Fred Kayiwa and youth project

I copy this email to my blog, to introduce Fred. He has supported me a lot, especially when I have needed help to make chats go well.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pamela McLean
Date: 2008/12/15
Subject: Re: [learningfromeachother] Re: Fred Kayiwa and youth project
To: learningfromeachother@yahoogroups.com,

Hi Fred

I came across this link to Soccer Without Borders http://www.soccerwithoutborders.org/
I don't know if they are looking for any new teams to support.The website is asking for more donations and telling potential donors about the work they already do. However there is no harm in emailing them about your work and asking if they will be looking for any new partners in future. They do already have links in Uganda - I don't know if that would prove to be a benefit or a disadvantage.

Pam

2008/12/15 fdkayiwa <fdkayiwa@yahoo.com>
-Hello all friends
I just wanted to share with you what we do currently
http://dreamforthekjteam.org.uk/ and perhaps you can advise as well as
support our project in any way you can
thank you a lot for being there for us.
Fred kayiwa

Dadamac (shortened from Dada and McLean)

Dadamac (shortened from Dada and McLean) is the name the John Dada and I use when we are working on things together. We started collaborating in 2003. How that came about is a long story, but the outcome is that:

• I am John's eyes, ears and voice here in the UK.
• I am active on the Internet on his behalf as well as my own.
• I can describe John's various community development projects in rural Nigeria from first hand experience.
• John and I communicate regularly using the Internet
• We hold weekly online UK-Nigeria Dadamac team meetings
• Together we arrange effective collaborations between people in my network (in UK and online) and John's projects in rural Nigeria.
• We also act as consultants.
  

Our first project together was Teachers Talking, which had its fourth online anniversary celebration on November 29th 2008. Our most recent collaboration enabled Marcus Simmons of Ecoshelter to visit Attachab Eco-Village, to learn about Nigerian realities, to teach about eco-buildings, and to construct a demonstration eco-dome.

John's work at Fantsuam Foundation and Attachab Eco-Village is driven by his personal commitment and concerns and is work-without-pay. My independent investigative work into ICT and Education is done the same way, and so is our work with the Dadamac Learners, and some Dadamac Collaborators.

It is possible to contribute to our social/community initiatives (at Fantsuam Foundation and elsewhere) through a registered charity Dadamac Foundation (previously known as CAWD). At time of writing this edit (January 26th 2009) Dadamac Foundation has a policy of making no deductions for administrative costs (where necessary they are covered by Dadamac Ltd).

It is possible to employ the Dadamac team through Dadamac Ltd.

Open Farm and Marcin Jakubowski

Marcin's work and vision - The world’s first replicable, post-industrial village

OpenFarm is the work of Marcin Jakubowski. Quote from Marcin's blog: "We are actively involved in demonstrating the world’s first replicable, post-industrial village. We take the word replicable very seriously - we do not mean a top-down funded showcase - but one that is based on ICT, open design, and digital fabrication - in harmony with its natural life support systems. As such, this community is designed to be self-reliant, highly productive, and suffciently transparent so that it can truly be replicated in many contexts - whether it’s parts of the package or the whole. Our next frontier will be education to train Village Builders - just as we’re learning how to do it from the ground up.

(snip)

On another practical front, we’re interested in collaborating with other existing post-industrial village construction programs out there. OSE-Mid Missouri just started as a student group at the University of Missouri, Columbia. We are framing our collaboration as experiential learning by building a post-industrial village. We also aim to develop this relationship to a clearinghouse of applied research and development projects for students in general.

What are other best examples of global village construction? How are they contributing to the integration of natural and technological ecology for creating replicable nodes of regenerative transformation? How do we work together?"

Good ways to learn more about the Open Farm project:

Visit his blog to follow developments on his farm as they occur

See slides from Marcin's presentation on Global Village Construction Set: Tools for Sustainable Living (4.23.08). I have started to put direct links below to the slides that are most relevant to the "bandwidth challenged" Dadamac team in Nigeria, to help make the most of time online. I will try to add more sometime.

Slide 1 - Introduction

Slide_5 - Creating self-sufficient communities anywhere

Slide_6- Open source and lifetime design

May 22nd, 2008 podcast to learn about his ideas and innovations - podcast introduction says
"Marcin Jakubowski is one of the premier pioneers of open source appropriate technology and agricultural innovation. Guided by Gandhi’s principles of swadeshi, Marcin has made great strides in moving towards community-based development and local autonomy...."

