Railer – Live In Portland

We encourage ride-sharing, walking, bike-riding, or public transit to / from our shows! Join up with other Railer fans at www.portland.brightneighbor.com.

Randy White Comedy / Stand Up

Sometimes, you have to move beyond the blog – so I went and laid out some thoughts in front of an audience.

Late Night Brainstorming Sessions

For any of you following the Bright Neighbor project…

Ten Ways To Twitter Our Way To Hyper-Local Sustainability

Recently, we have had amazing breakthroughs in human communications. We have broken the four-minute mile, and the real-time web of living in the moment has arrived. You can now be instantly witnessed around the world by anyone with a modern communications device. There are useful applications for this technology that can be immediately applied to community-building.

By Randy White
@randywhitepdx and @brightneighbor

The authors of a recent PEW Internet Project report write that
” …developments in social networking and internet applications have begun providing internet users with more opportunities for sharing short updates about themselves, their lives, and their whereabouts online. Users may post messages about their status, their moods, their location and other tidbits on social networks and blogging sites “

The rapid spread of Twitter and Facebook adoption these days is mind-blowing. Twenty percent of online adults 18-34 are on Twitter, and even grandmothers are getting onto Facebook. That is a hefty chunk of the population. While tech-savvy money sharks are figuring out how to carve up profits to be made from selling deep-search stats to Tostitos or whoever, I am thinking about how we can use technology at local levels to deal with economic and ecological collapse. The cool part is that we are starting to quickly track our progress and observe how one’s social influence in a community can help to shape other people’s sustainability actions. Imagine when we will track how neighborly people are:

As exciting as these new technology achievements are, we still have real problems to work out. Families are suffering as relationships are becoming more and more strained by financial pressures. Throughout government, business, and communities – our high standards of living have been supported by cheap, easily available energy. President Obama hasn’t told you the super-bad news about our immediate future. In materialistic terms, we have arrived in the gates of hell and now we get to Tweet each other about it. With a second energy shock and major spike in oil prices on the way, communities need to get prepared. Now.

The problem is that even though so many Americans have cell-phones and blinking blue Borg-like communication contraptions glued to their heads, there are still large swaths of communities across America not taking action to build resiliency at hyper-local levels. And if any new political group was able to actually overthrow the existing Democratic / Republican system – who would pave our roads? How does a society run without money? What is money, really?

It seems we are still in shock and awe that things are so messed up, yet so cool at the same time.

As Americans, we subscribe to a social contract that states to be ‘normal’ we must spend time trying to earn this stuff called money. Since we have to constantly chase the stuff to live comfortable lives, it is literally impossible to get to deeply-know all of our neighbors because there is not enough time or desire to do so. On this planet we are physically limited to caring for small tribes of core humans in our lives. We can’t possibly get to know everyone or have them know us back. But, with technology, we have cobbled together ways to build community relationships while tracking local leadership and involvement in communities at the same time.

The significance of this insight is that we can actually report on local neighborhood influence, carbon emissions saved, energy not used, and many other earth-preserving behaviors. For instance, in the following screenshot, you can see I’m communicating with a local neighborhood organizer, a popular radio DJ, a concerned citizen, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Marketers pay millions of dollars to achieve the kind of free PR, influence, and tracking now easily achieved for free on the Internet. Money aside – If you can get others to pay attention to you, you can improve your sphere of influence at a hyper local level to achieve sustainability. The idea is to be a local leader and use your results to help others at the national level through showcasing your success. Other influential leaders can easily amplify your message, creating near instant consciousness of thousands of individuals.

In order to focus these breakthroughs, I have been experimenting with ways to use Twitter to track items lent out to neighbors and friends, and many upcoming Bright Neighbor 2.0 features will continue to innovate in these areas. In the meantime, here is a 10-step action plan on how Twitter can help people that live in close proximity to one another get to know one another better:

1) Go to your local neighborhood meetings
This may seem so simple that it’s stupid. Get involved! There is a local neighborhood organization that you can join and if you can’t find one, you can start one. This way you can place faces with people you will be connecting with.

