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Passing at the solstice

December 23, 2006 By Being, CoHo 2 Comments

christmas tree

This is a dark time of year, and the light is returning. It is a time for rebirth.

My friend Finn Voldtofte died last night. He was well known in the world cafe community as well as in communities of practice in Europe looking at collective intellegence. He was an early designer of the Art of Hosting and the flow game.

Finn was with us here on Bowen Island in November at a gathering we held looking at conscious evolution. He was sick while he was here, and upon returning home he discovered that he had pnuemonia and leukemia. Back in Denmark, doctors attempted to treat both, but they were unable to handle his infections in a way that allowed the treatment of his cancer.

He died with the most amazing grace and with a community of people around the world holding to his request to let him do his work to be free. I have never seen anyone die like Finn did; even from a distance his dying touched us very deeply and was a profound reminder of the power of practice and liberation and how one strong and courageous heart can touch and transform many.

And so I offerthis image of a sun behind a fir tree I shot last year and this song, that is about the choices we have to step into the new and deep world, whatever it may be. We sang this song for our closing at our gathering in November, and it feels as if Finn embodies this sentiment unlike any man I have ever met.

One stormy spring day
As I rambled at the Cape
And gazed out to the ocean
Where the seals sport and play.
From the sea foam and spray
There arose a fair maid
As she stepped on the rocky shore
To me she did say:Oh the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come.
Oh the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come.Her gaze met my eye
And she began to cry
And her keening stilled the south wind
In the far distant sky
Said she “Sir, you stand
Firmly rooted on this land
I appeal to your true heart
Will you give me your hand?”

For the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come
For the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come

The wind died away
And the sea foam and the spray
Took back the fair maiden
At the end of the day
In a grove of old fir
I felt my heart a-stir
To respond to her calling
And devote my life to her

For the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come
For the old world is dying, and the new is yet to come

This is a time of year for rebirth in the northern hemisphere. And so I wish peace at the end of the transformation for Finn, his children and his partner Tina and all who are deeply touched by the stories and examples of new birth, hope and light that permeate the cultures of northern peoples at mid-winter.

Sore…but good.

December 17, 2006 By Practice, TKD 6 Comments

Black Belt.png

I am sore today in new ways and new places, but also very relieved, happy and honored.

Just a note to mark it.

Hacking happiness at work

December 14, 2006 By Being, Organization 2 Comments

My friend Alex Kjerulf has just released his new book about happiness at work.

Alex is a true clown in many senses of the word bringing joy and humour to everything he does.   How do I know?   Well, in November 2003 he suggested that we swap blogs for a week.   It was a crazy experiement and it drove some of our readers nuts.   I wasn’t too high on it either, but I was game for a go.

When I switched to wordpress the author marking fuction didn’t come over in the import, but Alexe’s post are still in my archives.   You can read what he had to say about the experiment as we finished.   It was an interesting experiement in mixing up online identities, and it was fun to hack Alex’s blog for a while and have hime hang around in mine.

At any rate, I am a happy worker and I deeply appreciate Alex’s life mission.   And I hope his book becomes a classic.   He already is.

Harvesting collective intellegence

December 14, 2006 By Art of Harvesting, CoHo

Here is a post with five good methods for using the web to harvest collective intellegence. These may seem geeky to some but they are excellent source materials, and they have their correlates in the analog world:

1) Be The Hub of A Hard To Recreate Data Source – This is a classic Web 2.0 concept and success here often devolves to being the first entry with an above average implementation. Examples include Wikipedia, eBay, and others which are almost entirely the sum of the content their users contribute. And far from being a market short on remaining space, it’s lack of imagination that’s often the limiting factor for new players. There is so much more terrific software like digg and del.icio.us waiting to be created. So don’t wait until it’s perfect, get your collective intelligence technique out there that creates a user base virtually on its own from the innate usefulness of its data. Just be careful and avoid crowded niches, like peer production news.

2) Seek Collective Intelligence Out – This is the Google approach. There is an endless supply of existing information waiting out there on the Web to be analyzed, derived, and leveraged. In other words, you can be smart and use what already exists instead of waiting for it to be contributed. For example, Google uses hyperlink analysis to determine the relevance of a given page and builds its own database of content which it then shares through its search engine. Not only does this approach completely avoid a dependency on the ongoing kindness of strangers it also lets you build a very big content base from the outset. This ultimately has interesting intellectual property implications, as I’ve discussed before.

