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The rapture of wirearchy begins

March 20, 2007 By Art of Harvesting, CoHo, Collaboration, Emergence, Organization 5 Comments

My friend Jon Husband is alive for the signs that new organizational forms are upon us.   He found one today that really rang out for me.   It seems that Amerian bloggers having been using distributed networks of readers to find the patterns of organization in a government conspiracy.

This is not tin-foil hat stuff.   It’s the real deal, with an alarming plan to engineer the firing a number of United States Attorneys for political reasons.   The bigest challenge for the bloggers who are following the story is to stay on top of the thousands of documents a day that are being released, almost in an effort to flood the public with disclosure.   How do you find the gems?   Well, if every reader of these well read blogs were to pick a couple of pages and harvets the nuggets, they could almost discover the actual plan pretty quickly, in theory anyway.   And in practice, that is what’s happening.   Within hours, the bloggers had begun to make some serious findings.

I’m quite interested in this, and thinking about how it might be a model for building things as well as taking them down.   For example, I’m wondering how we might use a community of stakeholders/readers to sift through harvests from an engagement process to find the meaning that points the way forward.   It would be a collective harvest of people’s own work, fed back into the system so that it may be developed further.   From that, an emergent, collective set of patterns can be made visible, upon which something new can be designed.
As I think about this, and how the process would work both for uncovering a gpovernment conspiracy and building a new approach to social services for example, I am left with the following principles of practice:

  1. Agree collectively as to the purpose of the joint inquiry (uncover a government plan, build a new community-based approach to child and youth mental health, etc.)
  2. Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
  3. Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
  4. Invite anyone to read whatever they want of the documents and select the pieces that seem to have the most relvance and benefit to the inquiry at hand.   It would seem to be a good idea to have a large and diverse number of people to do this, especially if you had a substantial and complex inquiry and body of thought.
  5. Make this second level harvest visible and begin pattern finding within what is emerging, all the while feeding that back to the system to both show progress and te help people go back and find additional meaning and wisdom to support what is emerging.
  6. Have a further inquiry to tap creativity to fill the gaps that are being noticed.

Just a sketch at this point, but I have a place where I might be able to try it on a smaller scale.   One could use this anywhere one had a large number of people that were contributing to a project that affected them.   Wirearchy changes public engagement and makes it more democratic.

Very cool indeed.   Thanks for the heads up Jon!

[tags]wirearchy, governance, public engagement[/tags]

links for 2007-03-19

March 19, 2007 By Uncategorized

The Bridge to Terabithia and harvesting

March 18, 2007 By Art of Harvesting, CoHo, Invitation, Stories 4 Comments

This is what happens when you travel the world with a question: you find teachings in all kinds of unexpected places. There’s a spoiler in here, if you haven’t seen the movie.

Last night my family all enjoyed a night in Vancouver, dinner and a movie. We went to see Bridge to Terabithia, which is a pretty good film about two pre-teen outcasts, Jess and Leslie, who find meaning in each other’s imagination. Together they ease each other into opening minds and hearts to create a fantasy world, and it’s neve clear whether or not the world is becoming real as the movie unfolds. Towards the end of the film Leslie dies – a strange enough occurrance in a children’s movie – and Jess is left alone with the fantasy world he created with his friend.

It’s a strong film with many themes, but as I’ve been carrying around the questions of what it means to harvest in the world, I found it interesting that the movie resonated for me on that level.

One way to think about harvesting is to see it as putting imaginations to use to create meaning in one world so that another world may come into being. In social change efforts, harvesting is most powerful not when it simply documents the shift from one state to another, but when the harvest itself becomes the catalyst for the coming into being of the new world.

In Bridge to Terabithia, Leslie is a storyteller whose words can invoke physical realities. Jess is a talented visual artist who draws the worlds he sees. Together they create their new world, tentatively at first, but later with so much energy that they inhabit it with wild abandon. In the end, after Leslie dies, Jess shares this world with his little sister, who is introduced to the world by crossing a bridge that Jess has built over the creek in which Leslie has died. When they reach the other side, Jess’s sister utters “Terabithia!” and her ability to see and live in the world begins immediately.   Her own profound imaginary engagement with Terabithia is a testament to the power of what Jess and Leslie harvested from their creation and experience of the world. It ‘s fascinating to look at the film from this angle, at how the power of Leslie’s imagination, and Jess’s harvest of it literally creates a bridge for Jess’s sister to cross so that she may be fully invited into Terabithia.

I’m quite interested how a multimedia, multimodal harvest of meaning from an experience can facilitate and sustain new levels of consciousness and awareness. In this film, the continuation of the world requires a harvest that envelopes Jess’s sister so that she immediately opens to the power of her own imagination. It’s what every good meeting should be about.

links for 2007-03-18

March 18, 2007 By Uncategorized One Comment

Christy on the sources of sacred conversation

March 17, 2007 By Being, Collaboration, Conversation, Practice 4 Comments

Christy Lee Engle has posted a beautiful pair of quotes on sacred conversation.   There is so much goodness in it that   i republish it here for your edification.:

Peggy Holman recently posted a beautiful article called “Evolution, Process and Conversation: A Foundation for Conscious Evolutionary Agency” to the Open Space listserv, originally written for the Evolutionary Life e-magazine.

In it, she wonders/suggests:

“Could it be that consciousness is the latest evolutionary innovation that, when applied to conversation, catalyzes a new form of social system, the conscious co-creative collective, the radiant network of deep community? I believe that conscious conversation is the path to what Thich Nhat Hanh imagined when he said: “It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” [Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha” in Inquiring Mind, Vol 10, No.2, Spring 1994]


which reminds me of a teaching I read a couple of years ago — a similar co-evolutionary idea in a different costume:

“‘Messiah’ in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean ‘conversation’. Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach — Messiah, meaning ‘from dialogue’ or ‘of conversation.’ [Me’or Enayim, Parashat Pinchas] His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation — every mutual act of voice-giving.

All conversation is sacred. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in whihch both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is messianic. Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah.”