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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
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Dee Hock on chaordic leadership
- 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 Meetings and Incentive Travel, that quotes my Canadian mates Diane Gibault, Michelle Cooper and Larry Peterson. Add to that this very useful short film on Open Space, and you could safely say that our beloved process has truly tipped.
- And speaking of mates, Thomas Arthur comes through with a link he sent by Google chat which deepens the ida of Pattern Language, moving it into another level of “generative code” for building living neighbourhoods. This gets at something I was saying in Belgium, standing up for Pattern Language which I understand as a noticing about the world rather than a prescriptive recipe. It is very much generative code. Thomas’ link sent me running to check up on Kevin Harris’ excellent blog and I note he has been recently posting interesting things on third places, mass creativity and social interactions in public spaces. Kevin’s blog is in my “check once a month” folder, and it’s always rich.
- Last note for this week: While I was in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team held a monmumental celebration to mark the formal shift to an interim authority. What this means is that we are half way to becoming a full authority for Aboriginal child and family services on Vancouver Island. The celebration was held at the Snuneymexw longhouse near Nanaimo, and a really nice piece aired on TV about it (.wmv).
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 Coola River and the impact that has had on the Nuxalk Nation.
If you didn’t celebrate Aboriginal Day yesterday, take the time to view the video and think about helping out Liz and her community as they work at building a community house in which the culture can thrive despite what has happened the Nuxalk Natoin’s fish.
At the Leading Change conference today, the organizers were fretting this morning about a sit down lunch. We’re in Open Space, so the room is kind of chaotic. We weren’t sure how this would happen, so we carved a half hour out of the agenda, and let people know in the morning that we would need them to be out of the way while the room was getting set up.
But this is Open Space, and of course it was also about leading change. Eleven o’clock came around and the groups broke up and trickled back into the main room. Someone asked if they could help set up the room others joined in and in 7 minutes, we had transformed the room from a chaotic circle to a sit down lunch, complete with linen.
And then, lunch completed, we reversed the whole process and got back to work for action planning.
And to cap it off, the lunch was sponsored by The Co-operators. How cool is that?