My friend Rowan was exploring some online tools and asking the question, how do we make these tools useful and relevant. My response, which I posted at his blog, goes like this: In my experience what is most important is to first understand what your community needs. For example, a small group in the organization I am currently working with wanted a tool that allowed people to work on a document, but to only have access to the most recent draft. They set up an experimental wiki to do it, but that entailed them all learning wiki …
An Earth Without People — [ environment ]: Scientific American A new way to examine humanity’s impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared By Steve Mirsky (tags: environment nature science interesting toread)
The Art of Chaordic Leadership — Dee Hock full-text article Dee Hock on chaordic leadership (tags: leadership chaordic)
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 …
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 …