20120810
From: Franz Nahrada Date: Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 11:51 AM Subject: Being present in tomorrows GVN meeting ...
Dear All,
I have been in touch with most of you in the course of the last few weeks about the intended Network Meeting which is going to happen tomorrow, Friday, 11AM CET (summertime). I am informing some additional friends,too.
Just as a reminder: more than 20 people will come together on Friday in the rural village of Aigelsberg near Polling near Altheim in the Austrian Border Region of Innviertel at the farm of Rajah Guptara-Öllinger. Rajah is an active network member, with family roots in India, who partly turned his farm into a fine touristic and convention location. We are considering creating a critical mass of activities to "brand" Rajah's farm as a hub for learning and study activities, especially on all facets of Global Villages, and tomorrow's event is a small inauguration of these.
We have a very fine selection of people attending physically. Among them will be the founder of the New Work Movement, Frithjof Bergmann, and many others involved in the renaiscance of the local in the global age. The first part of the event, from 11AM to 1PM Central European Summertime, will be dedicated to short presentations - not limited to the people present, but also synchronously and simultaniously connected to remarkable people worldwide in village situations. We will do this with Skype powered by a cloud videoconferencing service (Videomeet). So we will have the possibility to make use of up to 25 interactive streaming slots. In the afternoon we will continue and focus on the local workgroups, but we still will use and pay attention to some global interaction. See below the technical details including the team for production and backchanneling on site.
We will convene contentwise around the following themes:
- Is there a new quality in village to village cooperation when we are
empowered by bandwidth? One person that will give us first hand experience is Chis Conder from B 4 RN?, a rural broadband user alliance in the UK.
- Will there be shared themes that villages all over the world could
work on? We hope to hear from: Barbara Kovats from Solar Power Village Tamera in Portugal's Alentejo; from Richard Nelson and Richard Hogan at Greenfire Farm in Ohio/USA and many others about Village Innovations that make a difference.
- How can we possibly cooperate? Andrew Sandakov und Jean Jebanov from
the Russian Republic of Buryatia will issue a call for synchronous coaching and cooperation in rural permaculture - possibly with iPads in the field.
- What can we achieve? Kordian Euris will present the amazing
development of Open Source Ecology as one example how shared knowledge will enable us to regain our basic values of life.
- Where will we end up? Dagmar Eisenbach and John Broomfield will show
the case study of Bittlebronn, a bioenergy village in Southwestern Germany that has achieved a lot with a bioenergy plant and is aiming for new horizons in village development. Tony Gwilliam and Marita Vidal from Bloo Lagoon holiday village will show what village aesthetics can mean to us.
We have a very clear goal, even if the development is still based on individual goodwill and voluntary contributions and the event is self constructing: we want to see a virtual university of the village, a stregnthening stream of knowledge, experience and empowering relations built up and maintained by this media connections which will become habitual in the years to come. If we understand that this is a fourth resource that complements the soil, the water and the sunlight, that we have to install it rigourously and use it primarily to raise our level of autonomy, then the possibilities are endless.
We think that in today's world the village, the local community of people, is a much needed life support system that we rediscover and redesign after the Big Industrial Dream that has turned into a nightmare. And instead of crisis, decay and destruction brought about by the industrial spirit of competition, we seek to lay the base for a truly cooperative world.
The village will be at the centrepiece of this world, playing a similar role in a world society as individuals play in a local society. Villages will be the voluntary associations to realize and manifest values, they will be the convergence point of the cultural communities that are blooming in masses facilitated by the Web. But they will be much more - they will be the microcosm that allows us to digest the manifold offerings of the world in a meaningful and productive way and turn them into an abundant local reality everywhere.
I hope we can do our event in this spirit tomorrow. The purpose is also to create a first video documentation about the idea of Global Villages with the help of the material gathered.
Technically, those of you who want to participate are cordially invited - but please mind the fact that we have only 25 slots. We will turn off audio and video interactivity most of the time due to limited bandwidth (you can still watch the stream, just not interact by speaking or video) - Rajah's farm has only a mobile provider connection for the time being. A short and hot presentation can always be squeezed in but we will keep a rough ratio of 16 - 20 presentations with 8-10 online and 8-10 local. We hope that you will be able to see them all.