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The world we want

May 27, 2006 By Conversation, Leadership, Open Space, Philanthropy 9 Comments

One of the most incredible application of Open Space Technology I have ever seen was the Giving Conference that was sponsored by Phil Cubeta and convened and facilitated by Michael Herman with an assist from me, It started something that has flowed out all over the place, and the story has been retold in many places, most recently on Phil’s blog The World We Want

Phil challenged me, at his other blog Wealth Bondage to put together a small manifesto on the world I want. As it relates to philanthropy, open space and democracy, here are a few thoughts:

  • Spurred on by a number of ideas, books and thoughts, we can convene local conversations about giving. These conversations need to invite a huge diversity of people, from many different political, economic, social and cultural types to engage around these ideas. We need givers and activists to be in attendance as partners and peers. We need bloggers to be there to witness the power of the story and to tell it to the world. We need thinkers and visionaries to challenge us forward and we need tech people to design and implement the network supports that can emerge and serve us in the moment.
  • Connected to one another by appreciative effort, we invite engagement and local action around the world/nation/community we want, and tie our passions to responsibilities, made easier by doing things together in networks, self-organized around what we love and what we are prepared to steward.
  • Supported by local networks and conversations face to face and the ever increasing intimacy of global networks served through the web, we find local expression for our action but together contribute to an open source world of solutions and designs for people and places that are stuck.
  • Spurred on by what is behind us we make good on our promises and what is budding in our work and use micro-philanthropy to leverage invitations to more open space events, more engaged conversations and more change. Small change becomes big news and yet the money amounts stay small, and the efforts stay local but the scale takes over. Imagine if Wikipedia were not a reference work but a change effort. Imagine if every hour spent working on that was spent working for the world we want. And imagine if we could choose the pieces to work on, contributing where we can, unafraid to make mistakes and muddle through and sense the success with nothing to lose and everything to gain…

I’m up for it. How about you?

Not the practices of Open Space

May 27, 2006 By Facilitation, Leadership, Open Space, Practice

Michael Herman started thinking through the practices of Open Space again and yesterday we had a good conversation about the not-practices of Open Space. He has blogged about them here and here, trying on different words and language and making a case (:-)) for various iterations.

Briefly, these not-practices, or anti practices are:

  • Analyzing as the opposite of appreciating (and opening)
  • Protecting, defending and facilitating as the opposites of inviting
  • Problem solving and fixing as the opposites of supporting (and holding)
  • Accounting and making a good case as the opposite of making good (grounding)

For me these are important because thy help us to throw the practices of Open Space into high relief. I would say that “business as usual” highly values analysis, protection and defense of decisions and turf, problem solving and fixing (especially in the consulting world) and accounting and making a case as the “desired outcome” of all of this work. One of the reasons I have become so disenchanted with traditional strategic planning for example is that it proceeds from this particular world view:

  • Analyse the problem
  • Protect the enterprise, turf, or project from encroachment from the environment
  • Fix any problems that might be around
  • Measure what you have done and use it to make a business case or a best practice.

My problem with this is that it works at creating and maintaining boundaries, and rarely does anything happen. This is a common complaint about the modern work world and traditional conferences and meeting. Nothing seems to happen, but at least if we can make a good case, we can save some of the effort.
Sometimes that is useful, but I think in a world where the work of making good is the highest calling (no matter what enterprise you are in), the Open Space practices offer a way to do more effective planning:

  • Appreciating the resources and assets that we have by viewing them as being of multiple use and increasing value, and being open to other resources
  • Inviting choices to participate, join and work together so that people come together in a way that is more like a fellowship and less like a project team or even a community of practice
  • Supporting connections between people and enterprises which means opening the boundaries of structure to find solutions from outside and allow order to self-organize and finally;
  • Making good things happen and seeing the results spin out into the world in ways that you cannot control nor foresee, nor scarcely measure.

