Title and contact data Jump-starting the Iberian Node of the Chaordic Permaculture Institute Why Content Who Participation Leadership Technologies Success indicators Challenges Project sustainability Requests Online tools Budget We, the People ... Discussion

 

 

Title and contact data

 

RISING VOICES GRANT APPLICATION

Application Deadline: November 30, 2007 (Extended to December 3)

PROJECT TITLE:

Jump-starting the Iberian Node of the Chaordic Permaculture Institute

YOUR NAME: Stefania Strega-Scoz & Lucas Gonzalez

TITLE: Ms Stefania & Mr Lucas

YOUR ORGANIZATION (optional): Asociación Gaia Tasiri

WEB SITE: http://institutodepermaculture.pbwiki.com (Spanish), http://permacultureinstitute.pbwiki.com (English)

ADDRESS: Finca Luna, Isla La Palma (TENERIFE), SPAIN

PHONE/SKYPE/GTALK: skype: StefaniaStrega

E-MAIL: stella(at)finca-luna(dot)com, lgs0a(at)yahoo(dot)es

 

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• Please NOTE ... that although all links given below are to the english part of the Chaordic Institute this is only because this is the language for this grant application.
• What we are asking to support with this grant request is the (much less developed) Spanish 'mirror' of this Chaordic Institute, and in fact just a small part of this site: we are asking for a contribution to travel costs to document the profiles of the Iberian Permaculture Network. Essentially to give wiki workshops to permaculture activists in Spain & Portugal only.

 

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Why

 

Why are you seeking Rising Voices funding? How will your project benefit the community you are targeting? (100 words)

 

• Why - To connect "permaculture" (="design for sustainability") activists in Spain and Portugal, to each other and to the global network of activists, via an innovative project: the Chaordic Permaculture Institute (design started in 2003).

 

• How - Visits for face-to-face training in new wiki & blogs technology, to bring together many permaculture activists, specially those who aren't computer literate (often very active innovators, being permaculture a hands-on but mostly low-tech science), in Spain and Portugal.

 

• Benefits - develop more and easier relationships by humanizing the internet for this strategic community, better working connections between projects on the ground, faster knowledge transfer & more likely cross-boundary research.

 

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Content

 

What kinds of news, stories, information and other content will your project provide? Describe your vision for the content. (250 words)

 

• Profiles of as many active permacultural designers as possible (each with name, photo, contact data, current work, investigations, offers and needs, etc), creating a "meeting place" to foster relationship-building among activists (which is how projects thrive). We are developing an innovative complementary currency to support our internal gift economy.

 

• Investigations: each permacultural designer profiled becomes an investigator of the Chaordic Institute as they openly share their discoveries and research challenges. This multiplies the benefits and quality of their research, and accelerates the growth of the collective intelligence of our community and also of the many other groups and citizens concerned with sustainable development.

 

• Work Groups: Openly accessible individual profiles will make it easy for working groups to self-organise, with pages where designers can meet up across boundaries, document their work, ask questions, etc. An example in English is the European Academies Group used to think about how the various 'nodes' of the Permaculture Academy in Europe can work together better. In fact there are more working groups already in the Spanish site (see Menu). Self-organisation has taken place spontaneously and informally in the permacultural community for the last 30+ years, with friendship-based networks allowing the developement of a body of knowledge and wisdom, with two limitations: the network's growth in itself makes internal access increasingly difficult, and access to the information from the outside was never very good. Creating a design that includes both the old community-links benefit with these new technologies, we'd enable both further growth and wider inclusivity of our knowledge base and also a people-based (hence more effective) 'flushing out' into the wider world.

 

 

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Who

 

Who will generate the content? Who is the target audience? How, and how often, will it be distributed? What language(s) will it be available in? (300 words)

 

• Content will be generated by any permaculture activist who is engaged in designing, implementing and evaluating any type of design that is intended to make a system more energy efficient, socially & economically just and harmonious with Nature's laws. As many of the more isolated or most engaged activists are also the least likely to know about this initiative or know how to use new internet technologies, we propose to go to them physically to invite their participation, giving them a small hands-on workshops in wiki editing whilst we create their profile with them. Activists who are more connected and internet-savy will play a facilitating and documenting role while they learn and share with the wider community.

