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A local example of what Facebook has cost us

January 25, 2025 By Bowen, Community, Democracy, Featured 9 Comments

When I first moved to Bowen Island back in 2001, there was a very active discussion board of Bowen Island issues called the Bowen Island Phorum. This was a typical late 1990s bulletin board type website. Locals could join and make posts and sometimes the discussions would cascade over four or five pages with replies into the hundreds on especially contentious or important issues to our little community. Although that place drove me crazy with frustration a lot of the time, and I used to issue earnest warnings about the tone of some of our debate, which, probably seemed like …

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Some heuristics for good public engagement practice

January 20, 2025 By Community, Conversation, Democracy, Design, Facilitation

From time to time I have conversations that remind me of the principles that guide my own work in different aspects of facilitation and engagement. Today, in two different design conversations, I was reminded of these again, and I took a few notes as we were talking. These aren’t the be-all and end-all of good practice, but they are things that roll off the tongue and are basic heuristics for how I structure and facilitate public engagement sessions. So those are a few. There are many more besides these, not to mention rigorous thinking about power. But these are among …

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The calm before the coming moment

January 18, 2025 By Complexity, Democracy, Featured 4 Comments

Thomas Homer-Dixon writing in the Globe and Mail this weekend: Constitutive moments are a special kind of historical inflection point. Powerful actors like U.S. presidents always operate within a constellation of macro-trends, cultures, institutions, and social and political alliances. But during constitutive moments, they have a rare opportunity to radically reconfigure that constellation because the usual constraints on selecting from, combining, and adjusting its elements are greatly weakened. The systems they’re operating within are abnormally susceptible to massive change. Leaders who effectively exploit these opportunities can create not just profoundly new ways of doing things, but also new ways of …

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Just enough to live a good life

January 15, 2025 By Art of Hosting, Being, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Facilitation, Featured, First Nations, Leadership 5 Comments

The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage. We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners and programs. All over the world there are organizations like this, not always obvious or seen by the global Art of Hosting community, because they labour away on their own …

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