Is this not the coolest thing? The Open Space Sangha has come alive.

A little less than four years ago I started what I think was the first Open Space weblog which folded into this one. Since then a fair dozen or so have cropped up and now our little community has gathered in the Sangha to reflect deeply on the practices of Open Space.

Props to Wendy for getting the ball rolling. She’s a great person to work with!

Fitfully tracing portals for five years, wood s lot celebrates a birthday.

I love Mark Wood’s weblog. It was one of my first bloggy reads and I continue to read it several times a week, finding myself taken far away by his amazing collection of links and findings. Unfortunately, he hand rolls the blog and has never produced an RSS feed of any quality, so he doesn’t show up in my links roll, which is powered by Bloglines. But he’s always been generous with sending traffic my way, and I’ve appreciated that and the occasional email exchange we have had over the years, so here’s a shout out to Mark and a great big thank you for the continuing education in cultural studies that unfurls from the garage on the river in Perth, Ontario.

If you’ve never heard Metis music before, you should go over to metisradio.fm and tune in. This is a good quality 64kb stream of traditional and contemporary Metis music.

Metis music is predominantly a fiddle genre, springing out of the traditional cultures of the French and Scottish traders that went west and married First Nations women. As the Metis Nation arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the music, becoming a unique genre of fiddling, although borrowing many tunes and styles from Celtic, French, Old Time and, more recently, country music.

Saying that Metis music is just fiddle music doesn’t do it justice though. Traditional influences still pervade the music and hand drumming, singing and chanting are still a part of the Metis music world. It is perhaps the most diverse single genre of traditional North American music.

One of the real treasures of this site is the collection of recordings from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota, which is a strong home of the American parts of the Metis Nation. These recordings are astounding quality and give an amazing overview of this diversity and range of music produced out of the French, Scottish and Chippewa traditions.

Bonus stream: Aboriginal Voices Radio Canada’s national Aboriginal broadcaster, broadcasting in Toronto on 106.5fm and across the web.

I’ve just returned from a very interesting small conference in Arizona, where we were talking about philanthropy, discovery and education. And I have some questions for you all…

• What if the essential political questions of our time – the questions that ask “how should we do things?” – were not about right vs. left but bottom-up vs. top down? What would that do to the political spectrum and its discourse?
• What if our work was about creating space – for discovery, connection and collaboration – rather than narrowing down options and coming up with answers?
• What if accountability was about trust, intimacy and love, and not measurement, punishment and suspicion? How would we foster such a system? What would it mean for politics, governance, leadership and community?

I’d be really curious about your answers, or further questions that are suggested by this short list.