 

• Target audience is the growing number of people who are concerned about the environment, sustainability and social justice, and specially those who are actively working (or considering it) towards the great re-design that humanity is currently engaged in, in order to avoid the worst predictions of climate change, destruction of biodiversity, massive desertification, peak oil, increasing poverty and wars.

 

• Distribution: content will be available on a permanent basis, perhaps with interim and closure reports for specific investigations or workgroups.

 

• In many languages. Eventually, as the aim is to do a great "who’s who" of permaculture, and it is designed to self-organize, this Chaordic Institute will be in all possible languages, meaning the news of this iniciative will reach all, wherever in our network. To date, we have two pilots started up (English and Spanish). Several of our Portuguese colleagues are actively engaged in the Spanish pilot (we can understand each other fairly well) and we are at the moment thinking whether to start a wiki in Portuguese. All of these sites will of course be linked to each other.

 

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Participation

 

What kinds of participation and interaction do you expect from the readers/listeners/viewers of your content? How will you encourage participation? (75 words)

 

• Investigators maintain their own profile and working-group pages, with the support of students and a small admin group. Payment in ThePermis helps this process.

 

• Participants can add comments to other pages.

 

• We already have various email groups and bioregional and international conferences; these will all interact with the Institute.

 

• We believe the face-to-face start-up is essential in order to get the system to a point where it will mostly self-organize.

 

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Leadership

 

What is your knowledge of your target community? Why are you the best individual/organization to lead this project? Do you have prior experience in citizen media outreach? (100 words)

 

• The DesignOfPilot group is constituted by 17 permaculture designers from a variety of organizations around the world, working on the design since 2003.

 

• We meet through email and skype, in Spanish and in English sub-groups, with the bilingual people in both.

 

• Design Group membership will be always kept open, the minimum criteria being to have a Certificate in Permaculture Design.

 

• We work actively to make this group representative of the wider community, balancing the mix of men and women, including all generations (very experienced and newcomers), who bring a variety of skills and experiences, including citizen media outreach.

 

(see our 'extra' section at the end if you want to meet some of the initiators of this pilot)

 

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Technologies

 

Describe what technologies and tools your project will use to produce the content. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs? (100 words)

 

We want this Chaordic Institute to be as self-regulating and self-managed as possible, so have chosen the most accessible and easy to use technologies, those we have observed unexperienced computer users usually learn first:

• Editing Word documents (very similar to editing wikis).
• Navigating the internet.
• Using email and later email groups.

 

Later people add photographs, audio and, in time, short movies.

 

In the DesignOfPilot group we have a number of skills and experience in these basic and not-so-basic technologies.

 

So far we have opted to use pbwiki because of its ease of use and administration, and because it allows for uploading of images. We might also investigate other wikis, and we're following multilingual wiki trends.

 

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Success indicators

 

How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact – on your main participants? other contributors? on the larger community? How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement? (200 words)

 

Success indicators are mainly whether the aims of the Chaordic Institute are being met. It is the job of the Design Group to monitor this and make adjustments accordingly.

 

We will be looking at numbers of:

 

• Complete profiles (as per our protocols). There are more than 70 already but not complete. Growing by 100-200 profiles per year is an estimated target.

 

• Permaculture activists who learn to use this new technology through this project, and find it useful in their wider work, as well as in the contacts they make through the Institute.

 

• "Fertile connections" made by people getting to know each other through the Chaordic Institute (this will be difficult to count, we will necessarily rely on anecdotal evidence).

 

• Working groups formed and / or documented on the site and how productive they are (new discoveries, good documentation of existing pioneering work, etc). An intermediate indicator will be activity through email groups and the very important "live" or physical meetings where we will keep evaluating this community resource.

 

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Challenges

 

What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them? (200 words)

 

• The main difficulty is running this project entirely on volunteer labour and donated personal resources, as we have little spare time or cash as busy permaculture activists. But the feedback we have received so far is very encouraging, and therefore expect that with time, more recognition (like getting this grant!) we'll welcome more volunteers to share their day-to-day work.

 

• There's some difficulty in teaching a new technology to permaculture activists who are often distrustful of "high tech". The face-to-face workshops we propose are designed to overcome this difficulty.

 

• We want the members to be involved at all stages of designing the Chaordic Institute and so must overcome the difficulties many designers have when thinking in terms of organizational design. So this is an opportunity to teach and practice this important skill, together with the new internet technology.