3) Trigger Large-Scale Network Effects – This is what Katrinalist and CivicSpace did and many others have done. This is arguably harder to do than either of the methods above but it can be great in the right circumstance. With one billion connected users on the Web, the potential network effects are theoretically almost limitless. Smaller examples can be found in things like the Million Dollar Pixel Page. That’s not to say that network effects don’t cut both ways and are probably not very repeatable, but when they happen, they can happen big.

4) Provide A Folksonomy – Self-organization by your users can be a potent force to allow the content on your site or social software to be used in a way that more befits your community. It’s the law of unintended uses again, something Web 2.0 design patterns strongly encourage. Allow users to tag the data they contribute or find and then make those tags available to others so they can discover and access things in dynamically evolving categorization schemes. Use real-time feedback to display tag clouds of the most popular tags and data; you’ll be amazed at how much better your software works. It worked for Flickr and del.icio.us and it’ll probably work for you too.

Five things you might not know about me

December 12, 2006 By Being 9 Comments

I’ve been tagged by Jeremy Hiebert, Johnnie Moore and Dan Oesterrich to play this game, so that’s a compelling invitation…

Here are five things that you probably don’t know about me:

1. From the ages of 10-13 I lived in the UK. My father was transferred there to set up some computer systems for the Canada Life Assurance Company from 1978-81. I lived in three houses in three years all in southeast Hertfordshire. We lived in Broxbourne, Hertford and Widford. While there I attended Flamstead End primary school, Morgan’s Walk primary and Richard Hale School (also the alma mater of Rupert Grint from Harry Potter fame), Many of you knew that, but here are some facts about my life there that you might not have known:

  • I played cricket and specialized in playing short leg and silly point, largely at the behest of a vindictive coach who was appalled at my batting ability. I also developed not a bad leg break (bowling style, not injury!), so to say I was a specialist was putting in mildly.
  • I was bullied fairly extensively at Richard Hale and had two very lonely years there.
  • I spent a few weeks living with a family in rural France when I was 12. They spoke no English and had two cats. It was there that I discovered my allergy to cats which used to be asthma heavy. Trying to get a prescription for Ventolin in Moissac in 1980 as a Canadian citizen visting France with friends of the family made for a long and interesting day. I did get to watch the Olympics though (they were blacked out in the UK in 1980).

2. When I was a teenager I had my heart set on becoming an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. I was mentored heavily by three amazing ministers: Hanns Skoutajan, John Lawson and Will Walker and encouraged by many others. Ultimately, I chose not to work in the United Church, but my work is very much about the call to serve others in community and organization. In that respect, when people ask me how long I have been doing this work, I sometimes reply, in all seriousness, “since I was 17.” Oh yeah, and our church was called “St. James-Bond United Church.” Seriously.
3. Although not athletic in the traditional sense of playing on organized teams much, I come from a family of notable atheletes. My paternal grandfather, Jack Corrigan, played football for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues in the 1920s and my maternal grandfather, Maurice Murphy played lacrosse for the Mimico Mountaineers in the 1930s. He won a Mann Cup with that team in 1932, and his brother Joe Murphy went on to fame as a lacrosse player and later a referee. Joe was inducted into the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1975. My sister, Suzanne, was a minor sports celebrity for a while. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she set standards by becoming the first girl to play Junior C hockey in Ontario as a goalie with the Hanover Knights of the Ontario Junior Hockey League. She was also the first girl to play boys high school hockey, when she suited up in goal for the Lawrence Park Panthers. She was part of a small number of young women in the 1980s that played hockey with young men in the light of the Justine Blainey case at the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1986. Justine was a linemate of my sister’s at Leaside in Toronto for a few years.

4. I have had a few unusual jobs over the years, but the strangest, or at least the one that seems most interesting to folks, was the cemetary worker. Mostly I cut grass at Mount Pleasant cemetary in Toronto, working for an alcoholic supervisor during the summer of 1986. My supervisor was prone to making strange staffing decision with the summer students, so he put me on a shift one day helping to fill graves. That involved helping the crew pack the earth down after the coffin had been buried and the funeral was over. Several practical jokes ensued, including one where I was asked to get down in the grave to retreive a rake after which a shovel full of dirt came down on my head prompting a highly visceral fear of being buried alive. One rainy day I also did an afternoon helping inside the crematorium. That was just plain creepy. The crematorium supervisor had a little jar of metal bits in his desk. One doesn’t ask.
5. This Saturday, god willing and the creeks don’t rise, and provided I can perform 100 push ups, 11 patterns and 10 different breaking techniques at the end of a three hour physical test of sparring, kicking, punching and blocking techniques, I will take my 1st Dan black belt in Kukkiwon style taekwondo. Wish me luck.

And tag to Christy, Ashley, Dustin, Michael and Jack!