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Open Space Practice Retreat, April 18-20

January 31, 2006 By Open Space

Michael Herman and I are pleased to announce a three day Open Space Technology practice retreat to cultivate the essense of Open Space leadership April 18-20 here on Bowen Island. This is an intensive retreat for leaders, managers, facilitators, consultants, community activists, and anyone else who wants to open more space for renewal, visioning, learning and productivity — in business, government, educational and community organizations. This is an opportunity for deep learning about leadership and change, in the context of the practices that support facilitating Open Space.

If you would like to register, or for more information, visit the Practice Retreat page or contact me directly.

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Unconferencing

January 30, 2006 By Open Space

Okay folks…having read Jeff Jarvis today (thanks for the pointer Johnnie) and noting the unconferencing angst going on out there, and noting also that people seems to be feeling around in the dark for some way forward, I’m here to offer what I can.

I am a facilitator and I specialize in Open Space Technology. There is hardly a better method of structuring a conference that mimics the social networking landscape that we call the Internet. I have run all kinds of conferences with Open Space, including using Open Space combined with speakers and other bits of inspiration. I’ve used Open Space in combination with other large group process like World Cafe. I’ve convened conference using Open Space that were supported by wikis and blogs and that had an online and real life for months afterwards.

If you are after building bottom-up, conversational and highly networked conference, it’s really a very simple thing to turn a traditional conference into an Open Space event that gives you what you’re looking for. I have been hearing about people wanting to do this for a couple of years now, but no one has called yet, so here’s the offer:

If you are serious about wanting to create an unconference, phone me or Skype me or drop me an email and I will talk your ear off for free and tell you everything I know about how to do it. I will even help you create the invitation and figure out the logistics. If it suits you to work with me after that, I’ll facilitate the conference for you as well and/or find others out in the world who will be eager to help you out for an obscenely reasonable rate. You will have, at the end of the day, a dynamic event, with engaged participants and you will bring it in at a huge cost savings over what you are budgeting for a full-on conference with panels and video conferencing and skirts on the tables and such. You will have a powerful, low cost, learning event.

In exchange for my free set up advice, I’ll ask you to share what we learn with others on our respective blogs. All I want to do at this point is make sure that the new kind of conferencing takes off and that we can learn from one another.

So I look forward to hearing from you.

unconference

Mindful of teachers all around

January 30, 2006 By Being, Featured, Learning

Good old whiskey river:

Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver

Yesterday my five year old son and I went for a walk in a remote and wild part of our island to a point where the waves riding the southeasterlies up the Strait of Georgia break on a basalt reef littered with driftwood. And in that place, in that moment, with rain washing our faces and wind lashing at our ears, we talked about seeing with the close-seeing eye that watches where we step and seeing with the long-seeing eye that knows where we are in the forest. So turning, we made our way back through the trees with our close-seeing eyes and long-seeing eyes both tuned. We learned that it is important to stay aware of our feet below us and the turns in the forest path ahead of us, and that getting lost is a result of losing the manner of both modalities.

Such a trove of teachings in a simple, slippery path on a rainy day.

Allegri’s Miserere and Mozart’s birthday

January 27, 2006 By Music One Comment

Here’s an mp3 post for a rainy Friday afternoon, another contemplative moment.

This is Allegri’s Miserere, a stunning piece of choral music composed in the 1630s. It is so sublime that for a long time it was only performed once a year and anyone who wrote it down would be excommunicated for doing so. The story goes that Mozart (whose 250th birthday is today) broke the ban by hearing the piece, transcribing it from memory and then giving it away. In this respect Wolfgang may have preceeded Napster by a couple hundred years. Thanks to Wolfgang’s transgressions, this Miserere is now open source and able to be performed by any choir with a soprano that can hit that high C. For me, as one who is not a great fan of Mozart’s music in general, I consider this one act to be his greatest acheivement.

The piece is ten minutes long, so sit back, close your eyes and enfold yourself in the textures of it as it moves between plainsong and polyphony and as that soprano descends from heaven with the most heartstopping phrase in choral music.

Networking models for grantmaking

January 25, 2006 By Uncategorized

That sounds like a dry title…but let me explain.

I am doing some work at the moment with an organization called the Centre for Sustainability, a group out of the Vancouver Foundation that administers some grants programs to support organizational development for non-profits.

We are designing a program, called the Technical Assistance Program for Aboriginal Non-Profits (TAP) specifically for Aboriginal non-profits and as part of that work we are travelling around BC hosting conversations with the folks out there who might end up being recipients of the program’s funding. Yesterday in Terrace we heard some things that made us rethink a large part of the approach to how these types of programs are run.

Essentially, government and philanthropic organizations support these types of initiatives by issuing grants to recipients who do the work and then return a report to the funder. The work benefits the organization, and the funder is satisfied with the results. The loop is closed.

In Terrace we heard from people that there is much to gain from sharing stories about organizational development efforts and that our focus groups themselves, using storytelling as a means to contribute to our learning, are just as valuable as activities for which organizations might get funded. This started us thinking a bout a new model of networked learning and organizational development support that we sketched out for further inquiry.

Essentially, this model is an open loop learning process and is based in the idea of “paying forward” the lessons learned. Organizations would continue to receive grants to do the work, but with one additional reporting requirement: they would have to share what they learn. Materials produced in the process of rejigging their governance, designing policy manuals or creating human resources recruitment processes for example would be open source, and freely available to any other organization that wanted to use them. The resources would be hosted on a website and available to all.

Also, the recipient would be required to produce a presentation for one of five annual regional networking events around the province. These events would be supported by the granting agency and would invite organizations interested in OD issues to come together to learn from one another, participate in workshops and most importantly, hear the results of TAP recipients learnings from the work they have been doing. The advantage here is that presentations and reports could be in any format. And arts organization could make a dramatisation of their process, others could use video or storytelling sessions, and some might want to convene a conversation to tell the story and then discuss it further with other, to build even more learning.

Over time, we can build these networks into self-sustaining communities of practice, using and contributing to a growing body of materials freely available to all, and with increasing capacity in the regional networks for mutual help, support and collaboration.

The idea is new to us, but it combines many thoughts and theories I have worked with over the years including open source, social networking, learning networks and communities of practice, new forms of giving and I think it has some implications for progressive philanthropy as well. Hopefully Phil and others will weigh in and let me know.