 

• Fostering an international perspective is also not very easy in a movement which is very much about getting down to work in your locality. Another great challenge / opportunity.

 

• How to produce and incorporate audio, video, and other tools linked to from the wikis. This project is a great and exciting learning curve for our movement!

 

 

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Project sustainability

 

How do you plan to sustain your project's content after the Rising Voices funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future? (300 words)

 

• The funding we are seeking is only a "start-up" fund for a small section of this project, and not meant to cover any running costs as these are already provided by our own resources, since 2003.

 

There are many avenues to focus resources to keep this Institute working and growing in the future, these are just a few:

 

• Short term: Our permaculture network has a diploma system which requires students to pay a fee of about US$600 (for two-year support in their self-directed action-learning in permaculture design), most of which is destined to fund various processes which this new Chaordic Institute could offer more effectively. So part of this amount could go to paying an administrator for doing the basic maintenance work, without anyone being required to pay anything extra. The students (the main beneficiaries of the wealth of knowledge) would in this way be the main supporters of the system.

 

• We are developing an innovative internal currency (ThePermis) which is designed to fund an important part of the admin (eg. translations, research of pioneers, admin tasks, etc.)

 

• Longer term: As we envisage that this will mainly a "showcase" of permaculture professionals, we can ask that people who gain paid employment through the Institute contribute a percentage of this income back to the Institute. Alternatively we can request a small membership fee from those who want to keep their profiles on the site, and donations for "mentoring" others whose work they want to support.

 

• Eventually the idea is that this Institute becomes so professional, effective and known that it can access grants and donations like any other serious Research Institute, produce publications, videos, etc like other similar entities do. This project also aims to change the fact that we have much of the practical expertise in doing Earth-repair work, but very little of the collective organization to access the funds being offered for this work.

 

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Requests

 

What resources and support can Rising Voices provide to your project to ensure its success? (200 words)

 

• Help us get the project more widely known.

 

• Support us in the practical tasks of compiling more profiles (if this is possible): for eg. anyone who is interested in researching a Permaculture Pioneer, could easily multi-function this interesting study with creating or adding to the profile of this person. We also have much precious archive material (eg. wonderful interviews with pioneers) which we have not been able to add to the profiles both because of lack of time and lack of skills (eg. how to edit large .wav files to small pieces easily downloadable from the wiki, taking into account people with slow internet connection).

 

• Funds for travel expenses for our "honey-bee" team to go cross-fertilize across Spain and Portugal, bringing the news and teaching of wikis that we need to get this project really off the ground here.

 

• Advice and contacts of where else we could source funds to do this essential face-to-face work and training, to replicate this small pilot to other areas, eg. Africa, South America, SE Asia (a great deal of excellent permaculture designers are there and their work is very little known). Also advice and support on how to fund some one of our Spanish Design Team to attend the next International Permaculture Conference in Africa, 2009 to present a progress report and wiki workshops there.
• Help in finding more people with these basic IT skills who are also interested in people and permaculture, who could share with us the onerous task of compiling so many profiles.

1. E.g. some of the very best permaculture designers in the world are in Africa, but this work isn't as widely known or documented as we'd like. At the moment it isn't a good time to ask our African colleagues to work on this project as they are mostly very busy with the preparations of the International Permaculture Conference, but we hope that by having a presence from the Spanish network after a successful pilot here, this will kick-start a similar face-to-face pilot there. Before this however, we would love to find people in Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa etc, who would be interested in starting to research and documenting some of the great pioneers there.
2. Likewise for South America, which is where some of the most innovative and important work is being done by our permaculture colleagues, also almost completely un-documented. Although we are hoping that starting with a small 'seed pilot' in our local Spanish-speaking network will open up international access (Spanish being the 3rd most spoken language in the world, after English), whilst we multi-function some important connecting-up work nearer to home, we would also welcome people now, who are perhaps living in Brasil, Argentina, Chile, etc. to help us compile the profiles of known designers (we have much precious archive material of some of our pioneers there, which we haven't been able to make widely available yet, like interviews, etc.)

 

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Online tools

 

What online tools and software programs do you plan on using? What experience do you have with these tools? (200 words)

 

• At the moment we are using pbwiki because it is the simplest and most reliable free wiki we have found.
• We use yahoo groups for the same reason.
• Some of us in the Designers Group have used skype for one-on-one calls and for conferences.
• We plan to use YouTube but have yet to learn how to do it or get the people in our network who do to teach us.

