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I need an academic researcher on networked governance

December 3, 2008 By Uncategorized 7 Comments

Prince George, BC

Spread this request out to your networks.

I am involved with a fascinating three year project which is creating a network of learning circles across Canada to bring policy makers, practitioners and academics together around cracking the next level for urban Aboriginal economic development in Canada.   We had a very successful kick off meeting in Ottawa in October and we now have some learning circles taking shape across the country.

One of the circles is located in Prince George and it’s looking at models of urban Aboriginal governance.   Tonight my friends Ray Gerow, Veronica Creyke and I were talking about the fact that when most people look at governance structures, they picture a body that makes decisions and manages resources.   We are very interested in looking at the way governance happens when people take responsibility for creating their futures collectively.   In other words, a bottom up approach to governance that is based on networked action, governance that emerges from community and economic development in action.   That is what is happening here in Prince George and we want to study it and tell the story.

The basis for this inquiry comes from an Open Space we ran here four years ago.   That event was notable in that the community created 21 projects all led by community members who attracted people to help them out.   Everything from resurrecting the Aboriginal Choice School idea (which is why I am here this week) to organizing drug addicts and homeless men in helping to spruce up the parks and public spaces where they live.

The champions of the action groups were completely self-selected and they later came together as a champions council and together decided how to spend the $250,000 that the federal government set aside to support these projects.   It was remarkable and it lasted for two years in tha format.   Since then, an organization has taken over the funding and the process has gone back to a more traditional governance model.   But much of the work that was started continues on and another Open Space is in the works to revive the idea, and that made us think that the most effective governance for this urban Aboriginal community was not a structure at all but rather some form of “action governance” based in real development work.

We don’t know what any of this means or looks like, but through this project we have a chance to explore it.   What we are looking for is an academic who would be eligible for a SSHRC grant to look at a very different kind of community governance, something akin to wirearchy in action but absolutely without using Web 2.0 or really any kind of social networking technology other than Open Space and other conversational social technologies. Part of my inquiry in thinking about how social technologies can come into this field and enhance the latent governance function.

If you are interested, or know someone who is, let me know.   We have money and some interesting questions and we would like the story told.

Three kinds of networks

December 3, 2008 By Open Space, Organization 2 Comments

Johnnie Moore has a great post today that discusses how people act within three distinct forms of networking.   Along the way he points out that in the above diagram we have too much A and B masquerading as C.

IN the discussion he praises the establishment of seemingly redundant links in a network, which is something I am heavily in favour of as well.   The more ways you have to work between people, the more creative you can be and more truly community you are. Johnnie rolls this into his observation of how people behave in Open Space events:

First, it’s really important if you want to talk about something to put it up for discussion without concern for it’s popularity as a topic. And second, be wary of criticising how others choose to engage: are you in effect demanding they conform to your personal view of what’s important, as if yours is the only one?

I think the picture that Johnnie uses to illustrate this is very important.   Often in talking with organizations they want to move to a more networked way of being but in reality they choose just to decentralize.   This intermediate stpe has several characteristics.   It is certainly a shift to a networked organization and it invites a community to arise within.   It also preserves some of the weak points of a centralized organization, which includes reliance on a hub, meaning that the system does not have the kind of resilience that a true network has.

The trick I think is seeing that the network actually does exist in several organizational settings, and lives happily alongside a bureaucratic structure which moves resources and accountability around.   It is the active network within siloed structures that invites and encourages innovation to emerge.   Open Space events are a great way to make the network visible and to put it to use.

The story is being spun badly

December 2, 2008 By Uncategorized One Comment

Watching the news tonight and both CBC and CTV are talking about “Anger in the West” with lots of video of conservative talk show hosts in Calgary and folks in diners in Lethbridge mad as hell and not willing to take it any more.

So let me just say something, as a Westerner.   The West is not a seething homogenous conservative backwater.   It is not united on this issue and it not any more angry than it usually is.   Callers to Dave Rutherford’s show in Calgary are always angry, because Dave Rutherford is always angry.   People in diners are always cranky when you stick a camera in their face and interview them while their eggs get cold.   The only time diner interviews are good news is when a local team has won a championship.

And with healthy Alberta First folks willing to shoot off their mouths at the drop of a hat, it’s fun to provoke the hypocrisy of Western seperatists who complain about Quebec seperatists, and are themselves quick to talk about taking their oil and leaving Canada in pieces.

So whatever.   Are we served well by this kind of bluster and outrage?   Not really.

Bottom line, is that there is anger everywhere if you look for it, but there is very little benefit gained in the midst of a Constitutional crisis by declaring the entire country west of Kenora “angry” and characteriszing us all as a bunch of reactionary rednecks.   So lay off the stereotypes and let’s focus on the people on all sides that are trying to put a government together.

The new politics in North America

December 2, 2008 By Collaboration, Leadership 2 Comments

I can’t speak for Mexico, but this fall has had a transformative effective on the other 2 countries in North America.

First, Barack Obama.   And now here in Canada, the prospect of a progressive coalition unseating the newly elected Conservative minority seems like a more and more likely possibility.   So what gives?