2) Create A group and go back to old-school promotions
Being in a rock band helped me learn this one. If you are ready to be a local leader, then go old-school and hit the streets. Putting flyers up at local shops and into people’s hands still works. The constant real-time flow of communications data goes away in seconds, and if someone has calendared one event and learn via Twitter or whatever where other cool people have gathered – they will alter their plans to go where the people are that can help them advance their social status. Offline flyers help build your online reputation to achieve this by putting your group’s Twitter name or hashtag on the flyer and asking neighbors to join your group.

3) Ride sharing
“Can anyone give me a lift downtown? I’m at the corner of SE 39th and Stark.” If you get a big enough group of followers in your neighborhood, that message could score you a lift if your friends are too lazy or broke to come pick you up.

4) Resource locator
“Does anyone have a ladder I can borrow”? The more you know your neighbors, the more people that will follow you and that will see your plea for help when your bushes go wild and need a trimming. With the ability to add pictures and video to Twitter, soon people will be able to discover a person in close proximity who has what they need and communicate in real time to strike a deal.

5) Saving money
“Does anyone have a coupon they can forward for the India Grill?”
Offering people coupons used to be a paper-only option, and times have made it such that there are multiple online methods to save big money on stuff like:

* Activities
* Bars
* Clubs
* Coffee
* Fitness
* Food
* Shopping
* Health & Beauty
* Hotels
* Automotive
* Events
* Dessert
* Tickets

Because that’s the kind of stuff we humans value right now. And in order to keep getting it, we are looking for ways to save money on it. One way is to call out to our social networks to see if anyone can forward access or knowledge of a money-savings deal without everyone becoming annoyed by cheap people looking for deals.

6) Work with your local government
In Portland, the Office of Emergency Management has set up a Twitter feed. If each neighborhood leader subscribed to the emergency feed and vice-versa, top-down communications could mingle with grassroots reporting to keep communications clear in an emergency.

7) Tap into your neighbor knowledge base
My raspberries developed a bunch of ugly yellow spots on them, and with a click of the camera in my phone, I sent out messages to neighbors and friends asking if they knew what the disease was. While I didn’t get a solid answer back on that try, I found out the solution to the by walking next door and asking my 93-year old neighbor instead. Take care of our old-time gardeners!

Give help, get help
As technology allows us to define our roles in society, it also helps define each of us because people are judgmental. The more projects you get involved with, and the more people Tweet about them, the better your Karma Card looks. Your actions and activities are now transparent in real-time and the historical record, and people will be able to see how much you give back in addition to asking for help.

9) Showcase your breakthroughs
Don’t just send out a picture of that new rainwater catchment system you built out of spare parts, invite people over to learn from it! We have so much waste in our system, we can repurpose woods and plastics to help retrofit our homes to prepare for climate change. If it’s too expensive to go buy new stuff like solar arrays or hybrid-cars, then we can help each other by teaching useful, sustainable behaviors that we know how to do. Online video has not yet replaced human-to-human team learning.

10) Make people laugh
Because laughing is a part of healing.

Leaked Footage of Randy White / Lawns to Gardens editor

Leaked footage of a street interview with me.

When Relationships Turn Economic

So economists are trying to paint a rosy picture, eh? I don’t have access to their data, so let me take a stab at a not-so scientific observation.

If food stamps, social security, and medicare went away tomorrow, what would happen in America? If the supply of oil was disrupted, how would people still earn enough money to pay for the huge spike in prices? How are people expected to pay their mortgages while being told to drive less, buy less, not consume, yet keep their job? If we can’t continue as we were, then who gets what, and why?

And will porn always be free forever, even if the economy completely collapses?

I believe we have entered the era of Friendonomics. This is the time when the snake really begins to chomp on its own tail, and relationships turn economic as people’s personal social networks bloom. And whether the friendonomics relationship is either hiring a friend or being hired by a friend, it’s important to see it from both sides of the equation.

HIRED BY A FRIEND
For instance, let’s say you have a friend, and you like them because of (fill in the blank). But right now, you need some dough to pay for stuff, and you offer to help that friend for money.

That is when that friend owns you.

If you make an agreement and take payment for performing some sort of work, your friend either becomes your customer or your boss. Kind of like marriage. But when you charge your friend money for doing a job, you lose something that was there when there was no economic relationship.

HIRING A FRIEND
“Hey buddy, you know I love you, but I was really hoping you could have had it done by now, done it for way less than market rates, and change some stuff too.”

