Introducing: Montague Commoners' Guilds
Hey all! Finally getting caught up on things around here. We've got a pretty big new thing to announce this week, so let's get right to it:
Coming up this month:
- Friday, April 3rd, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
- Friday, April 10th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
- Tuesday, April 14th, 5-7pm - Common Ground is hosting a discussion at the White Lake Community Library! This month: "AI" is all over the media and business worlds, but how does it actually work? Nathan Fry is a senior software engineer who specializes in machine learning algorithms. He'll explain the many different technologies that get grouped together under the "AI" umbrella, how Large Language Models (chatbots) are able to generate their realistic-looking answers, and why it's so easy for them to get things wrong.
- Thursday, April 16th, 11am-1pm - Open Studio time at the Nuveen Art Center! Get to know other local artists while you work on whatever you'd like.
- Friday, April 17th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
- Friday, April 24th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
- Saturday, April 25 12-4 - Earth Day Lakeshore in Grand Haven - Gather for the Green March at noon (Ottawa Co. Courthouse Parking Lot) bring signs/banners to walk/bike the route. 1-4pm is an indoor fair and outdoor electric vehicle expo at the First Presbyterian Church Grand Haven.
- Sunday, April 26, 1-4pm - Trash Bash, a community wide clean-up! Meet at the Chamber of Commerce (124 W. Hanson St. in Whitehall) at 1pm for brief instructions. All ages and group sizes are welcome. Dress for the weather and task (long sleeve shirt, sunscreen, gloves, hats, etc.) Trash bags supplied.
This Week in Nature
Spring ephemerals are starting to pop all around town! These are flowering plant species who have evolved to survive in a woodland environment by sprouting early, blooming quickly, and gathering enough energy to reproduce before the trees above them leaf out in the spring. In our yard, we get crocuses, Glory-of-the-snow, Virginia Spring-beauty, Lily-of-the-valley, and Jack-in-the-pulpit. They provide a nice little floral calendar through the weeks of early spring, and it's nice to have something to check on when Nate and I take our daily walk.
This Week in Giant Sandwiches
I've been teasing you all for a couple of weeks about the giant fabric sandwich that Tamara and I were making, and I'm pleased to be able to report that it made it on the news! Check out the video above to see it in action, with Tamara explaining how it works. We're pretty happy with how it came out in the limited time we had, and we're already full of ideas for improving it for next time!
Training opportunity!
Sociocracy is a set of tools and principles that people can use to work together on complex tasks without getting bogged down in power games or bureaucracy. It lends itself very well to workers' co-ops and other co-operative projects, and it's a big part of how Montague Commoners operates behind the scenes. Sociocracy For All, an organization that provides free and low-cost digital training to individuals and co-ops, is offering a free one-hour webinar on Thursday, April 9th at noon. This is a great opportunity to learn the basics if you're interested in getting involved in one of our new guilds.
Speaking of which: Guilds!
I make a lot of jokes about Montague Commoners secretly being 30 squirrels in a trench-coat, because we have a LOT of different projects going on, and they tend to progress on a fairly chaotic basis. It's been a strategy that's allowed us to accomplish a lot in the last few years, but it makes it hard to recruit new members into the chaotic squirrel army when I'm the only one who knows where all the nuts are buried 🤣
A lot of folks out there are looking for a way to get involved in their communities, and to build the local systems and resources that we're going to need if the outside world continues to break down. We want to be able to offer them an easy path to plug into the work that we're doing, and that means getting a little more organized.
So in between rounds of giant sandwich stitching, I've been working out some of the details for the next step in the growth of Montague Commoners, and I think they're starting to get ready to share.
How Guilds are Organized
Like a lot of our projects, our Guilds model is based on a braiding of traditional co-operative practices from pre-imperial Europe, co-operative practices from Indigenous traditions around the world, and innovations from modern co-operative movements.
Each guild is a group of people with skills or interests in common, who want to use those skills to help the community, and who want to work together to make their work more effective. They're defined by the work that their members choose to do together, not by formal rules and structures. The people in the Firewood Guild are the people who are helping gather and prep firewood. The people in the Crafters' Guild are the people who are making things for the Commons. In that sense, a lot of these guilds already exist. They're just mostly me wearing 25 different hats. Or in the case of the larger guilds, me, Nate, and one or two of the other people we drag in sometimes 😂
Our goal for this phase of the expansion is to take as many of the guilds as possible from "one of Wiley's many hats" to "five or six people in a group text". We'll be featuring a different guild each week in the newsletter, with details about the work that guild currently does for the Commons, as well as what that guild might be able to do if it had a little more people power behind it. I'll also be going into more detail about how the Commons works as a whole, and how we can build a co-operative economy based on traditional rural practices of solidarity and mutual aid.
In the meantime, if you want to get on the contact list for a particular guild, you can reply to this newsletter with your email address, phone number, and whether you're on Signal yet. If you're not on Signal and you'd like some help setting it up, just ask a member of the Tech Guild (me and Nate 🤣)
Recommendation Corner
The Economists' Hour by Binyamin Appelbaum is a great read for anyone who wants to understand why all of our institutions have been coming apart at the seams. It was published in 2019, so it stops before the massive acceleration in TechBro bullsh*t that we've seen since then, but it offers valuable insight into the ideologies that drive a lot of Silicon Valley's thinking.
This Week's Nails
You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! Nail art this week is celebrating the crocuses and other early spring sprouts starting to pop up this week.
Have a good week, try not to wash away in all this rain, and I'll see you back here next week.