Kick-off slides: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ABL-EDWh3zH0Tl8V3xH6mLxWLDMBngdk?usp=sharing
This bootcamp is not simply about finding solutions to Odaka’s energy challenges. Instead, Odaka will serve as a real-world case study through which you will learn how to understand and identify challenges within a community.
Throughout the programme, you will explore three fundamental questions:
How is a town or community shaped and sustained?
What relationships, people, businesses, institutions, and resources make a community function?
How can we understand the challenges a community faces?
How do we move beyond what we see on the surface and uncover the underlying problems that matter to the people living there?
How can we identify the right problem in an unfamiliar place and within a limited amount of time?
How should we gather information, engage with different stakeholders, test our assumptions, and make sense of conflicting perspectives?
To explore these questions, this bootcamp will use energy as a case study. Before visiting Odaka, you will build a basic understanding of the town and its energy system through preparatory learning. Once in Odaka, you will speak with a wide range of people: from government officials and local businesses to farmers and other stakeholders, to deepen and challenge your initial understanding.
You will then work in teams to make sense of what you have learned, compare different perspectives, and identify what you believe lies beneath the issues you encounter. Finally, each team will define the “true problem” that it believes should be addressed and present its reasoning to others.
The true problem you identify does not have to be an energy issue. In fact, it may lie somewhere beyond the initial case you were given. What matters is the process: learning how to enter an unfamiliar community, understand how it works, uncover the challenges it faces, and determine which problem is truly worth addressing.