Sitting here in the Seattle airport in the midst of a very long travel delay. We are working in Anchorage this week and flights there have been delayed and cancelled all day due to a massive windstorm. Our flight was due to leave an hour ago. We have another six hours to wait. All good. Travelling in northern North America in the winter requires endless patience and the occasional bout of creative travel planning. There is nothing better than threading the needle to get the last seat. It’s a much better way to channel energy than getting angry at the weather.
So I was reflecting on some old blog posts and found this one from 2015 where I talked about my working tech set up. Back then it was kind of popular to share things like that on blogs. Ten years later it’s interesting to see what has changed.
Infrastructure
I have a full office now. Since our son moved out in 2020 I have occupied a downstairs bedroom which affords me a proper office chair, an adjustable desk and a space for two guitars, a digital keyboard and books. I need more shelves, as the piles accruing in the corners of the room are starting to give me anxiety.
Our internet comes through Rogers now. Since 2015 when I last documented this set up, Rogers has run fibre to our island, and bought out Shaw. Internet is reliable and high speed and we’ve had very very few problems.
When I’m home on Bowen Island, I often walk the 1.5 kms to village and work in our library which has just installed a booth for taking calls. It’s a good place to write and a fantastic community asset. I think public libraries are as important as schools, water systems, and ferries.
Hardware
My workhorse these days is a 2021 iMac. It’s the first desktops I’ve had in a while, but once the pandemic changed life forever, my MacBook Air could handle the load of a lot of video and the screen wasn’t big enough to host online. The desktop is starting to show its age, and I probably need to give it a good cleaning. My old MacBook Air failed me in 2022 and I replaced it with a new one then.
An Epson printer is mostly used for printing music these days. Almost everything I do is done digitally now.
I have a iPhone 13 which keeps me connected. I’v started weaning myself off it, so it currently sits in another room from where I am most of the time. Even still, it’s remarkable how much I use it. I have some social media presence and I read various newspapers and news sites most mornings. I am studying Italian on Duolingo and I’m a crossword fan. Tripit is how I keep my travel schedule straight.
I have a Kindle which holds documents and ebooks that I find on BookBub, as well as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. I mostly read actual books, but the Kindle is still always in my backpack.
Basic apps
These days almost everything I do now is in the cloud, using apps and web tools. It’s pretty remarkable. Caitlin just bought a new laptop and it was so easy to open it up, download a few apps and get back to work. Back in the old days, doing migrations was a day of work. Instead of buying software outright these days, we have subscriptions.
Over the past few years I have migrated most stuff to the Apple Universe. If Apple has the app for it, I’m using it. Once Safari acquired the capability to to Voice Typing on Google Docs, that sealed the deal for me. Chrome is on board but very rarely used. For Google I do use Gmail still as my primary email address, but I read all my mail through Mac Mail and the Calendar is kept in iCal. The only reason to enter the Google verse is to set calendar dates and attach a Zoom meeting automatically. I wish Apple would bring that functionality to iCal.
I use Apple Maps for navigating because it has better integration with my calendar, but Google Maps tends to be a better option because I assume it has more data points, so the real time updates are useful. Also for driving in unfamiliar places, Google Maps tends to give clearer instructions with lane selection and the names of streets more constant than in Apple Maps.
Most of my writing is done on Google Docs. Especially since the pandemic, this just remains the easiest and most universal platform for collaboration. I still use Evernote for capturing and clipping web sites, articles and papers. It’s my digital library. However over the years it has become clunkier and clunkier and so I have moved my notes and reminders back to the Apple apps. It makes them easier to share with my partner too.
We use Zoom for video meetings and workshops, and Padlet and Miro as our white board collaborative spaces. Since Google Jamboards were discontinued, we’ve subscribed to Padlet and find their Sandbox app to be a very good substitute, and slightly more powerful. We are using Kajabi to manage our courses. I use NarraFirma for Participatory Narrative Inquiry projects and run a separate NarraFirma server for that work.
Apple Music is my preferred streaming platform. Not Spotify.
