Thinking about the state of the climate has become inescapable in the 21st century, yet for many this proves to be a lonely affair. While popular media provides ample sources to inform one’s consciousness, and subsequently their anxieties, with regard to the world’s rapidly changing climate and its implications for human societies, it is easy to feel alienated by the scale of the problem and daunted by individual inabilities to face it beyond a certain degree. Might coming together give us more clarity? It might be worth our while to try…

For the month of October, we will be watching the short film The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens followed by a discussion at multiple venues around Bangalore.

Climate Commons is an attempt to create a city-wide community invested in collectively understanding the state of the climate today, humanity’s role in accelerating global warming and what these changes might mean for human society, on global and local scales. Grounded in popular non-fiction literature, these conversations will take place in physical gatherings towards the goal of  nurturing a community of people from diverse backgrounds who are aware of each other’s presence and motivations. These gatherings, centred around the same reading material, will happen at separate institutions with facilitators leading the engagements and taking down notes to make accessible views that have been shared at one site to the community at large.

We look forward to your participation. Please share this webpage with any of your friends who might be motivated to learn more about Climate Change and let’s have Bangalore bustling with conscientious conversations towards more optimistic futures.

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FAQs

The Climate Commons hopes to bring together the different experiences at the various venues for its participants to go through at their leisure, and this is to be facilitated through digital tools.

Currently two tools are being used to convene the Climate Commons (Bangalore) community: Dara & Miro. While Miro acts as an interactive noticeboard and a space for making decisions though its native voting mechanism, Dara is a community friendly messenger that allows people to make connections and watch out for events without having to worry about their privacy. If you have queries regarding Dara, their team can be contacted easily through the app. 

1) Navigating the Climate Commons Community on Dara

The following link maybe used to join the conversation on Dara: https://dara.network/climatecommons/

There are currently four channels on the Climate Commons Community of Dara. More can be added as requested by community members. 

• Climate Commons Chatter: This channel can be utilised by members to connect and break away into any conversation they wish. 
• Climate Commons News: All updates and announcements will feature here. Conversations around these may be pursued in the Chatter. All community members can get in touch with the admins to share any relevant announcements outside of Climate Commons activities here as well. 
• Facilitators’ Lounge: This space can be utilised to volunteer to be a facilitator at any of the venues for the on-ground reflections session, and share your experiences at these sessions informally with others.
• This Month’s Text: Itching to share your feelings about what you’re reading this month, but the on-ground session is still a while away? Well, this is the space for just that.

2) Using the Climate Commons Miro Board

To access the Miro Board, kindly make your e-mail address visible to “Public”/”Everyone on Dara”/”Community Members”. You will receive an invite to participate in the Miro Board shortly afterwards and you may turn your e-mail visibility back to “Just Me” upon accessing the Miro Board.

• On accessing the Miro Board, you will be directed to a frame displaying all community members, their interests and relevant links they might want to share. As it is a prerogative of the Commons to create a space that allows us to identify like-minded individuals, it is recommended for all participants to name themselves here.  

• In order to do this, kindly copy and paste the identification template (the one with the really big head, where space for a profile picture is) and paste it where there is space in alignment to existing member profiles. If you do not wish to share a photo, please remember to resize the head to match other members’ in order to avoid confusion. (Filling the space provided for “Bio”, “Interests” & “Links” is optional, but we encourage you to use this space to give a short description of yourself in a manner that is true to you. We are sure many in this community would love to get to know you and these little ice breakers can go a long way in discovering shared affinities.)

• If you represent any organisation interested in climate action in any capacity and are the first from your team to find our community, you can use an empty yellow-bordered box to the right of “The Community” frame to describe your organisation to the Commons. Going forward, this may be used as a organisation-specific noticeboard if you would find such a space useful. As a practice, kindly ensure you create a new empty box sequentially below the one you have occupied. The toolbar to the left of the Miro Board has a range of functions, including creating post-it notes, shapes, inserting text and connecting different elements using lines, to help assist in representing your organisation and initiating other conversations.

Initiating Conversations:

• Apart from recording minutes of various meetings, space has also been allocated for community members to reflect on any topic under the sun and to share resources. 

• For sharing random thoughts, you may use an empty box under “Reflections”. To make the conversation more accessible, kindly provide a subject line by replacing “Title”. You can choose to name yourself in the space allocated by the side of “Title” or remain anonymous. Other participants can interact with your provocation within the yellow box. Please remember to provide space for further conversations by copying and pasting an empty yellow box vertically below the space you will be occupying. 

• Community members can use the top-most box under “Resources” to share links to literature they would like the community to read together and these will be put to vote on a date after all reflection sessions of the previous text have concluded. 

• Subsequent boxes under “Resources” may be used to communicate thoughts and reflections about any form of media you might want to share with the community. Please note that Title here refers to the title of the text, film, podcast etc. you might want to share with the community and the space next to this is meant to refer to the author of this material. If you wish to name yourself, please do so within the parenthesis that has been provided.

• Please note that all the space surrounding the boards that have already been created is open for community members to start other conversations outside of those that have space allocated on the board. 

Voting on the Miro Board:

• The space under “For Ballots” has been allocated for voting on the coming months’ reading material over a period of three days. 

• Books and essays that have been shared under “Resources” will be compiled in this space in the days leading up to the voting. 

• Each community member will be given three votes which they can use to upvote their top three preferences.

• The results of these ballots will be shared under “This Month’s Text” in the introductory boards and on Social Media.