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Complexity, AI, and democratic deliberation

August 19, 2025 By Complexity, Democracy, Facilitation, Learning, Notes No Comments

Chris Mowles has a lovely post on the perils of an unquestioned commitment to directionality in complexity. Our work is never starting from scratch, and what does “going forward” even mean in a non-linear context?

…maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out. The future is important, and we are oriented towards it, but this shouldn’t prevent us from thinking about how we have become who we are, and what matters to us. What remains of the embers of the past from which we can still derive succour and find resource?

Rosa Zubazarreta has long been a curious “pracademic” – as she calls herself – about facilitation and deliberation. We have met a few times in the past, but I consider her a close colleague in the work of constantly trying to learn about how to host conversations and design group spaces in which dialogue and listening is maximized. She recently had a peer-reviewed article published called “Listening Across Differences” about deliberative “mini-publics” which are small democratic fora hosted in Austria. Her most recent blog post explores the role of AI in group facilitation, a topic about which she is deeply passionate, and about which I am very curious.

It’s happening and I’m certainly willing to explore it more in deliberative contexts. I have run a couple of small experiments using AI to summarize vast amounts of narrative information and advice submitted by citizens to create high level summaries of advice, high level articulations of dissenting opinions and so on. This becomes material for further deliberation. I have been toying with a design where members of a group all spend time feeding information to different GPTs, querying the data in different ways and bringing their insights to a conversation. It’s about how to make vast amounts of opinion accessible, and generate a learning conversation that everyone can participate in.

This is becoming an interesting field and I notice the twin poles of curiosity and resistance in myself. My friend Jeff Aitken sent along a link to Metarelational.ai which feels like a true TRIP to explore. There are several varieties of trained chatbot there. I have seen and explored some of these, each one cultivated like a garden, each one designed to do something a bit different. Honestly, after a hour or so in a session with these tools, it’s hard to know what terms like “relational” mean. I am firmly in the world of knowing and working with human-to-human relationality. The work at Metarelational seems to at times to evokes a kind of eschatology of human relationships stemming from our own design, and a sort of surrender to AI and machine intelligence that feels religious. It uses religious and spiritual terms and language like “agape” and “right relationship” and “interbeing.” I joked with Jeff the other day about when a new religion might sprout up around an AI chatbot. It’s a joke, but given the proclivity for human beings to seek a higher intelligence that has all the answers, and to be led in a course of action “forward” at any costs, I think there is a serious question here.

A few course offerings this fall

August 18, 2025 By Uncategorized No Comments

The rainy weather here has me thinking about the fall, and we have a few course offerings coming up in the next few months, including two in-person Art of Hosting trainings and a couple of online offerings on working with stories to make change, and facilitating large-group meeting methods.

The Art of Hosting continues to be my core work in terms of training and capacity building. From October 16-19, I will return to Ontario to join Jennifer Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle for our third annual Reimagining Education Art of Hosting. There are still a few space left for this gathering, which takes place at the Queen’s Biological Station near Elgin, Ontario, in the heart of autumn colours season. It’s a rustic location on a lake with a smaller group of fewer than 40 folks, many of whom are involved in public and Indigenous education systems. These folks are joined by others who are working in other sectors and that richness means that it isn’t just an education conference and that people working elsewhere will meet lots of folks who are skilled at creating learning environments.

Twice a year in Vancouver, Caitlin Frost, Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier, Kris Archie and I host an Art of Hosting open to any and all. From November 12-14, A group of around 40 people from all over the world gather in Heritage Hall in Vancouver for a three-day intensive. This is always an incredibly diverse group of people and the connections and ideas and encounters that happen are amazing. Still spots open for this one and we will repeat it in April as well.

Two shorter online offerings are open for registration as well. Along with my friend Donna Brown who does on-the-ground community organizing in Baltimore, we will be participating in a series of courses offered by the School of System Change. Donna and I will appear as provocateurs for a session on Uncovering Stories to Understand Systems on October 8. Registration is open for this session and the whole program now.