First of all, the general mood of both countries has shifted to the progressive side of things, although in Canada, a weak Liberal leader and a screwy representational system left the Conservative party with 37% of the vote and the majority of seats and thus the first shot at forming government.   Certainly Obama’s leadership, vision and message has grabbed a hold of the American left in a new and energizing way and it seems like much of the centre right opposition to his leadership has simply vanished, leaving bitter neoconservative right wing idealogues stewing in their jealous regret.

Now both the Obama administration there and the progressive coalition here are trying to do things differently.   That begins by reaching out to unlikely friends.   In Obama’s case he appoints Clinton and some Republican and bipartisan picks to his Cabinet.   Here in Canada, Stephane Dion, the man who penned the Clarity Act which drove a fairly effective stake into the seperatist movement in Quebec, has reached a pact with the NDP to govern (with six NDP Cabinet ministers), assisted by a deal with the seperatist Bloc Quebecois who have agreed to support him on confidence votes at least for the next 18 months.

Three months ago none of this would have seemed possible.   Obama’s election seared possibility into the minds of everyone, and in Canada, the Parliament, which had been completely hobbled by Conservative tactics in its last session vowed to bring in new levels of decorum in the new session.   Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister, then did a 180 degree turn on that commitment, tabling an economic statement in the House last week to deal with the economic crisis but which contained a slew of ideological poison pills.   To adopt it, the Opposition parties would have had to vote against workers rights to strike in the public service, and against the public funding that political parties receive on a per vote basis.   That such a statement was made when the Canadian economy is in its worst shape in decades was simply too much for the progressive majority inParliament and they vowed to introduce a non-confidence motion, defeat the government and form their own.   All the ground work has been laid for that now and we await the next moves of the Conservatives who may yet suspend Parliament to prevent the change in government.   Imagine that.   A party forming a minority government suspending Parliament to protect itself from a coalition representing a majority of votes and seats in the middle of an economic crises that needs a new government budget and economic policy.   That would truly be the most self-serving of political acts, risking Canada’s economic position for a few months of limited power, for the Consertaives would surely be defeated in the House at the first opportunity.

Now as a progressive minded person, all of this has made me a little giddy and a little nervous.   I am truly captured by the notion of politics being done differently (even though on our side the reason for it is much more opportunistic than in the States).   I have been imploring my American progressive friends to remember the significance of Obama’s election and remember that what he has set out to do will be hard work and will anger and alienate many people IF people become preoccupied with the day to day struggles and appointments and policy statements.   It’s akin to doing major surgery – Obama has the chance to remove a malignant pox on American politics but to do so means making friends with people and ideas that are anaethma to his supporters.   But stick by him and have faith that the patient will survive.

My friend Alison made the same prescription this morning for us north of the border too.   If we are to have this coalition and we are to make it wotk, we must argue its ideas with conviction but at the end of the day support it at the cost of a disunified progressive poltical sphere, ripe for the splitting by the Conservatives.

If this works, in both countries, the potential benefits are enormous for everyone.   The Nothern 2/3 of North America will have a steady, progressive and creative hand on the rudder during this huge economic crises, politics may never look the same and the right wing in both countries will have a chance to reinvent themselves away from the ideological orientation of their previous incarnations, and towards a new conservatism that brings something to the table other than derision and fear mongering.

We have a chance here to seize something.   Crisis.   Danger.   Opportunity.   Political leadership will be remade in the next couple of years, and its about time.   Hang on.

Harvesting from long germinating seeds

December 1, 2008 By Art of Harvesting, Emergence, First Nations, Flow, Leadership, Open Space One Comment

Prince George, BC

Four years ago less a month I was running a huge Open Space event here in Prince George, in fact in the building that right outside my hotel room window.   Called “Seeds of Change” the event was a kick off for the urban Aboriginal Strategy, a community driven and led process intended to begin and seed projects that would make a difference in the lives of the urban Aboriginal community in this northern city of 80,000 people.

One of the participants at that event was Ben Berland, who was at the time working with the Prince George school district as an Aboriginal coordinator.   Ben had a vision of doing something really different within the education system here in PG.   He built upon a long standing recommendation to start a different kind of school.   He attracted a number of interested folks at the Open Space and moved his project idea forward.

A couple of years later, a task force was struck to study options for systemic change in the school system and one of their recommendations was to establish a primary Aboriginal Choice School within the school district.

The choice school idea is based on some very successful models in Edmonton and Winnipeg.   Getting it rolling has been a lot of work for many people here in Prince George, but tonight was the first of four consultation cafes we are running with four inner city school communities to find out what it would take to make a choice school successful in this city.

Ben, who is now working with the local Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council showed up tonight to hold some space with us and help run some small group conversations.   When he saw me the first thing he did was to remind me that this whole idea – four years in germination – had started at the Seeds of Change event.

This whole choice school initiative is a huge undertaking and it feels like in many ways the community here is just beginning its work, starting to engage in earnest with the complexities of finally implementing the idea that gained momentum across the street four years ago.

Things take time.   It’s interesting that we know that and we forget it at the same time.   We crave immediate results for our ideas.   When we forget that things take time, we forget everything that has gone on to take us to the point where we are finally able to start something and we forget the people that laid the groundwork for things.   So tonight I am sitting here grateful for Ben’s reminder about where things come from, and what it takes for big shifts to happen.   It takes hard work, and a firm conviction and most of all, it takes time.