Open Space Sessions

1. Whoever comes is the right people.
   
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
   
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. When it's over, it's over:
   

There is also a "law" - the law of two feet:

If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

Rachel introduced the Open Space session and people suggested topics and offered to lead them. In the end the following groups emerged:

1. “How many people are enough?” or “Do we have to expand forever?”

2. Converting Words Into Action

3. Scope of Transition Groups

4. How Best to Arrange a Region-wide Series of Talks?

5. Moving from a Core Group to Community Involvement

6. Open Space on Communications online and otherwise

7. How best to tell the story of Transition within the present media and culture?

Scroll down for the write-ups of each session:

“How many people are enough?” or “Do we have to expand forever?”

People: Carol Hunter, Ivan Ivanovic, Aileen Richmond-Shaw, Kate Jackson, Mark Watson, Kirsten Murray

This was offered/requested by Carol Hunter from Downham and Villages in Transition. The question came out of the experience of discomfort on “going out” to meet the public in the street - sense of the offering of information as unasked for despite ingenious methods thought up in the group and this being an exhausting process.
Remembering the assertion (from somewhere in Rob’s book...) that only15% of the population need to make changes in order for them to have a transformative effect on society as a whole is heartening and could positively inform the way we are doing this work of awareness raising....?

Discussion - notes taken by Mark.

There is a problem in the dynamic “We have something important to tell you about what you could do differently” - Nobody responds well to being told what to do, including ourselves. May be useful to think that we are all at different stages on the journey of accepting and taking responsibility for our lives and “intervene” appropriately - The challenge of “Meet in the Street” is that the setting is not Intimate and is characterised often by speed so may be difficult to gauge the “stage”. Also, the street is often associated with being “sold” stuff/ideologies.... Transition Circles are a creative response to this issue offering small, intimate settings of peers wherein honesty and openess may be fostered.

Throughout the discussion there was often a pull towards using language such as “trying to get them to do things differently” ...or variations on that. A suggestion was that this dynamic is inherently problematic because it’s manipulative and therefore not an open/honest encounter between equals. The example was given of frustration that fellow villagers seemed to have great energy and enthusiasm for village activities in the shape of flower arranging, bell ringing etc, but not for things that matter. Would it be useful to think of “those people” as having the same concerns/fears as “us” and that activities which may be judged as unimportant may answer significant needs of people for, for example, meaningful social connection....we recognised that even the conscious wish or intention to change our own unskillful habits is not always enough to effect that change.

So, the best use of our energy/skills seems to be to relate to/with others intimately. For that it seems, we need “time” or the sense of an absence of speed/pressure. This is often elusive when we are working together on activities - the pressure of the work is such that we want to get away as soon as meetings are over rather than stay together and change gear. It seems we need a sense of space and time to create intimacy - this is the foundation of understanding our particular strengths as individuals as well as groups. Let’s not fritter away our energy on lots of novel activity - If street meeting is not your thing, don’t feel you have to do it...but do it if you love it.

Wasted energy is worth avoiding in all aspects of this work! In particular, energy is wasted when our actions start to be goal oriented in that we are subtly attached to a desired outcome. The worth of our actions then becomes judged in the light of whether or not those outcomes have been met, i.e. the person we are addressing is “converted” or not!....leads to burn out.

The inner work which is so necessary helps us recognise what drives us to want “other people” to change..... So how many people are enough?.......

Notes written up by Carol

Converting Words Into Action

Signed-in: Sarah Dunnet, Jez Gladwin, Viv Manning, Elena Judd, Kerry Lane, Linda Owen, John Webb and Nick Watts

Soundbites (we did of course go somewhat off-topic)

• - Communication is fundamental in group achievement

• - A skills audit would help to balance "doers" and "thinkers"
• 
- The compromise between overview and focus

• - Use examples of projects other groups have tried, perhaps with partnership working
- Sharing responsibility helps avoid burnout
• 
- Make some New Year Resolutions as a group
• 
- Respect local people's existing knowledge & social networks
- Ask for advice: "what's going on?"
• 
- Everyone has a small amount of time to give & lots of small things make a big thing

• - Training & resourcing is important
• 
- Regular meetings with not too long in-between-time
• 
- Celebrate achievements

What about people who attend meetings regularly but don't take responsibility for action?

• - Ask them directly why they don't, what do they bring to the group? (ugggh)

• - Be prepared to say "I don't have all the answers"

• - Say "I'd like to do X - would anyone like to help me?"

Notes by Nick Watts

Scope of Transition Groups

Initiator: James Thomas
Participants: James Thomas, Nigel, Lucinda

Posed question about what issues and initiatives Transition should get involved with and if/what limits should exist.

Responses:

• - Just let it flow - develop as people want
• - self organise
• - allow new ideas
• - Spurious Ideas - get involved with them
• - bring round/re-orientate towards Transition aims if possible
• - If free for all, if/how to stop mad-cap ideas?
• - do we try to 'convert' people? Should try to persuade people.
• - activity can be irrelevant, its a chance to connect, get involved in other local groups
• - don't want to be told what to do
• - could pass initiative/idea around the group
• - depends on your own community, in some cases certain things might be inappropriate

How Best to Arrange a Region-wide Series of Talks?

