The Permaculture CoLab is a common space for collaboration in the permaculture movement. In 2020 a team of contributors launched a funded project to develop capacity for Permaculture CoLab to better meet our aims; a major part of which is to invest in our community’s literacy in aspects of social permaculture, and for us to better collaborate across the world.
The Training Coordinator, Naomi, is currently looking for an apprentice who is interested in working in a decentralized, remote “un-organization”, and who is passionate about social permaculture, grassroots education, and systems change.
Update Nov 1: we have found the right person for this post. Thanks for your interest, stay tuned for more opportunities or get involved in the slack to proposition your own idea for a role!
Role Description
In this role, you will learn the practices and processes that the team (Capacity+) use, and will experience consent decision-making, role-based accountability, and interfacing with various workflows and platforms in Permaculture Colab’s digital ecosystem. You will help with scouting and promoting events relevant to our community, and adding to our map of literacy-building groups and communities. The platforms that we will use include wordpress, nextcloud (open source alternative to Google Suite), slack, parabol, and miro.
During your apprenticeship, you will meet with the team weekly (currently Mondays at 9:30 UTC but open to change), and have regular check-ins with Naomi (based in NZ). We will practice working asynchronously between meetings.
This work exchange offers compensated/funded training in any skill that you would like to developthrough the role. Some examples include: sociocracy, database design, leadership coaching, eco-social design.
Eligibility
To fill this role, we ask the candidate has or commits to:
5 hours per week
Good communication in English
Somewhat reliable internet connection
Discipline (you will be self-managing your workload)
An attitude of respect, solidarity and creativity
Timeline is flexible, however the right candidate will be able to commit to joining the capacity#team through to the end of 2022.
Future plans
The position is designed as a succession plan, to step into leading the Training Coordinator role in 2022. This will be part time (5- 10 hours per week) with a monthly stipend, depending on your self-assessment of circumstances (currently paid contributors earn somewhere between £15-£30 per hour depending on their situations), and there will be opportunities to submit proposals for supplementary funded work. See our equitable waging guide for more information about self-assessed wages.
This post can start once you feel confident taking the lead.
We will review applications on a case-by-case basis and update this page once the position is filled.
We are collaborating with Ray Milidoni of the Soil Learning Center to offer integrated exchanges with the Permaculture CoLab’s Project-Based Learning programme.
As an invitation to our network, Ray is offering any of these courses for free to people who are keen to road test the user interface and experience (UI/UX). Courses can be downloaded so you can take them with you offline throughout your day.
Side-note for the micro-enterprise designers in our community: Ray is keen to collaborate on a platform for co-farming (sharing land for producing crops), and this could be developed as the ‘project-based’ component to this information sharing platform.
If you are interested in taking one of these courses (enrolling before September 20th), please submit the form below and we’ll be in touch with your access details.
Brief
Ray’s team are looking for the following information:
How is the ‘cart’ experience? (Using our discount code, you will check out a $0 course)
How intuitive is it to navigate this site? Anything confusing or difficult to find?
Do you find notifications too much, too few, or just right?
What features are missing, which would really make this awesome for you?
And of course: Bugs!
Requirements
It’s preferable that beta testers are comfortable using Loom or a similar screen-recording software to make short videos describing the experience, what isn’t working, what you would change, etc.
If you aren’t able to do so, you must at least be able to screenshot the window.
There are no other entry requirements.
After you submit, a member of our team will be in touch with your discount code and details about where to log your feedback.
The International Permaculture CoLab have introduced an Events Aggregator to auto-magically integrate events submitted from across our network. As well as events hosted in the Permaculture CoLab itself (such as our quarterly Open Space events), we also promote events from regional permaculture associations, regenerative communities, social innovation and systems literacy, and other allied movements. Events can be filtered by location, language and topic.View our calendar at perma.earth/events and use this form to submit a one-off event, or this one to link your own events calendar and we will set it to fetch the events that you tell us to, at a frequency determined by you. We envision building a commons around this knowledge asset, allowing the ongoing development to be co-designed by those who benefit from its existence. Email the Calendar Coordinators to learn more!
