My friend Peter Rukavina is a pretty good traveller. He usually make a couple of trips a year to Europe, some with family in tow, and he offers this wonderful guide to travelling in the continent, RuK style.
Tom Hurley and George Por enjoy a laugh in Belgium
George Por is a friend and an occaisional co-conspirator and colleague. What I appreciate about George is that he has been in this game a long time. He has been ahead of the curve for years – decades in some cases – with respect to the web, social networking and evolutionary consciousness and as such he has an uncanny perspective on things.
For a few years now he has been working with a number of thinkers in looking at Otto Scharmer’s Presencing ideas. Today I read a long and interesting piece from George about one aspect of Presencing practice: social presencing theatre. It’s worth a read, if only to see what George is thinking about these days. He blogs far too infrequently for such a curious and delighted soul.
[tags]George por, presencing, social presencing theatre[/tags]
Carman Pirie with a nice bit of noticing:
The good folks at Facebook are facing a bit of a backlash after closing the account of at least one Canadian mother whose snaps of her nursing her child were deemed obscene.The Facebook group “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” is gaining members as fast as Angelina Jolie’s fan club…. all of them rather put off by all of this.
The way I see it, the rules have changed. Just because you’ve built (and could sell for an incredible amount of cash) a social network like Facebook, doesn’t mean you own it. The users own it. Facebook can learn this now, or learn it later – but learn it they will.
My advice: take the same ingenuity used to create Facebook and build a self-governance framework for users. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-governance when the conditions are right.
This is pretty basic chaordic theory really…. determine the minimum amount of order required, then get out of the way. Control is not the answer.
[tags]facebook, chaordic[/tags]
From a collection of pictures made in 1910 in France about what life might be like in 2000. With thanks to AKMA for the link (who is another unschooling parent).
I didn’t champion the Great Canadian Homework Ban this year (although everything I wrote last year still stands) but my kids and I enjoyed a nice not-back-to-school week. My six year old son and I spent Thursday down at our local golf course hitting buckets of golf balls into an azure blue sky, while the smoky blue mountains of Vancouver Island shimmered in the distance. All the other kids were back at school and the adults were back at work and we had the whole place to ourselves. Enjoying September days like this is one of my favourite side benefits of having a life learning family.
One session in Camden last week that really grabbed my interest was hosted by my dear friend and colleague Father Brian Bainbridge from Australia. Brian is another remarkable man, generous, dry in his humour and open hearted. He has been working on a little book for a while about brining Open Space to parish life, which documents his stories of working with the parishoners of St. Scholastica’s in Melbourne. In a little over two years, Brian has been exploring the transformation that comes about from shifting from the managerial worldview to the open space worldview. What he has found is a renewal in the life of the parish, and in the spiritual life of the parishioners. What interests me about this transformation is how it relates to the spiritual teachings that lie at the heart of the parish. In other words, is an Open Space worldview compatible with Christian teachings?
Brian was good enough to host a session on this topic which was attended by folks from many faith traditions. For me, it became very clear that Open Space invites us as individuals to connect with the deeper sources of creation in our world. Almost all major religions teach both a path for individual spiritual practice and a path for collective spiritual community building. Whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, Baha’i, Jew, Taoist, Muslim, Hindu or you practice a traditional spirituality, there are precepts for the life of spiritual communities that, I think, invite us to notice the source of creative energy as it flows between us. Living in community is a spiritual practice. Open Space, it seems to me, offers us a chance to connect with one another in a deeper way by connecting with the source of creativity in the universe. We call this by many names. Religious people migt call it Spirit, secular folks will see it as self-organization, Taoists call it the Tao. Whatever it is named, it is possible to experience it, and Open Space seems to create the conditions for that experience. This explains to me why many people report a much deeper experience in Open Space than in many other process I work with.
This theme surfaced at the Art of Hosting workshop I took part in later in the week in Indiana, where there was a large contingent of participants who were exploring the roots of their leadership practice and discovering that at a certain point they converged with their spiritual paths as well. This continues to be interesting for me, and I wonder what your experience of leadership, Open Space in particular and spirituality is?