I met Cheryl Honey earlier this week at the international Transformative Mediation conference in Minnesota. She’s the creator of something called Community Weaving and the Family Support Network. Taken together they are a wildly ambitious — and effective — application of Asset-Based Community Development.

Cheryl and friends have created a site that allows anyone to register as a good neighbor and add skills, abilities, interests, experiences and other contributions to a national “resource treasury.” The treasury is searchable by geography, interest, skill, need, and many other ways — but only after you register.

I just registered myself in Chicago, and was able to find several others here to connect with. One of them is even listed as a facilitator of Open Space. I’d like to see the C3 leaders start registering here, too. There is a special designation for groups and we could use that for C3.

I want to talk about my next car purchase with folks on this biodiesel map. Glad to see what I would call “so many” of them in within a 100 miles or so of me.

Today was a rare treat, lunch with my friend Shilpa Jain. Rare because she lives in India, Udaipur to be exact. Once upon a time we ran a few days of Open Space Technology training together, for her organization, Shikshantar, the People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development.

My favorite of all the stories we told today was of a week-long bicycle trip 14 colleagues did last October in India — without cash. They rode out, with signs, juggling gear, sleeping pads, jewelry making tools and no food on their bicycles.

The signs invited conversation. The other stuff was some of what they used to survive… by offering entertainment, cleaning, carrying, and other “body labor” along the way, bridging the gap between urban and rural people, and learning a lot about simple, human relations, economics, exchange, humility and power. I think the humility of the endeavor is most impressive for me.

Shikshantar is doing community work with zero-waste and organic urban gardening. I shared my new Nestworking experiment and Shilpa has connected me with somebody here in town working on community gardens.

Finally, Shilpa brought me a copy of Expressions Annual 2005, a journal recently published by abhivyakti.org.in in which Shilpa interviews me about Open Space. Dialogue, walking, film-making, cooperative games, and a piece by Juanita Brown on World Cafe are also featured this year.

Jill and I are hoping to meet up with Shilpa in Udaipur this Fall, but likely not for the next cashless bike/work tour. Guess we’ll just have to organize our own tour here in Chicago!

I take it as a good wedding omen that it just gets harder and harder to be away from home.

I’m done now with travel (I think) for the next couple of months and it feels really good to be home. So I’m starting a new practice, which I’m calling Nestworking, an inverted or locally-focused sort of networking.

For years, I’ve been expanding a global network of friends and colleagues. Now I want to actively request the good people I know around the world to connect me with interesting people they know or meet from Chicago. In this way, I want to turn my network back in on itself, and use it to help me find others who are active in global conversations — AND living and working here in town.

Mostly we think of extending networks, but this is a sort of local thickening, the practice of which has been new to everyone I’ve asked about it. Seems promising in a region of eight million or more people. I want to find those who live simultaneously in Chicago and in bigger global circles.

Who do you know is making good in Chicago and the world? This might be a quiet little series of connecting conversations or blossom as the next generation of GlobalChicago networking. Who do you think I should I know in Chicago?