Transition Santa Cruz has published a good list of key features of Transition Initiatives:

Transition initiatives…

• are rooted in community and are not dependent on any one person
• find common ground among the many individuals and groups who care about the well-being of the community
• are inclusive; avoiding “us and them”
• use peak oil awareness as a tool to help people think about living with low energy usage and with local resilience
• provide forums for people to dream of positive outcomes, and create a vision of an abundant future
• create a sense that something new, fascinating, and transformative is happening
• address widely held concerns
• move forward flexibly, with ideas reworked regularly
• incubate many specific projects; in many cases by working with other community groups
• respond to both the need for practical life skills and for psychological training in how to cultivate positive visions and deal with fear, discouragement, etc.
• keep an emphasis on personal responsibility, and use advice as recommendation, not prescription

Four Key Assumptions 

• Life with much lower energy consumption is inevitable and it’s best to prepare.
• We currently lack the resilience we need to cope with a lower-energy future.
• We have to act collectively now.
• With our collective genius we can design an energy descent that features better ways of living than our current lifestyle.

TSC adds a fifth:

• It is impossible to be resilient without also being equitable.