Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure:
- Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via
- The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.” via
- Network Organizing – A Strategy for Building Community Engagement: “Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement…Our response to this situation is a “network organizing” strategy that connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life – from the neighborhood group to the City Council – in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. Our approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking to our work has helped us to challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement, and shape a strong demand environment for change.”
- ConsensusPolling: “…is about winning together or refusing to play the game. Because it can be a laborious process, it is most appropriate when a group of individuals must collectively solve a problem that affects them all. It seeks to avoid voting for VotingIsEvil (see VotingIsEvil) when such a vote would generate winners and losers and thus divide the community that must support the result of the collective decision.”
- Technophilia: Find great podcasts: “You could spend hours scouring the end of the very long tail for quality podcasts, but thankfully, there are a few sites that have already done the heavy lifting for you, including podcast search engines, directories, and roundup sites. Keep reading, and I’ll show you how to find some of the best, most interesting, and must-listen-to podcasts on the web.”
- Getting Out of the Way – Naomi Aldort:”My husband and I are often complimented on our children’s behavior and demeanor. People think that we discipline them. We don’t. It is ourselves we discipline.We meet our children’s needs, provide for their protection, and expose them to life’s possibilities. We do not, however, meddle in their play, their learning, their creativity, or any other form of growth. We love, hug, feed, share, listen, respond, and participate when asked. Yet, we keep our children free of insult and manipulation resulting from “helpful” comments and ideas – influences to which children are so sensitive in their state of dependency.”
- Bo Lozoff at The Zoo Fence: “We need to start asking ourselves some searching questions about why life seems to be of so little value to our kids. From a spiritual perspective, one sentence can sum up the whole thing – not only our own and our kids’ problems, but our planetary problems too, from pollution to wars:
Human life is very deep, and our dominant modern lifestyle is not.”
- Informal Learning » The Power of Dialogue: “What habits do we need to let go of in order to have true dialogue? When does facilitation draw attention to the process or the moderator rather than furthering the inquiry? How does dialogue emerge from among a group of strangers, and what conditions are the most evocative for true inquiry? What role does individual ego play?”
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A Cooperative Solution: “Cooperatives typically cannot move without taking the time and effort to bring all participants to the table. As Arie de Geus says, “This involves more brains and more time up front – and therefore would seem to take an awful lot longer. But everybody who has worked with this system will tell you that the gain made in the implementation, both in speed and quality, outweighs by far the decisions made in conventional companies.” via
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Imagining the Tenth Dimension: “In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of “time”) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings”. The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth
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I’m throwing some love out to Jordon Cooper who got accused of plagerism because helinks to things without saying where he got the link. So here are ten pieces of linkage for you, discovered recently, from a variety of sources:
- Funding strategies for progressives
- James Howard Kunstler interview at Worldchanging: “Anybody can put a poster of the Rocky Mountains in their basement and go down there and sit and feel groovy about it, but meanwhile their town is crumbling around them.”
- Nipun Mehta on Organic Orgnaizational Growth: “My vision for any holistic organization would be one that anchors itself in the spirit of service and compassion, one where each of its constituents are rooted in being that change, and one where there is humility and openness for all that our conscious awareness can’t grasp.”
- A Taoist take on activism: “We have to do a lot of work on ourselves to make sure that the people who are making change in the world are making that change from a place of strength rather than weakness,” Legault says. “And that strength is comprised of a strong spiritual grounding — whatever spiritual grounding that is — and that we act from love and compassion rather than fear, hatred and anger.”
- Social innovation conversations: Podcasts with worldchangers.
- Choose your seatmates wisely: “We show ourselves in moments of system failure and panic and change and difficulty and crash-landings, not calm.”
- Watching the Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd:”After the BLACK &WHITE MGM Lion roars for the THIRD (3rd) time IMMEDIATELY hit the play button on the CD player. Be sure to turn down the sound on the TV because the dialogue and original soundtrack are not necessary for this experiment. “The Dark Side of the Moon” will provide all the sound you need.”