Hiring friends can come naturally as a friend’s work becomes valued with cash or credit. When I have hired friends, I have found myself to be a driven idealist, looking to achieve maximum impact. Whether the job is highly technical or a simple chore, I want it done right. And if you become a boss to your friends, your demands could be viewed by them as a relationship changer. Because if you are in control, then they feel like subordinate rather than a friend, and the level of social understanding between you changes.

HIRING A FRIEND OF A FRIEND
When one of your friends “Knows someone” who can do what you need, it is a gray area of friendonomics. I’m open to interpretation there.

As the economy continues to morph into something different than what it has been before, many people are going to experience all sorts of relationship changes as debts and social media fuel massive friendonomics. We live in a time when on your computer or mobile device you are actively monitoring the lives of people as they live and post stuff online. Even if it’s something trivial like your top 5 favorite albums or your tweet about whatever, we want people to know what’s going on.

And because we are so connected, many new people are available. Your old friends never really go away – they may just be choosing to unsubscribe you from their lives.

And this is why I hate our current system of capitalism. Because if you are doing things for money, you are a slave. And we are all slaves, trying to keep up with all the stuff we bought. Some work less by managing to get others to work for them. As money is no longer available to people, there are bound to be major social upheavals.

This is why before further mayhem ensues, I am training volunteer trainers to help people learn how to use technology like Bright Neighbor and Facebook to build community-based economies. My focus is to continue to work to help people deal with changing living conditions.

So if you get hired by a friend to do a job, perhaps you could work out a deal other than cash, so that your friendonomics relationship isn’t so much as boss/customer as it is friendship/barter.

Everything You Need To Know To Be A Farmer In A City

As a micro-farmer, I know how hard it is for the average home owner to get started with converting property to be a productive, home-based ecosystem. As an urban farmer and technology executive, I came to the realization that we have enough communications programs and it really comes down to working with available city land to grow food. Our home was a typical “1950’s Beaver Cleaver” type home, and now it is a productive food oasis, with water systems and beautiful, living soil. With just $10 in seeds, you can create $650 worth of produce!

Since we don’t believe in chemical-based farming, our recommendations are all organic methods. There is no substitute for hands-on learning, however this is a fantastic list of ways you can quickly get started and learn how to be a farmer:

Organic Food Gardening Beginners Manual
87 Page Step-by-step Gardening Manual For Beginners To Learn How To Grow Their Own Healthy, Organic Food – Saving Money And Eating Chemical Free! Revised Edition Just Released.

Profiting From Home-Based Farming
R.h.s. Medal Winning Plantsman Reveals His Amazing Ways. Promote His Easy, Simple Ways Among Plant Lovers & Gardening Enthusiasts & Help Them Earn A Part Time Income Of $500-$1000/week.

Your Very Own Tree Farm
The Complete Guide To Starting Your Own Profitable Tree Farm.

The Container Garden Expert
Finally Have The Benefit Of Years Of Specialist Container Gardening Experience At Your Fingertips And All In The Comfort Of Your Own Home, With Minimum Stress, And Without You Wasting Your Hard Earned Cash On Methods And Products That Just Do Not Work.

Organic Vegetable Gardening
Organic Vegetable Gardening Ebook. Even A Novice Can Start An Organic Garden With This Simple Guide. Complete Step By Step Gardening Guide.

DIY Worm Farms
How To Build And Manage A Worm Farm To Suit The Average Family. Recycle Household Organic Waste Into Fertiliser For Your Garden And Help The Environment Too.

High-density Gardening
How To Design, Build, Set Up, Grow With And Maintain A High Density Garden To Provide You And Your Family With Fresh, Wholesome And Tasty Vegetables.

Home and Garden – Country and Rural Life
Gardening And Birds, Raising Chickens And Goats, Baking Bread… more

Cinder Block Gardening
Learn how to make a super productive garden using cinder blocks and other methods.

Hey America – You Can Do It!

Hey America,

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a revolution that has started in Portland.

It’s called Bright Neighbor – and we are starting franchises all over America. Back in the 1700’s, we won the Revolutionary War with money help from France and mothers that kept their children in line and got them to work doing what was necessary… which is farming and keeping the community safe.

It’s time we put kids to work in the fields so they can learn how to farm – but make it fun! Let them jam out to i-pods while learning about food systems and soil – they have to if they want to survive the future. We can bus people (families) out to farms and let them stay in Yurts and housing so they can do hands-on learning. Or we can start farming within the cities themselves – wherever we can. It’s just reality, folks. We need to cooperate at the neighborhood soil level and start taking inventory of what land we have and share it with our friends.

