Getting Started - 19 January 2005

Opening Questions to Cafe members. 19 January 05

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

In brief: We really don't want this to be an unwanted burden on your time, but that said some form of feedback from the 101 members of this fine café would be most timely in helping me/us decide what if anything to do next with all this. If nothing else, it would be good to have your suggestions on:

(a) groups and programs that we should be linking to;
(b) colleagues whom you think should also be brought aboard; and finally
(c) your views and perspectives on what we are trying to do here.

Now, on to the main text:

Letter of 19 January to Group (Shopping list for comments, etc.)

Paris, 19 January 2005

Dear Patient Land Café Patrons,

Here we are, ready for you, and if it risks to take a bit of your time and thought, we do believe that it's in a good cause and we very much hope that it will prove useful to each of you and far beyond. So, to follow on from this morning's introductory broadside. We believe we have a pretty fair Mach 2 draft of the site, to the point where we can start to put it before you for your comments and guidance.

1. www.landcafe.org: If we can look at the new site for the Land Café, I would now like to scan it together with you for strong points (that surely can be made stronger) and weak points and omissions (hopefully with your guidelines and content to help make good). But before we do that I would like you to spend as much time as your interest and schedule allows to review what we have managed to bring together here thus far (the "In Brief" link to the left should help to gear you up for an efficient maiden visit).

And once you have satisfied yourself with this first tour of the premises, here are my first questions for you.

Is what is laid out here in this preliminary form going to be worth doing at all?
Is it simply too optimistic that we can among us come together to create a Self-Organizing Collaborative Network which could suffice to do such a big job. Even without resources as has been the case thus far? Is someone else out there who has tackled the same job and is doing it much better? And if so, should we just fold our tent and move away?
Or should we somehow refocus and still try to make a contribution as best we can?

Once we get over this first hump, it starts to be time to hear from you on some broad strategic points, For example:

2. Overall Presentation/Approach:

Does the proposed approach make it reasonably easy and agreeable to dig into these materials and tools?
The Café as a "First Stop Shop"? It strikes me, again based on our past experience with other programs, that if we are to be useful as a "first stop shop" for LVT/VC information, collaboration, support and action, we will need to give a lot of care to content, organization and to our commitment to make this useful.
We have undertaken this with a fair degree of success with a number of our focus programs under The Commons. I can point you to the New Mobility Agenda at http://www.newmobility.org for what I regard as a pretty good example.)

3. Naming it:

To start really at the beginning: Do we have the right name for this collaborative enterprise at this point? Are we aiming to create a café - the café we got - and if so what should be calling it?
For the right choice here it will help if we consider what the whole thing is all about. For example, I still have some difficulty in bridging the "Land Value Tax" / "Value Capture" breach. I realize of course that the latter is a sub-set of the former, but might it just be that it is here where we may have the greatest leverage for change?
Then too, might it be that the world has a problem with the word 'tax', an automatic negative, turn it off reaction? The rather agreeable part of Value Capture as a title is that it leaves out this very hot (often more heat than light) word. (Course Value Capture also has another business/corporate life, but I for one have no trouble with that.)
Is the old "Development Land Tax" easier both to swallow and understand?
(The nice thing about "Value Added" as a term, "tax" and all, is that it has a positive ring. But as we know, all is in the details. Hmm.
I vote that we play with this a bit together , that being one of the nice things about the web. We can give it a couple of whacks and once we see it in place for a while, it will suddenly start to come together.

4. Critical Mass/Participants:

Numbers: Even as we kick off, what I can report to you is that based on our decade-plus of experience with this sort of thing, our core group is too small for this next stage. Today, we have one hundred and one "members" who are signed in; experience suggests that we need at least x2 that. So are you prepared to help us reach out and bring in other qualified people and colleagues so as to move us closer to critical mass.
Greater diversity: Is not anyone here struck by the fact that for the most part we are not only devoid of women, but most of us are old(ish) "white" males, more or less Anglo in culture if not ethnicity, and while not rolling in cash at least more or less safe in our warm corner.
It's my theory that this monoculture approach simply ever works when it comes to the sort of large scale social and economic change that we all are talking about here. So, not only do we need more people here, but we also need more women, more of other nationalities and cultures, and certainly more young people.

5. The Top Menu and the Tools: Good place to state - intended for fast navigation and quick updating.

Navigation: The key here will be to click the Navigate link on the top menu. You'll see -item by item. (And here too we need your critical counsel and suggestions on each and all.)
The Cooperative Blog: You might also want to have a close look at the cooperative blog that we have just set up. This adds a new dimension to our exchange possibilities. We intend to invite all 101 (plus) of us so that it is wide open for our collective private use. If you have not yet received your invitation to participate, please do get in touch.
Wikipedia: Not perhaps as marginal as you may think? Check it out and if you wish, jump in to make it better. If one of our goals is to open up our topic for a world seeking new ideas, the Wikipedia is one place that many journalists, researchers and others may start their search. I would like to think that as an example of what we like to call a Self-Organizing Collaborative Network - much like the Café itself - this will get your attention and that you will share your thoughts with us all on this as well.
The rest under this section is pretty straight-forward, but is up for comment and your suggestions as well.

6. What we hope to get from you in this first instance:

More on Related Groups/Programs: Your suggestions for other groups/program with whom we should at least be linking, possibly doing more. If at all possible, it would be great to have their . . . (a) names, (b) URL, and (c) some kind of contact. Also if you would have a few lines of background on them for the others, we can also incorporate this into the expanded 'elated programs section'.
Key Documents: Likewise, if you can point us to any key documents that we should be having in our shared library that relate to our new innovation/implementation focus (as opposed to history or theory per se), we can put them on file for the others as well.

7. The Gaping Hole: LVT in Action. The most important section of all - and indeed the very reason for getting into all this - is at present a gaping void: LVT in Action.

From the beginning we welcome your references and supporting materials in this key component of this new program. But we also understand that this is going to be the result of the networking and sharing process that we are now just launching. We are hopeful that a lot of this input will come from the other groups and programs with whom we intend to take contact - with your help.

That's it. At this point we intend just to sit back and see what comes in from all of you. If time permits we may give a few more whacks to the web site and maybe some of the tools, but by and large we would say that for the time being the ball is in your court.