New subject: [omni-discuss] Fwd: Pleas send out over your networks TODAY? ???!!

14 Jan 2015

Filling in on this panel by last-minute request. Promoting the Omni Commons
fund-raising campaign and seeking connections to others who can contribute.

The Grange represents a very intriguing parallel organizing history to our
initiative with Omni Commons, I would enjoy engaging others in comparisons,
etc. What does the struggle over the commons look like in rural vs urban
contexts?

// Matt

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Severine von Tscharner Fleming &lt;smithereen(a)me.com&gt;
Date: Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 2:48 PM
Subject: Pleas send out over your networks TODAY? ???!!
To: Matthew Senate &lt;mattsenate(a)gmail.com&gt;

*Tonight from 7-9 PM Grange Future will be inhabiting the community space
that is Shaping SF <http://www.shapingsf.org/>. We will have presentations
by Matt Senate, Brewster Kahle and Severine Fleming along with our
traveling Grange Future pop-up exhibit on display.  The event is free and
open to the public. *

Mutual aid societies proliferated during the gilded age, as workers,
miners, loggers, and farmers joined together in fraternal orders. The
Grange, or  patrons of husbandry" was such an order, founded in 1867 by
forward thinking farmer Oliver Kelley, assisted by his niece Caroline
Hall. Grange
Future <http://www.grangefuture.org/> is a celebratory tour organized by
Greenhorns <http://www.thegreenhorns.net/>, a young farmers cultural
organization. This will be our 9th stop on the tour-- investigating the
revival and preservation of the grange as a commons. It's an
inter-generational event to help interpret the radical history, and
potential of the grange for both greenhorns and the grey-hairs who've
loyally tended this community-owned institution, its lovely halls and
ritual practices.

As victorian as it is Occupy, the grange holds a powerful critique of
monopoly capitalism. The grange was the first order to give equal votes to
women, and operated as a social hall, economic reform organ, and
legislative training facility for the populist movement.  Grangers believed
mightily in yeoman agriculture, in direct democracy, and in equal access to
information and science. Grangers successfully organized thousands of
co-operatives across the country as well as the 8 "Granger laws" regulating
railroad monopolies, and lobbied successfully for Rural Free Mail Delivery
-- the equivalent in its day to rural broadband or electrification.

Aren't today's cooperatives
<http://www.thegreenhorns.net/guidebooks/cooperativefarming/>, open source
licenses, hacker-spaces and mutual-aid associations an analog response to
Gilded-age type concentration of capital? Is the grange a venue for the sharing
economy
<http://communityenterpriselaw.org/forming-community-enterprise/nonprofit-organizations-in-the-sharing-economy/>,
today's populists and common-wealth advocates working on a public-banking
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/post-office-banking-_n_4776767.html>
to
rescue a failing Post Office (threatened with privatization), the community
seed banks (threatened with USDA regulation), to host buying clubs,
co-packing facilities, affordable rural day-care and fix-it potlucks? As a
generation with 1.3 trillion dollars in student loans, don't we need a
club-house for community action, democracy schools, and doesn't it not
matter if we aren't all farmers?

This tour brings a multi-format exhibit showcasing the radical themes of
Grange history to more than a dozen Grange halls in the state of
California. It’s a chance to interact with next-generation grangers working
on inter-generational truce-making. It's a chance to learn how to operate
the microphones, the power breakers, the correct arrangement of pots. In
short, it's a place to meet the keepers of the Commons. Severine has
created a slide show presentation with contemporary echoes of Grange
Spirit. We continue to sniff out and study, and perform oral histories on
emergent cultural forms and trends. So far we’ve documented: Pancake
breakfasts, benevolent societies, community orchards, seed libraries, and
community canneries. Our exploration of past and present populism
continues. Listenhere
<http://thegreenhorns.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=df3f36b607325b38808f5e844&id=269f4efa92&e=988f710374>
for
the podcasts of the Grange Future Oral history project.

Matt Senate collaborates with many others on the Omni Commons, a
grass-roots initiative to forge a commons in the east bay within a 20,000
square foot former Italian social club (and former music venue). Using a
spokes-council model and horizontalist organizing practices, the Omni
Oakland Collective is constituted by member collectives and operates on a
consensus-based process, as well as with do-ocratic values. He is a
co-founder of the Sudo Room, an Omni Commons member collective, and home of
the Sudo Mesh project launching the People's Open Network, a
community-owned and -operated wireless mesh network.

Brewster Kahle <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle> has been
working to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge for more than
twenty-five years. Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing
technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle
invented the Internet's first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area
Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering
electronic publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In
1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital
library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog
the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com <http://amazon.com/> in
1999. Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W.
Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. In 1983, Kahle helped start Thinking
Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as a lead engineer
for six years. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive,
and the Internet Archive.

Severine Fleming is a farmer, activist, and organizer based in the
Champlain Valley of New York. She is director of Greenhorns
<http://www.thegreenhorns.net/>, a grassroots organization with the mission
to recruit, promote and support the rising generation of new farmers in
America. Severine has spent the last seven years gathering, bundling and
broadcasting the voices and vision of young agrarians. Greenhorns runs a
weekly radio show on Heritage Radio Network
<http://www.heritageradionetwork.org/> and a popular blog. They produce
many kinds of media, from documentary films to almanacs, anthologies,
mix-tapes, posters, guidebooks and digital maps. They are best known the
documentary film, “The Greenhorns”
<http://www.thegreenhorns.net/category/media/documentary/> and the raucous
young farmer mixers they’ve thrown in 37 states and 14 grange halls.
Severine is co-founder and board secretary of Farm Hack
<http://farmhack.net/home/>, an online, open-source platform for
appropriate and affordable farm tools and technologies, as well asNational
Young Farmers Coalition <http://www.youngfarmers.org/> which now boasts 23
state and regional coalitions.  She serves on the board of the Schumacher
Center for New Economics, which hosts Agrarian Trust,
<http://agrariantrust.org/> her latest startup, focused on land access for
beginning farmers, and permanent protection of affordable organic farmland.

Grange Future is a community history project undertaken by The Greenhorns
to investigate the the Patrons of Husbandry as a 125 year old populist
movement, and to showcase the Granges and Grange-like organizations
continuing to work, and organize in this spirit. We see the Granges as an
appropriate vessel for futurist, family-farm oriented community action,
with a strong basis in economic theory, resistance and cooperation. We hope
to embolden greenhorns in our network with an entry-point into the grange
movement, to unlock and revive the many grange halls currently hibernating:
to use the syllabus of past actions to inform contemporary ones, and to
reclaim the radical politics of the grange at the local and national
levels. With this project we’ve captured the history and current activities
in audio, visual, and written form, we’re gleaning the institutional wisdom
from decades of agrarian organizing, and connecting with the broad
community tackling similar themes throughout the nation. Community is the
pre-condition for action, if you too feel inspired by the grange, we hope
you will join in the convening, the kinship and the future-making.