In connection with the remarks from @Technoshaman on Knowledge Gardening, I’m reminded of the how much I enjoyed having an allotment garden here in the UK (during the 3 years or so when I had one). It would have been a great thing to have during the pandemic and I’ve badly missed it!
I wonder if part of a sustainability model is building and sharing good habits. I know I need to work on that during this tricky time.
I think the wording above should probably be adjusted to generalize beyond “financial value”. For example, imagine that OGM developed practices that created some form of “ethical” (but non-financial) value, e.g., a space for mutual listening. Perhaps precisely because of the mutuality, it wouldn’t make sense for money to change hands over that. Nevertheless, certain principles of stewardship would apply (a little bit like with an allotment garden, in fact).
Relatedly, we were thinking in the Peeragogy project about how and where we might do some “customer development”. We thought: there are many people who, like us, are interested in “helping” or “learning” or “creating” or other such verbs. One example we spotted is a book about how to build an environmental movement. We wondered whether we might have something to offer to people and organizations in that space. They know about plants, animals, ecosystems, and corporations: but maybe there’s something extra we could offer based on our experience with peer learning and collaboration. We thought about this in two categories: a form of “peer teaching”, in which peeragogy itself is what we share; and “generic services”, in which we use peeragogy to solve some other problem for them. That was an interesting thought experiment, and building on that we sent off a quick LinkedIn request to the author of the book. if we arranged 20 or so interviews around these themes we might get a better sense of what peeragogy has to offer its “users”. But a key point to make here is that it’s not entirely clear whether money would ever play a role in any of those interactions. It’s not that we’re allergic to it! But maybe it’s fair to exchange one bit of knowledge for another (e.g., if the author wanted to write a chapter for our book, we could learn from her, and she could learn something from us in the process). This doesn’t solve the problem of putting food on the table… but maybe that’s where gardens, or day jobs, come into play. (And both of these could have peeragogical aspects.)
