The world has lost a fine young fiddler. Danny O’Connell, from Ottawa, left us too young and too suddenly and with only one CD to his name. I had the pleasure of playing with him last year in a magical session in Ottawa at the Celtic Cross pub on Elgin Street, and boy, was he going places. You can here a very short clip of his playing here or go to the Ottawa Folklore Centre website and see if they can ship you a copy of his album Green Fields of the Valley. My condolences to his friends and family.
On the OSLIST, the list for Open Space Technology practitioners, a conversation about using Open Space Technology as part of the design charette process elicited this story from Zelle Nelson in North Carolina: My experience with Open Space and an architect/design project is actually from a project I worked on with BP in Scotland. The 60 person business unit I was working with was moving from one part of the building complex to another (most would agree the space they were moving into was the worst space in the building). I started with an Open Space Visioning meeting where in …
This is a classic example of intrinsic motivation: My daughter is six years old and she is learning to read. At night we have been reading her The Hobbit and she has declared that it is the best book ever written. She is keen to read have more Tolkein read to her, but we’re wary of reading Lord of the Rings to her at bedtime. It’s a little gory for her age right now. Last week, my daughter confessed to her grandmother that she was secretly teaching herself to read so that she could read Lord of the Rings by …
Jim McGee points to a great post from Jevon McDonald on the price of silence in organizations, and what to do about it. Opening up communications starts from the bottom: A change in the prevailing culture of an established organization cannot come from the very top-down approach that is being reevaluated. It must come from people, like Harry in our previous story, who will lead by example. Facilitators and early adopters are key to the success of personal publishing in your organization. By bringing key figures into the picture, such as Presidents, Vice Presidents, and prominent people within departments, on …
Howard Rheingold blogs Wes Boyd, the founder of Moveon.org who recently spoke about the power of self-organization: We got involved in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and that’s where our big growth happened. People were disturbed about the rush to war. When the political establishment is not addressing people’s concerns, that is when the Net can afford a way for those people to come together. A little more than a year ago, we said that we’d done petitions and lobbying congress — should we try advertising? We asked for $35,000 for an ad in the NYT. In 48 …