Last night was the first General Meeting of Sackville’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative, with about 60 people in attendance in spite of the bad road conditions. Kent Coates, Director of the CSA and a local farmer, gave a good overview of why we need sustainable, local agriculture and what we can do.

We will have 60 memberships for local produce this year, up from 20 last year, and will stay there unless we get another farmer selling produce. We also have some local cattle ranchers offering natural beef.

As Kent said last night, “Fresh and Local Food requires Canadian Farmers to receive a fair price for their produce. The alternative is non-controlled imported food.” He went on to present these facts about imported food in Canada:

• Most Imported Food is not Inspected in Canada
• Less than 10% of imported food is inspected and it is not mandated to meet Health Canada Guidelines for Food production in Canada
• No Processed Food is inspected unless a complaint has been received
• The country of origin is not mandated on food labels

There was much food for thought last night …

Just back from a polished presentation by Richard Florida, hosted by Mount Allison University and the town of Sackville. Florida covered many of the basics from his previous books. I picked up Flight of the Creative Class (now in paperback) and will check out his new book when it’s on the shelves – Who’s Your City.

Florida reviewed the basic five pillars of any prosperous community, based on 30,000 surveys, from least to most important:

1. Basic Infrastructure
2. Opportunity to do what one wants
3. Leadership at all levels
4. Open minded and diverse culture
5. Quality of place

He also discussed the role that Canada can play in fostering prosperous communities for the post-industrial era because we seem to be more open to experimentation. It was good to see many members of our community attending the lecture and I feel that we may be ready to work hard at creating a more open and diverse town, because as Florida says, “People don’t move to the jobs; the jobs move to the people”. That would put New Brunswick’s recent population growth strategy as a step in the right direction:

The growth strategy has four areas of focus:

• increasing and targeting immigration;
• increasing settlement and promoting multiculturalism;
• retaining youth and repatriating former New Brunswickers; and
• adopting family-friendly policies.

Rob Paterson talks about the power of social media, especially Google Maps and Twitter, in a case study of San Diego’s KPBS Public Radio during the recent forest fires.

Social media are serious tools that can be used to address many of the needs of our communities, but they haven’t been adopted because they are not accepted by the organisational culture. Luckily for KPBS, several decisions helped an already open culture to meet the needs of their community.

The technologies called social media are highlighting the constraints of the industrial mechanistic model premised on Taylor’s, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), which has informed management for the past century:

To explain briefly: owing to the fact that the workmen in all of our trades have been taught the details of their work by observation of those immediately around them, there are many different ways in common use for doing the same thing, perhaps forty, fifty, or a hundred ways of doing each act in each trade, and for the same reason there is a great variety in the implements used for each class of work. Now, among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest. And this one best method and best implement can only be discovered or developed through a scientific study and analysis of all of the methods and implements in use, together with accurate, minute, motion and time study. This involves the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.

There is no single best way to address our pressing business, societal or environmental issues. The majority of our challenges are not Simple (addressed with best practice, as Taylor prescribed) nor are they merely Complicated (addressed by good practice) but more of our issues are Complex (addressed through emergent practice) and Chaotic (addressed by novel practice). Here is the Cynefin model:

The use of social media within and without an organisation allows a free flow of conversation and knowledge-sharing and better enables emergent and novel practices. As Deanna Mackey of KPBS said, “It was not business as usual and the site had to focus on the job at hand”. Social media help you deal with “not business as usual“.