From a paper on Korean poetry comes this poem by Ko Un, “Ode to Shim-chong:”
Indangsu sea, shine dark blue,
come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat.
The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know
the dark fate of the world beyond
that lies past the path that sometimes appears,
the weeping of children born into this world,
and the sailors may know my daughter’s path.
How can the waters exist without the world beyond?
Full-bodied fear
has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world,
and my daughter’s whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such;
might love be a bright world and my eyes be plunged in utter darkness?
Daughter, already now the waters’ own mother,
advance over the waters,
advance over the waters
like the mists that come dropping over the waters.
My daughter, advance and travel through every world.
Shine dark blue, Indangsu. Weep dark blue.
Are we not called to be in those waters, as sailors who know the dark fate of the world beyond, willing to stand in the full bodied fear that this world craves?
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My friend Rowan was exploring some online tools and asking the question, how do we make these tools useful and relevant. My response, which I posted at his blog, goes like this:
In my experience what is most important is to first understand what your community needs. For example, a small group in the organization I am currently working with wanted a tool that allowed people to work on a document, but to only have access to the most recent draft. They set up an experimental wiki to do it, but that entailed them all learning wiki technology, which is not what they wanted to do. I showed the Google docs, which allows people to collaborate on one version of a document and which saves revisions and everything else. It looks and acts like a word processor. There was no learning curve, other than just figuring out how to get in and share documents, and they were able to get right down to the work they were doing.
In English we have an expression: “If all you have is a hammer, then everything you see is a nail.” In other words, we get so taken with our tools that we don’t see the underlying needs of the people we are working with. In both the worlds of online collaboration and face to face collaboration I think the most important role of the facilitator is to be fluent in a vast variety of tools and to only use what is essential to the task.
Therefore, I’m fond of my own library of facilitation tools, and sites like this one, that show all the kinds of Web 2.0 tools that are available to help collaboration. Play with them yourself so that you can discover what they can all do and then when the need arises, you’ll be familiar enough with them to propose just what is needed and not any more than necessary.
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A new way to examine humanity’s impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared By Steve Mirsky
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Dee Hock on chaordic leadership(tags: leadership chaordic)
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- Kaliya Hamlin is getting really noticed for her work promoting Open Space in the tech community. The whole idea of unconferencing has jumped the shark, but there is still an art to doing Open Space. It’s easy but not simple, and Kaliya has been a great guardian of the essence of the process as it grows into the tech world in a big way This article from the Business 2.0 blog is another piece of good attention being thrown her way. Actually there are a rash of articles out these days on Open Space, including one in a publication called Meetings and Incentive Travel, that quotes my Canadian mates Diane Gibault, Michelle Cooper and Larry Peterson. Add to that this very useful short film on Open Space, and you could safely say that our beloved process has truly tipped.
- And speaking of mates, Thomas Arthur comes through with a link he sent by Google chat which deepens the ida of Pattern Language, moving it into another level of “generative code” for building living neighbourhoods. This gets at something I was saying in Belgium, standing up for Pattern Language which I understand as a noticing about the world rather than a prescriptive recipe. It is very much generative code. Thomas’ link sent me running to check up on Kevin Harris’ excellent blog and I note he has been recently posting interesting things on third places, mass creativity and social interactions in public spaces. Kevin’s blog is in my “check once a month” folder, and it’s always rich.
- Last note for this week: While I was in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team held a monmumental celebration to mark the formal shift to an interim authority. What this means is that we are half way to becoming a full authority for Aboriginal child and family services on Vancouver Island. The celebration was held at the Snuneymexw longhouse near Nanaimo, and a really nice piece aired on TV about it (.wmv).