I wasn’t at the Nexus for Change conference although I was there in spirit. I had a few lovely long design talks with Peggy Holman, Gabriel Shirley and Tracy Robinson who were hosting various parts of it. I also followed it online a little and even from a distance it was possible to pick up a thread and extend it a little into my own learning. What stood out for me was this emerging identity as a process artist.
John Abbe brought this to my attention with an update to his weblog in which he announced a Nexus project involving creating a wiki around process arts. It’s a great thought and a lovely enterprise, and it has given me some inspiration for talking about my work and what I try to bring to groups, organizations and communities.
I am certainly an artist in the traditional sense of the world, especially in the modality of music where I have practiced consciously since 1979. I am a martial artist, and I do rock balancing more as a meditation than as an art, but still. I have also spent times in my life working artistically with words, writing novels, poetry and other pieces from a place of deep artistic practice. I still practice that somewhat, although I wouldn’t count weblogging necessarily in that field. Blogging for me falls into another category, which I can now name as ProcessArts.
My practice as a process artist includes the following:
- open source learning here at the Parking Lot
- surfing with eyes, ears and fingers for ideas, inspiration and beauty
- parenting and living in a creative set of family relationships (which have their expression in the world in various ways!)
- the art of hosting, designing and convening conversations that matter.
- the art of harvesting learning from questions and learning journeys that I am on.
- Inspiring, creating and supporting change in a way that feeds evolution, life and peace at the many levels of social organization on this planet, from friendships to public service, in response to deep and heartfelt invitations to co-create and collaborate.
I’m going to give this some more thought, but I’d like to ask you two questions, dear reader(s):
- Where do you practice ProcessArts in your life?
- What experience of my ProcessArt practice have you seen that I’m missing in this broad list?
Curious…thanks to John, a little learning journey has begun.
[tags]processarts, john abbe, nexusforchange[/tags]
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My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us. He found one today that really rang out for me. It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy.
This is not tin-foil hat stuff. It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons. The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents a day that are being released, almost in an effort to flood the public with disclosure. How do you find the gems? Well, if every reader of these well read blogs were to pick a couple of pages and harvets the nuggets, they could almost discover the actual plan pretty quickly, in theory anyway. And in practice, that is what’s happening. Within hours, the bloggers had begun to make some serious findings.
I’m quite interested in this, and thinking about how it might be a model for building things as well as taking them down. For example, I’m wondering how we might use a community of stakeholders/readers to sift through harvests from an engagement process to find the meaning that points the way forward. It would be a collective harvest of people’s own work, fed back into the system so that it may be developed further. From that, an emergent, collective set of patterns can be made visible, upon which something new can be designed.
As I think about this, and how the process would work both for uncovering a gpovernment conspiracy and building a new approach to social services for example, I am left with the following principles of practice:
- Agree collectively as to the purpose of the joint inquiry (uncover a government plan, build a new community-based approach to child and youth mental health, etc.)
- Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
- Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
- Invite anyone to read whatever they want of the documents and select the pieces that seem to have the most relvance and benefit to the inquiry at hand. It would seem to be a good idea to have a large and diverse number of people to do this, especially if you had a substantial and complex inquiry and body of thought.
- Make this second level harvest visible and begin pattern finding within what is emerging, all the while feeding that back to the system to both show progress and te help people go back and find additional meaning and wisdom to support what is emerging.
- Have a further inquiry to tap creativity to fill the gaps that are being noticed.
Just a sketch at this point, but I have a place where I might be able to try it on a smaller scale. One could use this anywhere one had a large number of people that were contributing to a project that affected them. Wirearchy changes public engagement and makes it more democratic.
Very cool indeed. Thanks for the heads up Jon!
[tags]wirearchy, governance, public engagement[/tags]
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Christy Lee Engle has posted a beautiful pair of quotes on sacred conversation. There is so much goodness in it that i republish it here for your edification.:
Peggy Holman recently posted a beautiful article called “Evolution, Process and Conversation: A Foundation for Conscious Evolutionary Agency” to the Open Space listserv, originally written for the Evolutionary Life e-magazine.
In it, she wonders/suggests:
“Could it be that consciousness is the latest evolutionary innovation that, when applied to conversation, catalyzes a new form of social system, the conscious co-creative collective, the radiant network of deep community? I believe that conscious conversation is the path to what Thich Nhat Hanh imagined when he said: “It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” [Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha” in Inquiring Mind, Vol 10, No.2, Spring 1994]
which reminds me of a teaching I read a couple of years ago — a similar co-evolutionary idea in a different costume:
“‘Messiah’ in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean ‘conversation’. Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach — Messiah, meaning ‘from dialogue’ or ‘of conversation.’ [Me’or Enayim, Parashat Pinchas] His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation — every mutual act of voice-giving.
