[Peakoil] Re: Formalisation of roles

[Keith Thomas]

I like this.  The marrying of 'sustainability' with 'environmental' 
brings in the human, social aspect.

If I wanted to split hairs, I'd say that 'raising awareness' is pretty 
hands off.  It implies that we don't see any role for the group in 
advising people.  That's prudent.  However, when the statement sees the 
group drawing out the implications for sustainability and the 
environment, we are channelling our perspective to some extent; there 
is implicitly a judgement on where priorities lie as we have gone 
beyond mere awareness-raising.  I, for one, agree that we should do 
this, I just want it to be openly understood at this stage (for 
example, we have not mentioned the religious aspects, the aspect of 
equity - thank goodness!).

I thought about the special reference to 'corporate'.  At first I 
thought it was odd because it's originally a US term and, to me, it's 
implied in the 'public, political'.  But then I remembered the film 
many of us saw last year "The Corporation", so I'm happy to leave 
'corporate' in the statement.

About the only thing that I see missing is that we will provide mutual 
support.  Newcomers might come to us with questions, doubts, worries 
and look to us first-up to help them put things in perspective and I'd 
like to see that 'welcome mat' obvious to them when they first arrive. 
Do you think we should include that role at the mission statement 
level? It could quite easily go in an "about us" section of our 
re-designed webpage - which I expect will be one consequence of these 
deliberations.

Anyway, I'm content to go with what Leigh posted. His proposed 
statement doesn't exclude our straying beyond our mission should the 
need and the occasion arise, but it's a useful, practical, 
easily-understood statement that will help newcomers understand our 
role (what we do and what we don't do). And if we don't like the 
statement in the future, well, we change it!

--------------------------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
--------------------------------------------
On 08/09/2005, at 6:07 PM, Leigh Kite wrote:

Mission statement too long, here's draft three: -

"To raise public, political and corporate awareness within Australia of 
the inevitable decline in
availability of oil by researching, analysing and presenting the issue 
of Peak Oil and the surrounding sustainability and environmental 
impacts."

Are we happy?

Cheers,

Leigh