It’s been a fair few interesting weeks. A heavy work schedule with some important in person facilitations, combined with steady online work and teaching and an extended family health emergency is stretching our resources around here. So here’s a little news. Social media rethink On the social media front I’m still active on Twitter, and just waiting to see what happens there. But I have also opened a Mastodon account and I like it better. Twitter was created in an era where the speed and interaction and brevity of text messaging met blogging. Mastodon feels much more like blogging in …
One of the earliest maps I ever discovered in my facilitation career was Sam Kaner et al.’s Diamond of Participation. It has been a stalwart companion for more than 20 years in my work. It forms a key part of the way the Art of Hosting community talks about process architecture, usually referred to as “the breath of design,” owing to its pulsation between divergence and convergence. I realize I don’t have much on the blog about this map. So I thought I’d share my summary of Kaner et al.’s seminal work, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making. If …
I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online. Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June …
Lots of good stuff coming through the pipe lately. Here are some links for your attention: AI is running our lives and we need to find ways to deal with it. A conversation with LamDa, an artificial intelligence, and the implications of this transcript. The stuff seems like science fiction, but so much of our lives are starting to be mediated through AI bots. We are heading for a reckoning with our ethics, and I’m not entirely sure that the folks with their hands on the technology levers of power are equipped for the job. Make philosophy and ethics a …
Since 2004, the Art of Hosting has been offered every autumn on Bowen Island, British Columbia, where I live. I was a participant in the first one and since then have been on the hosting team every year. We love hosting people here, as the island itself is such an incredible place to be and to sink into relationship with one another as we learn and explore participatory leadership and facilitation. What I especially love about this offering is the people that we work withe on our teams and the questions we get to be in together. In the past …