The rapture of wirearchy begins
Art of Harvesting, CoHo, Collaboration, Emergence, Organization
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:
- 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.)
- Conduct getherings to collect a lot of diverse wisdom and thinking about the inquiry.
- Harvest detailed notes from initial conversations, but don’t make meaning from them right away.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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]
The Tofflers’ PowerShift is indeed under way. For the powers that be .. and probably almost everyone else because these conditions are new … this is the part of the plane ride when the Captain comes on the PA and says “buckle up folks, turbulenece aghead and we’re not sure for how long”.
While peoples’ instincts are good, less structured networked organized activity is “new” in some important ways .. as you and I have noodled over several times, opening space, reinforcing passion bounded by responsibility and harvesting from the patterns that emerge will, I (and I think you) suspect, be the way forward for more and more and more people. Whitewater & mountain meaning-into-action guides like you planting seeds in fields of people … thank goodness you and your facilitator brethren are there.
Thank you Jon…I too feel strongly that the capacities we offer as facilitators and trainers of skilful chaordic and generative conversation are becoming more and more important.
Jay Rosen, who blogs at PressThink, recently launched New Assignment, a project that bears a very close resemblance to the principles you outlined above. There’s a lot of discussion in the press and on the web about the power of crowdsourcing, or collective harvesting. A lot of people hold up Wikipedia as the exemplar for these efforts but Wikipedia misses the crucial bits you put into steps 3-6. Wikipedia has a purpose and collects a lot of information but doesn’t reflect on the worth of that information or try to reflectively put information back into the sources from which it was gathered. Right now this is the great untapped potential of the internet. New Assignment interests me because it appears to work on the knowledge creation/reflection steps you outlined above. Thanks for the interesting post.
[…] US bloggers are working cooperatively to follow the US government’s plan to fire United States Attorneys for political reasons, a process that requires mining thousands of documents a day. Chris Corrigan muses on how this process might be used for tackling other large and difficult issues. more […]
The “alarming plan” takes on even more insidious and ominous colouring.
In a WaPo article that just hit the Intertubes a short while ago, this recently-retired US Attorney who prosecuted a landmark case againstthe tobacco industry said:
“Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the “overwhelming politicization” of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.
Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.
“Political interference is happening at Justice across the department,” she said. “When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general’s office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window.”
Will all this, especially noting Bush’s defiance re: letting Rove and Miers testify under oath, become the Bush era’s equivalent to Watergate ? How ironic, after illegal invasion and occupation, massive lying, suspension of civil and legal rights, etc.