More from the annals of disappearing knowledge. Chris Lysy offers an incredibly detailed analysis of how evaluation resources on the web have become impossible to find. (He also has a solution for his professional field; read to the end). This is part of the bigger trend of how we find the craft knowledge to support practice fields like evaluation and facilitation. These are fields that require a pathway to proficiency that requires connection with good knowledge and good practitioners. Search engines have ruined this connection and social media algorithms on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook also bury useful stuff. And lets not even discuss the-platform-that-shall-not-be-named.
We are living in the biggest and best library in the history of the world, which is not only filled with books and videos and other delightful things, but in which you can personally connect with the actual masters in all kinds of obscure fields of knowledge. And yet, someone has stolen the card catalog, and is standing at the doorway directing you to the gift shop. You still might be able to get into the library, but it’s impossible to find anything there.
One way to look and find interesting things is to practice slow, mindful web surfing again. Get off the apps. Follow a link and see where it takes you. Maybe keep a log of the places you have visited, to share cool things with others. A “web log” if you will. You might find others who do the same, and then you have an interesting collection of sites to visit and learn from. Nadia van Holzen writes this week about the gift of slowing down. It applies to walking as much as it does to reading all of the amazing stuff people still put on the web. But you have to get out of the practice of searching transactionally, only looking for the things that are related to work or productivity. “Sometimes, slowing down is enough to open your senses and invite surprise—sparking something new in the everyday,” Nadia writes. Richard Olivier, a man I met once in London before he died, called it “Purposive Drift.” It applies as much in the virtual world as it does in the physical world. Let your brain be amazed by the beautiful stuff out there that no one paid for you to find.
“Back then” we were connected, not separated by the Internet. The Internet was a tool for that. We met real people and forged real relationships. These relationships were virtual and “in real life” and they were at times, DEEPLY meaningful and important. Until I blocked a number of local neighbours on my local Facebook page, I actually sought to AVOID certain people on my home island. Now I don’t care what they have posted there; they aren’t the same in real life. My sense of community has been restored. “Back then” whenever I met someone whose blogs I had followed for a while I discovered that they were the same and our connections were instant and deeper.
There will be many tributes to Joanna Macy forthcoming. She died yesterday after an illness and many people who know her well have been posting updates on her end of life journey. Of all the posts though I appreciate Benjamin Taylor’s because as a person unfamiliar with her work he made the effort understand her contributions and find some terrific sources which illuminate her work.
edited later to add a lovely reflection from Rebecca Solnit.
I will probably add some of these to my Facilitation Resources page in due course. Last week on LinkedIn, that page got a shout out and I’m delighted that more people have discovered this resource. It has been compiled to share tools and methods that are public, don’t require money or certification to use, and which are useful in a variety of participatory contexts when addressing complex challenges. The links occasionally rot on that page, so I’ll spend a bit of time in the next little while pruning and adding. Let me know if you find one that doesn’t work.
A pox on the houses of those who monetize the elimination of creativity. We are increasingly living in the simulacrum of a world of human creativity and beauty. Rick Beato has been on this train for a while now but this video today makes the point that we’re all vulnerable to being sucked down the hole of a culture of barely adequate wall paper. Our sense of taste and appreciation for art has been undermined my whole life in favour of commercialized slop. The end game is upon us.
And an antidote to that: because it doesn’t mean that artists have lost the impulse to create and craft their voices. For example, there is a stunningly beautiful show on at the. Owen Island Art Gallery – The Hearth – with two of my favourite Bowen artists, Di and Guthrie Gloag. Get on the ferry and come over here and see it. It needs to be experienced in person and appreciated with lingering reflection. As does all the best art. Just go to a local gallery and linger in front of a painting. Go to a play with actual local actors. The next time you see a busker stop and listen to them. Go hear live music played by people who play instruments. Buy a book of poetry or a novel. These acts sound obvious but reflect on the last time you did them. When did you actually share space with an artist who is creating? Or held in your hands the fruits of their work?
Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
I love acts of local placemaking. Today, I caught up with a neighbour and asked how her daughter was doing. Here daughter, Tessa Goldie, a designer and animator, has a fun little line of T-shirts poking fun at some of the recent events of human/nature encounter on our little island: Bedtime Stories of Bowen Island. We are well endowed with local talents that do this sort of thing on Bowen, like Ron Woodall, who was a famous marketing executive in Vancouver before retiring to Bowen and becoming our local newspaper cartoonist. Every week we are treated to New Yorker level cartoons from this fella, and if you are a bit of a local, it’s likely that he’s done a portrait of you at some point, which he will religiously post on your birthday on our local Facebook page, with no comments. Mine is posted above. This kind of local placemaking serves as a beautiful reinforcing feedback loop of belonging.
There is something like the hunt for a deity in the way humans search for that one perfect thing in nature and seem to find it in a misapprehension of sceince. I’m no scientist, but I have long admired the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. For mathematicians though, it must be frustrating to see people take work you know is clearly bounded and generally apply it to wildly inappropriate contexts.
Perhaps the deity is already here, and the prayers are tiny whispered pleas for approval.