PermacultureCooperative

Klimaforum09 as Gaia Permaculture seed

Nicholas Roberts, Permaculture.TV founder is travelling to Copenhagen (Dec 5th to Dec 21st) primarily for Klimaforum09, with a special interest in covering the “Planetary Permaculture” or “Gaia Permaculture” currents running through the program.

As you can see from the Klimaforum09 online program, the International Permaculture Council and listen (mp3) and kind of read in “Planetary Permaculture: A Global Strategy for Climate Change - Tony Andersen of Klimaforum09” one of the key organisers of Klimaforum, Tony Andersen, is a Danish architect (in cooperative design, the Scandanavian participative or user-centered design tradition) and permaculturalist since the 1980s.

Klimaforum is part of a global permaculture design process that seeks to get activists and grassroots talking and working together, the research, develop and implement a radical, democratic, planetary permaculture program which is called 10 000 Trees: A Practical Strategy for Climate Change. 

Klimaforum09 as Gaian User Centered Design

From the 10 000 Trees document, we get the outline of the project;

1. THE 1 TON CO2 10.000 TREES PROJECT - overview of the problem and the solution
   
2. Permaculture - the idea, practice and global and local success
   
3. Climate Change - the massive catastrophic problem
   
4. Carbon sink - a new category for locking, permanently ecology as carbon sinks in forest and soil
   
5. More than 10,000 TREES per. person per. lifetime - a requirement for local-global perennial polycultural replanting
   
6. Less than 1 TON CO2 pr. person pr. year - global energy descent and emissions reductions targets
   
7. The U.N. Climate Conference 2009 / COP 15- the failure of the official process, danger of carbon finance
   
8. Parallel activist and grassroots Conference - Klimaforum as user-centered permaculture design
   
9. The Permaculture network - massively expanding a global, democratic, locally-controlled permaculture network
   

Its a radical scaling-up of the what the Transition Towns Movement describe as to “take responsibility for action and then unleash the creative genius that resides within us personally and collectively in our communities”.

Transition Towns focus on the level of small-towns. While the Klimaforum is operating globally, with grassroots and activists working together to unleash their own creativity within a commonly understood framework for radical global permaculture. 

TECHNICAL NOTE: Ben Brangwyn of Transition Movement points out Technical point - Transition Initiatives exist in rural areas, villages, towns and cities. Am interested to know how the ideas of re-localisation can work on larger scales such as cities, such as Los Angeles.

Klimaforum09 “Gaia Permaculture” Events

•  Tuesday 8th, 10-12am, Venue 4, Title: From activist to grassroots (120), Organisation: Permaculture International, Contact: Tony Andersen - Klimaforum Program
• Thursday 10th, 1pm-3pm, Venue 6, Title: 10.000 threes (120), Organisation: Permaculture International, Contact: Tony Andersen - Klimaforum Program

Klimaforum09 Features

• a forum where activists start working with grassroots
  
• network for activists/grassroots to design a user-centered, radical, global permaculture project for Climate Justice
  
• becomes an ongoing network from which practical actions meet radical actions
  
• does not just work for climate change, it works for systems change
• An international grassroots/activist radical permaculture network is created and sustained.

Resistance & Resilience 

Global-local cooperative/inter-cooperative frameworks and networks are formed that can both resist the ravages of neoliberal globalisation and also develop community level, local solutions that operate within a universal global strategy and plan. We need both resistance and resilience. Local AND Global.

A Klimaforum Mandate emerges - that global-local permaculture (i.e indigineous local traditional perennial polyculture) is explicitly the international development model.

In a nutshell 10 000 Trees: A Practical Response to Climate Change



10 000 trees planetary permaculture plan - Obviously, this is pretty staggering.. and is a kind of organic geo-engineering in its scale.

• 10 000 trees per lifetime
• 1 tonne per lifeyear (per person) quota of carbon emissions, after which a carbon tax
• carbon tax of 100 euro per tonne
• all companies and international transport pay 100 euro per tonne
• carbon markets & carbon trading are stopped
• carbon tax spent on perennial polyculture (permaculture) style forestry programs
• perennial polyculture and soil become carbon sinks
• local permaculture groups implement 10 000 trees program, expanding existing permaculture institutes from a few hundred into the 10s of thousands
• if 5000-7000 trees can be planted per person in the next 25 years we can stablise extreme climate change
  

The Permaculture Cooperative Research

For the last year, myself and my partner, and a loose network of cooperators have been researching a number of related projects

• Permaculture.TV - video cooperative 
• Gaia Permaculture - a global permaculture design framework (still very much in development)
  
• Permaculture.coop - a globabal permaculture (worker) cooperative movement
  

This phase of the research and development journey started at the Permaculture Institutes in Australia (Geoff Lawton’s of Greening the Desert fame) & Robyn Francis of Nimbin’s Djangbang Gardens.

