Me: You should read this Tracy Gary article.
My partner Caitlin: Email it to me…
Me: Sure – but you should just read my blog.
Caitlin: I don’t have time to be your wife AND read your blog.
[silence]
Me: I’m going to blog that.
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A great article on Tracy Gary a lovely human and a philanthropic role model for us all. I was lucky enough to meet her last year at the Giving Conference in Chicago.
Link via Wealth Bondage
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Tod Maffin, a staffer at CBC in Vancouver has been on the leading edge of the future for a long time. During the lockout of CBC staff, he has been one of the movers and shakers behind delivering podcasting to a nation hungry for decent national public radio.
Today he put up a podcast on future of Canadian public radio which is a brilliant elegy to a future that seems to have been lost (only Maffin can create elegies to lost futures!).
What I love about the podcast is the way Maffin contextualizes his love for radio in the story of his own life (with audio snippets). But the power punch comes at the end when he points out just how much internet broadcasting, blogging and news gathering CBC employees are doing while locked out of their real jobs. The CBC management says that the lockout is about the fact that the corporation wants the ability to hire a flexible workforce, and Maffin openly wonders how much more flexible a workforce you can get. CBC lockout podcasts are top rated for downloads, locked out staff are making radio on community and college stations across the country and landing big names for interviews while the management at CBC struggle to put together a days worth of programming that is increasingly lifted holus bolus from the BBC.
Maffin’s point is well taken, and his podcast contains several ideas that, if management hears them for what they are, provide a basis for a rejuvenated and effective multi-channel public broadcaster that builds on the flexibilities and learning capacities of its front line staff. The challenge for CBC management now is how to create a workplace that is in fact as flexible as the people who work there.
What’s interesting to note in general about the CBC unplugged podcasts is how the power of conversation in public is strengthening the case for the things Maffin is talking about. Those involved in traditional labour-management dispute should take note. The old dualities are falling apart and complexity and conversation and openness are arising.
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Linkage for your edification:
- Fred First’s spider web collection grows and he points to a movie of tornados on Mars .
- Thoreau on preparing for the politicians
- Nipun’sthought of week
- Interconnected muses on emergence
- Everything I know I Learned from English Folk Songs
- Heartbreaking story of love and courage and 6 year-old leadership
- A Proposal for Mediators without borders
- Announcement for New International Listserv for Participatory Budget Making
- Costs and benefits of community involvement
- What IS Innovation? a graphic compendium
- David Wilcox says Participation often isn’t working and Participation language doesn’t work either
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“In a meeting the other day, someone made an often heard comment about the unrealistic expectation that we could or should be ‘appreciative all the time.’
The focus on what we want and what’s working and why is a challenge to culturally normative beliefs that ‘the only way to make things better is to focus on what we don’t want and what’s not working and why.’ For people who don’t have experience otherwise, the appreciative model is totally not realistic.
The good news is that the transition to an appreciative approach isn’t about trying to believe something different. It’s only possible when we see for ourselves. We do not become more appreciative by simply taking on someone else’s beliefs, no matter how compelling.”
There is something to the practice of appreciating that which is not positive as well, for what it offers us. For example, a client I was working with recently decided to use a “What would you most like to change…?” question in her appreciative inquiry in her community. When we worked through the implications of that question we looked at an appreciative conversation on how it was that the community DID change. This was to create a container in which calls for change drew on the best ways this community knew about how to change. So it involved looking back at a variety of ways the community had coped in the past in order to draw on the potential resources for future change.