Permaculture Convergence

I'm a longtime online communities guy with solid roots in ground-level collective living. I'm looking for alliances in my work to help it make a difference.

My main interest is in the local social aspects of climate change adaptation. Because that change is already happening and is increasingly likely to impact every local community - both directly and indirectly - I'm more interested in adaptative planning than I am in mitigation and sustainability planning though all of them are essential.  I don't have the answers, but that's never stopped me before. I'm constantly researching current best practices in local, grassroots adaptation planning and blogging my findings at pResilience.org

How do you plan as a community for unprecedented change in your environment while also dealing with the challenges of factors such as peak oil, economic recession, a broken healthcare system, demographic shifts and the need to alter many of society's assumptions about living and lifestyle? How do local groups coalesce around a mission and engage their communities in adaptive thinking? It will help if we have and collection of good examples to share around and develop.

(I see both the universal and local task of adaptive planning as great applications for wiki.)

More About stuff

I'm a parent and grandparent. I was a founding member of the The Farm (a large, still active intentional back-to-the-land community) 1971 -1983. I was director of The WELL (a seminal online community) 1986 - 1992.

I have extensive hands-on experience in group definition and commitment, the community dynamics of getting things accomplished, graceful sharing of resources and knowledge, how to avoid tragedies of the commons and how to build and maintain social trust. I'd like to apply this skill and savvy to improve our odds for weathering the, uh, weather.

My professional skills include online social design, online community strategic planning planning and management, project management, business management, writing and blogging. .I consult and blog for American Health Initiative, which is using the Web to help recruit retiring healthcare professionals as volunteers in free clinics, treating the uninsured and for the Farmer-Veteran Coalition - a non-profit effort to match military veterans with opportunities in localized and organic farming operations. I network - and sometimes work - with many other experts in social media. I'm working with a group on a wiki-based model for citizen-government collaboration at the local level - RealGov. I'm also working with a large international charitable organization to design learning processes for microfinance in the water/sanitation sector..