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November 20, 2011

How do you make a website for Transition?

"If we wait for the governments, it'll be too little, too late. If we act as individuals, it'll be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time".

This month saw the launch of three new outputs from Transition Network. These are a new book,‘The Transition Companion’; an online directory of Transition Ingredients and Tools; and a set of Ingredients and Tools Cards.

As the Occupy movement, too, begins to explore the question, "How Do You Code A Movement?" this seemed like a good moment to catch up with Transition's web coordinator, Ed Mitchell, and ask him a question: How do you put all that experience into a website for others to share?

The short answer is: you don't.

In talking with Ed I learn to change my initial question. Contextual knowledge of the kind created by Transition groups exists among an ecology of actors and resources. It is lived, embodied, situated knowledge. Putting knowledge into an airless 'bank' is liable to kill it. I should better ask: what kind of web service, tools and approaches are needed to support the continuous flow of knowledge among communities when and where it is most needed?

The context is exciting, but challenging. Transition initiatives and groups have been multiplying at extraordinary speed. Among the 900 initiatives are officially designated Transition Towns (or cities, districts, villages - and even a forest) plus a larger number of communities that are 'mulling it over' as they consider the possibility of launching their own Transition Initiative formally.

To support this ecology of projects and groups, Transition Network has set up an international network of 95 Transition Trainers in 25 countries. They help provide training on a local basis. There are now also National Hub organizations in 12 countries that provide additional local support and networking.

Among the practical changes already achieved are Transition Lewes’s community-owned renewable solar energy company
and Transition Brixton’s local currency that recently introduced pay by text transactions with the participation of local businesses.

Given this explosion of activity, Ed's starting point is that the Transition web project is not about the delivery of pre-packaged content. "Transition Network is a support organization, not a political party HQ", he tells me. "Our approach is not to tell groups what to do, but to facilitate the effective sharing of ideas and resources between initiatives".

Technically, this has involved the development of what Ed calls a "Product Sharing Engine" (below):

Ed's approach from the start has been that face-to-face is overwhelmingly the most important mode of communication for Transitioners. He is committed to cause Transitioners to "spend as little time in front of computer screens as possible".

Ed is therefore much more than a web developer or platform builder. His work spans network, community and event design, and facilitation. "Sharing community-based knowledge depends multiple elements in different combinations at different times", he explains; "there can be no one-size-fits-all solution".

Transition's work is inspired by one of Buckminster Fuller's insights - the system-scale rule. This is the idea that large-scale problems do not require large scale solutions - they require small scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

Transition Network's tiny staff engages with a grassroots movement in which many thousands of people are developing models, tools and methodologies in a variety of contexts. In this spirit, Rob Hopkins' new book is filled with ingredients, not with rules.

These ingredients are laid out in stages relating to the Transition process - from deciding to give Transition a go (‘Starting out’), to making localisation a reality on the ground (‘Building’).

Back in 2009, Ed was given a budget of £36,000 ($57,000) to work with. He first asked for suggestions on which web tools and processes would be resilient enough to support the changing needs of transition groups around the world. The result was a huge list. He quickly decided that "this will kill me if I try to implement them all. From the start, I wanted to avoid the trap of trying to build a huge platform that would never be finished".

Ed's approach is to augment the practical needs and requirements of Transitioners - not keep them stuck in front of screens all day. He admits to a "cordial hatred… of the way many social media managers talk casually about 'driving people to the site' or 'keeping people online. The idea that living online and tweeting and blogging all day is nonsense".

I ask Ed about the architecture of the Transition web service. "The Transition Network site is not in the middle" Ed explains; "there is no middle. Our idea is is to enable the widest distribution of project cases as possible, not to gather them all together in one place".

I ask Ed how he measures progress and assures quality. "We did look at such functions as voting, and star-rating widgets" he tells me, but "in the event, the ratings tools never worked properly. Our preferred approach is to enable a kind of distributed guided search in which human beings advise each other on which, in their direct experience, is the best source of help to turn to".

