How to get involved

So Volunteering for this project is pretty straight forward. If you have something to add, an on-going project perhaps, a useful idea that might work, be good to hear about it. The idea of a collective is to avoid reinventing the wheel. If other people are doing it, we will support it and help out where we can. If folk are interested in helping out with the subject matter on our "TOOL BOX" page or have skills in these areas be good to hear from them. It would also be good to hear about articles, things and projects we should know about. As part of the idea is to encourage active citizens or maybe inhabitants is a better word our subject matter will be wide and inclusive as the components that make up our city are, art culture commerce, politics and so on.

At this stage we do not have the capacity to do training workshops, but that may change. At the moment we are looking for folk with people skills and motivation we can find a place for most people and interests. 

This project is based in Glasgow but the content will be useful to any community, city, village anywhere. Our geography should not be a barrier to sharing ideas and information.

Money

The project has no money apart from what we spend ourselves and we do not intend spending any of our time applying for funding, which we believe can be more of a hindrance sometimes. In a way we are trying to attract folk who are not busy, new people, new blood to support the jaded and the too busy activist.People who have knowledge that can help to widen the horizons of others. People from the blighted communities of the east end and else where. Folk who are practical and useful who can make pots of soup. Folk eager to learn about the world and what we can share. There is no membership card of anything only an understanding that collaboration is one of the main things that will get us out of this miopic neoliberal dystopian place we find ourselves in.

We are happy to meet up, discuss ideas with people, do presentations to groups, schools... 

We need to emphasis, we are not service providers. We are not here just to give people something to do, to entertain them, or keep them busy. These are things we fully endorse. But they can also be used to maintain the status quo. We want to change the world as well as understand it. It is about an exercise in access, collabourations, in encouraging, solidarity and citizenship through some collective and uncontroversial, aims. Like that well used phrase, but rarely practice. We are all in it together.

Time

The whole idea here is commonality, collectivity and creativity. We are all too busy we can take this as a given. Here lies the major question. Why? 

We need to start living for each other as human beings. Why do we put up with a dog-eats-dog life. We need to find out what connects us and work with that. We hope to uncover at least some of the pragmatic questions that need to be answered that will help to build energy for change through the participation of ordinary people. It's a no brainer we give up so much to be represented by giving permission to people in suits to do as they please. and they persistently fail us. Then we pay again for their failures with our money as well as our time. It's no wonder then we have none.

Place bases learning

There is a need for place based education. Not to look at the wonderful successes of our overly consumerist world-class city, but to look at its failures. From 2007 the year before the banks crashed till now, Scotland lost 2,870 teachers. This in a country that once had a world class "education" system. While many over worked teachers do their best slaving in their class rooms, where they are being forced to educate students into well formed consumers. We need to remember the education for life we inherit from our families, friends and mentors, that is what we want to talk about here. And that is what has been sadly lost from our communities. We need to invest in real social interaction, not Bezos $160,899,304,840.03. Facebook can not exploit this kind of direct interaction it belongs only to ourselves.