful here that is far beyond the capacity or vision of Rob, Natalie and the TT UK, NZ or the good old USA. Our role is to stand beside groups of people in the crafting of shared visions, this is design leadership, in design conversation…to create the space for our collective wisdom to emerge.”

… and with this I whole heartedly agree.

Thank you again for opening this up for discussion. For clarification, I don’t think there was ever any intention to question the motives of yourself or anyone else involved in crafting this MoU. And neither is there any fear that the Transition Network is trying to centralise control. Your service to the Transition is consistent and deeply appreciated, and expresses more than words, your motives.

You referred to various interactions we have had over the last two years since the Transition work began to get traction in New Zealand. I am grateful to you for your responsiveness to my requests for participation in various events. Having you come in for skype video talks and Q&A’s has positively affected the many people who have attended them. These and various phone calls I have had with you and Ben have been helpful – particularly in the early stages of the work taking hold here in Aotearoa/NZ. The transition training was a service that the attendees paid for and fits in a different category, and the Aust/NZ edition of the handbook was a commercial venture initiated (by the publisher I assume), and was something many of the communities here also, like yourself, contributed to, as a way to help get the word out.

Maybe this MoU is for people who approach the Network wanting to form a national hub. In our case (NZ) I was not motivated to form a hub. I was simply wanting to serve what I saw as a desire to build local resilience in response to an awareness of Peak Oil and Climate Change as real challenges. I saw people stepping up and wanting to serve in their communities. And I saw people recognising (as I had) the potential in the Transition model to help them. And I saw that these responses could benefit from some support and communications coordination.

Since the first Transition Towns workshops in October 2007, the idea has taken hold and the numbers have continued to grow. Some initiatives have have chosen to connect to the UK and get “official” status – thank you for processing these, but many continue to progress their work without particular concern for the “official” title.

Given that New Zealand doesn’t have a Transition organisation (no legal entity has been created), I will sit on the sideline and watch how the dialogue develops in case it moves, as I not so secretly hope, in a direction that is rather well described in this talk by Clay Shirky, about organising without organisations. http://yesterdaysfuture.net/blog/?p=140

In service and gratitude,

James

Unfortunately, human nature here in the States is not so benign, at least among commercial interests.

We’ve already seen a high level of greenwashing here, often through taking over the use of a word or phrase and diluting its meaning until it means nothing at all. “Organic” was like that, until some level of regulation was imposed (although certainly not perfect!), and “natural” still is (to the point that the only thing you can be certain about something claiming to be natural is that it isn’t). Now, as grist.org reports, “local” is under attack by corporate assimilation, by companies which most certainly are not local.

So I do really worry about Transition remaining unsullied without some level of protection. I’m sure that as soon as corporate US understands the spread and appeal of the Transition movement they will attempt to co-opt it. I don’t doubt that the US could see Transition stores and Transition kits and Transition snacks and Transition whatevers, if care is not taken. Greed is just too strong here, and if there is a buck to be made by misusing a popular movement, it will be.

I do trust the excellent people I am working with on Transition to do the right thing and let it go where it goes, but these early adopters are pure of heart. Others aren’t (I’ll take this opportunity to apologize for the economic devastation coporate and financial America has inflicted upon the rest of the world), and some structure is necessary to bar them from getting their fingers into this, perhaps our last best chance.

thank you very much for engaging in this dialogue and opening it up for others to join in. I agree with Marcin above that we may have reached a defining moment in the Transition movement and it’s important to have this conversation, I think.

Thanks also for posting my comments in full. Whilst they may appear provocative in part, I can only repeat what I said at the start: I very much honor the work you and others have put into all this in the past and I think it’s extremely valuable. We need to think about all this carefully.

As for your reply: Thanks for explaining how the MoU came about. You mention some bad experiences about people wanting to create national hubs that were actually about something else or out of touch with the local initiatives. I can see what you mean. However, I still wonder whether this issue can’t be resolved in a slightly different way, eg. by setting out clearly those very guiding principles and the content of what transition is about in a joint declaration (rather then regulating the relationship between the network and the hub in detail). Applying transition principles here would mean to me to focus on what we have in common, rather than on what we don’t – and being inclusive. If we can get agreement on what Transition means to us in principle, the process, ways and means of interaction can arise naturally from this.
- As for potential “abuse” of power or the Transition brand: could we not let our actions speak for themselves? Rather than trying to anticipate all the potential things that may go wrong or trying to prevent them – could we not just get on with our positive work – and disregard those who try to abuse it? If this is a grassroots movement, the “grassroots” will chose who they are drawn to and will only follow those whom they trust and feel supported from. Am I being too idealistic to think we can let this happen? Someone abusing power structures, I would expect, will lose the grassroots support – and then: who do they govern over?

These are just some thoughts. I hope this dialogue will continue and am excited about the good things that will come from this.

Warm regards,
Natalie

When I saw her comments, I took the time to carefully read each point and compare it to the particular section or sub section in the MoU and I found I resonated with the points she had made.

Sometimes silence is taken as consent, yet my conversations with others who had been sent the MoU was that they felt somewhat overwhelmed by the scale and wordiness of it, and were grateful that someone else had taken it on with some seriousness.

When Natalie put TT Lewes’ principles at the end of her feedback, as an example of a simpler approach to agreeing how we work together, I felt relief. I sense that through using a simple statement, clearly focused on principles rather than details, I could imagine having a way to refocus how we work together (whenever that was necessary), without having to resort to infinite details in a lengthy document that uses almost legalise language.

We have two eco villages on Waiheke Island where I live. The first uses a very lengthy docuument to guide how the residents work together, the second a document that fits on two sides of an A4 page. While they have different focuses and I don’t want to denegrade either of them for the valuable work they both do, it is my obesrvation (judgement), that the second of these has achieved more, is more pro-active, and spend less time discussing the details, but gets on with the job at hand.

Given so much work that has already taken place in New Zealand, using, celebrating and respecting the transition model, I wonder if we need to spend any more time pondering details of a document that describes how NZ relates to the UK?

With all due respect, we havent had one yet. Do we need one now?

Gotto go now, and plant some vege seedlings, Spring is coming.

how to balance maintaining the integrity of the transition ideas whilst letting it go where it wants? or How to continue with a working formula without it becoming just another ideology prescribing and limiting.

I think the MOU is a good idea but an understanding is something we should come to jointly.

Was the draft sent as a fixed version? Even if it’s the least controlling, most beautifully worded document on the planet, if it’s fixed, it is likely to be, to some people and in some way, disempowering, feel controlling and be met with mistrust. Perhaps infinitely more important, the document struggles to evolve and adapt to local circumstances.

However, sending a draft MOU for discussion enables hubs to gain from TN experience, no more wheel inventing. Keep the MOU, they can be a really important mechanism for discussing all the sticky issues early on in the relationship. Conversely, not having a MOU or having a fixed MOU doesn’t encourage dialogue and not discussing areas of potential tension will invariably come and bite you on the backside later on.

So my proposal would be;
- have a MOU
- invite those who already have one to jointly rewrite adapt based on localalities
- send example drafts to people wanting to set up hubs
- use as the basis to come to an agreement (or not)
- perhaps even have some simple principles or criteria to guide TN in this agreement making process.

as you go on you have a larger pool of example MOU’s to send to people wanting to set up hubs. I think this will feel more liberating for the recipient and the sender won’t have to eternally try to write the perfect document because there probably isn’t such a thing.

So there you have it: clarity and security.