Take a deep breath

This email exchange shows how valid concerns about process, conflict of interest, and accountability were dismissed or reframed as personal attacks.

I publish this to document what happens when a culture resists clarity — and how ethics like transparency and fair share are easily overridden in the name of “sociocratic process.”

This is not about attacking individuals. It’s about showing patterns that hinder progress and erode trust.

In 2022, I raised concerns about permaculture certification processes being shaped by people without the relevant qualifications — specifically, the Diploma paths being discussed by non-diploma holders at Suomen Permakulttuuri Yhdistys.

The thread below is from the assosication's Slack workspace. I’m sharing it to document the origins of a conflict that eventually led to my resignation from the Finnish Permaculture Association.

Some years back I came into possession of a Amazon Fire HD 8" 7th generation tablet. The thingy was more or less useless for me as during the time I got it, in 2020, there was no chance of loading an alternative firmware onto it. And who wants use a device with Fire OS on it other than a TV?

In the Finnish Permaculture Association (FPA), we implemented aspects of Sociocracy from the beginning, primarily consent decision-making. Later, we added the Sociocratic Circle Method (SCM) as our operational foundation. The primary assumption was that the board could only change once a year, while within circles, members could come and go during the year. Although the chair of the board and the board members are the legal representatives of the association, the board trusts people who want to get things done. This means that power lies with those doing the work.

In August I have been at the Nordic Permaculture Festival. I have been part of the core team organizing the festival, but during the festival I was more or less there to shot pictures and videos. While concentrating on the task I couldn’t listen to the lectures – you either work or don’t.

During a migration using Migration Assistant my Synology DS220+ hang up because of a power outage. The Migration Assistant claimed that the source was already in migration. A reddit thread pointed towards the Migration Assistant Task Cleaner. But according to the logs it unfortunately got deleted. Since reinstalling the Migration Assistant didn't bring back the task I went via SSH into the file system and located the file that gets called by the task.

There is always a lot of discussion going on at different forums about being off-grid. And many discussion are confusing because they lack and understanding what off-grid actually means. While the term itself can be easily defined the personal reasons for being „off-grid“ are very different.

Let’s start with the “why”.