[first draft of the section in the Web Project report on this pilot. Comments welcome.]

Report on the Local and Regional Pilot project in East Anglia

Background

The purpose of the Local and Regional Pilot is to make a practical start to the overall purpose of the Transition Network Web Project: to provide an infrastructure to bring together the various local initiatives to enable them to work together effectively.  It is meant to find out how best neighbouring towns in a region can keep in touch with each others’ activities and support each other.

One key issue we face is that all the local initiatives are autonomous and based on volunteers. There are no means of requiring them to do anything, even if we wanted to do so. We needed to create co-ordination without hierarchy or compulsion.

More specifically, the purposes of the pilot are:

• For existing initiatives, a way for them to meet each other, to learn about what has worked well and what hasn’t, so they can build on each others’ experiences and best ideas.
• For newly forming initiatives, to link them to others with a little more experience, so they don’t feel isolated and can build on what has worked.
• To enable local initiatives without a web presence to create one easily, with no technical knowledge required.
• For local initiatives with an existing web presence, to offer them extra features they might not have, and to enable them to share events, news and discussions.

East Anglia is very suitable for a pilot as they have a few towns that are quite well advanced (Norwich, Cambridge, Ely, Bungay) and quite a few that are in their early stages. Some have their own web presence and discussion groups while others do not. Thus we would be able to see if new initiatives wanted to take advantage of the facilities, and explore ways of connecting those who already have their own systems. Also, at the time this pilot was conceived, there were already completely independent plans for a regional co-ordination meeting, held on 7th March 2009.

The move to hold a regional meeting came out of various informal meetings in which people from several local initiatives were present, often by accident. We learned, for example, that in some of the more established groups, people in one sub-group often had little idea as to what was happening in others. As people described the activities of their group, others would immediately realise that here were ideas that they too could try. The benefits of working together were obvious.

An East Anglian pilot for a web portal could also build on pre-existing work by Dr. Gary Alexander in Diss, who had been building a community portal, DissConnected, that appeared to have much of the required functionality, with funding from the EU and local authorities.

Design

There was no time for a long and careful design phase, nor was that needed, as the point of this pilot was to make a quick start and see what we could learn from that. There were two main strands to the design, social and technical. We felt that the point was not just to develop some software, but to actually begin some social interaction.

Social: Since the goal was co-ordination without hierarchy, the most relevant method appeared to be the Viable Systems Model1 of social organisation, which is abstracted from the functioning of an organism with a nervous system.

We proposed a ‘Regional Support Group’ be drawn from people within the local initiatives who are willing to take an overview of the region and its activities, to take on the following functions:

• Stability and conflict resolution: Help local groups to systematically monitor their activities. Are they going well? If not, what can be done? Support for handling conflicts between people is a crucial part of this.
• Synergy: Look at the activities within a local initiative and across initiatives (ex. nearby food groups) and see where they affect each other or could benefit by working together. For example, by working together it may be possible to set up a regional transport infra-structure which would provide an effective means of moving goods around the region, saving both carbon and money.
• External relations and planning: Keep an eye on what is happening in the wider transition movement, other relevant organisations, and the broader environment, and use this to help local initiatives plan in general, and to their develop their Energy Descent Action Plans in particular.
• Policy and identity: Support the membership in formulating overall policy. Most policies will come directly from the Transition ethos but some may be needed for the region in particular.

These functions are sufficient to enable the separate groups to function as a co-ordinated whole, providing the advantages of scale of a large organisation, but while retaining the autonomy of the separate groups.

Technical: We built upon the design of DissConnected, and used a specification by Dr. Alexander that extended that.

Its principal features are:

• For individuals, a personal profile page which can be expanded to a personal website if desired.
• ‘Recursive groups’: Each group and sub-group has their own area that feels individual and has a clear identity, with content created easily by its members (using simple templates), yet is clearly connected with information to and from other groups at the same, larger and smaller scales.
• Standard facilities are included such as events listings with calendars, news/blogs, resource centre for sharing files, pictures, and media with good indexing and search, map pages.
• Organisational support such as group editable pages (wiki), member lists with roles, agreement lists, task trackers.
• Enhanced communication facilities including a discussion system optimised to promote groups coming to agreement, with email notification and online archives.
• Exchange/trading system designed to promote exchange on a basis of personal relationship, integrity, quality, need, and environmental soundness rather than simply for money.

Pilot

Technical: For the software development, we chose the open source content management system Plone as our starting point because a) it offered very rapid, and very flexible development, b) we had a starting point in the DissConnected community portal, and c) we had the services of an extremely capable web developer, Souheil Chelfouh, who is part of the Plone core development team and so knows it inside out and can work very quickly with it. (We are nonetheless very aware of the difficulties with Plone: need for specialised developers, expensive to host.)

Over the period January to March 2009, we built the transitioneast.net web portal, starting with a basic Plone 3 installation, which comes with a lot of the required functionality. We added an existing module for the forum, and then were able to quickly build on that to incorporate most of the functionality in the specification. We were aiming to have a version to show at the 7th March regional meeting and succeeded at that. Work is still continuing, with more needed especially on the exchange/trading system. The cost to date of this development work has been 5,000 €.

Social: For the social development, we held two meetings and attended the regional meeting.

• A preliminary meeting on 29th January, 2009, attended by Ed Mitchell and 11 local people, at which we presented our plans and agreed to proceed.
• A presentation of the idea of a Regional Support Group to the first East Anglian regional meeting at Downham Market on 7th March 2009 in an open space discussion and in the plenary, at which it was approved. We presented the new web portal at a second open space discussion and then to everyone over lunchtime. It too was approved in the final plenary.
• A first meeting of the Regional Support Group3, held after a shared meal, on 17th April, 2009. We talked about the roles described above. Then each person described the state of their towns’ initiative and the group gave them each advice.

Findings

The Regional Support Group and the transitioneast.net web portal are still only beginning, so it is too early to draw any strong conclusions, but initial signs are promising:

Web portal:

• although just in its first few weeks, transitioneast.net already has initial pages or sections for 12 of the regional towns and 30 people have created accounts on it.
• people are beginning to put up notices of coming events for other towns to see, and news of interest.
• there are a few active discussions, so far mostly about the website itself, its usability and minor early problems with using it. The developer has begun to correct these problems.

Comments from the Regional Support Group meeting:

• All agreed that any organisational system for transition had to preserve group autonomy, could not be hierarchical and had to connect groups (within and between initiatives).
• Food and the Heart and Soul / Well-being theme groups appear to be particularly dynamic.
• Some of the Initiatives  were concerned about maintaining momentum and interest in certain theme areas. Some of the theme groups and initiatives lacked focus and purpose. We discussed the development of work plans and how responsibility is divided / assigned.
• We talked about ‘burn-out’ as a threat to individual and group / initiative well-being and how this might be identified and managed.
• We were all impressed by how well things seem to be going in Cambridge and thought there were many lessons to be learned from them!