The efficacy of the Open Space worldview is evident in the difference between proprietary software development and the Open Source movement, for example. In the proprietary world (closed space worldview) one analyses the market and the need, defends the company and product from market encroachment by copyrighting it, takes full and exclusive responsibility for fixing, problem solving and debugging, and sells the thing by making a case for why your should use it through marketing and so on. In fact much of consumer culture is based on the fact that poorly working things have better crafted marketing messages. The quality is misplaced. Look at beer ads for example.
In the open source world, we appreciate what is out there, listen to what people want and invite each other to play. The invitation extends right through to bug fixing and problem solving. Anyone can play: you can code solutions or offer to pay someone to do it for you and invite others to incorporate your fixes. Instead of protecting code, it is released into the community, supported through places like Sourceforge and what is made is a good product. And from a good product, which in this case is given away, good things happen. Non-profits for example find themselves better able to meet their stated purpose in the world because they are using Open Office and therefore not spending huge sums of money on licensing.

So this is the value of seeing the not-practices of Open Space (if you can think of a better term for them let me know). They throw some more light on the benefits of what I call the Open Space worldview, and they help describe the reasons why Open Space is not a generally accepted way of doing business, even in progressively structured communities of practices.

Big links post

May 26, 2006 By Conversation, Emergence, Leadership, Notes, Organization, Uncategorized

Here are a number of bits and pieces that have been waiting around for ages to get posted:

The word indigenous* means ‘born into and part of’, and by inference ‘inseparably connected to’. We are all, I think, indigenous at birth, born into the Earth-organism and connected in a profound and primal way to all life on the planet, even if we are born in the sterile confines of an ‘antiseptic’ hospital. But we are quickly indoctrinated into the civilized conceit of human separateness, and that conceptual separateness is reinforced by a physical separateness until, soon enough, we forget that we are a part of a constituency greater and deeper than family or state. Conception thus becomes our reality.

My most important moments of learning and discovery have occurred in those rare moments when I’ve been able to briefly shake that illusion of separateness, and re-become indigenous, liberated, part of the real world.

If I’m correct, then the aphid I’m looking at right now does think and feel. She wonders. She is curious. She experiences the profound joy of living, and the commensurate desire to go on living. She enjoys the company of and communication with others. She is driven to learn and gets satisfaction from doing so. She experiences emotional grief and/or physical pain at being lost, separated, witnessing the death of a fellow creature, or being stepped on. She cares about all the life she can fathom, and as long as she lives she fathoms more, and passes along more knowledge, and more reason to care, in her DNA. That is why she is here.

One of the most basic and fundamental Nuu-chah-nulth principles is embodied in the phrase, “Hish’ukish Tsa’walk” (Everything is one/connected). A full comprehension of this principle teaches us that we cannot support unsustainable development. We cannot support an industry that would threaten our watersheds with complete devastation. We cannont gladly shake the hands of corporations who use proxy governments (US, UK etc.) to wage wars all over the world, killing other Indigenous people. We cannot make the best of an inevitable corporate imposition by selling ourselves for a few jobs and money. We cannot accept this inevitability.

Conversation can help move us out of the discomfort of confusion. Inquiry opens a space for meaningful conversation. It makes your intangible confusion visible to others so you can begin to build a more complete understanding.

So, next time you’re confused try staying with it for a while. Share it with others. Start conversations. Connect the otherwise unconnected dots

When faced with a bird’s eye view of my own desire lines, measuring in quick paces the decisions I’ve made or not made, do I allow them to become the real path, or do I put up a concrete barrier to redirect myself back to the “official” road? And what is that process of creating our own path? What feelings does it entail, engender, cause?

As Finch said,

“Sometimes, following unknown paths, we find ourselves in a maze of growth, in failing light, unsure where we are, flailing through jungles of stiff, impenetrable shrubs and sharp briars in deceptively benign-looking woods. All at once we realize we are lost, unable to retrace our steps. Then, suddenly, we come out onto a paved highway, far from where we thought we were, feeling a gratefulness and a relief we are ashamed to acknowledge.

But sometimes, just sometimes, we come upon a new and unexpected clearing, a magical place unanticipated in our daily thoughts or even our dreams; and when we do, we are so amazed that we cease even to wonder whether we will be able to find our way back home, or, perchance, whether this might in fact be our new home.”

