- Kaliya Hamlin is getting really noticed for her work promoting Open Space in the tech community. The whole idea of unconferencing has jumped the shark, but there is still an art to doing Open Space. It’s easy but not simple, and Kaliya has been a great guardian of the essence of the process as it grows into the tech world in a big way This article from the Business 2.0 blog is another piece of good attention being thrown her way. Actually there are a rash of articles out these days on Open Space, including one in a publication called Meetings and Incentive Travel, that quotes my Canadian mates Diane Gibault, Michelle Cooper and Larry Peterson. Add to that this very useful short film on Open Space, and you could safely say that our beloved process has truly tipped.
- And speaking of mates, Thomas Arthur comes through with a link he sent by Google chat which deepens the ida of Pattern Language, moving it into another level of “generative code” for building living neighbourhoods. This gets at something I was saying in Belgium, standing up for Pattern Language which I understand as a noticing about the world rather than a prescriptive recipe. It is very much generative code. Thomas’ link sent me running to check up on Kevin Harris’ excellent blog and I note he has been recently posting interesting things on third places, mass creativity and social interactions in public spaces. Kevin’s blog is in my “check once a month” folder, and it’s always rich.
- Last note for this week: While I was in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team held a monmumental celebration to mark the formal shift to an interim authority. What this means is that we are half way to becoming a full authority for Aboriginal child and family services on Vancouver Island. The celebration was held at the Snuneymexw longhouse near Nanaimo, and a really nice piece aired on TV about it (.wmv).
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Yesterday was National Aboriginal Day in Canada, a kind of pretend holiday which kicks off the 11 day period of Canadian national holidays. After this comes St. Jean Baptiste Day on June 24, celebrated as Quebec’s national holiday and then Canada Day on July 1.
I spent the day working at VIATT, helping design the community structures for the transfer of the child and familiy services system to Aboriginal control. Meanwhile, up in Bella Coola, my friend Liz Hall was busy forwarding an interesting video to her friends about the disappearance of the eulachon from th Bella Coola River and the impact that has had on the Nuxalk Nation.
If you didn’t celebrate Aboriginal Day yesterday, take the time to view the video and think about helping out Liz and her community as they work at building a community house in which the culture can thrive despite what has happened the Nuxalk Natoin’s fish.
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Amy Lenzo at the World Cafe blog tossed out a great link today, to the Global Oneness Project, a collection of videos about what we need to do on this earth. The bonus for me is an interview with my friend Tom Hurley, who I met last week in Belgium. I connected very deeply to Tom for a variety of reasons, but we shared a deep set of conversations on topics as diverse as stewardship, governance and the responsibility of love that helped me ground and understand my experience. The video with Tom is a nice summation of our need to integrate opposites, inner and outer, science and spirit. These are themes that lie deep in my practice of “practical decolonization.” Colonization as a project is about splitting polarities into opposites, decolonization is about making these whole again – healing.
I’m constantly amazed at how close we can come to people we have never met before. I’m wondering what it is we share that creates the invitation to depth so quickly. It’s beyond the fact that we share practices and approaches. What lies at the heart of such a phenomenon, and is this new or did it occur in the past?
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Some notes and stuff from my trips around the web:
- Passion bounded by responsibility is one of the tenets of Open Space. To see how powerful this is in action, you should go and visit WikiClock. Very simply, it’s a clock that shows the current time if you update it to do so. It’s a ridiculous notion, until you realize that it actually works. And if you still don’t know what a wiki is, Viv McWaters has come across a video that might help you understand it a lot better.
- Jack Ricchiuto has discovered something about appreciative leadership in Aboriginal communities that has long formed the basis of my practice: “he understanding is that childhood traumas cause our souls to fragment. The work of healing is to enable the reclaiming of these parts of our souls – like wisdom, love, and courage – that are ours to reclaim.”
- It still amazes me how intimate people can be in person after engaging with each other over time on weblogs. Since my lunch with new friends in London last weekend, Richard and Kevin have both posted interesting thoughts about this particular lunch on their blogs. If you still haven’t had the experience of meeting someone physically whom you have known only through a blog, I recommend it. It will blow your mind.
- One of the processes we used in Belgium for looking at ourselves was a systemic constellation. I’m quite interested in this methodology (here is a website for the community of practice) and would welcome anythoughts from those who have used it in organizations and communities about resources that are useful for understanding it in those contexts.
- Finally this week, a note on a great looking training offered by my friend Christine Whitney Sanchez in Colorado this summer combining Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe and Polarity Management. It’s just one more offering on the kinds of things we teach at an art of hosting. You can also explore these ideas through a workshop with Myriam Laberge and Brenda Chaddock, which they call “Wise Action that Lasts.” (July 9-11 near Vancouver, BC) and of course you could also come to an Art of Hosting training, several of which are going on in Europe and North America this summer and fall.
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Some short notes about various things:
- Friends of mine in Estonia have started the White Tulip movement to bring peace to a deep seated ethnic conflict that is flaring up there at the moment.
- In the Ukraine, the 15th annual OpenSpaceonOpenSpace has just concluded and the photos are online. I was reflecting on how much easier it is to harvest from these gatherings now than it was when they began, or even six years ago when we hosted OSonOS in Vancouver.
- I haven’t plugged Redwire Magazine for a while. Redwire is published by indigenous youth in Vancouver, and it captures a raw spirit and energy of some powerful young leaders. You can read their issues online, or better still, subscribe for the real thing. Once in a while they produce a “Redwire mixtape” which is a CD of mostly rap and poetry. These guys are the urban native storytellers of our generation.
- In the true spirit of sharing his thinking and learning, Rob Paterson is musing openly about his reboot presentation, called is on the natural patterns of human organization. Here are parts one, two and three of that thinking, some of which had it’s origins in a yurt in Carleton, Nova Scotia, when Rob and Toke Moeller and I explored organizational forms with some other folks. That has spawned my thinking as well, and a post is forthcoming.
- Finally, Phil Cubeta has published a small set of links on developing true community, which I’ll have a peek at soon. I think these might actually complement some of the thinking Dave Pollard has been doing on designing for emergence.