From a paper on Korean poetry comes this poem by Ko Un, “Ode to Shim-chong:” Indangsu sea, shine dark blue, come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat. The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know the dark fate of the world beyond that lies past the path that sometimes appears, the weeping of children born into this world, and the sailors may know my daughter’s path. How can the waters exist without the world beyond? Full-bodied fear has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world, and my daughter’s whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such; …
My friend Rowan was exploring some online tools and asking the question, how do we make these tools useful and relevant. My response, which I posted at his blog, goes like this: In my experience what is most important is to first understand what your community needs. For example, a small group in the organization I am currently working with wanted a tool that allowed people to work on a document, but to only have access to the most recent draft. They set up an experimental wiki to do it, but that entailed them all learning wiki …
An Earth Without People — [ environment ]: Scientific American A new way to examine humanity’s impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared By Steve Mirsky (tags: environment nature science interesting toread)
The Art of Chaordic Leadership — Dee Hock full-text article Dee Hock on chaordic leadership (tags: leadership chaordic)
Kaliya Hamlin is getting really noticed for her work promoting Open Space in the tech community. The whole idea of unconferencing has jumped the shark, but there is still an art to doing Open Space. It’s easy but not simple, and Kaliya has been a great guardian of the essence of the process as it grows into the tech world in a big way This article from the Business 2.0 blog is another piece of good attention being thrown her way. Actually there are a rash of articles out these days on Open Space, including one in a publication called …