Random assembly

This week I've learned a concept of permaculture called "random assembly". It's what I used to call before "witch's brew". It means that, when you don't know what to do, just throw together all the elements that you think are needed, let them stew together, and see what happens. It's more or less what's been happening this week with the Transition stuff I've been involved in.

One of the random assemblies has been the Energy Fair. To be perfectly honest, it was my intention to follow that method, and that's why I sent an email round to a lot of people asking them to come together to do something about it. It's worked beyond my wildest dreams. Whether the results are successful or not is a different matter. On Monday, the Mad Scientist invited me to dinner with some of his friends, and one of them, Clever Salesguy, was somebody I wanted to add to the random assembly for the Energy Fair. Instead of accepting the job I saw for him to help with publicity, he pointed me to another two guys that might help. I thought things were moving in unexpected but definitely positive directions. I began suspecting that things were getting a little out of hand when I started seeing emails from Monologue Man spreading the word about the Energy Fair all over the place, before we have any idea of what we are doing, but I thought publicity is always good. Then, on Friday, Hyperlogical Man sent me an email that he had booked a venue that costs a thousand pounds. A flurry of emails from all sides ensued, mostly people throwing up their hands in panic. I still don't know what is going to happen there, and I'm supposed to be coordinating this!

The other random assembly was the Action Plan. I met with the Buddhist Engineer on Wednesday to talk about it and about other Transition stuff generally, then on Thursday was the Action Plan meeting, and it was attended only by the Buddhist Engineer, Hyperlogical Man and me. In spite of that, it was useful, in that I suddenly started to see the way forward with it. Obviously, I haven't been going about it in the right way, partly because I wanted to do things in what I thought was the logical order. What needs to be done, instead, is a random assembly in parallel of the three stages: the bones (finding the facts), the flesh (establish the key decisions) and the dress (telling the public what it would look like). Never mind logic, if people want to do the dress, let them. They will have to knit a new dress later, but what the hell.

On Saturday I went to the permaculture workshop where I learned the useful term of "random assembly". I also learned that I already knew what permaculture was, I was talking about it in my first home page I did in my early days of the Internet, still running but ignored:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/4430/life.html

I'm going to love it, now that I know the permaculture terms for the kind of things I'm always doing, the Transition guys are never going to hear the end of them!