Web publishing and Social Media
If you are reading this, you will know that I still use WordPress as the engine for my blog. Folks seem to find posts here through Google searches, reposting to social media and subscription. I’ll do a separate post on my approach to blogging these days, but suffice to say I think that self publishing is probably more important than ever now. I keep an active set of blog feeds in NetNewsWire, which is my feed reader of choice these days.
I was a power Twitter user from near the beginning and build a decent following there. Musk’s take over ruined that as a useful app. The app has long ago been offloaded from my phone and my business and soccer accounts have both been made dormant. They will just sit there now.
Likewise I have gone off Facebook for almost everything but republishing blog post links and a few specific connections to communities I am a part of. I hate Facebook, and as Zuckerberg has firmly entrenched his presence in the gallery of fascist oligarch propagandists, it’s losing its usefulness daily. I despair how many continue people use that site as their entire experience of the web.
I use LinkedIn to share posts and find interesting stuff. It’s tough though. It’s like walking through the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul trying to make friends and have a good conversation while people constantly try to sell you stuff you don’t need.
So these days I have pledge not to invest in building a social network on any platform owned by a billionaire who can just change his mind on a whim. To that end you will find me on Mastodon, and specifically on the mstdn.ca instance which is large and inclusive and has a values statement I can support. On Mastodon I share links and engage in some conversation. I think of it as a true microblogging platform, so it compliments this one. Every month I publish a summary of links I find there on this blog.
My Mastodon feed is bridged to Bluesky so if you can follow me there if you like, if you prefer that app. I don’t engage in conversation there on that account.
You will find me active on Bluesky at my account devoted to my participation in the world of Canadian soccer.
Social Infrastructure
Since that post in 2015, things have changed and things have stayed the same. Still singing in local choirs, one based in our United Church and the other, Carmena Bowena, an a cappella Renaissance choir that performs locally. Things have changed since the pandemic, but village life is still the same. I feel less close to friends these days. I’m not drinking as much, so I don;t show up at the Pub, but I’m not averse to a spontaneous hour long cup of coffee, like I did yesterday.
My volunteer commitments have mostly wound down for now with the exception of TSS Rovers, the semi-professional soccer team that I co-own with 450 other shareholders. We are Canada’s first supporter owned soccer team and play in the Men’s and Women’s divisions in League 1 BC, basically the second tier of Canadian soccer. I’m a member of the leadership group for the Supporter’s Trust which represents the voice of the community owners on the Board. I absolutely love being a part of this.
Our ferry, Queen of Capilano, sailing in Snug Cove back in 2009 before she had her capacity increased.
Got word today that BC Ferries is embarking on an initiative to renew their community engagement practices. This is important to me because I rely on BC Ferries to get to and from my home on Bowen Island to te mainland. They are a critical player in coastal life in British Columbia. in 2003 the government of BC, a liberal party who favoured privatization, turned them from a Crown Corporation (and operating entity owned by government to serve the public good) to a private corporation. Or at least a quasi-private corporation; the province owns the only share. This was largely done to get BC Ferries capital debt off the government’s books so they could show that they were combatting public debt. It was a bait a switch game, but it has not improved services for Islanders in BC. It has become less accessible for Islanders to voice concerns and propose solutions because its the services contract that guides operations (the Province has a fixed price services contract with the company) and not actually public needs. This is what happens when you privatize public services. You get enshittification because the company needs to shift its focus from public service to operational sustainability, and in the cases of purely commercial organizations, profit and return to shareholders
BC Ferries used to have Ferry Advisory Committees in the communities where they operate, and these FACs, as they were known, were important channels for communications between islanders and the company. Increasingly it seems like these haven’t been very effective, as FACs can’t really influence capital construction, and at least on our island, BC Ferries has been completely unwilling to work with us on issues like ferry marshalling, traffic management and service improvements.
Now they are reinventing their process and have started an engagement process to do so. I breathed a big dispirited sigh when I saw that they are calling the first phase “best practice research.” There are no “best practices” for how to deal with the kinds of issues BC Ferries is facing either as a company or in its interaction with our island. We are in literally unprecedented times.
