The best line I heard at the BALLE Conference today was “faster learning beats better planning.”
Instead of blogging presentations and such, I’m letting ideas seep in and run together and I’ll write over the next week or so about stuff I’ve learned and stuff I’m thinking about.
Share:
Live blogging from the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies conference here in Vancouver. Last night we got opened up with a welcome from Musqueam Elder Delbert Guerin, and then heard keynotes from Judy Wicks, one of the founders of BALLE and the proprietor of the White Dog Cafe, and Jim Hightower, who needs little introduction, and anyway any introduction you could give him would be too long. So just check his site.
This morning, we have a panel with Michael Schumann, Michelle Long David Korten. So on we go…stay tuned and I’ll report in.
Share:
I’m sitting in front of an agenda wall here at the International Conference of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. On the wall is an agenda created by something like 40 youth who gathered here to talk about sustainability issues, action and change. The proceedings are being posted at the BALLE youth forum wiki, and we encourage you to show up there and join in the conversation.
We’ll be here live and online until 4pm PDT (North America) and the wiki will stay live for the youth to use as a support tool. If you have anything to add, please do so, especially links, resources and more ideas to build on what we’re talking about.
Share:
Here’s an ambient track to start your week. This is called “Hermit Thrush” from a San Francisco-based outfit called Airking. Minimalism may not be your cup of tea, but as I’ve been talking a little about the combination of nature and technology, I thought I would blog this piece.
The piece features a loop of a lush synth chord, one that contains a suspended fourth, giving the feeling that there is something to resolve. Over this are some heavily modified samples of a hermit thrush call (click here for .wav file of such) and some synth fills that mimic the call and some of it’s elements.
Share:
To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the centre. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed.
— Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, quoted in TC McLuhan’s The Way of the Earth, p. 151
My work with group processes has always moved towards what comes to us most naturally. This is why my facilitation practice seems to culminate in Open Space Technology, where the natural and pervasive dynamics of self-organization can take over. Being a conscious part of a self-organizing system requires that we remember how to be a part of nature again. And so the four practices of Open Space – opening, inviting, holding and grounding – become essential for creating a container in which people return to their most basic and intuitive processes – conversation, choice, collaboration and contemplation – to help move them forward. When a group is truly ready to come back to what has always been Open Space, one finds reactions of astonishment and surprise that work could really be this easy and this deep, all at the same time.
It’s worth looking at what we are as humans – parts of the vast whole that holds us – and remember that our very oldest teachings tell us how to live within this enfolded context rather than futilely struggle against it.