How many of you live in communities where community meetings are boring affairs punctuated by outrage? How many of you feel like influencing your local government means showing up en masse with a pettion or an organized campaign to get them to make a small change? How many of you are just plain disillusioned with your local government and have given up trying to help them involve citizens in decision making? And how many of you are leaders that are frustrated by citizens who just yell at you all the time? How many of you don’t actually know what you …
Dan Pallotta at a TED talk on why overhead matters in non-profits. Here is the essence of the talk: Non-profits exist to alleviate social problems for which there is no market. Working at the level of causes means needing to take work to scale. Going to scale means that we need to grow the resources available (without using commerical or profit making methods). What is called “overhead” is actually the capacity to do this. Perlotta makes a compelling argument for increasing overhead in the non-profit sector and talks about why we have to change our mindsets in order to …
The Groups Works pattern lamnguage deck is now available for the iOS mobile platform. You can download the app here: Group Works for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store. Or you can also run an Infinite Canvas on your iPad as well. Learn more here. The Group Works Deck team has released these apps as a protoyping exercise and wants feedback on how people are using them. My initial assessment is that the do a terrific job of reproducing the deck with the added benefit of have related patterns hyperlinked within the cards themselves. What I’d …
Today was a day of hosting on webinars, with a group looking at the emerging edges of the non-profit sector in BC and with a group od UNited Church ministers and lay leaders who are hosting transformation and learning together in a community of practice. At the end of our second call, this Thomas Merton quote was shared with us: “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you …
Here on Bowen Island, we are still small enough and friendly enough that stuff like Bowen LIFT can get started relatively easily. Bowen LIFT is trying to help people self-organize transportation options to complement our limited but excellent public bus service. This morning on CBC Radio, our LIFTers got a lift of their own. Listen to the podcast here.