Hallo ihr,
hoffe ihr seid gut ins neue Jahr gestartet.
Bei uns geht die Renovierung weiter und ihr seid herzlich eingeladen vorbeizukommen.
Es gibt diese und nächste Woche noch allerhand zu tun und am 16.1 um 11 Uhr eröffnet
der Malraum Witzenhausen seine Türen.
Dazu seid ihr natürlich auch eingeladen und vorher freuen wir uns über jede helfende Hand.
Schreibt einfach an info@ttwitzenhausen.de oder ruft mal an 05542 6170347
es sind eigentlich immer Leute tagsüber da
und ihr könnt immer irgendwas machen, Lehm, Streichen, Holzarbeiten, Aufräumen und Saubermachen.
Bis vielleicht bald,
Silvia
First of all, I wish every one of you a happy 2015, where the pressure of growth (or to grow) does not occupy all the spaces and times for joyful conviviality!
We begin this year with a lot of exciting news regarding our GROWL network. I will not go into extensive details, but rather give you some highlights that hopefully will make you jump into this platform and start collaborating in the production of degrowth education materials, or simply to interact with other fellows!
International course applications
The selection procedure for the GROWL international courses in 2015 is still not completed. We have had over 150 (international) applications and having all 9 partners agree on who to send abroad and who to host on each course has revealed to be quite a task!
Each partner will contact the applicants of their own country as soon as the places are confirmed. If you are not contacted until the end of the month, please complain!
For now - and because GROWL is much more than just attending courses - we have added all of you who applied to international courses to this platform and space (if you are new, you should have received login information per e-mail a while ago; if you don't know your access credentials click here to request again). Use this platform to collaborate on the development of materials, get in contact with others, offer your help, or just look around to get inspired.
Website has been redesigned
Me and @Wojtek have been trying to improve the user experience with the GROWL site. We did a few changes to reduce the complicated structure and make it more attractive to visiting users, as well as to active collaborators. New sections (like this blog) have been added to improve our communication.
We are still working on it and our hands, fingers and brains are limited, so we welcome anyone willing to help :)
Training materials have been "open-sourced"
Until now we have been working on more or less closed doors on the production of training materials. Despite our will to produce open knowledge, we were not clear on the form, structure and content of the modules and did not really have a good enough structure to present to a non-engaged people. Well, it's still not perfect, but some of these modules start to gain form
Scrum sprints and peer production of modules
We use an agile project development methodology called "Scrum" to collaboratively work on the materials. @Eleftheria is working on a short presentation that explains in a very simple way how it works, but you can also find a lot of information about it on the net.
We have made a few monthly sprints until now, but now we want to open and invite the larger GROWL community to also take part. The quality of the developed modules depends largely on your engagement, so please consider taking the time to join the next sprint planning meeting on Tuesday!
That's all for now. Feel free to leave your comments and remarks on this post. Or to write to the international office if you have any doubts, questions or concerns.
And, for those that are receiving their first mail from GROWL - welcome to our community!
Recent news: 12 people killed, among them many people involved in Charlie Hebdo, a humorous french journal with a long history following the 1968 events in France.
We should really give tribute for their fair humoristic non violent fight against all types of extreme rights, be it religious (with extremist interpretation of islam, sionism, christianity, catholics) or racist in general. It is very interesting to see that the killers, if they are islamist, did not target the islamophobes. There seem to be some kind of implicit, and sometimes explicit, alliance between all of those that fight for closure and exclusion.
It might be a coincidence but the cartoonists and journalists killed were also very involved against the religion of growth: most of them also growth critics and degrowth supporters.
Charlie Hebdo, in their way since many years in the emergence of the idea of degrowth with the cartoon an 01 http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27An_01_%28bande_dessin%C3%A9e%29 (1970's)
which made a fantastic film which everyone should see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAe6776kbQ (1973) where Cabu and wolinski participated (both were executed yesterday). Bernard Maris another executed had written many texts against growth. Charlie Hebdo invented the figure of the "degrowther" (décroissant) in their humoristic way, which participated in the emergence of the term décroissance in France.