Overview

Video of discussion between Vinay and Marcin on May 26th, 2008. Introducing this Marcin wrote: " This interview is perhaps the most clear description to date of the essence of our experiments with Open Source Ecology, and its implementation lab - Factor e Farm. If you can bear the 54 minutes of time, this will definitely be insightful regarding the forthcoming peer-to-peer economy - and provide much insight into the threads of thought and motivations behind our work. At Factor e, we grow ideas, and winnow for the truth. "

It is a long video, but for anyone seriously considering working with Marcin and replicating anything of what he is doing, this video is very valuable for putting the whole thing in context.

Relevance to Attachab Eco-Village

Open Farm is a research and development project which combines technology and agricultural development. It includes many aspects relevant to our interests at Attachab Eco-Village. My hope is that, through Dadamac, Attachab will be near the front of the queue for replicating Marcin's Open Farm strategies.

Funding is through crowd sourcing. If people see that Marcin's work is relevant to Africa as well as USA it could make his work even more attractive to givers. Most people recognise that "something needs to be done" in rural Africa to address issues of poverty. However, not everyone yet sees the importance of sustainable local development approaches in USA. If we are working together, it could benefit fundraising for Marcin's research and development work as well as helping Attachab Eco-Village development.

I spoke to Marcin (Skype chat) before I visited Fantsuam last September, and since coming back I have met Marcin's associate, Vinay Gupta. Vinay and I plan another meeting soon to explore overlapping interests.

Marcin's blog includes video clips to show exactly what progress is being made. Ideally Attachab Eco-Village should be able to provide similar feedback. Dadamac has been working with learners at the Knowledge Resource Centre (KRC) to develop communication skills including blogging, camera skills, and video making. There are various cultural challenges in persuading people to develop these skills, which is another story, but progress is being made. We are also very fortunate at present in having a VSO volunteer who is blogging and can demonstrate the value of communication to people at the KRC.

Pattern Language and Helmut Leitner

I mentioned Pattern Language at a Meet-up last week, so here is additional information as requested. By putting it here, instead of in an email, I can more easily show other people later.

I will try to return to this blog entry sometime and add more explanation - but Adam - who I am writing this for now has already had some introduction.

My weekly half-hour Skype-chat tutorials on Pattern Language are with Helmut Leitner. His paid work is as a software developer and consultant. Currently his main personal interests are ...

1. videobridge events (connecting places for education and cultural events)
2. building a network of interconnected places in Austria/Europe/World taht collaborate that way
3. system theory of unfolding living systems, following the ideas of Christopher Alexander (wrote a book about that)

Here are some qotes from Helmut from our first Skype-chat (which I know he is happy to make public). I have picked out some main teaching points. I am privelaged because I am able to ask questions and discuss that ideas as we go along - but I have not included any of that. NB - we Skype in haste so there are some typos :

System situations are often complex and it is not clear which way to go, where to invest time, money, energy or other resources. It is interesting to find the potentials that allow to step forward in the most efficient way.

So there are structural concepts that help to describe and design systems. There are process-related principles that increase to chance to do things right.

Development would be relatively easy if the developed system
were like machines and followed certain laws or rules predictably ...
then we could act like a machine builder and construct and build
them ... but their aren't.

All really interesting systems - like society, humans, ecological
systems, cities, communities - are like organisms that have their
unique indivdiuality. They unfold according to general but flexible
principles but they are unpredictable. They are to be nurtured,
gardened, supported in their growth.

Such unfolding processes have always numerous opportunities to
continue from the current situation. Development needs decisions
to follow one path or the other. Each decision influences all the
future decisions and may be right or wrong.

For example: do you want to marry this partner, Yes or no? Your
whole life will change on that decision. The children you get
and care for. The perspective on what is important in life.

For example: Learn this or that profession? On such decisions
almost everything depends. The people you have most contact with,
the things you learn, the abilities in which you grow.

The support of development, the coaching of unfolding is not easy.
Only in 2002-2004 Christopher Alexander published his 4-volume
"The Nature of Order" life-work, which shows the rough outline
of a general concept how to do this in a holistic way. His
earlier books "A Pattern Language" and "Timeless Way of Building"
(about 1980) tapped the potential and inspired people but they
were not yet the breakthrough that is available now.

In my book "Mustertheorie" (published in German) I tried to boil
the 4000+ pages of Alexander, that need a year to reading and study,
down to about 170 paperback-pages that can be consumed and thought
through during a weekend's time.

"Pattern Theory", a theory about how to improve systems, by
understanding their structures and processes, by recognizing the
meaning of patterns as the fundamental modules of knowledge that
can be shared, for decisions to be made in a participation process
based on our feeling for the quality of life.