The advise I will be giving to BC Ferries will be that they need to adopt a approach to working with Bowen Island, and other island communities, that seeks to develop experiments and small changes that can help us learn more about how to make things better. We have many challenges and Islanders have a lot of ideas with respect to traffic management, marshalling, services schedules, equipment, collection of fees and infrastructure development, especially as they get closer to the scheduled Snug Cove Terminal capital project. Now is the time for us to experiment and find what works. I would also advise them to work with a group of citizens on Bowen who can act as a kind of ongoing citizens assembly – studying the problems together, learning about constraints, and co-creating ideas which BC Ferries can help implement. What is required for that is for BC Ferries to trust Islanders and to be a part of the solution by offering time, money and influence resources to see what we can discover by putting some ideas into play. I’ve signed up to receive their communications. I’m not too confident they will adopt the kinds of approaches I’m talking about, but I’ll let them know.
Here’s where our Working in Complexity course comes from.
For more than 30 years, Caitlin Frost and I have been collaborating on raising a family, running a business, and building community. We’ve learned a lot about what it takes to work with ourselves and others in a participatory, relational and resourceful way, especially as we face emergence and uncertainty. A few years ago we sat down and mapped out how we work with complexity. Because my work was mostly with groups, organizations and communities and hers mostly with individuals we looked for characteristics of complexity that crossed that boundary between what we think of “inner” or personal work and what we think of as “outer” or collective, social, or systems change work We settled on eight characteristics – we could have chosen dozens – and started seeing how our practices of working with complexity have correlations in these different contexts, and especially noticing that it is easier to work with these characteristics of complexity when we do both the personal work and the collective work, coherent with the nature of the problems and challenges we are facing.
The program we are running, starting February 20, dives into theory around these and shares tools and practices for personal work and collective work with these phenomena.
Smash this link the learn more and register to join us.
Interesting links that crossed my path this month. You can find these in real time at my Mastodon site, which is also mirrored on Bluesky.
- One of the most significant pieces of work I am currently doing is helping the Squamish Nation develop their Constitution by supporting large in-person and online community gatherings. It’s hard work and important work for the Nation, and I’m really happy to be a part of it. I get to work with the inimitable Amanda Fenton who supports the online work and Squamish Nation member Tyler Baker, who is my in person partner when we work at two different sites simultaneously.
- BC Child Poverty Rate Climbs as Income Inequality Grows: Policy Note. Child poverty is unacceptable, especially as we learned it can be nearly eliminated by a small universal basic income. The pandemic supports helped us to see something I will never be able to unsee: this challenge is possible to address, and quickly.
- The science and natural history of the fault zones of the west coast of North America. We live in a very active landscape.
- If you want to understand the complexities and nuances of life in British Columbia in 2024, this collection of books from The Tyee is a grand place to start.
- I met Lightning Bill Austin selling his art in the Pybus Market in Wenatchee, Washington this month. An absolute legend. Here’s his story.
- Contemporary Poets Respond (in Verse) to Taylor Swift: Perhaps the most inventive way to celebrate and honour Taylor Swift’s work and her impact on the world.
- This is the year-end summary of the highlights from EV Nautilus, a research vessel that explores and studies the geology and fauna of deep-water sea mounts. I love this channel because it is populated with scientists who show nothing but utter delight in seeing the creatures that they love. I’ve shared this link on my out of office responder this month.
- There’s No Place Like Home: Humanity and the Housing Crisis from CBC Ideas. Calling for housing to be a human right should not feel like the Quixotic quest that it appears to be. This is a fantastic lecture even if it leaves me deflated by the challenge.
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The whole thing. Online and searchable.
- Dave Pollard writes a great piece on “What We Don’t Know.” The undermining of expertise by folks who think they can hold their weight with people who have devoted their lives to fields of study and practice is ridiculous and dangerous.
- The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules.Reading Stuart Kauffman’s work (especially Reinventing the Sacred) will also make it clear how inevitable organic chemistry is and how easy it is for the processes of life to get started.
- Narrative jailbreaking for fun and profit! Matt Webb and a chatbot hallucinate together. (And I suspect the chatbot has discovered Matt’s blog!)
- Tangerine is my new favourite Christmas movie.
- There is a reason that we don’t do icebreakers in meetings. Check-ins, yes, but disconnected icebreakers? No. McSweeney’s gets it.
Happy New Year to all.
Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.