The Transition wiki states, "Here's how it all appears to be evolving...". I ask Ed how on earth he keeps up when things are moving so fast. "We can't control the situation" Ed replies, cheerfully. "I suppose we could employ reseachers to record all our information on Excel spreadsheets. But, well, we just don't". Ed does concede that Transition Network could probably use an historian, or a librarian.

Three years after Ed first inspired me with his non-techie vision of how the web could help Transition movement, a new Stories Project has just been launched. Twelve 'social reporters' around The United Kingdom will each produce one blog post every day on a subject set by a guest editor at the beginning of the week.

The aim, as Ed's colleague Charlotte du Cann explains it, is "to communicate the real-life issues and experiences of being in Transition…a new narrative for the ‘down curve’ of consumption and energy use". To show and record what is really happening in Transition towns across the country, in the neighbourhood, inside ourselves".

"We're not trying to convert users into viral marketing evangelists" Ed explains. "We're exploring a channel through which people can tell their own stories of the ins and outs of their lives, and to help connect communities as they struggle through an unknown present and uncharted future.

"We've built a website, but at every point we question the concept of centrally-controlled systems and authority" Ed concludes.

"The aim has always been to see the website as a star in a Transition Constellation rather than a 'Hub' with spokes".

[Two previous articles on Transition by this writer are here and here

Posted by John Thackara at 11:34 AM

November 05, 2011

Man and Nature, Re-Connected

There are times when you have to wonder whether ad industry persons totally, er, get it, on the matter of man's disconnect with nature... and what to do about it.

This Aigle ad, which I tore out the Air France magazine, reads "For the re-introduction of man in nature". Yeah, right. And go buy some Chantebelle welly boots while you think about it.

Mind you, when it comes to the eroticizing of biophilia, the art directors of Corriere probably win hands down....

Posted by John Thackara at 03:06 PM

November 02, 2011

Turn-key food hives

Hanging out with health system innovators in recent times I've been struck by two interesting things. The first is that the buzz in the investor community about health apps is palpable. To feed the hunger, a new incubator called Rock Health, positioning itself as "the seed accelerator for health startups", promises to "power the next generation of the digital health ecosystem" and bring together "the brightest minds in technology and healthcare".

All this would be great were were it not for the second thing I've learned: there's almost no contact between the health apps crowd and the food system crowd. And this is weird.

The need for a whole systems approach is urgent. In the US, one in five children aged 6 to 11 is now obese. Each one of them risks heart disease and diabetes in later life. Industrialised food is one of the major causes of these childrens' sickness. If more of them had access to better and affordable food, fewer people would get diabetes and heart disease - and many of the hot new diabetes-monitoring iPhone apps would not be needed.

Why is this nightmare happening? Well, between 1995 and 2010, North American taxpayers spent over $260 billion on subsidies of junk food ingredients compared to $262 million - *one thousand times less* - subsidising apples [which is pretty much the only fresh food to get a subsidy at all].

Where's the app to fix that?

Of course it's hard. Maybe it'll take a saint to figure out how to be a whole-systems, whole-food entrepreneur. But in the absence of such a saint, we probably need to call these things sickness apps, not health apps.

Thankfully there's a lot of service innovation - if less investor frenzy - in the local food system space.

A new kind of community supported agriculture [CSA] project has been launched in Paris, for example.

“La Ruche Qui Dit Oui” ("The hive that says yes!" or LRDQ) is a business model and web platform that enables anyone to set up a fair trade organic food distribution and supply network - and make a sustainable social business out of it at the same time.

Compared to traditional community supported agriculture [CSA] schemes, LRDQ enable consumers to choose the products they want to receive rather than be sent a box full of produce chosen by the farmers.

La Ruche is the brainchild of Guilhem Cheron, an industrial designer and chef. He drew on expertise gained during fifteen years in the design industry to develop new ways for people to develop better relationships with the farmers their food came from. With the motto “Manger mieux, manger juste” (“Eat Better, Eat Fair”) La Ruche cuts out traditional food system intermediaries - but also supports local hives on practical matters to do with information, logistics and other issues.