The Permaculture CoLab is incubating a new circle – the Funding Circle. As we expand into new Domains we are looking for people with experience and / or a strong interest in learning all about funding applications and helping people accessing funds for their Permaculture activities, work and projects.
The Permaculture Collaborative Laboratory (CoLab) is an international network of individuals and enterprises that enhances the coherence and effectiveness of the global permaculture movement. Many experiments are underway that further this great goal and include the creation and stewarding of online spaces for collaborative working, the weaving of synergistic networks within and beyond permaculture, the application of permaculture ethics and design to social and digital systems, the support of emerging regenerative projects and networks in their ambitious work. Find out more at: https://perma.earth
The Capacity+ project is a three year grant funded process, hosted by the Permaculture Association UK, that enhances the capacity of the CoLab network to deliver on its own aims. Capacity+ helps the Permaculture CoLab to become a more powerful version of itself. A small team of individuals has come together to collectively manage and deliver the Capacity+ project. We would now like to share the opportunities that Capacity+ represents with further / future contributors and team members. To that end we have defined some roles and tasks that we envision people undertaking as part of the Capacity+ project.
In a nutshell:
Comms domain: We are looking for explicit capacity in the communications domain. We hope to add skills and experience to the project that helps the CoLab to reach larger and more diverse external audiences. These roles could be shared, or coordinated by one person with good operational and relationship building experience; and you will be working alongside a passionate and flexible team. We are in a good position to generate valuable content but we need more capacity when it comes to strategy, planning, coordination, media choice (platforms and content curation), and implementation of communications activities. We are looking for (a) team member/s who are interested in experimental intervention to the current system of online content and engagement; and passionate about designing comms protocols to better support social and personal wellbeing, combining living systems design with new approaches to organizing. We have access to £12,000 or more to do some of this work over the coming 2 years.
Responsibilities:
Co-designing engagement and communications strategy for permaculture networks
Designing transparent ways for “external” individuals to get involved with ongoing CoLab processes and Capacity+ work (this will be supported by others in its implementation)
Promoting the micro-enterprises being incubated in CoLab and advertising their services (being responsive to each one’s needs and designing for synergies)
Co-designing fruitful edges with allied movements and facilitating sustained communication habits among and between their representatives
Development of Communications Micro-enterprises for financial sustainability of communications domain within CoLab
External documentation (to share with our learning networks and add transparency for stakeholders)
Social media
Copywriting / copy edit work
How we work:
The above list of responsibilities can be seen as an informed starting point developed by those individuals currently involved in the project. However, we are keen to support each individual that decides to contribute to the CoLab and Capacity+ project to show up in their own way. Being part of our network and team is a commitment towards joint exploration, mutual learning, and shared responsibility. This means, for example, that these responsibilities will evolve depending on who we meet and how the needs of the CoLab ecosystem evolve over time.
What to do now:
If the above sounds intriguing to you, explore what it means to work as part of the Capacity+ team (by reviewing our flowchart and/or video explanation)
If you still feel like this is an interesting proposition then register as a contributor here. When you submit the form PLEASE ENTER “communications responsibilities” under How you would like to contribute? (be aware that your response to the signup sheet is visible in our Slack space)
We will get back to you by the end of December to communicate next steps. These next steps will include exploration with interested individuals about their suitability for the envisioned work and responsibilities. Thus, this process is anticipated to require some time commitment from all parties involved. For example, instead of working on a CV and preparing for an interview you may be invited to answer some questions, join an online conversation or workshop, and co-write a proposal for work you may undertake within the above outlined domain. Note: If you feel you may not be able to volunteer your time throughout this process please mention this to our facilitators early on in the process as we may be able to support you.