Bringing beauty back to the blog

May 23, 2006 By Music One Comment

My garden Buddha
It was a rainy day here on Bowen Island, so I pushed around some pieces of my blog. Readers familiar with the evolution of Parking Lot over the past four years will remember that I once devoted a great deal of time to reading poetry and collecting the work of poets I admire. I have reset those collections, and you can find them on the sidebar in the “Collections of poetry” page. The Denise Levertov collection is still one of the most popular pages on this whole site.

Also in the sidebar is a restoration of a page that has also been popular over the years. Forty Meditation Practices is a small collection of forty ways to practice in four positions. No excuse now.

Finally, there is the page that contains links to my Webjay playlists called simply Free Music. There you will find the “Parking Lot Soundtrack” to which I will now add the following track, a traditional Norwegian song hauntingly sung in a tomb by Unni Løvlid. Enjoy the beauty!

[tags]Denise+Levertov, Seamus+Heaney, Derek+Walcott, Jorie+Graham, poetry, meditation[/tags]

Good reasons why Canada should change course in Afghanistan

May 22, 2006 By Uncategorized 4 Comments

This past week, the Conservative led Parliament in Canada voted to extend Canada’s military commitment in Afghanistan until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s term in office. In so doing, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the following:

Together, diplomats, workers and soldiers from 35 countries are working with the government of Afghanistan to rebuild that country. We are providing knowledge, financial assistance, security; security that allows the Afghan people to build a justice system, develop and grow their economy, construct schools, hospitals and irrigation systems, and yes, ensure that the rights of the Afghan people are protected.

[Translation]

I am thinking of the right of women to be treated like human beings, of the right to see, read and say whatever one wants, of the right to choose one’s leaders through the electoral process.

You can read the full text of the debate at Hansard.

In trying to make sense of Harper’s reasons for wanting to extend our commitment, the most compelling I could find were the above: that since the invasion of Afghanistan and in the ouster of the Taliban in 2002, human rights have improved.

While I have no doubt that this is the case, the Taliban being one of the worst regimes ever to grace the family of nations, the question of degree is a very important one. We are moving to become a major player in that country, backing Karzai’s government and otherwise participating in the establishment of democratic institutions. To me this is maybe the most compelling reason for being in Afghanistan, even as I stand firmly opposed to our combat military role.

But today I discovered that in fact this core purpose, the establishment of democratic institutions and guarantee of freedoms, the only thing that anyone claims to have been successful, has been a bit of a sham. According to a US Government Commission, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Afghanistan is on a watch list for exactly the kinds of reforms Harper was trumpeting as successes.

The USCIRF is a multi-faith committee that reviews religious freedom around the world using international standards. In their latest annual report, issued May 3, 2006 (download .pdf here; Afghanistan report starts on page 199) you can read about why Afghanistan is on their watch list. Among the reasons included are the following:

  • The Afghanistan constitution, the one created by Karzai and the Americans and adopted in 2004 contains a clause known as the “repugnancy clause” which states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”
  • There is no constitutional guarantee for freedom of religion, meaning no protection of individual rights or minority rights to practice freely.
  • Journalists such as Ali Mohaqiq Hasab have been jailed and threatened with the death penalty for publishing opposition to punishments such as amputation and stoning, which are legitimate sentences in the Afghanistan legal system.
  • In a public statement to the Commission by Afghanistan Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari he stated that he completely accepts the UN Declaration on Human Rights except for three clauses – the ones that protect freedom of speech, freedom of religion and equal rights for men and women. The Chief Justice himself protested the presence of women singers on the radio last year.
  • TV and radio stations that have broadcast material considered arbitrarily contrary to Islam or Afghan culture have lost their licenses.

The report has been accepted by the US government.

To me, these reasons fly directly in the face of Harper’s most compelling argument. Canada may be fighting the remnants of the Taliban, whose views on these matters are more repugnant, but it seems that we are fighting at the behest of a President and government that, in law, has entrenched virulently anti-democratic principles that do nothing for the rights of women, journalists or religious minorities. The fact that we are actively participating in the creation of this justice system is appalling.

For formality’s sake, I am writing to Harper and my MP to see what the government’s plan is and will post any response I receive here.

[tags]Afghanistan, religous+freedom, Canada, Stephen+Harper[/tags]