And finally, later in the winter, I will be returning again for my annual offering through Simon Fraser University’s Certificate Program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. On February 13, I will be teaching my one-day Introduction to Powerful Conversations. Focused on World Cafe and Open Space Technology, this course also contextualizes those approaches with a little complexity theory, and an introduction to chaordic design. You can sign up for the session without being fully enrolled in the certificate program.

You can stay up to date on these offerings through our Harvest Moon Consultants newsletter, on my courses page, or by subscribing to my blog at the link below, using RSS, or on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Changing seasons, short form literature and weekend football

August 18, 2025 By Bowen, Football, Music, Notes

Clouds continue to hang around here in the wake of our first Pineapple Express storm of the season. The Music By The Sea Festival wrapped up late last night (I was home again after midnight) after three full days of community music-making, with a few professional ringers thrown into our midst. It was a multi-generational event which sprang out of a group of local Bowen Island families who were long time regulars at the Nimblefingers Festival in Sorrento, BC. As a result there was a strong core of bluegrass and Americana music-making at MBTS, which suits me fine. Bluegrass is like folk jazz. Simple chord progressions and beautiful melodies and harmony singing, but incredible virtuosity on the instrumental side, including a strong value on improvised breaks and solos. It is massively accessible music, but for the performer the sky is the limit in terms of technique and creative possibilities.

Importantly, the gathering brought together many Bowen Islander, including several who left the island years ago. The music scene when I moved here was rich and vibrant and diverse and it withered a little as we made the transition between the 1970s-1990s nearly intentional community of interesting characters to a place where property became a financial investment. Since COVID, our demographics have radically shifted and there is more of a feeling of intentional community again. People are moving here for something other than what might be a decent return on a real estate investment. Make no mistake, this is still a massively unaffordable place to live, and our best efforts to address it are swallowed in a context of general inaction and apathy about structural policy solutions. But. There is a revival of community going on here, and I met many people this weekend who are my neighbours and with whom I know I will be making music this year and into the future.

I love short forms of writing. Poetry, short stories, short novels. And aphorisms. There is something about the pithy wisdom contained in a single sentence that can make it powerful. A well crafted aphorism has a rhythm to it as well. It swings, like a jazz lick. And like a lick, it evokes something timeless and connected to an ecosystem of meaning. Peter Limberger lives aphorisms too and here he writes about two medieval aphorists, Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest who wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman who wrote a collection of Maxims, while also pointing to his favourite, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.

Sometimes questions are like aphorisms. One has to be careful asking questions that are beautiful in their own right. Questions occasionally try too hard to impress. They aim too much for a response that is in awe of the question itself. Mary Oliver’s “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is one of those. But asking “What time is it?” Is a question that dances ever so lightly on the fence between genuine curiosity and profound insight in its own right. Tenneson writes “I used to see people more often resist these kind of questions. It was resistance that saw some fluff and said, “let’s get to the real work.” These days, oh gosh, so many more people recognize these questions are the real work. Or are the real contexting that helps us get to the real work.” Amen.

Life is just a long conversation that we drop into for a bit. Patti Digh:

Life, then, is less about owning the discussion and more about showing up to it. Listening well. Speaking honestly. Departing graciously. And trusting that the conversation—like life itself—will carry on.

Perhaps the real measure is not how loudly or how often we speak, but how we change in the process. We arrive thinking we understand the argument; we leave having been shaped by the voices around us. We are participants, yes, but also apprentices to the human story—learning from those who came before, influencing those who come after, even in ways we’ll never know.

Some day, someone else will walk into the same parlor after we’ve gone. They’ll hear the echoes of our words, softened by time, folded into the larger chorus. They may not know our name, but they will inherit a conversation made—if we’ve done our part—slightly kinder, richer, and more open than when we found it.

A decent start to the Premier League season for Tottenham. After an early goal from Richarlison, Spurs were a bit disjointed for the rest of the first half. They came out ganagbusters in the second though and Richarlison scored his second from a beautiful scissor kick off a Kudus delivery. Kudus impressed with his flair and quickness. Brennan Johnson scored the third for an emphatic win in the end.

