Putting the Land Cafe to work

22 Jan 06: Every page here is a working draft. Please comment & help us improve

Your first visit? Some hints to get you up to speed.

The Land Cafe is an informal shared public interest knowledge building consortium -- we call it a Self-Organizing Collaborative Network -- which has been created under The Commons as an independent Open Society forum, specifically to serve and bring together people and groups around the world who are interested to find ways for our societies to come to grips with the troubling but important issues of value capture and land tax reform in an age in which important public services remain substantially under-funded.

About us
Who we are? Why we are here? And what we aim to achieve

Side Menu Bar ("Table of Contents")
Your first guide in getting around here, the main Menu Bar just to your left is your constant companion and source of orientation as you move around the site. Your ever-present 'Table of Contents', which expands to provide links to additional programs and items. If this is your first visit we suggest you to take a moment to click your way down it quickly to get a feel for how the site is organized (but only after you have first had a look at the Top Menu and Navigate page).

Top Quick Bar ("Bookmarks")
Intended to provide a Quick Guide for those who access and use the site on a regular basis and wish to stay up to date on latest developments around the world. Also a great way to start out your first visit here.

A free, public, flexible repository for sharing documents and reports (see Files to your left) and key links to other programs and site (see Links), and creative discussion space for people and groups who feel that we need to do a lot better in these important areas of society. The Café is a public service of The Commons. We welcome diversity of background, culture and views -- and stay open 24 hours a day for people who wish freely to exchange ideas and information about it in a plain-speaking but ever civil way. Like any good café, it's important that we be good listeners as well as interesting talkers. The Factory is fully searchable, which helps make this not just a place for once-off, fast-forgotten exchanges but an accessible database of expert commentary and discussions.

Check out the Message Center here.
Look through the Shared Library here. (And add it ot for the others.)
And here the Bookmarks and Links to other programs ans sources.

This newsfeed organized through Google News calls up related items from the print press in English drawn from the web and covering more than four thousand news sources. Each search is carefully focused. Roughly 90% of the entries relate to our target topic.

Also useful to visit from time to time and check up your world view. You may be surprised. This train is not stuck in the station.

(We intend to extend this and other portions of the site to pick up related news from other language sources. See Translation Aids below)

Hello once again: As part of this work in progress around the extension of our joint project, this is to invite you to have a look at our new group blog in support of the new Land Café -- open 24/7 to all our members and there for you to share your ideas and insights with the world.

The Blog is intended to add yet one more dimension to our group work toolset, by providing a broader forum for posting your ideas and proposals which stretches beyond our usual email messages both in terms of length, perhaps compositional effort on your part, and, we would like to think, their eventual outreach and impact. (The Blog is indexed and regularly scrutinized by the Google search engine and others, thus ensuring a broader reach of all that appears there. Unlike the messages which are subject to (we hope light and useful) moderation, blog items posted by our invited colleagues will remain untouched unedited.)

One of the handy things the blog offers is short (250 word) XML Site Feed (Summaries). You'll see it just to the right on the blog itself. (And we look forward to making this better.)

Are you already on our Land Cafe blog team? If not, please get in touch and we'll make good on that.

This is how we and others who share our interests and concerns can define and make ourselves known to the world in 2006. Wikipedia - The first place a journalist, researcher or student is going to look to find out what this is all about. It is our job too to make sure that this entry is accurate and complete.

A good place to start is our own Wikiepdia intro page here.
Check out the current entry for Land Value Taxes here (own window)
And for Value Capture here. (ditto)

And while you are there why not lend a hand and help us all ensure that the entries are accurate and complete.

Behind each of these entries are some really quite intersting dialogues which you may also want to check out. For example:

The 'Talk dialogue', together with the no-less elucidating history section for for Land Value Tax
And ditto for much newer (actually original to us in these last days) Value Capture dialogues: Talk, and History.

But before you dig in to make actual changes, etc., we invite you to have a look at our Wikipedia user hints page here.

These tools work only for the genuinely curious and flexible. But for such people they offer surprisingly useful insights as to what is going on in other language parts of the world. (Bear in mind that these machine renderings are not so much "translations" as usually understood as "hints". You'll see. Very useful for the genuinely curious!)

This entire project and approach is predicated on the basis of easy and efficient interaction and exchange. Have a look to see the ways you can link to us, and to each other.

As you will see from the menu, we have built in a one click Skype link in order to facilitate easier and fuller contact among members of the group.

As you will see if you click above, Skype also provides a pretty good place to hold group conferences and get-togethers (depending on your willingness to take the care to organize properly and make full use of the quite handy toolset - for parallel chatting and text exchanges, one click information on websites for co-access, parallel high speed file transmittal, introducing new members, agenda modification, etc.) All in all pretty good and well worth giving it a spin.

You will need these only if you are not a confirmed user of the web.

Putting the Land Cafe to work on a daily basis

Here is how we recommend you gear up your work routine if you wish to be kept fully and easily up to date on developments world wide. We ourselves in our counterman roll tend to check in every day. Most of you however will simply not have the time, so we advise you visit regularly from the home page here. With the right routine, it can be very efficient.

For starters we recommend you switch to Mozilla Firefox as your browser if you have not already done so, and that you have it loaded automatically each day as you start up. Why Firefox" Well simply not only because it is faster and more secure (brrrhhh) than IE, but also because it offers "tabbed browsing" (a terrific research aid) and permits you to start up each day with your preferred selection of sites on line for quick reference. We for example call up all of the sites under The Commons and of course the Café', to check with a couple of quick clicks the latest news and developments in each case.
Once in The Café' we then tab quickly across our top (quick) menu to check out the latest on: :
- Latest News Alerts (carefully tailored to ensure relevant references);
- The Message Center - to get the latest from our expert forum.
- The Co-Blog - to see who has contributed what there of late.. We always make it a habit to accessing the Forum discussions via this the main Land Cafe homepage and menus. Why? Well because we find it a great help in presenting the various bits and pieces of the communications in an easier to understand broader frame and perspective.
- Searching: Click here to the Messages page, for example. Here are a few hints that you may find helpful:
  - We click the "Date" column heading to the top right to make sure we have the latest entries up top for a first scan - using the "Summary" view (top left)
  - We then click the Thread view option (also upper left) which, when we have managed to respect the continuity of the topic headings, gives us a nice cluster of all the communications addressing that topic.
  - Finally there is the very good Search tool for the messages database. Try it for example for "housing", "Harrisburg", or "Metz" to get a feeling for how useful this can be for your research or updating.
  - Note: When it is time to post to the group, there is a short Welcoming Note that we kindly ask you to read before sending your first message. We all thank you for that courtesy.
- The Cooperative Blog - We always like to have a quick look-in to see what new has arrived. This is a creative group and the blog gives us a good way to share our more lengthy thoughts. (You will also see that the blog comes armed with an XMS Site Feed summary features, a handy time saver that permits you to scan the first 250 words of each piece to decide if you wish to read on.)
Need some help with your project or program? Click here.
And to get in touch: Click here.