Still, to make this work, one should understand that numerous
concept have to be understood and practiced. Pattern theory is
like a new kind of science or an intricate game like chess.
One can give an principle explanation of science or chess in
a few minutes, but to make this work, to create first results,
it may take days, weeks, months or years, depending on your
intuitive understanding and talents. Some may grasp this
immediately, others may never grok or like it.

There are about 50 concepts that make up the body of pattern theory,
roughly ordered in four groups. The more these concepts are
available in your mind, without thinking, the easier the work
with development processes will be. I give an incomplete
overview:

- The first group of concepts describes STRUCTURES by using
gerneral PROPERTIES that living systems have. We have words that
label these properties but its important, that what is meant is
deeper than the meaning of these words in everyday language.
So we have properties like BOUNDARY, SIMPLICITY, GRADIENT,
RHYTHM and LOCAL SYMMETRY (and more) but these need explanation.

- The second group is about principles of PROCESSES that help
in creating system development. There are principles like
STEPWISE IMPROVEMENT, REVERSIBILITY, STRUCTURE PRESERVING
TRANSFORMATION, WIN-ALL, TRANSFORMATION ORDER, ATTRACTIVE WHIRL
OF PARTICIPATION and RESONANCE JUDGEMENT (and more).

- The third group of concepts is about the concept of PATTERN,
which unifies structures and process as units of meaning.
Patterns have INPUT and OUTPUT, they are subjects to FORCES,
there are ALTERNATIVE PATTERNS and CONNECTED PATTERNS,
ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES. Patterns also have a NAME
given and a DESCRIPTION supporting their application.

- The fourth group of concepts kind of glues everything together.
We talk about SYSTEM and the elements in the system are called
CENTER (not necessarily in the center, everything and everyone
you can see or image is a "center"). Our main concern is LIFE,
and its unfolding by increasing the QUALITY OF LIFE. Doing so
requires to perceive and think about STRUCTURES and PROCESSES
and PATTERNS (already mentioned and on top of the first three
concept groups). It is about WHOLES. At a human level we think
about the SELF and its unfolding (sense of life) in a co-process
with unfolding environments, people, communities.

This link takes you to diagrams.

There is also a website which has developed from Douglas Schuler's Pattern Language yahoo group. The book mentioned there Liberating Voices - A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution was developed through the Pattern Language yahoo group.

Activist Road Trip is pattern 134 in the book, Helmut pointed it out to me as an example and for its possible relevance to Dadamac.

Cecily's Blog - FF through UK eyes

Cecily is a working at Fantsuam Foundation through VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). She comes from the UK so her surprises, shocks, delights and insights are perfect for anyone in the UK wondering what life is like at Fantsuam.

You can go direct to her latest blog entry here , and explore the archives.
The links below used to be direct to the right story - but have developed a glitch - please ignore them for now.
Alternatively, go straight to the topic you want via the links below (in reverse order):
Children - The Day of Change: Launch of the Children's Parliament
Attachab Eco-village. - Cecily's blog - Site visit Friday 5th December 2008 - great photos
Culture vulture - Abuja Carnival
Stop the press! and File, Print - Credit crunch story, then scroll down for the realities of trying to get a print out at Fantsuam.
The wonderful world of work! Starting work at Fantsuam
Pretty in Pink - Cicely's new home in Nigeria

eGaia - by Gary Alexander

Gary Alexander's book eGaia has interesting ideas about collaboration instead of competition. You can read about Gary; download pages of the book; find out how he is implementing the ideas in practice; and get his latest news here

He is a recently retired lecturer from the Open University and has practical suggestions for how we can move to a more sustainable future. He suggests that the human race at the moment is a threat to planet earth (like a cancer). He suggests how we could collaborate with each other in new ways, and could also work in harmony with planet earth. In his ideal future the human race would act more like the nervous system of the planet, rather than a cancer.

I met Gary last year at an Open Space event, during which he kindly gave me a copy of eGaia "on condition that it's not just used as a door stop" - and it certainly hasn't been. I have appreciated the ideas in the book and shared them. The full title is e-Gaia: Growing a peaceful sustainable Earth through communications. You can read more details and download much of the book here.

Meet-up (face-to-face not face-to-screen)

"Meet-up" is a great online way to meet-up with people locally who share your interests , and on Thursday 11th December 2008 I went to my first meeting. Meet-ups is world wide, although first impressions at the Meet-up home page are that it is very American. I won't explain much because there are videos and explanations at the home page. For anyone who feels "I have local friends but they don't share my deepest interests, and I have people who share my deepest interests but they are not local" Meet-up is a great find. It is also excellent for people newly arrived in an area.

It's slogan is "Maybe it's time for a little less face-to-screen and a little more face-to-face." The range of groups is amazing, and if you can't find what you want then you can set up a new one and invite people to join.