The latest TSS Rover to turn pro is Aislin Streicek, who played for us in 2022 and 2023 and who was signed by Celtic FC to a two year contract. She made her first appearance yesterday coming off the bench in a 2-1 win over Hearts. Watching and helping young players turn professional is why we do what we do at our little second division Canadian club.

A Pineapple Express, music, and keeping meaningful things going

August 16, 2025 By Uncategorized

Silvery light this morning at play on the east wall of Átl’ka7tsem this morning


A Pineapple Express swooped in yesterday and doused our area with more than 66mm of rain, setting a new record for the rainiest August 16th in history. That’s basically a month’s worth of August rain in 24 hours. Coming home down tha Sunshine Coast and across Howe Sound the air was foggy and grey with high winds on the exposed parts of the inlet. Our ferry back to Bowen was stopped for two humpbacks who swam by. They out in an appearance along the shore at a small music festival we have going to is weekend – Music By The Sea.

My friends Ted and Dyan Spear have been hosting this gathering for a few years now. Very small and mostly local and intimate held on their property beneath tents and tarps this year!

I was able to unpack and head over there for the last set of the concert (a lovely set from Kip Johnson, including some very nice originals and The Witch of the Westmereland by Archie Fisher, a favourite of mine). The concert was followed by a contra dance called by my friend Becky Liddle and then we got stuck in for a couple of hours of jigs and reels. It’s been a long time since I played Irish music in a good free flowing session and playing with Neil and Keona Hammond is always good for the soul.

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi’s short story “The Archive” published at The Hinternet is a moving piece about the way subtleties of meaning slowly drift away:

I slipped solastalgia into an acid-free envelope and filed it under “Algorithmic Casualties”, between beefbrain and paracosm. I logged its last known public appearance: a blog post from seven years ago, archived only in fragments, the photographs long replaced by blank gray squares. The author, anonymous, had written about watching their childhood valley transform into a mining pit. Without the word, their grief became harder to name. And without a name, grief becomes harder to notice at all.

Tom Atlee reports on a citizen-led assembly in Norway which discussed the future of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Wandering Lund

August 15, 2025 By Notes, Travel

Lund harbour, taken last year, when the skies were clear of smoke and rain.

The little town of Lund sits pretty much at the end of the road near the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast. It was established by two Swedish brothers who opened a store in 1889 right on top of the historical village of Tla’Amin, from which the surrounding First Nation derives its name. It is a town that now sits surrounded by Tla’Amin treaty settlement land, and which is still very much a working port. There are a few fish boats, but mostly it caters to marine services and adventure tourism for people living on and visiting the outlying islands and nearby Desolation Sound.

It was rainy and smoky yesterday so instead of a planned hike into the mountains we canned blackberry jam in the morning and walked around Lund in the afternoon. Along the way we visited Ron Robb and Jan Lovewell at Rare Earth Pottery. We met these two about four years ago, and we have mutual friends. Over the years we have bought a piece or two from them, and today left with a tea bowl and mug. Ron makes tea bowls using the Japanese method of kurinuki rather than throwing clay on the wheel or building pots from coils. Kurinuki means “hollowing out” in Japanese. The potter begins with the shaping of a solid block of clay and then scoops out the centre and takes away clay until the final item is produced. The result is a unique piece that has arisen from stillness, rather than the motion of the wheel, and is shaped from emptying out, and that very much resonates with me.

It’s worth a visit to their gallery if you are ever in Lund, and perhaps you will even find them in one of the twice-annual kiln firings. But if not, there is a wonderful video of them firing a wood kiln in Earl’s Cove with two other potters.

From Ron and Jan’s place we wandered down to Finn Bay where the Tidal Art Centre sits in an old forestry station. The gallery is currently hosting a beautiful solo exhibit of the work of Donna Huber. Huber’s work is inspired by everything from Chagall to Inuit printmaking and it shows in her use of space and perspective.

To cap off our afternoon, I had a stroke of good luck. While shopping for a lemon at The Stock Pile, I spied a copy of Phil Thomas’s Songs of the Pacific Northwest on a display carousel. Copies of this book used to be very hard to come by, but it seems it has now been reprinted by Hancock House. There is a playlist on YouTube with all of these songs, many of them sung by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat, of whom I wrote last week.