Here’s a great story from MashUp Camp on how an Open Space Technology unconference worked. The article concludes with this quote:
‘The amazing thing about these camps, using open space methodology, is they shouldn’t work,’ said Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, which makes social software for collaboration. ‘Like a wiki, it turns out that some very simple and open rules have shockingly positive results–because people, on the whole, are good. Open events like these have become almost commonplace in the Valley. In fact, I’d say they are a key driver for the current wave of innovation. One part wiki, one part space and two parts people, add water, and voila!’
Tags: openspacetech, openspace, facilitation, unconference
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I’m reposting this list holus bolus from Peter Levine’s blog. It’s an excellent summary of what we can expect from volunteer networks, and very top of mind for me at the moment:
1) Volunteers will plan and run meetings and conferences, even doing hard, detailed work on invitation lists, agendas, and menus. But they will not reliably write up the results of meetings for public distribution. After a meeting, writing feels like a chore, and there’s usually no specific deadline. Therefore, many meetings leave no tangible public record.2) Volunteers will write grant proposals, because proposals are plans that determine the work that will actually be done later on. However, they will not do the other work involved required to obtain grants, such as identifying potential funders. If they have their own contacts with foundations, most won’t share them.3) Volunteers will handle pleasant human interactions, but will avoid difficult relationships.
4) Volunteers may provide regular, written information under their own names and control, but few will contribute in a sustained way to collective writing projects. That problem can be overcome with scale but is serious in small networks.
5) Volunteers will generate wonderful ideas but are much less likely to implement them.
Tags: networks, volunteering, learning
Jockey Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo has died at age 62. Even people who are not fans of world music know the legacy of this man’s work. Jockey was the founder of LBM, although he took a backseat to his brother who sings the lead for the group.
According to a report on CBC today, he chose the name because “Ladysmith” was his home township, “Black” was for the colour of the strongest oxen, and “Mambazo” means to cut down with an axe, a reference to the fact that the group started out singing in contests and that it would lead its competition in shreds.
Here is a track to commermerate Jockey’s passing.
Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone…
I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups.
Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported by foundations and other funding and has a great deal of goodwill associated with it. Our work has taken us into designing a program that is based on sharing, free exchange of materials and learning and funding. Our language is full of the language of gifting, sharing and capacity building.
The participants in our design consultation groups were given an honorarium for being in attendance, and yesterday several of those participants donated their honorarium to one organization that provides meals to homeless folks. The gesture was out of the blue, and had no connection to what we were talking about when the first person volunteered their money. That made me curious about where the volition for doing so had sprung from.
I think that as a facilitator, a lot had to do with how we were shaping space, or shaping the field. The conversations throughout the day were about this very thing, and then to have the behaviour manifest so clearly and so out of the blue made me wonder about the power of shaping space, awakening moments, and working with morphogenetic fields. Several folks have been commenting here recently about this idea of shaping space and awakening moments. Here is a concrete example of how doing so creates emergent phenomena like the sudden donation of $500 to a mobile soup kitchen.
Categories: facilitation, gift, morphogenetic+fields,
From Jack Ricchiuto’s blog:
I want to riff off the comment on the ‘Free Speech’ post by zenmaenad: In my experience, when the issue seems to be free speech, the deeper issue usually has to do with responsible *listening*.It surfaces a significant distinction between free speech disconnected from listening and free speech that flows from listening.
I’ve been thinking about this in a variety of contexts, but the one that comes to mind is the kind of listening we do when we are receiving a teaching. Traditionally, in First Nations communities and in other traditional settings, when Elders are teaching, listeners engage in a kind of deliberate discernment. The point is to hear the underlying truth of the story being told, to believe not the truth of the story’s “facts” but the truth of the myth itself.
This came up elsewhere this week with a post at Anecdote as well, about the truth contained in narratives. I think this arises largely because in the west we have forgotten these practices of listening to stories and observing the world as interpretational acts, in which we see everything around us as a teaching. The history of the past 500 years has been the history of trying to figure out how to reach an objective consensus about things. This weighty cultural thread has created a situation where conversations about stories, if they are conversations at all, seem to be about clarifying the facts.
The deeper truths, the embedded teachings, are lost if we put too much weight on this. That’s important because if you are setting out into the world to learn something, whether it is a personal quest, or with a group, on behalf of an organization or as a member of an inquiry team, simply getting at the facts does nothing to propel your trajectory to a new level. Instead, you are left solely with the facts and very little else to suggest how one might transcend the situation that gave rise to those facts. Developing the capacity to hear all stories as teachings is an incredibly valuable practice.
Categories: facilitation, dialogue