Interesting stuff popping out today around the net on social tools and face to face. On the OSLIST, there was a little discussion on using twitter and facebook and the pros and cons. I posted these thoughts:
I love the social tools because they allow me to connect with and get to know people in far flung areas who are closer to me in thought and spirit than those who are nearby. For me, twitter, facebook, skype and blogging are a means to an end, and that end os sharing open face to face conversations with folks that are in disperate places, but with whom I learn a lot.
And something to think about intergenerationally is that there are teenagers now who have lived their entire lives in a world with blogging, skype, and facebook. Think about that for a minute. These people don’t consider these technologies to be old at all. They consider them the default setting.
In a time when intergenerational conversation is becoming more important (how do we talk to the people with whom we have saddled with a trillion dollar debt, to explain to them to follies of our excess?) knowing a little about how these technologies enable self-organizing behaviour among digital natives is very important. And learning to use them I think is as important as employing other powerful social technologies like, say, Open Space.
So I don’t begrudge the unwillingness to particiapte in the collective monkey mind (thanks Karen!) or the pining for real contact, but I do encourage people to learn about and play with these tools, just like we have with OST and see what happens…
And then today, a couple of posts in the feed. Wendy Farmer-O’Neil dives back into blogging with a piece on “Web 3.0” and my neighbour and friend Emily van Lidthe de Jeude offers a lovely reflection on working with real world intimacy and global connectivity.
Micheal Herman posted a cool cafe design to the OSLIST today. It marries the best of Cafe and Open Space:
i just facilitated an afternoon program with 120 “high potential” high school seniors as part of a final selection process for full-ride scholarships to two excellent universities. it was a cafe format, but the first session was used to write questions that these young leaders thought they and other young people should be addressing. then we did three rounds in which table hosts picked the questions and raised them with whoever rotated to their table for one session. after the first question-making session, the 20 tables went in 20 different directions, like an open space with so many small stakes in the ground. and i went around picking up cups and the last bits of box-lunch trash in cafe-style, with a small tray and quiet “can i take that out of your way?”
UPDATE: Michael has posted an excellent detailed write up of this design at his blog.
In Thunder Bay on the Fort William reserve there is a distinct volcanic remanant called Mount McKay in English but Animikii-wajiw in Anishnaabemowin. Animikii-wajiw means “thunder mountain” so named because a thunderbird once landed there, ampong other things.
My mood has changed markedly after the work we did today working with Ojibway leaders and Elders from around the north shore of Lake Superior and parts further north and west of here on traditional governance and the assertion of Aboriginal rights and title. This is timely stuff given the historic proposed legislation that will be coming before the BC Legislature soon. There is good news on the Aboriginal title front and it can all lead to good things for First Nations – not without challenge and much effort mind you – but things are looking optimistic on the legal front in a way that is truly unprecedented.
At any rate, our work here is about exploring the meaning and practical implications of all of this stuff, introducing people to a powerful political and legal strategy that has been developed by the National Centre for First Nations Governance, and thinking about what it takes to do this hard work. Today there were three great little teachings that came my way as a result of discussing traditional leadership.
Teaching one came from Nancy Jones one of the Elders who gave us small blankets with a medicine wheel design based on a vision that she had about unity, leadership and healing. One of the great teachings in this medicine wheel was about the north, the direction from which winter weather and wind comes. We laboured here through a blizzard today, waiting for an hour until whoever was coming was going to show up, and working small processes with diminished numbers. But the Elder gave the teaching that essentially the weather teaches us that “whatever happens is the only thing that could have” and that the chaordic path is an inherent part of leadership: you can never really be in control.
The second teaching was from Ralph Johnson. I asked him about the Ojibway word “ogiimaw” which is often translated as “chief” or “boss.” I asked Ralph what he thought the word must have meant before contact, when the concept of “chief” was basically unknown. He said that word relates to the word ogiimatik which is the poplar tree, the tree that is considered the kindest of trees. Poplars are gentle, flexible, quiet and kind and are also good medicine. He said this idea of kindness is what is under the word “ogiimaw” and that influencing people through kindness is the kind of leadership that the word implies. This is very different from the kinds of leadership implied by the word “chief” which is a title now won by competition in a band election, a process that seems to engineer kindness right out of the equation. This is a great legacy of colonization – the lowering of kindness from a high leadership art to a naive sentimentality.
Ralph also gave me one more little teaching that rocked me. He told me that the word I had always understood as “all my relations” – dineamaaganik – actually means “belonging to everything.” Seems like a small change in translation, until another Elder, Marie Allen chimed in and said that the problem with leadership these days was the way ideas like “all my relations” activated the ego. The difference between “all my relations” and “belonging to everything” is the difference between the ego and the egoless I think. This is what Ralph was trying to tell me. That the centre of the universe is not me, and things are not all related to me, rather I belong to everything. Marie and I took a moment to express amazement at the way the earth used us to channel life in a particular shape for a short period of time. We come from her, we return to her, and in the interim we do our work upon her.
So tomorrow, with this platform of reverance firmly established, we return to work with young and emerging leaders in Open Space.
Not so lonely here after all is it?
Work-In-Progress, is the new blog of Open Space Technology creator Harrison Owen. It’s taken many years, but I’m happy to see him in the blogoshpere. Harrison has always been generous about sharing his writing and his thoughts and of course, the process he created, and this is a nice extension of that spirit.
On my way to Regina to work with the Urban Aboriginal Strategy steering committee there. We’re running an Open Space for the community on Saturday preceded by a community development/hosting training on Friday. Still designing the training and using the basic structure of covering invitation, hosting and convergence/action/decision making. Can anyone suggest exercises that might be useful in the context of a day long training to explore skills around these three areas? I’m interested in trying new things to teach the importance of these areas of attention.
I’m looking forward to our Open Space. I was in Regina a year ago, when the windchill was -55 and we were talking about how people survived these temperatures on the prairies 400 years ago. If you were not a part of the group, you were dead. So depending on relationship and getting to a fire was a life or death situation. Amazing how easy it is to forget that when so many of our basic needs are covered.