Evaluate - LR2

Being responsible now for a piece of land I have a high motivation to design our land carefully and holistically. I realize that I can gain hands-on experience that is very valuable as a (future)permaculture designer. I think the land itself and our vision we have will let me grow with the years to a permaculture designer. My thinking is already dominated by unconsciously applying the permaculture ethics and principles, but what is missing are the practical experiences in permaculture. 

So far I gained a good understanding of the (permacultural-)theory (includes land-based knowledge, permacultural approaches, design models, etc.) and I started to gain first practical experience. 

In general, I notice that there are different „streams“ of permaculture people. For me, the „typical“ permaculture stream focuses on sustainable land-design with a lot of real-life experience and the knowledge is passed to interested persons. Then there is the „social permaculture stream“, which is not less important. People focus on holistic and violence-free communication and are leading complex group processes. Possible are endless combinations between these two streams.

 I want to focus on land-based permaculture and our property will help me to build skills in this area. As soon as I am feeling confident in a topic I want to pass this knowledge to other people.

The PoDAPO criteria are a Gaia University intern evaluation system to holistically assess the quality of an OP. For people that are not familiar with those criteria, it seems very complex and sometimes also confusing.

Five categories, which are Presentation & Organization of Output Packets, Design Skills, Action Learning Skills, Process Skills, and Outcomes form the PoDAPO criteria. These categories each consist of four thematical subtopics.

I used the PoDAPDO criteria to review my Ops (as that is standard in GaiaU) but also to evaluate smaller projects that were not part of an OP.

I learned to assess the value of these holistic criteria. In a project, I often focus at the beginning of just one category (or even subtopic). PoDAPO helped me to be conscious of my focus and remembered that I may not neglect the other dimensions of the criteria.

So PoDAPO criteria can help to design a project integral and balanced.

Nevertheless, naturally, I spend on some categories/subtopics more attention than on others and that is where I want to work in the future. So in the following, I laid the focus on the topics I want to work on in the future (My focus is not: What is working well).

Presentation & Organization of Output Packets

The first category is only OP (and not project) focused. It is about how my work is presented in Mahara (a platform where we share and upload our work). This is the category where I had the least trouble with understanding how to fill it out in the PoDAPO-form. So for designing a project one does not need to pay attention to this category.

Design Skills

It gets more complex in this category as I always had trouble to understand what is wanted in each subtopic. As I already outlined in the Design Phase, there are two different approaches to how Design processes can be applied (To read these approaches go back to DESIGN and read the last paragraph).

Reflecting on my design process patterns I recognize, that I used the most design processes in a combination of the two approaches. That means, that I used for each project a process that provides a structure to sort the content and I also tried to set a timely intention. Often this made it a little confusing for me and me over-designed.

Sure sometimes design processes ( e.g. SADIM in my land-based design provides both, a structure for the content and a timely chronology), but most times it makes a lot of sense to decide for one intention. So that is a learning edge I need and want to work on in my next Action Learning Cycle.

Another point I want to work is conscious tracking of my chosen design process and also my points of intervention. Often I am not clear what to track (or which points of intervention are worth to document). To be honest, I am still struggling with the term „Points of Intervention“ because it sounds very abstract for me.

But to say some closing words to the category "Design": During this cycle, I grew as a (permaculture)-designer and now I have a good understanding of different processes, methods, and tools I could use in a project. Especially permaculture provides many strategic and clear processes for each design phase. So since I started with the Permaculture Diploma I feel even more familiar with Design.

Action Learning Skills

The Kolbs Model helped me more than once to assess my Action Learning Skills and also balance my projects. As I already outlined in my Kolb analysis I naturally prefer a specific learning style, but still, holistic Action Learning happened during this cycle.

But again what is still missing is the appropriate Tracking of my Action Learning Skills.

It is also challenging for me to be conscious of my un/learning patterns. That is another term that sounds a little too abstract for me and often I am not sure how to „set goals“ and track them.

Process skills

The process skills are in general very clear for me. But to be honest, I did not pay too much attention to consciously work on them or track them. In some OPs (and projects) I paid more attention to the subtopics, than on others. So it feels that this category is just worked on by the way and in some projects are some subtopics more representative than in others (e.g. Leadership, Facilitation and Mentoring Efforts).

So in the future, I want to spend more conscious attention on that category.

Outcomes

Outcomes sound for me like a very clear and easy category as I just need to take a look at my outcomes. On a more complex level, two of the subtopics are more difficult to answer and I consciously need to think about them before starting a project: „Practical Benefits to the field“ and „Adding value to the knowledge commons and dissemination efforts“. At the beginning of a project, I should answer some very general questions within the goals: What is the value of my work? And who has been impacted? And „How will I work, so that my knowledge collected is valuable for other people in a similar situation?

To be honest, I never answered these questions at the beginning of my project, only at the end of a project I tried to find an answer to them.

I easily can evaluate my Outcomes on a more practical and visual level (e.g. what professional skills did I gain). I want to work on defining my outcomes directly at the beginning of a project, so I am able to track them and also can answer the questions I mentioned above more easily.