David, now that I've put your no till gardening pictures into context, I can see that it all great stuff!

My first instinct is to say that people's readiness to participate may affected by their anticipation or expectation of:

1. job satisfaction through taking part
2. a return on their investment

If that is the case, my suggestion would be to focus your publicity for Veg-n-ables on job satisfaction and ROI.

Job satisfaction

Might contain elements of ethical life choices, good health (physical activity), good health (nutritious food), community investment, being with friends, community self-sufficiency, personal investment, scope for creativity, egalitarian working arrangements, large degree of control over personal tasks undertaken and working close to nature and the natural cycle.

I have italicised elements that Veg-n-ables may not fully be able to deliver, either because their inclusion may run contrary to some overall design considerations that may be beyond decision-making at an individual level, or else because these elements may run counter to each other in practice e.g. two people may simultaneously endeavour to undertake the same task when in reality it is a task that can only be done by one person at a time.

Return on Investment

If people are to receive PoPs, when will they know how much value is placed on their contribution? Logically, the value will only be known when the crops have been harvested. So, in the meantime, what rate of exchange for PoPs will have been agreed with all the pizza suppliers, contributors of money and workers in the field? And will the PoPs for work be based on tasks completed or hours put in?

I would imagine that only after satisfactory answers to these questions have been agreed, would it be possible to start serious recruitment for the scheme.

No doubt you will already have the answers to these questions, David. So it may be more a question of creating attractive advertising and careful branding of the Veg-n-ables concept than of thrashing out the nuts and bolts of the scheme. Can you get any high profile endorsement of your aims?

Sorry guys,

The aim is to produce thought provoking and innovative threads... granted.. new ideas take us into new territory... unexplored territory at that... but.. ummm ahhh... why would the local pizza place want lettuce??? I've eaten pizza in a few different countries... god knows Australia has the dreaded Hawaiian pizza which is smothered in ham and pineapple... but lettuce??.. lets get real guys... lettuce does not belong on a pizza... back to the drawing board on this one!!!!!

Lettuce does work in a salad which goes great with pizza.

Liam, have you ever had a salad with your meal? :-) And, we can also grow tomatoes, onions, herbs . . .

David, yes, I think we have to focus on the other reasons we want to have a community garden until we know (1) what went in, (2) how much we produced, and (3) now that we have that experience, how much could we produce if we did it efficiently. The core group comes from the transition movement - peak oil and climate change - the coming collapse - motivations. I try not to tie the garden too closely to that because I think the coming collapse part will turn some people off who just want to garden.

The part about:

egalitarian working arrangements, large degree of control over personal tasks undertaken

is very interesting to me. I imagine a collaboration of the most experienced gardeners - laying out a series of tasks - that are then taken on? by the participants according to their ability and availability and interest.

In this type of organization I think you want the best knowledge available making decisions and here is how I have been thinking of "valuation of tasks".

Hi David,

I never eat salad with pizza.... by the time I'm done with the pizza I'm as full as a fat girl's sock.

hahah.. I eat salad with pizza so that I don't get that full!

Leaving the virtues of salad aside, the idea behind this proof of participation is that it represents a share of the capacity to produce "value":

We find flowing through the system energy, materials, nutrients, goods and services, information, belonging . . . the generic term is value. They flow through human systems based on the value we place on them. (From bridges)

It is a right to partake of the value created by the group and the group in this case is anyone who cares to contribute time, materials or money.

This system allows us to acknowledge contributions to the production that do not have "monetary value", as discussed in the Real Wealth thread, creating a "caring" set of relationships.

This system allows any group, resident in any locality, to devote that part of their talents that is not in demand in the market to building additional capacity to produce value locally, potentially leading to what we are discussing in the Resilience thread.

It is a way to collaborate in the realization of our mutual wellbeing.

It is local production for local consumptions as advocated by the Balle groups.

It is a way to express our values of caring about our fellow humans and the environment by helping others realize their "value" to the community.

These connections between issues, the way one issue impacts another issue, are what I am interested in - and I apologize in advance where that appears that I am "off topic".

Oh my God am sorry have been offline but am now back and am to participate here often its quite Interesting Thanks all

I'm sure you're familiar with the Metacurrency Project, David. I want to take a snippet from that page exaplaining how various metacurrencies are alike:

"formal information systems that allow communities to interact with flows"

Recently from Jan Chipchase's blog I saw a photo of a California farmer's market. People using food stamps would authenticate by swiping a card at a central location. Then they would charge an amount to their account and get wooden tokens--wooden nickels--to use to go buy and haggle from the individual vendors who all work on a cash basis. The vendors then would redeem their wooden currency at the end of the day.

So that's a little off-topic, I raise it because the shares are a sort of metacurrency. I think there are many benefits to having a symbolic system to signify value.

There are many Time Dollar schemes around, in the USA mostly associated with elder healthcare. A sort of dirty little secret about Time Dollar schemes is that they depend on some people not ever cashing in. It would seem this might be a fatal flaw, but in practice doesn't seem to be one. People appreciate that the value of their service is recognized, and that should they ever need to use the services they have a place on the roll. The value isn't just in the cashing in, part of the value is a little like an insurance policy.