After all, wouldn’t you rather lend your stuff and labor to friends over people you don’t know? MySpace and Facebook are good tools, but they don’t focus to help people survive and thrive in this messed up capitalism system. We can fix this place, but it’s going to take some New England style patriotism for a while.

We need to break out the revolutionary uniforms, get some drummer boys and flutes, and parade through the streets to rally ourselves. It’s time for purple-blooded Americans to take a stand for themselves. We are leading the charge in Portland, Oregon. Here is how:

By connecting rural lifestyle values such as growing and preserving food to hungry city dwellers who are paying to convert their lawns to gardens, Bright Neighbor is helping grow a new bull market – which is urban agriculture. If you are selling soil, then you are making MONEY. If you sell honey, you are making MONEY. If you throw $10 worth of seeds in the ground, it can net you $650 worth of produce!

We did not win the first revolution without the help of farmers, and we will not win the newest American Revolution without farmers either. That means Uncle Sam needs to stop buying frozen food from grocery store shelves and start growing, storing, and preparing his own meals at home. And if you don’t have access to land, one of your friends does.

Using Bright Neighbor, Portland hipsters are asking each other what crops they are growing rather than what music they are listening to. The techno-geek culture has merged with permaculturists, master gardeners, and we are now connecting with rural dwellers to reshape Oregon’s new economy. Our system is even functioning as an emergency back-up communications network for when power goes out to connect neighbors electronically, which means businesses and communities are moving beyond what present city governments throughout Oregon have been able to accomplish.

So get with the program America! We can get a Bright Neighbor system up and running in your town, it just takes $5,000 to get one started. Why not ask your local mayor to look into it? They just got a boatload of money from President Obama to help people, and Bright Neighbor is helping people. We can help you too.

Privacy Is The New Transparency

To the folks on Mashable that think they know markets had better listen up. Privacy is the new Transparency.

Social innovation and technology are starting to stink. I am neck-high in communications technology development, and the abuse of it is making me just want to throw my gadgets away except for my i-pod so I can rock out to tunes while I’m gardening.

Facebook sucks, because you never know when someone is going to blackmail you with naked pictures.

Thurs., Feb. 5, 2009
MILWAUKEE – An 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts.

Seriously, things are getting out of hand. The watchdog group Privacy International is sounding an alarm about Google’s new phone tracking system, Latitude. “As it stands right now, Latitude could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners and obsessive friends,” Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said in a new report.

So let me just lay it out on the line. Here are the hot trends that will be followed by money in 2009 – because my company is making money with them.

1) Walled Gardens & Private Clubs Will Soar

It sucks to not know if the person who you are chatting with is real or not. I’m no fan of Ronald Reagan, but he had one thing right: Trust, but verify. Just like the real world, you are allowed into some clubs and not allowed into others. You will start to see a lot more “Pay To Enter” groups, clubs, and social networks, because privacy is something that people will still pay for. It’s no big secret that humans like to have fun and enjoy sex and drugs and other social taboos. It’s whether or not it hurts your relationships and ability to earn money that matters. And relationships are where it is at. So businesses that capitalize on private, licensed walled garden community technology as well as free, community supported social networks will win.

And I’m just kidding about Facebook sucking – Facebook rocks. I see it as a vital player in helping America deal with our upcoming liquid fuels crisis. President Obama will be issuing orders through it, and it’s not Facebook’s fault anyone can use technology to do harm if he or she is a bad person. My bet is that they mimic and monetize Bright Neighbor’s member verification process.

2) The return of activities based on Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs

This economy sucks. But hey, mountain hiking is practically free! And bowling is cheap! And people like to gather in the real world! So we will replace lost jobs with activities that help shape up our country. We are angry Americans, pissed off that we are losing access to money, but still the spoiled brats of technology and oil culture. That means we aren’t going to roll over and die just because some old fogies in Washington can’t get their checkbooks balanced.

3) Hyper-Local Community and Permaculture Becomes Sexier Than Hollywood

Please Hollywood – no more computer generated action sequence movies for a while. Batman is a weird, weird guy. We need stories that show monetary incentives that rally Americans to pick up shovels and get digging – not geomagnetically blowing up stuff and talking to armed vampires. It’s time that we all start listening to local hippies and farmers that get to say “I Told You So”, even as globalists start to freak out at the prospect of their capitalist empire of global trade shattering.

