Current Directions - What We Are Doing
The four capital groups have the following assignments for next time -
actually, lets make the deadline Monday, Sept 22, so we will have time
to assemble things to distribute on Tuesday at class.
1. Edit and finalize your group's definition and vision statements.
These should be tight, concise, well-worded, suitable for inclusion in
the paper and the survey.
2. Develop around 5 "core" survey questions concerning your capital
type that we can apply to a range of intentional and unintentional
communities. Look at the "community sustainability assessment" document
developed by the Global Ecovillage Network
(http://ena.ecovillage.org/English/index.html) as a starting point, but
we want a shorter, more focused set of questions, all in the "ranking"
format (i.e. on a scale of 1 to 5 rank your community's BLANK). Think
about what characteristics of each capital type might most affect the
performance and sustainability of the community.
3. Begin to search the web and other sources to develop a list of
communities to be surveyed. As you do this, also note what kind
of information is easily available on each community (i.e. size, age,
vision, energy efficiency, etc.) Each group should generate a
list of at least 20 communities that would be suitable for inclusion in
the survey. To avoid too much overlap, we decided to structure the
initial search as follows:
Human capital group: Ecovillages
Built Capital group: Co-housing
Social Capital group: Historical, Planned, and Utopian communities
Natural Capital group: Co-ops and Other
Jon Erickson's Ecological Economics class will survey "non-intentional
communities in Burlington and elsewhere using the same format, so we
can compare results.