Anyone can start her or his own “hive”. They look for local food producers to work with, and recruit neighbours, friends, and family into their hive. The ideal number seems to be 30-50 people. Among the nearly 150 hives established to date, the average La Ruche member lives in the city, uses social networks regularly, has a full time job, and has an average age of 29.

Once the hive is up-and-running, producers offer their product at a desired price, and hive members place their orders. The producer receives exactly the price asked for, but the consumer pays 20% more than that. Of this, 10% goes to the leader or administrator of the community ruche; 7% to La Ruche HQ; 3% for taxes and bank fees.

Although most of the day-to-day interaction - such as contacting new suppliers, distributing the offer of products, aggregating offers - is internet-based, a social element is integral to the scheme. Delivery and distribution of orders happens one day per week at a convenient location; there, hive members get together to distribute the produce.

Guillem and his team are constantly looking for ways to make the system responsive to everyday needs. For example, if a whole cheese is too big for a single family, how can quarters and halves be supplied in a way that works for both sides of the exchange?

“I didn’t invent anything new" Guillem told Ortiz, "I just merged different ideas into a service that worked better for the people involved. We've designed a tool that can make the distribution and exchange process ten times faster, and easier, and be more appealing, than existing systems. An important aspect has been to create a a social enterprise model rather than just a voluntary organisation, such as the AMAPs.

At the moment, the La Ruche is only available in France. But this type of web-enabled direct distribution has huge potential on a global scale.

Third world coffee farmers, for example, receive a paltry 10 per cent, at best, of the eventual retail price. Along with the negative effect this has had on living conditions, the drive for increased output has had a knock-on effect on the environment as well, with mono-cropping and sun grown coffee now the norm.

La Ruche is one among a bunch of new online marketplaces to be springing up. In France, a new conference of food platform developers called Techfoodtook place in Paris this summer. And In the US, too, several such projects were documented at the website Food + Tech Connect when it posed the question: How Can Information & Technology Be Used To Hack The Food System?

Farmigo, for example, consumers to find, select, and receive fresh food from local farms and producers that are delivered direct to convenient pick-up locations. Farmigo charges a 2% transaction fee for food sold through the system. This is paid by the producer and does not impact the price shown to consumers.

] Face time before transaction time

Online platforms like La Ruche and Farmigo are terrific development - but it's an exaggeration to claim, as Farmigo does, that they are "providing an alternative food system". In systems-speak, they're providing the technical bit of a social-technical system which is a much bigger and more complex thing than a web platform.

For one thing, many otherwise passionate and reform-minded farmers, and other food system actors, are wary. “We just prefer real face to face time,” a meat processor told FoodTech Connect. “We do our processing by hand.”

Transparency, it emerges again and again, is not only a technical feature. Even when people are keen to try innovative approaches, a lot of trust-building face-to-face time is needed to set a new food system.

David Barrie, who led our urban farming project in Middlesbrough as part of Dott 07, had at least 50 face to face meetings before the first carrot was even planted. "That critical early period involved a lot of networking meetings with people in local government" David recalls; "I had to identify and connect with people responsible for many different services in the town - and then get them to take responsibility for supporting different strands of work in the urban farming project itself".

We also discovered during Dot07 that many lessons we were learning for the first time had been common currency for 20 years in other parts of the world.

In the developing south, for example, the complex social-ecological networks of urban agriculture have been studied since three early 1990s.

Such books as Agriculture in Urban Planning or Agropolis are filled with case studies from Argentina, Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, France, Togo, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe.

NOTE Material in this story about La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is taken from on the masters thesis of Natalie Ortiz: "A New Sustainable Designer: A Case Study of Collaborative Services and Creative Communities". For a copy of her thesis please contact natyort [at] gmail dot com

Posted by John Thackara at 09:53 AM