Initiator: John Webb of Transition Town Letchworth, Herts.

(Thanks to Rachel from Downham for nearly all of this advice!)

Some topics are well suited to a local group event. Others are too specialised so they need a wider area from which to attract a 'critical mass' of audience.

In that way, groups can join forces to tackle subjects that are of interest to a minority (such as methods of agriculture).

Don't rule anything out coming from the audience; an event is 'for real', time is short and people come to an event seeking answers to their concerns.

• - To bring about widespread change, you need a larger scale than local communities, e.g. industries, agriculture., ...
• - This is very challenging for businesses: “What am I going to do?” - perhaps diversify, talk with members of the public, etc. You don't have to brand the talks as 'Transition' – instead find ordinary words to engage with people's concerns.
• - focus on life experience, carbon footprint, ...
• - re-localising & 'powerdown' vs. the myth of endless growth.
• (Suggestion arising from the 'Local government & contacts' group: - add 'local land-use planning to the draft list of topics.)

Moving from a Core Group to Community Involvement

Session Initiator: David Greenacre (Greener Fram)

Participants: Lucinda S, Linda Owen, Kirsten Murray, Michael de Whalley, Anne ?, John Webb

• Importance of making links and using personal networks.
• Do something different , Changing habits –initiative from Kings Lyn group
• Use the media to keep issues in the public arena
• Be careful with words they have the power to be negative or positive
• Become a pest- attend council meetings, badger those who make decisions
• Get people enthused
• Use all the skills, interests, contacts, networks of the core group
• Encourage each other
• Be positive even though time could be very short. Provide practical actions
• Empower people to make their own actions
• Aim to be redundant as a core group!

Open Space on Communications online and otherwise

Initiator: Gary Alexander

Present: Robert Stanford, Gill Hodge, Leonie Ramondt

Main points

• Online and offline communication are equally important and are complementary. We need to use channels that people are used to. For example, Gill does a regular couple of pages in the monthly village magazine.
• Online communications could be seen as the 'spine' of a system that can reach many, but we also need means to get information to people with limited or no use of computers or the internet. This means using 'agents' or people who link those who are not using computers with the online information.
• Build on existing community groups and communication channels.
• Gary outlined TransitionEast.net our region-wide website. It is used for news of all the local initiative, sharing events, resources and dicussion. Any initiative that wants their own webite can use TransitionEast.net for this with no need for a programmer/developer or expert knowledge.
• Twitter, the micro-blogging site, is being used as an aggregator. Useful links to news, interesting stories, etc. are sent to a list of people who, if they choose to do so, send it on their lists, and so on.
• Bassingbourn is using Ning for their website because it is free and easy to set up. (It is also commercial.) It is used for events, newsfeeds, groups and a video library. 
• Actions
• We will develop a short guide to what online tools are easily available to local initiatives.
• Robert will begin to do this on TransitionEast.net, sharing Bassingbourn?s using of Ning and Twitter.
• Gary will be promoting the use of TransitionEast.net

How best to tell the story of Transition within the present media and culture?

Question asked by Charlotte Du Cann (Norwich/Bungay).

Present: John Preston and Sue Hatfield (Downham Market and Villages), Anna McIvor (Cambridge), David Price (Framlingham), Sarah Dunnet (Saxmundham)

When I came to type up this session. I realised you can’t write a story in bullet points.  Bullet points, pixels, soundbites, none of these forms really capture what we are actually living through in Transition. So I’ve written a kind of freestyle version of the event. . . it’s how the meeting went in fact. Maybe it was the subject. Maybe that’s the best thing about story, the way it goes with the people who make it up.

It took the form of several go-rounds. The first was to say who we were and where our initiatives were in regard to our relationship with the media and in-house communications. These ranged from television interviews to arguing about nuclear power in the letters page. Most of us had had some modest success (parish magazines, community radio, local papers covering events), but none of us had put great attention on the matter. Our best communications included:

Cambridge’s  jam packed website, weekly bulletin and two highly attended Storytelling sessions.

Bungay’s quarterly printed newsletter and several interviews on BBC Radio Suffolk

Norwich’s monthly bulletins, new blog and share in weekly column on the EDP.

Framlingham’s recent double-page spread in the EADT and regular slot in the local magazine

Downham Market’s engagement with the “village rag”.

Most of us were fully aware of the manipulative nature of the media and that had in many ways made us cynical. But Charlotte (ex-journalist) felt however the mood was changing and that perhaps it was time to engage. Both Norwich and Bungay have been recently interviewed by the Politics Show on BBC1 (for Dec 6). It was time that the story of an alternative way foward to the business-as-usual/apocalypse scenario to enter the collective discussion. Journalists were always looking for a story, we just had to be aware we had one.

“Communications from the heart is completely different from the communicatin of the head,” said Sue.