Because even though it looks like we have extra oil now that the price has dropped, it’s not the price that is the concern – it’s the supply. If someone blows up an oil terminal, we will have a real liquid fuels crisis, and immediately could suffer energy and food shortages, leading to social, business, and military pissed-offedness in a world full of really, really big missiles and boom boom sticks.

So 2009 is the year to get to know your neighbors better, even if you don’t want to. And don’t just get to know them, start hanging out with them and put yourself in an uncomfortable place for a while to get used to it. Because in case you haven’t noticed, we are arriving in Hell’s lobby. We have to take evasive action to immediately build hyper-local trust networks because people’s willingness to do things for each other, and to trust one another, depends on how well they know each other and how often they see them.

This has been my mantra for a long time, and luckily we do have so many ways to communicate with one another. It’s whether we are doing the right activities that counts more.

One last trend to report… hacked road signs. The trend is growing!

Randy White is the Founder of Bright Neighbor, a community self-sufficiency and technology company that specializes social collaborations and logistics to help communities adapt to the triple threat of economic, ecological, and energy collapse. A city dweller who has focused on reducing his impact on the planet while helping entrepreneurs forge new businesses, Randy’s expertise focuses on home-based self sufficiency opportunities. He will be speaking at the Pacific Northwest Better Living Show March 28th at the Portland Expo Center.

The Mother Of All Crossroads

My buddy Sam Drevo is a world class kayaker. He has navigated some of the fiercest waters on planet earth while simultaneously making love to and taunting mother nature. Sam looks at rapids ahead, and paddles straight into what could be the last moments of his life every time. It is his confidence, training, and humility that always allow him to come through alive, even if he knocks his head along the way. At least he has a plan for rough waters, and knows how to navigate new, uncharted territory like an expert.

And Sam has known adventurers who have made mistakes and paid with their lives. We are all fallible, right? You know you yourself have made miscalculations in the past just like everyone else, and things haven’t gone according the exact way you thought they might go.

Oh sure, you must have been smart about your plans, made all your mental details, laid out your strategy, and went for it, right? You were plotting, you see. We all plot every day, because we have to in order to survive. It could be anything from what to do in case you wash your cell phone and lose all your stuff, get that hot person to go out with you, or try to get away with something naughty. It could have be anything from trying to fake your own death, to helping fix your community. As long as you have a plan.

And right now, it seems many people have been caught off guard with this economic hardship and are just now scrambling to make a plan.

Who usually makes the plans for you? Is it your faith leader? Your boss? Your spouse? Henry Kissinger?

As we continue along the timeline of our lives, we are at the mother of all crossroads in human history. Everyone knows something really, really big is going on, but no one seems to know who to listen to about it anymore. Even as Obama takes his place on the throne, I am finding people asking themselves “what is my plan, and do I know exactly what to do?”

We can certainly make up for our past mistakes, we absolutely must. We blew it, America. We screwed up, bigtime. I have screwed up , you have screwed up, we all screwed up. Now we are facing the consequences, and we need plans that are not only ready to go, but that are already working.

As we each can at least pitch in at the local level, we need to be asking ourselves:

- Do I have a good relationship with my neighbors?
- What skills do I have that can help the community?
- What can I do to help others that will make me feel better?
- Do I really need all this stuff I have acquired to be happy?
- How will I make rent / the mortgage this month?

In globalism, we are expected to either be a producer or a consumer. You either make something, or you use something. Then there are the middlemen – called markets. And it is the markets that are collapsing, along with the ability for people to earn money as markets cease. If you get laid off, and no one else will hire you, what are you going to do to survive?

It is for this reason that I created Bright Neighbor. We are setting up communities across the country right now, and we are here to help governments, communities, businesses, and faith groups. We are already doing it, and are teaming up with Powell’s Books to offer the new Bright Neighbor University lecture series.

In April, I will be presenting an hour long workshop called “Lawns to Gardens: 10 Strategies For Thriving Through The Recession“. Or a title like that. More details to come!

- Randy White

BONUS VIDEO:
Sam Drevo and the Down The River Cleanup Crew