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 …
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Fascinating article in the New York Times about the norther area of Somalia where people have built peace in an incredibly turbulent region by mixing indigenous governance with democratic participation, using elders and tribal leaders to harness attachment to clans AND to transcendent principles such as independence and peace. Some quotes: “You can’t be donated power,” said Dahir Rayale Kahin, the president of the Republic of Somaliland, which has long declared itself independent from the rest of Somalia. “We built this state because we saw the problems here as our problems. Our brothers in the south are still waiting – …
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I had never come across the work of Mary Parker Follett before until this week, and I have had some Firefox tabs open with her work in them including The New State written in 1918 when it must have felt like the state itself had become a murderous and inhumane human construction, in which the role of groups in democratic process must have seemed in need of some deep reflection. Follet lays out her thesis in the very first paragraph of the work: Politics must have a technique based on the understanding of the laws of association, that is, based …
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Interesting report from a group I hadn’t heard of before, the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership. THey have just released a publication called “Coping with Growth and Change: The state of leadership in rural BC.” I have an interest in this given that I teach and facilitate collaborative leadership and I live ina rural community in BC. The report’s authors write: “Many people see leadership development assisting with issues like change, economic diversification, youth attraction, innovation and collaboration, key ingredients to 21st Century success for rural communities.” Many communities reported that youth are moving away and young families are …
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Via Johnnie, comes a sweet elucidation from David Weinberger about the creeping relgion of “accountabalism:” The Folly of Accountabalism Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil. The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where …