How to tell the story of heart when most of our focus and that of the press is on the mental and gut reaction level? How to bring attention to peak oil and climate change when daily distractions bombard us from all kind of media technology? How to focus our attention on the matters that matter?

It was at this point that Sarah joined the discussion. She had not yet worked within Transition and had come to the Gathering to find out how to start up an initiative. She challenged Transition for its parochial attitude, how it failed to speak of and to the disadvantaged people of the world. All of us listened, as we had listened many times before to these objections.

What is the point of planting a community orchard, she asked, when there are billions starving in Ethiopia? Several of us interjected. Had she followed the trajectory of a commercially imported apple from Chile, its carbon footprint, its fossil fuel consumption in terms of agri-business, slavery, supermarket profit, health of individuals, destruction of natural eco-systems etc. and even how drought has been the prevailing condition in Ethiopia for millennia? Had she considered the effects of bringing artificially-separated people together in one place and doing something for the planet instead of against it?

That’s when I realised that Transition makes you smart about a lot of seemingly dull things you would never have considered a year ago (climate science, transport, waste) and that unless you get down into the physical and intellectual business of changing your own and your community’s way of interacting with the earth, you are going to be prey to a million mental “facts” broadcast about the world that you are powerless to do anything about. We imagine that the media’s task is to investigate the truth of the matter when actually it is used to mask reality, and that culture’s function - to structure and make meaningful the collective presence of human beings within a bio-region- is being manipulated to do quite the opposite within the present global mindset.

Our challenge was to respond to the questions posed by a media-influenced view of the world with the complexity of Transition. We needed to consider the state of people within our culture, see it as an opportunity to study our fears, our powerlessness, our greed and then proceed. We needed to make the connections between the local and the global. And mostly we needed to see this situation as material for creating our own culture and media.

What model do we used to engage with the world?

We jammed then in order to find one. Sue talked of her desire to write a column based on a diary of her personal Transition experiences. I talked about a community blog we had started, how it gets people telling their own stories, taking pictures and building up a creative record. David said how much he enjoyed reading the entry that talked of no saints or sinners on the Transition journey. On a wild imaginative tangent we explored writing all kinds of stuff that started with a sequel to the Handbook (The Dark Side of Transition, The Clouds of Transition) and ended with a low-carbon sitcom along the lines of The Good Life. John did a great rap called  you didn’t answer my email.

Being able reflect back our blindspots and to laugh was key. It made everything light (“where climate change stuff falls down – making you feel guilty and heading to hell”)

We laughed a lot about our common dilemmas and especially the people who make all our lives so difficult in meetings. What can you do about it?

“You can’t,” said Anna. “That’s how they are.”

The fact is we don’t want how people are, we want them to agree with our world-view. We don’t like confronting old resistant ways of thinking and behaving. We have great wishlists for the future and imagine a community made up of neighbours who grow immaculate vegetables and think we are the bees-knees. An easy life. But to be in Transition you have to work with whoever is sitting round the table. Sometimes you get lucky and get to sit at a table for half-an-hour with people who have gone through the same experiences as you have and you have a laugh about your common problems. Outside there is a storm, here now in this conversation it’s secure and warm. The day had started with a rainbow that arched its way across the Waveney Valley. It will end with a tornado in Lowestoft and a flood in the North. We are already not living in the old story we were told. And now we’re just realising we’re going to have to make up the new one as we go along.

“We’ve got to find a story underneath the story,” said Sue.

What’s underneath the story? We all pressed forward on that one.

“I remember,” I said “Being told a tale about the ur-story, the story beneath all stories. Man goes into hell and comes back with riches. I had been told this by an Anglo Saxon tutor. She was talking about Beowulf, the dragon slayer, the first English poem ever recorded. Beowulf slays the beast Grendel and garners his hoard.

It’s a good story, but not when those inner poetic dragons are projected onto other people, nations or the earth itself. The underworld tale is sung because the work of transformation is something we have to do ourselves if we want to live as human beings in synch with the planet. Civilisation tells us we don’t need to do this stuff. Work for the city and you can buy yourselves an underworld-free experience. 5000 years later the planet is wrecked by grendelplc.com and we’ve got no minstrels to remind us of our duty to the tribe.

Or maybe we do have them but no one is yet listening to what they are saying.

“We don’t want to shovel our shit,” said John. “We want to flush it away and have clean drinking water.”

That was an aha moment: our desires for outer riches and an immaculate lifestyle are a substitute for those inner riches we have to strive for amongst the refuse. And that work – what Gary Snyder once called the Real Work – is what we need to do to bring the earth, life and all people back into balance.

 “What’s really needed is a deep and profound spiritual change in humanity, said Sue.

We’re not going to undergo this sea-change unless we look at all our material, including the dark stuff, our difficulties, and start telling the world of our experiences within the context of Transition. Starting here with sharing our troubles and laughing on a wild and windy day in Diss, sharing food and getting real about the situation we face. So we can do these things with heart  and do them together. It was definitely time for lunch!