Liu Yang is a Chinese artist. This piece is from a series of works about huamn patterns in Chinese and German social settings. This one is called “At a Party.” German is blue, Chinese is red.
More here.
[tags]liu yang[/tags]
Carman Pirie with a nice bit of noticing:
The good folks at Facebook are facing a bit of a backlash after closing the account of at least one Canadian mother whose snaps of her nursing her child were deemed obscene.The Facebook group “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” is gaining members as fast as Angelina Jolie’s fan club…. all of them rather put off by all of this.
The way I see it, the rules have changed. Just because you’ve built (and could sell for an incredible amount of cash) a social network like Facebook, doesn’t mean you own it. The users own it. Facebook can learn this now, or learn it later – but learn it they will.
My advice: take the same ingenuity used to create Facebook and build a self-governance framework for users. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for self-governance when the conditions are right.
This is pretty basic chaordic theory really…. determine the minimum amount of order required, then get out of the way. Control is not the answer.
[tags]facebook, chaordic[/tags]
Here is a selection of interesting papers for your summer reading:
- Is it time to unplug our schools? – Almost everything published in Orion is interesting. This article looks at what schools are doing to teach a deep relationship to nature.
- Altar calls for true believers – on the challenge of practicing what we preach with respect to sustainability. This is a good piece on why systemic change in general doesn’t necessarily correlate with necessity.
- Horse Power – Old technology for a new world.
- No coffee – A great piece on Jurgen Habermas, coffeehouses and the power of conversation.
- Modern Cosmology: Science or folktale? – I think the cosmic story is both. This article argues the same, but from the perspective of a skeptical scientist.
- World Bank economist Kirk Hamilton on the planet’s real wealth. – It turns out that the greatest resource the world has is “intangible capital” – people’s wisdom and labour.
- Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. A review of a new biography about the Italian patriot Giusepe Garibaldi, for whom my local extinct volcano at the head of Howe Sound was named.
- Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch – Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom think it’s possible we live in The Matrix.
- Heretical thoughts about science and society – Freeman Dyson muses about the global warming crises. But he might be wrong. He’s been wrong before!
- The quandry of quality – a great blog post from Bob Sutton on what is hard to measure but essential nonetheless.
[tags]nature, sustainability, change, horses, Habermas, coffee, conversation, cosmology, big bang, human resources, Garibaldi, Matrix, Nick Bostrom, freeman dyson, robert crick, global warming[/tags]
Nick Smith has a nice post on common vision and team building in which he offers a few useful approaches for building common bonds, prefaced by this:
I’ve never been comfortable with the word ’empowerment’. It’s speak to me of something manipulative and I’ve never found that motivation works that way. I tend to agree with what Henry Miller said, “The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”
I like that.
- 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 Meetings and Incentive Travel, that quotes my Canadian mates Diane Gibault, Michelle Cooper and Larry Peterson. Add to that this very useful short film on Open Space, and you could safely say that our beloved process has truly tipped.
- And speaking of mates, Thomas Arthur comes through with a link he sent by Google chat which deepens the ida of Pattern Language, moving it into another level of “generative code” for building living neighbourhoods. This gets at something I was saying in Belgium, standing up for Pattern Language which I understand as a noticing about the world rather than a prescriptive recipe. It is very much generative code. Thomas’ link sent me running to check up on Kevin Harris’ excellent blog and I note he has been recently posting interesting things on third places, mass creativity and social interactions in public spaces. Kevin’s blog is in my “check once a month” folder, and it’s always rich.
- Last note for this week: While I was in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team held a monmumental celebration to mark the formal shift to an interim authority. What this means is that we are half way to becoming a full authority for Aboriginal child and family services on Vancouver Island. The celebration was held at the Snuneymexw longhouse near Nanaimo, and a really nice piece aired on TV about it (.wmv).