Five members — Clare S., Julie, Jan, Brandon and Larry — met to focus on Regenerate Cascadia’s Aims and Roles/Responsibilities. At the request of Kwin, who could not attend, emailed us on the day of the meeting, asking us to answer 4 questions on how to bring in new people to our guild from the February 17, 2024 Open Space Learning Symposium. After check-ins and other preliminaries when we came to the reports from the Website Group (Julie) , Bioregional Literature Archiving (Brandon) , Regional Learning Resources (Clare S), February Symposium Group (Kwin/Brandon/Jon), we deferred to Kwin’s and discussed the Symposium.
Unfortunately, that took up more time than we expected but eventually we were able to get back to Aims and Roles. While there was a brief discussion of roles until it became clear that we really needed to focus on Aims first before going to Roles.
We agreed that in order to facilitate whole system shift we needed to:
- Identify and update important arenas of “knowledge” — bioregional colleges and universities, research organizations, governments, businesses, community service organizations, tribes and so are important sources and people in our communities have their perspectives and knowledge to share as well. Clare S. is working on this topic as well as #2, the identification of holders of knowledge. While she will not be attending the meeting on 02.08.24, she might be able to send us and update on her progress for us to discuss at the meeting.
- Identify holders of knowledge
- Increase guild exposure to knowledge and holders of knowledge. This topic was not discussed accept to acknowledge that this is important.
- Encourage flow of knowledge among guilds and hubs. This was discussed as it is clear that Guilds are compiling valuable information for all the hubs and the lines of communications going both ways is most important. The guilds need to keep the hubs updated on their work that impacts the work of the hubs; the hubs need to communicate their needs to the guilds, so that the guilds can obtain the information needed and share it with the hubs.
- Encourage integration, application, evaluation and adaption of knowledge:
“Knowledge”= policies, practices, mental models, values, strategies, possibilities, modalities, wisdom (also beliefs, stories, rituals, taboos, rites) = Bioregional Culture? In other words there is hard data (facts, etc.) and there is warm data—our values, mental models, wisdom, creativity and so on as described in the first sentence. How do we value, integrate, apply, evaluate and adapt all of this knowledge so that communities can survive and thrive as we move forward into the future?
More discussion is needed on this topic by the whole group. Suggestion: we begin writing documents in our google drive that dig into these questions so that can begin to develop focus, policies and practices at all levels of community to provide guidance in collection, integration, application, evaluation and adaption of this knowledge.
Definition of knowledge = fluid, grows with use, exchanges between hubs, will change as system changes.
#ACTION: Process vs policy – before the end of every meeting check on roles for next time. Basic group organization. Upload to gdrive and link to circle log agenda item.
Discussion group – Pinned to the top in the circle log. Topics/Bioregional education guild/
Needed clarification of how we do things. Comes before shared work etc to work effectively.
#ACTION: Make documentation for how to organize materials and meeting, links etc.