Liberty is a fight
Francois
Bernard Maris on growth
Growth ", the most horrible word is growth ... to where? the sky? wisdom? horror? This word should be banned from the vocabulary. Growth does not mean anything. When I'm in a traffic jam, I make growth (I consume gasoline, so I grow as GDP equals consumption plus investmen, and I consume not only gasoline, but also the social security system, since it ruins my nerves). What could be the word substitute for growth? Activity. Men act, move, invent, transform. This activity is it beneficial or not for the species, that is the question.
Personally, I support the ecological stream of degrowth. After the war, liberalism triumphed by offering a way of managing violence which would be based on free trade: you should trade rather than make war. Socialists and Communists offered another contract, based on sharing, but always with material abundance in sight. We must now move towards spiritual abundance, with a contract based on intelligence and research. But socialism is still caught in the productivist maelstrom .
translation from:
Bernard Maris: Croissance », le mot le plus détestable… Croissance vers où ? le ciel ? la sagesse? l’horreur? Ce mot devrait être banni du vocabulaire. Croissance ne veut rien dire. Quand je suis dans un embouteillage, je fais de la croissance (je consomme de l’essence, donc je croîs, car PIB égale consommation plus investissement; et je consomme non seulement de l’essence, mais aussi de la Sécu, puisque je me ruine les nerfs). Quel mot substituer à croissance? Activité. Les hommes agissent, bougent, inventent, transforment. Cette activité est-elle bénéfique ou non pour l’espèce, voilà la question.
http://www.liberation.fr/economie/2012/11/07/le-socialisme-est-une-doctr...
A titre personnel, je me raccroche au courant écologiste décroissant. Après la guerre, le libéralisme a triomphé en proposant un mode de gestion de la violence fondé sur le libre-échange : on ferait du commerce au lieu de faire la guerre. Socialistes et communistes proposaient un autre contrat, fondé sur le partage, mais toujours avec l’abondance matérielle en ligne de mire. Il faut maintenant aller vers une abondance spirituelle, avec un contrat fondé sur l’intelligence et la recherche. Mais le socialisme reste pris dans le maelstrom productiviste.
Dear GROWLers,
we now finished the Documentation of the Leipzig Course "Mental infrastructures and Degrowth transformation", which took place in Leipzig, 2nd-11th of September, including the IV. International Degrowth Conference. You can find it here:
http://co-munity.net/mental-infrastructures/materials-0
What was the course about?
Mental infrastructures of growth are a persons' unconsciously internalized psychological, social and cultural settings. At the moment these models are strongly shaped by a growth-oriented pattern which affects also our actions and daily habits and helps keeping us from imagining – and building – a sustainable society. But if social and ecological transformation is very closely linked to a transformation of our mental infrastructures – how do we deal with these? Can we „change“ mental infrastructures? Do we want to change them? And how?
In the course we addressed the topic from different perspectives. We theoretically discussed infrastructures of growth and where they come from. Moreover, we tried to reflect our personal mental models and experimented with their convertibility by offering a variety of experience-based workshops.
In the documentation you find content and methodology of the course, please feel free to use it for your own work and to further distribute the ideas...
It was a wonderful experience, also for us as trainers. Hope to see you all again,
Susanne for the Leipzig organizing team
So, I have started finally to describe and fundament my understanding of the kind of social innovation we are generating with the use of agile processes, particularly the scrum methodology in GROWL. Feel free to comment or improve the wiki article, which is still in a preliminary form.
A short excerpt:
Our capacity to address the complex and urgent challenges that are presented in contemporary times depends on "abandon[ing] (...) ideas of ‘control and management” seriously by arguing that science should be the servant of outcomes framed in, primarily, societal terms, rather than the other way around" (Healy, 2011). I argue that precisely the same logic applies to education and the production of the knowledge related to the transformational processes ocurring in society and supporting degrowth.
"The increasing disciplinary specialisation of many in the academy simply renders specialists incapable of comprehending the systemic character of current problems and potential solutions." (Healy, 2011)
A postnormal "education" requires not only the access to quality facts, provided by open access and open knowledge, but also the promotion of processes within and accross online and offline communities of practice. This is part of the idea of a commons-based peer production of training materials.
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