Then we did some research in the San Francisco Bay Area, with the Permaculture Guild of San Francisco & the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives.

Next a visit to the Mondragon worker cooperatives to research a global sustainability (permaculture) cooperative network.

Climate Camps in Scotland and London.

And next Klimaforum09 in Copenhagen.

We imagine, that in the 1st quarter of 2010 we will incorporate a cooperative and start doing permaculture worker cooperative business.

Media Coverage for Klimaforum09

Am interested to understand the range and coordination of coverage for Klimaforum09.

Last year, I volunteered in the ALIS Interpretation, Media Center & Documentation teams at the European Social Forum in Malmo and I did some calculations on making video and audio of every event.

Running the numbers it turns-out online storage and hosting of such seemingly vast quantities of content is cheap.

Finding video cameras, computers etc to film and edit was harder, but compared to organised people, very easy.The key problem is organising people.

The real bottleneck to publishing ALL the core content from Klimaforum09 will be people, coordination and cooperation

The prices are low for cloud computing hosting services such as Amazon EC3 or even on co-located servers on independent ethical hosters. There is also the free internet archive for audio and video, The Internet Archive.

The difference between ESF2008 and Klimaoforum09 is that the program is a PDF only. ESF2008 has a web-page profile for every attending organisation and event.

Klimaforum09 Media Schema

media types

• video
• -mobile phones
• -prosumer camera
• -professional camera
• images
• -photos
• -infographics

Subjects

• People
• Organisations
• Events
• Ideas
• Actions
• Themes

Web pages

• Organisation web-page profile
• Event web-page profile
• Theme web-page profiles
• Topics / Ideas web-page profiles
• People web-page profiles

Editorial Content

• Supporting organisation web-page profiles
• video of events - low, medium, high quality
• audio of events - low, medium, high quality
• photo of events - low, medium, high quality

Web Project Ideas

Metavid of Klimaforum09

Use the MetaVid, Semantic MediaWiki extensions to host ALL of the video content of the Klimaforum09 and auto-generate hyperlink transcripts.

• metavid.gaiapermaculture.org
• auto transcripts and hypertexting of video
• hosting ?
• sponsors

Wikipedia style

Use the Semantic MediaWiki extensions of MediaWiki (the software running Wikipedia) to create and expand a global permaculture designers manual. 

• wiki.gaiapermaculture.org/wiki

Content Licensing

• Creative Commons Plus GaiaPermaculture.coop License
• ie. ShareAlike PLUS special requirements for adhering to Gaia Permaculture Principles

Open Video

• encourage mashups, remixes, re-usage, translation
  

Story Idea

Who, What, When, Where, Why, How, When? etc

Why are you here?

Media Format: Media Templates

• Interviews
• Discussions
• Behind the Scenes
• Next Steps
• Our Stories
  

Scenarios for Coverage and Free Cooperation

High Coverage / High Cooperation

• every subject person, event is video’d, photographed, audio’d & translated in 5 languages
• all content post processed
• all content uploaded and tagged, categorised into pooled/common accounts

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Low Coverage / Low Cooperation

very little interest in covering many events, and what is covered is not shared and published in isolated and fractured channels

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
  
  
• Threats

High Coverage / Low Cooperation

lots of editorial coverage, but little cooperation leads some high-profile websites etc and lots of isolated and fractured content.. overall reducing effect of event and message.

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Low Coverage / High Cooperation

few journalists covering core content of klimaforum, perhaps mainly focussed on celebrity activists like Naomi Klein or “spectacles” like demos and media stunts. What little Klimaforum09 content that is covered is projected, but depth and breadth of content coverage is low

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Channels



Websites

Community

Corporate

Archives

Possible Case Studies

USA Examples of Netroots/Grassroots Media Activism

1. FoxNews and the Obama is a Fascist Counter-Revolution
2. Obama Everywhere Revolution

The permaculture school and its associated projects turned into a cooperative society last week. T. phoned me to inform me of that fact. Lots of discussion, and a long period in the making, there will now be an umbrella organization for all projects that sprouted from the work of the permaculture school. One of the requirements for attendance is that you have to start your own permaculture project upon graduation. And so, like plants in a garden, permaculture is sowing itself, getting dispersed ever more widely. The new co-op will be linked to Hof van Twello’s center for localized economy and its projects and this will guarantee that there is an outlet for the gardens’ produce. In time, more and more projects can become members. It was very important, in keeping with the school’s philosophy, that it should be a co-op, that members should have voting rights, as permaculture is also a philosophy about living and working together. The goal is to arrive at a real “market of the commons”, where produce, goods, services and ideas can be freely traded. It is one step on the road towards building resilient local communities - and cultures. Tonanzi will become a co-op member, as will my own business. I was incredibly honored when T. asked if I wanted to be on the board of trustees and on the advisory board, and I gladly accepted

http://permacultuurcoop.aardedenker.nl/permaculture-co-op