Chaordic PermaCulture Institute

Comment

Comment by Jacob Rønnow Jensen on January 4, 2010 at 8:14am

In my comment before, I was assuming, that there was already a place for knowledge sharing about earlier permaculture projects. If not, then this seems like a more obvious place to start. A place with the projects catagorized , the challenges and insights listed and a "do's and don't's"-section, a debate forum, contact information, ....

Comment by Jacob Rønnow Jensen on January 3, 2010 at 11:51pm

When Christer began talking about permaculture, I looked it up on the web and found David Holmgren's design prinsiples on Wikipedia. While still trying to get my head around this, you introduce the chaordic version, so I was happy to see both the question and the preliminary answer.

In my post on Open World Cafe "A call for Innovation", I refer to a seminar I went to on systematic innovation. The clue here was, that time had been spent on reengineering succesfull patents to see which innovation-prinsiples had been applied. This had been entered into a database so that others could use this to find answers to the question: "what questions do I need to ask myself now, to get to the next level". The underlying principle could also be used for empowering the permaculture-"communiy".

Comment by Stella on January 2, 2010 at 4:19pm

Added text box for this group, thanks for the suggestion Chris!

In general we can observe that the word 'network' is used quite loosely to mean all sorts of things and the chaordic model is very interesting in that it defines what a more clear and useful definition of a network might be (a technical or design description).

The permaculture movement (like many other organizations that are called or call themselves 'networks') is actually more of a decentralized structure: it has some 'net' workings. This is fine and 'networks' up to a point, just in a random rather than designed (or optimally effective) way. The down side is that in many places it fails to 'join up the dots' and what we see in practice there is a lot of re-inventing of wheels, wasted resources and cross-purpose activities.

So I guess that the answer to your question "what is Chaordic Permaculture" might be that it's something we've yet to see and some of us are trying to design for: an optimal network of relationships, knowledge, resources and lively dialogues that add up to a peak-collective-intelligence experience for the wider permaculture community.

thanks for the stimulating question!
what do you think it means or what else does this answer suggest to you from your experience?

Comment by Christer Soderberg on December 30, 2009 at 10:47pm

Great initiative! I am very interested in learning more about Permaculture Design and it's applications, looking forward to seeing lots of activity here.