Linkage

Ten new bits and pieces for your surfing pleasure:

1. Grupthink: “GrÅ«pthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended questions with the rest of the world. Anyone can ask a question or post a topic at GrÅ«pthink, and everyone can respond. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can respond with new answers, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.” At the moment it seems to be fixated on rather superficial questions, but that could change. via
2. The Big Here: “You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.” via
3. Network Organizing – A Strategy for Building Community Engagement: “Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement…Our response to this situation is a “network organizing” strategy that connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life – from the neighborhood group to the City Council – in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. Our approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking to our work has helped us to challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement, and shape a strong demand environment for change.”
4. ConsensusPolling: “…is about winning together or refusing to play the game. Because it can be a laborious process, it is most appropriate when a group of individuals must collectively solve a problem that affects them all. It seeks to avoid voting for VotingIsEvil (see VotingIsEvil) when such a vote would generate winners and losers and thus divide the community that must support the result of the collective decision.”
5. Technophilia: Find great podcasts: “You could spend hours scouring the end of the very long tail for quality podcasts, but thankfully, there are a few sites that have already done the heavy lifting for you, including podcast search engines, directories, and roundup sites. Keep reading, and I’ll show you how to find some of the best, most interesting, and must-listen-to podcasts on the web.”
6. Getting Out of the Way – Naomi Aldort:”My husband and I are often complimented on our children’s behavior and demeanor. People think that we discipline them. We don’t. It is ourselves we discipline.We meet our children’s needs, provide for their protection, and expose them to life’s possibilities. We do not, however, meddle in their play, their learning, their creativity, or any other form of growth. We love, hug, feed, share, listen, respond, and participate when asked. Yet, we keep our children free of insult and manipulation resulting from “helpful” comments and ideas – influences to which children are so sensitive in their state of dependency.”
7. Bo Lozoff at The Zoo Fence: “We need to start asking ourselves some searching questions about why life seems to be of so little value to our kids. From a spiritual perspective, one sentence can sum up the whole thing – not only our own and our kids’ problems, but our planetary problems too, from pollution to wars:

   Human life is very deep, and our dominant modern lifestyle is not.”

8. Informal Learning » The Power of Dialogue: “What habits do we need to let go of in order to have true dialogue? When does facilitation draw attention to the process or the moderator rather than furthering the inquiry? How does dialogue emerge from among a group of strangers, and what conditions are the most evocative for true inquiry? What role does individual ego play?”

9. A Cooperative Solution: “Cooperatives typically cannot move without taking the time and effort to bring all participants to the table. As Arie de Geus says, “This involves more brains and more time up front – and therefore would seem to take an awful lot longer. But everybody who has worked with this system will tell you that the gain made in the implementation, both in speed and quality, outweighs by far the decisions made in conventional companies.” via

10. Imagining the Tenth Dimension: “In string theory, physicists tell us that the subatomic particles that make up our universe are created within ten spatial dimensions (plus an eleventh dimension of “time”) by the vibrations of exquisitely small “superstrings”. The average person has barely gotten used to the idea of there being four dimensions: how can we possibly imagine the tenth