I’m just returning from Calgary where my partner Susan Neden and I have been doing some design and faiclitation work with the imagineCALGARY Roundtable. imagineCALGARY is a 100 year sustainability planning exercise, in the spirit of the Imagine Chicago process. Last night we took the group through a short Cafe process about their engagment and reasons why the roundtable participants agreed to join the enterprise. In the midst of all the conversation a line stood out for me that rocked me very deeply. In going over the table notes afterwards Susan read out this zinger: “Cities last longer than countries.” …
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What if you lived in a country where something like 20% of the population had a phone, and waiting for a phone took 5-10 years? What if you had pioneered a microlending scheme that enabled very poor women to buy cows and sell the milk? What if cows=cell phones? The Grameen Bank, well-known for their micro-credit loan circles has come up with another amazing scheme for building empowerment in poor countries using a distributed business model in which poor people are seen as assets instead of liabilities. Ethan Zuckerman reports on a presentation by Iqbal Quadir, one of the founders …
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I’ve been mulling this one over for a few days. At WorldChanging, Jeremy Faludi posted a set of six ideas on preserving change once you have it. In sum: Stricter rules and oversight Good public relations Networking progress, spreading the benefits through agents at the edges rather than central hubs Decentralizing administration and authority Self-sustaining financing (make it pay for itself) This might be a good list to add to. Here are some things I can think of: Build learning and deliberation around the progress. Make the gain part of the public conversation around policy by hosting gatherings where citizens …
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I love being a dad. One of the reasons fathering is so great is you get great singing partners out of the deal. And so in honour of all the fathers out there, and their children, here is an offering for your ears. This is a Tibetan father and son singing together. Enjoy! mp3: Father and Son
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George Por went digging around in his archives dating back to the late eighties and came up with an interview he did with Peter Senge on “generic structures.” Senge said: We’ve had a particular view on this point for many years that is one of the specific contributions of the systems dynamics field is the idea of what we call “generic structures”. Basically the idea is simply that nature tends to repeat certain patterns. Now, structure has a very particular meaning in our work. It does not mean a structure imposed on people or anything like that. It has to …