The Great Turning

Person responsible: Kristin

Date: likely to be Sunday 10am.

Title:

Transition Web Project: Bringing the transition movement together.

Body:

Transition network has been running a web project for several months; our focus is on how we can use the web to work together to share good practice and support each other. This covers community networking; websites for initiatives; creating and sharing knowledge; training, and more. We've been researching and learning with pilots, surveys, workshops, interviews, expert techie analysis, lightning conductors and divining rods.
 
This non-technical session aims to cover the findings, seek further discussion, and uncover interested supporters.

It will also be a chance to see the pilots for yourselves, including our regional network software from East Anglia where any initiative can create their own pages and share events, news, discussions etc., the food projects hub, connecting people and sharing findings from food projects (soon to be energy, transport etc.), our new training portal, where you can get the training you need from other Transitioners, and more.

Hosts:

Gary Alexander: bio

Gary is the author of eGaia Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications, which describes the kind of future he thinks most Transitioners would like to see. See his website at http://earthconnected.net.

He is working to create a collaborative locally-based economy to replace our competitive, money based one.  Look out for his open space offering on this.

He has retired from faculty of the Open University after 37 years, where we was a pioneer in online collaborative learning. He now devotes himself to community projects, especially Transition Towns and is passionate about tango dancing.

Jon Walker: bio

Jon has worked in the co-operative business sector since 1978. He has established and/or co-managed a range of businesses including retail outlets, a small-scale manufacturing plant, a warehouses and a chain of shops dealing mainly with whole-food, organic and fairly-traded products. Concurrently, Jon has lectured, published, consulted and provided training courses in both private and public sectors.  Currently helping the Village in Ireland to use the Viable Systems Model to re-design their organisational structure, writing a book on systems and sustainability with Angela Espinosa , developing an OU course, establishing a vegetable garden, keeping up with two sons, and failing completely to allow a minimal amount of time to  various Transition Inititatives.

Ed Mitchell: Bio:

Ed does network and community design and facilitation, and event design and facilitation.

He has been building and nurturing networks and communities since being studio and website manager for Gaia Live (an early community webcasting start-up) in 1997. After a bout of London-based web production ending with being production manager of UpMyStreet.com, he did a MSc in IT at UWE, Bristol, focusing on how organisations relate web metrics to knowledge management.

Since then he has since been immersed in the knowledge aspects of groups, and how they relate to network building for communities and organisations. He is not a big fan of 'walled gardens', or highly centralised web strategies, preferring to work across the wider web to support networks who thrive on diversity and all that sort of stuff.

He likes walking, climbing, reading modern fiction, cycling, digging the allotment and gossiping with his neighbours about vegetables.

Nick Osborne: bio:

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Earlier versions follow - not for print:

Short description: from Ben's magnificent pen: what do we think?

Transition network has been running a web project for several months now, involving pilots, surveys, interviews and expert techie analysis. We've been looking at functionality that covers: web presence for local initiatives; community networking solutions; co-creation and sharing of knowledge; training platform.
 
This session will look at the findings - along with a few surprises - from the research phase, and the resulting report and recommendations that will define the range of tools, templates, process, support, documentation, systems, integration and aggregation that we're going to deliver over time.
 
Implements for creating disruptive noise will be handed out to non-geeks so they can sound the alert if they hear any technobabbling - we're determined that even if you don't have a certificate in Plone, Drupal, Python or even Anaconda, you'll still understand what's going on.

Gary's try at this:

Workshop:
Transition Web Project: Bringing the transition movement together.

How can we work together to share best practice and support each other? Our Web Project has been building tools to help with this. Help shape our plans for further development. Find out about work so far:

Our new regional network software for East Anglia where any town can create their own pages and share events, news, discussions and more. Your region could set up its own too. Our food projects website, meant to link all the people working on food projects. We can set up more for energy, transport, hearth and soul, etc. Our new training portal, where you can get the help you need. Our plans for a new national Transition Network website. And more.

A non-technical workshop!

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