- Down with Jazz: A short story by Dervala Hanley
- The Spirit of the Game: “Spirit of the Game has to be on the rise, in ultimate and beyond, because technology has brought us an era where survival means valuing brains over brawn. It doesn’t matter anymore that my teammates can tackle your teammates to annihilate your key player. Because it can’t matter anymore that my country can blow up your country – everyone knows the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, and knows we’re ALL worse off if balance is lost. If the games we play reflect society, then there’s a damn good reason why kids should learn the negotiation skills ultimate teaches. We’re their examples”
- Incredible photos of the shapes of a flock of 1,000,000 European starlings
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Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted:
- Donella Meadows on being a global citizen and dancing with systems. From Bill Harris at Making Sense with Facilitated Systems.
- Getting Started with Action Learning, also from Bill.
- Dave Pollard on indigenous capacities for learning and discovery:
The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are born in the sterile confines of an ‘antiseptic’ hospital. But we are quickly indoctrinated into the civilized conceit of human separateness, and that conceptual separateness is reinforced by a physical separateness until, soon enough, we forget that we are a part of a constituency greater and deeper than family or state. Conception thus becomes our reality.
My most important moments of learning and discovery have occurred in those rare moments when I’ve been able to briefly shake that illusion of separateness, and re-become indigenous, liberated, part of the real world.
- More Dave, on what we can learn from aphids:
If I’m correct, then the aphid I’m looking at right now does think and feel. She wonders. She is curious. She experiences the profound joy of living, and the commensurate desire to go on living. She enjoys the company of and communication with others. She is driven to learn and gets satisfaction from doing so. She experiences emotional grief and/or physical pain at being lost, separated, witnessing the death of a fellow creature, or being stepped on. She cares about all the life she can fathom, and as long as she lives she fathoms more, and passes along more knowledge, and more reason to care, in her DNA. That is why she is here.
- Na’Cha’uaht on Indians and oil:
One of the most basic and fundamental Nuu-chah-nulth principles is embodied in the phrase, “Hish’ukish Tsa’walk” (Everything is one/connected). A full comprehension of this principle teaches us that we cannot support unsustainable development. We cannot support an industry that would threaten our watersheds with complete devastation. We cannont gladly shake the hands of corporations who use proxy governments (US, UK etc.) to wage wars all over the world, killing other Indigenous people. We cannot make the best of an inevitable corporate imposition by selling ourselves for a few jobs and money. We cannot accept this inevitability.
- Squashed Philosophers, a redux of the major thinkers that underpin Western thought.
- Getting out of confusion through conversation by Nadine Tanner:
Conversation can help move us out of the discomfort of confusion. Inquiry opens a space for meaningful conversation. It makes your intangible confusion visible to others so you can begin to build a more complete understanding.
So, next time you’re confused try staying with it for a while. Share it with others. Start conversations. Connect the otherwise unconnected dots
- Patti on following desire lines:
When faced with a bird’s eye view of my own desire lines, measuring in quick paces the decisions I’ve made or not made, do I allow them to become the real path, or do I put up a concrete barrier to redirect myself back to the “official” road? And what is that process of creating our own path? What feelings does it entail, engender, cause?
As Finch said,
“Sometimes, following unknown paths, we find ourselves in a maze of growth, in failing light, unsure where we are, flailing through jungles of stiff, impenetrable shrubs and sharp briars in deceptively benign-looking woods. All at once we realize we are lost, unable to retrace our steps. Then, suddenly, we come out onto a paved highway, far from where we thought we were, feeling a gratefulness and a relief we are ashamed to acknowledge.
But sometimes, just sometimes, we come upon a new and unexpected clearing, a magical place unanticipated in our daily thoughts or even our dreams; and when we do, we are so amazed that we cease even to wonder whether we will be able to find our way back home, or, perchance, whether this might in fact be our new home.”
- Lisa Heft’s collection of papers on Open Space Technology
- Kevin Harris’s musings on community leadership, with links to an interesting paper.