There were several examples of "local currencies" being promoted at the Balle conference. Art Brock is developing what he calls a "recirculating gift certificate" through our local Balle organization and there was a representative from Sonoma County where they have a system based on a credit card like electronic transactions.

In all these currencies, the symbolic system is separate from the value itself. They are arbitrary measures of value that people treat as having intrinsic value as a function of the trust they place in being able to redeem them. If a group of people owns the capacity to produce value - and the PoP represents a right to partake of that value - the dynamic changes. It is then more like the wealth of Bill Gates represented by his shares in Microsoft.

The next set of transactions I would like to add to the growing of food would be an exchange of services much like the way time banks works - and then combine that with "value added" production - like cooking food for people - as in the So All May Eat Cafe.

David, I'm not yet clear on whether you have participants (how many?) or if this is still an idea waiting to be born... I like the idea, but want more info on what's actually happened so far before thinking over how to advise you on attracting more participants.

Hugs to you - C

Thank you for the offer Christina. There are actually two active gardens. One in Boulder and One in Broomfield. You can see some pictures at Nice-World.org. Click on the garden link in the upper left.

We have yet to attract a dedicated core of people to take responsibility for the Boulder garden.

The Broomfield garden has a "core group" that originated in the local transition movement. I have explained "proof of participation" to them but that is not yet their primary motivation. They are motivated either by the love of gardening or the fear of peak oil and climate change.

By the end of the year we should have a better idea of what it takes to produce from this system and what it will take to produce abundance . . .

You are faster than me David....I was out gathering the links and you popped on!

It seems to me, David, that proof of participation needn't be relevant to the motivation for gardening. What it does is facilitate a friendly and logistical solution for how to distribute the product of the gardening passion. I'd bet your pitch could take on much more weight once the groups have gone through at least one harvest season together.

Have you thought about working with youth groups in Boulder?

We have a connection with the campus ministry of the catholic church (University of Colorado). We have had some help from that group - they are recent graduates that are staying around to go to graduate school - and we may perhaps have more participation from that group when school starts again in August.

We also had some contact with the local high school agricultural program but that has not worked out yet. We have had some interest from the transition group in Boulder but no one willing to commit to making it happen. David Ward is acting as the garden coordinator and taking what volunteers he can find.

The local transition group that is working on our Broomfield garden asked me to be on their core group. Here is my response:

I want to thank you for the invitation to be on the core group. Don and I where talking about these issues, and it is primarily a difference in point of view. The Transition point of view is that we must prepare for the catastrophes that are on their way (and I don't dispute that they are) but my goal is organizing to heal nature and produce abundance - which is what we want to do even if technology ended up giving us unlimited energy and balancing the carbon in the atmosphere.

I would echo Brad's comment that this is about:

educating people about how and why to live in such an ecosystem on both intellectual and visceral levels.

In an ecosystem, each species is engaged in a series of exchanges with other species creating the "food web". An economy is no different - except that we humans have the capacity to be conscious of which exchanges we choose. So I see what we are doing as setting up new local exchanges - using resources that will otherwise go unused (the church's property, the horse manure, the potential of our neighbors). Not every one has to understand the how and the why, just enough to set up the exchanges - and people will participate in these new exchanges if they work better than the ones they have now.

When I talked to Don I was feeling a little overwhelmed and reluctant to commit to a regular evening meeting - but the more I think about it the more I see that our goals are the same - only expressed in different terms. So, if the offer is still open, I will be pleased to join the core group.

David Braden said:

...

When I talked to Don I was feeling a little overwhelmed and reluctant to commit to a regular evening meeting - but the more I think about it the more I see that our goals are the same - only expressed in different terms. So, if the offer is still open, I will be pleased to join the core group.

Bravo, David!

Have you read "The Great Turning"? (It is what I am reading right now and is pulling lots of strands together for me. It is dealing with the same issue you you are dealing with here. We can not let differences in defining the problem keep us from working together on what happens to result in the same solution.)

• Joanna Macy
• David Korten
• Riane Eisler

Thank you for the support Linda. Yes, I never wanted to be just another organization competing with all the other organizations. I wanted to move past the organizational imperatives we discussed to think of ourselves as a members of a community - and it is that community that must thrive if we are to have the opportunities we want for ourselves and our children.

I have not read The Great Turning or Korten's latest work but, I find much of this advocacy directed toward "policy makers". There is a role for government, but this will not be a top down solution. It will be a restructuring of our most basic transactions - implementation is necessarily local.

The Great Turning is essentially his personal story and how he has come to coalesce information from widely disparate sources - economists, development professionals, a Buddhist scholar and systems theorist, a microbiologist, an evolutionary biologist, a cultural historian, and civic leaders and citizens from around the globe - into a blueprint of sorts for building thriving local economies on a model that is people/life-centered, self-organizing and cooperative.

I think you might see a different side of Korten.

I finished installing drip system yesterday and now hope to get back to building the functionality in the Nice World web site. I am also starting a discussion with the Broomfield participants about an "executive committee" decision making structure. (Linda, as a participant, you will be getting an invitation to participate soon :-)