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From Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Keeping conversations inside the room

September 30, 2004 By Uncategorized

Apropos of what I blogged the other day on vision, Johnnie Moore has posted a nice piece at finding where the true potential lies.

Change is often spoken of as something to be done elsewhere, by other people. I think the effect is to make change some hypothetical process, and perhaps to give the speakers a kind of illusory sense of power.

Turning the conversation to the one thing we can change – ourselves and the ways in which we interact with the world – creates a more empowering and realistic set of tasks, and works from a vision that feels truer becasue it comes from within.

A playlist of world music

September 29, 2004 By Uncategorized

I’ve been playing around with Webjay for a few months now. It’s a tool that creates playlists of music (and other media) from users all over the place. My musical tastes are pretty varied, but I have always loved what is known as “world music” and so I have distilled some great findings on the web into a rotating top 40 of sounds that are making my ears tingle at the moment. You might have heard of some of these artists, but I’m willing to be that most of them are new discoveries.

Go visit the playlist and have a listen. You can subscribe to the playlist’s RSS feed as well to be alerted to when I change it up, which should happen every week or so. There’s a link on the sidebar here, under “Little Projects” that goes to the playlist as well.

Happy listening!

Taking the long road here

September 28, 2004 By Uncategorized

Recent searches that have brought visitors to Parking Lot:


  • “repatriation of sacred objects and human bones and First Nations people”

  • “japan everyday relationship to living space”

  • “How did politics influence space technology?”

  • “every Year the Salmon Come Back”

  • “Ojibway turtle song lyrics”

  • “example of short essay about students parking space”

  • “the claw marks of those who preceded us”

  • “experiences living in remote communities”

  • “poems for staff finishing work”

  • “hungarian detachment AND strategy”

  • “small structure in open space”

That last one would make a cool tag line, eh?

Welcome to all of you, no matter how you got here.

Seeing and vision

September 28, 2004 By Uncategorized

It seems almost intuitive that there should be a connection between seeing and vision. Certainly in the physiological processes, seeing is what you do and vision is what you have. You can still see if you have bad vision, but you can’t see well.

I have been reading Presence by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworsky and Betty Sue Flowers very slowly now for a few months and it’s time to start posting from it. The book is really about the evolution of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, which is a map for looking at how people reach down into their deep sense of intention and purpose and bring that out to bear on the world around them, creating the futures for their communities and organizations that they want to see. It is beautifully in line with stuff I have been doing intuitively for years. This is one of those books that comes along to confirm one’s work and to give it language.

At any rate, not knowing where to start in posting from this great work, I am choosing this great quote on vision. It comes after the part of the book that talks about developing the capacity to see from within a system:

…many visions are doomed from the outset because those who articulate them, whether consciously or not, are coming from a place of powerlessness. If we believe that someone else has created our present reality, what is the basis for believing that we can create a different reality in the future?…When this happens, people formulate visions that are disconnected from a shared understanding of present reality and a shared responsibility for that reality. If people are still externalizing their problems, they create, in a sense, “externalized visions,” which amount to a kind of change strategy for fixing problems which they have not yet seen their part in creating. Only when people begin to see from within the forces that shape their reality and to see their part in how those forces might evolve does vision become powerful. Everything else is just vague hope.

— Presence, p 136

There is a nice review of the book here.

Harnessing self-organization FAST!

September 27, 2004 By Uncategorized

I’m an Open Space Technology guy, but that doesn’t cloud my eyes to other forms of self-organizing tools.

From the ever interesting Designing for Civil Society comes a report from David Wilcox on a speed dating process to form communities of practice. In 35 minutes.