 

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Budget

 

Detail a specific budget of up to $5,000 for two years of operating costs. Applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum $5,000 as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects. Hosting fees and curriculum resources will be provided by Rising Voices and therefore need not be included as budget expenses. Potential costs might include hardware, internet access, workshop costs, translation, travel, and coordinator expenses.

 

 

 

NOTE on budget amounts:

• Please note that the amounts are purposely kept per unit and per visible result (per profile) so that the amount can be easily changed and administered.
• The costs asked for are only contributions to travel and admin: the rest of the costs of this project are supplied by us, generally (but not exclusively) in kind: coordination, accommodation, equipment, labour. The main preparation costs (in labour, admin, travel, etc.) are considerable and have been subsidised privately by us since 2003, when this design started being visualized.
• Although we are asking for the maximum amount (because we think the most effective way to 'kick start' this project is with as many rich profiles as possible), we will of course be grateful for your contribution to 100 profiles instead of the 200, or 50 etc.

 

NOTE on budget concepts:

• Admin costs = phone, internet connection etc.
• Travel costs – 100 profiles by 2 Spanish colleagues, 100 profiles by Cuban colleagues (1000 $ per person subsidy to their travel and admin costs only: their labour in presenting the initiative and conducting the wiki workshops will be paid by us in our internal currency (ThePermis), so in effect is their labour donated to the network and project. The costs of accommodation and food will be covered through the permaculture network in Spain: the various organizations they will research will be offer work in kind for these accommodation costs.
• Creating the profiles will include giving wiki workshops so that each investigator is fully competent in later editing their page as they wish.

 

 

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We, the People ...

 

This is very much a people-centred project so we thought we'd add this extra section and introduce ourselves properly, for those who are interested in seeing the faces behind all the text, and how we got to cook all of this up!

 

• Two of our best young permaculture students Karlos & Sarah started off the idea of this travelling pilot when they presented us with a wonderful "interconnecting design" straight after their design course. They wanted to combine their wish to learn more hands-on permaculture by staying at different permaculture projects in mainland Spain & Portugal, being as useful as possible. So they asked us of the Iberian Permaculture Network how else they could help. They already had a plan to document their work on the various projects through internet, continuing their Action Learning documentation pages, which they want to combine with collecting footage for an eventual DVD on permaculture in Spain & Portugal. As they are already expert wiki-users and understand the design of the Chaordic Institute, we thought they could also provide the projects they visit with small workshops on the Institute design, as well as wiki workshops, whilst they collect as many profiles as they can. In exchange we would help them with their travel costs.
• Likewise our Cuban colleagues had asked us some time ago to help them come to Spain for a mutually-beneficial tour of permaculture projects: they have much to teach us, as Cuba is now considered the most sustainable "post-peak-oil" country on the planet, and they achieved this partly by a mass-education in permaculture, which Cari helped with bringing about. Cari also wanted to bring us their "Creole Permaculture" book, which is a precious resource as there are very few Spanish-language permaculture design books in print. In exchange we will be hosting our honored guests in various permaculture projects, as they also show their hosts how the Chaordic Institute design works, giving wiki workshops (after Sarah & Karlos meet up with them and teach them in turn!) whilst they collect profiles and up-to-date documentation.
• Stella & Lucas are the two permies in Spain who have put together this grant application, with the help of Martine in London (no profile yet).
• We have been inspired by Andrius Kulikauskas and his amazing global "Independent Thinkers Lab" in persisting with this project, and through Andrius is also where we heard about this Global Voices grant. Thankyou!

 

 

Title and contact data Jump-starting the Iberian Node of the Chaordic Permaculture Institute Why Content Who Participation Leadership Technologies Success indicators Challenges Project sustainability Requests Online tools Budget We, the People ... Discussion

 

Discussion

 

Stefania, Lucas, what a great project! I hope that you win.  Your plan is very cost effective and makes a lasting difference in many strategic directions: multiplying the energy of the permaculture movement with collaborative tools including wikis, community currency, multilingual work, video documentation, social networking.  This year I spent several weeks organizing independent thinkers in Oaxaca, Mexico and we are very interested to work with you.  Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas, December 3, 2007.