README.md
Eric Vought
2014-12-12 County Registration Handbook
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License
#What This Project Is
This project was initially a circa-2010 collaboration between the Well-Fed Neighbor Alliance, The Statesmen For Our Constitutional Republic, and other organizations. The goal of the handbook is to provide a guidebook and framework for restoring the sovereignty, good stewardship, stability, and general resilience of the counties of the United States, starting with Lawrence County, Missouri, as our initial focal point. Sovereignty is the focal point of this effort: none of the other terms we use: good stewardship, stability, and resilience, make sense outside the context of local people having control over their own lives.
None of this is intended to imply that a locality can or must isolate itself from the rest of the country or the world. Each locality, however, can and must be prepared to provide its most critical needs for itself, when it must, during all kinds of emergencies or crises. A locality must also have alternatives for any of its basic needs, even those it traditionally provides for itself. Without being able to provide for its own needs, neither a community nor its individuals have autonomy nor control over their own destinies: you cannot successfully negotiate for anything when you cannot walk away from a bad deal. The Lawrence County document is meant to be heavily tailored for different localities. Clearly Greene County, MO, Tioga County, NY, Los Angeles County, CA, and Pima County, AR have very different needs and must meet them differently. No single effort can hope to cover all these diverse needs, but many ideas and best practices can be shared.
Since the original effort began, the website and tools were found inadequate to the task of the kind of collaboration envisioned. Instead of a system where individuals could contribute and the technology would mostly assemble the manuscripts--- the technology simply was not up to the problem--- it ended up being a submission-and-editing environment, which it was not really suited for. Several draft manuscripts were released on Scribd in 2010 after a substantial effort, including the initial check-in to this GitHub repository, and the project went dark for some time. In the intervening time, the Statesmen For Our Constitutional Republic was reformed into several more targeted efforts, including the Lawrence County Sheriff's Auxiliary.
The hiatus has allowed the editors to gain some valuable perspective on what the project should be and also to experiment with some of the concepts within the community. As I write this README, for example, a new neighborhood watch effort is underway in nearby Freistatt, MO, and will need to confront many of the same issues of rural neighborhood watches whcih make them different from the urban block-centric watches which the National Neighborhood Watch Association provides guidance for. I find myself, therefore, presenting and updating the same material originally written in this Handbook. There is a need for this information and the material is available; it is time to pick it up again.
This project contains the original DocBook sources for the Handbook. DocBook is a structured markup language similar to HTML but made for large book-like projects containing cross-references, citations, figures, glossaries, and similar book-like structures. The files tracked in GitHub represent the chapters which are assembled into the full document in both PDF (for print) and HTML (for online viewing).
The document was originally assembled with OxygenXML, a DocBook authoring environment. As we update the manuscript, it will be re-worked to a more generally available tool so that other editors can potentially participate. GitHub will track changes to the files, allow editors to collaborate, log issues/milestones, provide a Wiki for discussion and assembly of sources, and store releases (which will also be put in PDF form in Scribd where the Handbook has been previously found).