All conversation is sacred. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in whihch both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is messianic. Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah.”
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Fascinating article in the New York Times about the norther area of Somalia where people have built peace in an incredibly turbulent region by mixing indigenous governance with democratic participation, using elders and tribal leaders to harness attachment to clans AND to transcendent principles such as independence and peace. Some quotes:
“You can’t be donated power,” said Dahir Rayale Kahin, the president of the Republic of Somaliland, which has long declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia. “We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the south are still waiting – till now – for others.”
…
Its leaders, with no Western experts at their elbow, have devised a political system that minimizes clan rivalries while carving out a special role for clan elders, the traditional pillars of Somali society. They have demobilized thousands of the young gunmen who still plague Somalia and melded them into a national army. They have even held three rounds of multiparty elections, no small feat in a region, the Horn of Africa, where multiparty democracy is mostly a rumor. Somalia, for one, has not had free elections since the 1960s.
…
Somaliland, like Somalia, was awash with weapons and split by warring clans. Their first step was persuading the militiamen to give up their guns – a goal that still seems remote in the south. They moved slowly, first taking the armed pickups, then the heavy guns and ultimately leaving light weapons in the hands of the people. Again, this stood in contrast to the south, where in the early 1990s thousands of American marines and United Nations peacekeepers failed to put a dent in the clan violence.
“We had a higher purpose,” said Abdillahi M. Duale, Somaliland’s foreign minister. “Independence. And nobody in the outside world was going to help us get there.”
…
But the one issue that unites most Somalilanders is recognition. Somaliland has its own money, its own flag, its own national anthem and even its own passport.
“And we have peace, a peace owned by the community,” said Zamzam Adan, a women’s rights activist. “You’d think in this part of the world, that would count for something.”
[tags]somalia, somalialand[/tags]
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Openly musing today on wondering what it might look like for participatory budgeting to be deployed for an Aboriginal governance authority responsible for child and family services.
The work we are doing on Vancouver Island is about building the capacity of the community to be the owners of the child and family services in their communities. We are about to do an Art of Hosting training here with 40 or so community members to build the leadership capacity of the local communities, but I was thinking today, after having dinner last night with my friend Donna Morton, who knows much about these things, that participatory budgeting might be a cool thing to try.
Participatory budgeting is a deeply democratic process of having citizens use deliberative dialogue to set budgets for the ervices that affect them. It has it’s deepes community of practice in Brazil, where the cities of Porto Alegre and Sao Paolo have pioneered the use of the process. It has since spread to many places around the world.
I know there is a small movement of people here in British Columbia interested in the process, and one councillor on my island, Lisa Barrett, tried to introduce t as a practice on Bowen Island. She was met with too much reticence to pursue it at the time, although it sems like at some level and over some longer period of time democratizing public budgeting may be an inevitable move especially in municipal governments.
So I’m looking for some expertise among people near and far who have used this process especially in the non-profit world, or even better, in the quasi-governmental world of school board, health authorities and the like.
My main inquiry at this point is around how you have the conversation with the people that control the purse strings in a way that invites them to share power. I was talking to my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart this morning as well, who works in the social services sector in Columbus Ohio and she gifted me with a great question to use to invite a conversation about this process. She was talking about how easy it is to talk a good line about sharing power – and in still-semocratic North America, there are many places where people are able to participate. Many of these forums however are shallow if they don’t tie the exercise of that shared power to shared responsibility and benefit. Tuesday’s insight was that it makes sense to talk to people who are already open and who already believe that sharing is the right thing to do and then ask “Where can we share power that results also in shared benefits?” That is a way to talk about how to include the voices of clients for example in the structuring of the budgets that affect their lives and it helps us get at what Tuesday called “what we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s a brilliant little question.
So, friends, where can you point me for people that have had experiences using participatory budgeting in the social services sectors anywhere in the world?
PS. Here are some links I uncovered about participatory budgeting in a quick scan around the web:
Porto Alegre Participatory budgeting virtual library
Articles and books in English, Spanish and Portugese
Participatory Budgeting Project — Resources
This page contains papers, links, and other information about research and other projects related to participatory budgeting that are being developed throughout the world.
participatorybudgeting.org
ParticipatoryBudgeting.org is a companion site to the book, Militants and Citizens, and a general resource site on participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting tag at del.icio.us
[tags]participatory+budgeting, democracy[/tags]