Earth Activist Training

From Omni Commons
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Earth Activist Training

'Welcome to the Wiki'

Combines Permaculture training with earth-based rituals and organizing tools. In addition to a 2-week PDC course, EAT also offers trainings in Social Permaculture taught by Starhawk, Charles Williams and Pandora Thomas.

Technology Tools for Facilitation

Collaborative Communication

Core values:

  • Free and open source (not rooted in a corporate cloud that owns your data)
  • Security-conscious (uses encryption and has been successfully audited)
  • Post-beta: well-developed by a large open source community and reliably used by many communities

Riseup.net

Riseup is a radical collective providing communication and computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression.

They provide:

  • Mailing lists
  • Email accounts
  • Etherpad docs (like this one)
  • XMPP (secure chat servers)

If you want to make a new pad, go to https://pad.riseup.net and click new pad

Etherpad is the free open source software on which this runs

-Allows for groups to write collabroative notes -Allows for people to particiapte in the meeting remotely (from home or elsewhere)

Signs and Symbols to use so when you transfer to Wiki, it formats correctly =Word= is a header ==Word== is a Subheader ===Word=== is a Sub-Subheader

  • is a Bullet
    • is a Sub-Bullet

'word' is bold text

Wikis

Great for organizing collaborative knowledge in the form of text, images, PDFs, etc; Keeps a revision history and has access control features allowing for authentication of users before they can edit and create pages.

  • Mediawiki (the gold standard, what Wikipedia runs on): https://mediawiki.org
    • Example: Check out Omni's Wiki at
    • When categorizing, think about how you construct the tree (of headers, sub header, sub sub headers); and how you construct the rhizome(how subjects connect to each other)
  • Wagn: https://wagn.org
  • LocalWiki (integrated w/ maps and designed for localized communities, eg; OaklandWiki): https://localwiki.org
  • Github: For tracking changes and collaborating on code. Can be used for more than just code, see for example the Sudo Room book: https://git hub.com/sudoroom/SudoBook )

OwnCloud

OwnCloud removes dependence on other 'cloud-based' services such as Google Drive. Set it up on a server of your own choosing (they provide hosting for a small fee) and own your own data:

  • File Storage
  • Contacts database
  • Photo albums
  • Calendars
  • Collaborative document (.odt and .doc) editing in the browser
  • Activity feeds
  • Other features available via the open source App Store: https://apps.owncloud.com/

OwnCloud has mobile apps for syncing data across devices. It allows you to share your data publicly or privately with whoever you want.


Security

  • Encrypted email: Thunderbird + Enigmail
  • Encrypted texting: Signal (iOS) and TextSecure (Android)
  • Encrypt your laptop's hard drive
  • VPN services (bounce your network traffic through a secondary, secure server):
  • Network anonymity (disguise your IP address): Use Tor: http://torproject.org/

Gratuitous Link Dump


Community Garden Threat

  • Facilitator: Barbara
  • Notetaker: Jenny
  • Vibe-Reader: Rachel

Suggestions of actions:

  • Joy: We did enter into an agreement - be careful of how we frame lobbying. Don't want us to seem totally crazy.
  • Yaro: Organize to defend the current space and try to find a different space
  • Julie: Super angry, can't form a good alternative, willing to listen. Acting up/acting out is in order.
  • Kate: Supports Yaro - defend the gardens but look for a new spot
  • Noemie: Defend the garden and do a big campaign w/ allies in the neighborhood against gentrification - we have youth coming to our course from the whole neighborhood this June - showing the value of it
  • Leslie: Agree with Yaro & Kate. Look at short term and long term. We need to hold our ground. Two-pronged focus.
  • Ryan: Turn the problem into the solution. Haven't had as much participation - potential to open the space as a commons and generate momentum. Defend,

not leave. Our agreement with the state was just a foot in the door.

  • Cammer: Camp Leslie. Supportive of the defense, while the space is there a chance to propagate and get readiness for an expansion.
  • Jenny: Media propaganda campaign, hold it as a commons, outreach to our community
  • Rachel: Agreed, and outreach to other potential spaces. Use the opportunity to make a big righteous noise
  • Star: Burn down the developers and blow up their bulldozers. But I understand y'all want to play it safe, we should leverage this into as many policy games as we can screw out of the fucking politicians.
  • We do a spectogram along the axes of: 1) Looking for a new place and sticking to our agreements with the city <--> holding onto the garden no matter what, and 2) Long-term strategy <--> Immediate direct action. Most end up in the middle, with Star in the far left quadrant and Joy in the bottom right quadrant.
  • Star: I don't know why any of you are willing to make compromises, but I'll go with the consensus of the group.
  • Noemie: Diversity of tactics over time - we need to do something now, but also keep in mind multiple temporalities
  • Joy: We can't back down from our agreements.
    • Proposal: We should form committees:
      • Media Committee
      • Direct Action
      • Policy
      • Scouting
  • This proposal unanimously not dug

Starting point:

  • Direct Action
    • Garner support from the community and build alliances
    • Media to reflect we're holding the space
  • Hold and honor our committment to the summer school participants
  • Privately work on backup plan for leverage over the long term
    • Additional demands

If you're going to hear the ideas you should also hear the concerns, see if a proposal emerges and otherwise table it for later.


Fishbowl Conversation

Challenges

  • Noemie: Standard role - encouraging others to facilitate and take ownership
    • Not wanting to take up too much space
  • Cammer - Feeling bad for others having to take on so many things;
    • Balancing, doing it kindly in a way that respects each others edges and levels of responsibility within that action
  • Ryan - trying so hard to stick to equalitarian principles that you don't take the group in the direction they want to go in anyway.
    • Leadership, those who are used to hierarchy can see that leadership through voluntary association, with too much strong leadership do we forget how to self-organize?

Strengths

  • ? - Really appreciate a skilled facilitator and like providing that for other people. What people are missing isn't vision but that organizational tool to transform the dream into reality. Facilitation is a great and truthful thing to birth things into being
  • The actual work of getting things done and talking through them is so challenging that it prevents that organizational capacity. There are literal tools that you can learn how to use
  • Strong process and great opportunity, facilitator is like peeling an onion - being able to redirect and ask for clarity - additional questions can be asked to pull that out of individuals - what's in our head is often not what's heard - so being able to redirect and ask for clarity benefits all. Just keeping a lid on it
  • We think of it as superceding all the filters of perception we have going on - being able to filter it and extract out from the convuluted subtext to the next level
  • Just providing a container for people is really the most important part of it

Reflections

Sky on #2: Facilitation is essentially the road you travel to take the idea to reality in a group process

___ on #1: People are concerned about the energy they consume in that role

Retrieved from "https://omnicommons.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Earth_Activist_Training&oldid=3512"