In the fall of 1974, I was invited to serve as a consultant to the Indonesian effort to develop a National Strategy for Non-Formal Education. The brunt of my effort concerned action research for developing and testing an empirical "Community Learning System" designed to link local learning needs with the management-resource-learning system. Field investigations quickly determined that resources were being brought to bear in a diffuse, often redundant, fashion and at differential levels of efficiency and effectiveness. An emergent research design incorporated villagers in the municipality of Ujung Pandang articulating their own learning needs and identifying the resources at their disposal. Contact with local governmental officials determined that village organization could not be carried out without their participation, hence they were included in the resource identification stage of the field effort. The meeting for identifying village resources was a stunning success with the participants themselves being amazed by the breadth of their own resources. Although we were gratified by the group's response to our effort, there was the lingering question of how much of the group's participation was autonomously generated and how much it merely reflected their sensitivity to what we were attempting to have the participants do. (Author/JR)