Category: Miscellany

could this posting by email actually get me back in the blogging game?
it’s been WEEKS since a blogger.com “networking issue” interrupted my
blog life here… with not a peep in response to more inquiries than i
can count. read in a forum that publishing by email might be workable
alternative, messy as it is. so here goes. could it be that i’m back
in the game?

Am I crazy? Blogger.com has been mysteriously non-functional, some sort of networking problem, for more than 10 days now… but I keep posting anyway, expecting that all might yet be well. And might yet show up at the published end of the web.

Meanwhile, Jill and I are off for a couple of weeks driving and hiking and camping around Scotland and Wales. Lots of borrowed gear (thank you thank you!!!) and expecting to be unplugged for longest stretch since first plugging in, I think. Maybe I’ll kick my blogging addiction? Doubts.

Then, when I get back, I want to study this about corporate blogging. Call me crazy, but I’m convinced that there is a happy marriage to be made between OpenSpaceTech and blogging in businesses.

…because this thing has been down, unpublishable, for two days now. it’s turning into one of those tried everything, nothing makes a difference, god if i jiggle it long enough or test it one more time it’s gotta start working again somehow sort of weeks. argh. please please…

UPDATE: a week later and only one cryptic response to my inquiries… after many auto-admonitions to read online FAQs comes the admission that there is some networking problem. this also after i’ve made my hosting outfit check on this three times. no clue when these postings might actually be published. hanging still in this weird space of being able to post but not publish, May 31st and counting…

I’ll be back in Chicago just in time to facilitate this first capacity-building conference for the Omidyar Network community in July. It’s sort of a next generation of the Giving Conference where sCNN was born last year.

Please join us for a three-day event of, by and for the Omidyar.net community and friends — to build our capacity to make good things happen.

What: Discovering Our Power to Make Good Things Happen
When: July 29-31, 2005
Where: Carleton Hotel, Oak Park, IL
Details: http://www.moreandmore.us

Who We Are: Omidyar.net is a new, growing online community. We believe every individual has the power to make a difference. We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen. If you have not joined this community yet, you can go here and check it out.

You’re Invited: This conference is for Omidyar.net members, friends and other curious do-gooders to come together, make connections, have fun, do as much good work as each and every one of us can… and then go home, more connected, energized and capable of doing more and more of whatever we call good in the world. Come join a good party getting better! …and bring your good friends, too!

See the full invitation for more information and registration.

Finally catching up on details after MeshForum in Chicago. Shannon Clark and company did a brilliant job of birthing something very cool. What’s more, I think they did something that is especially challenging in birthing something new and different and diverse without succumbing to the temptation to let it slide into one old category or another, just for the sake of the “numbers.” As a result, it was small and brilliant. I was glad to be there and am glad to be part of the ongoing conversations that will become next year’s conference. A few links for the record…

• Yellow Arrow – an amazing experiment that is suggesting the world as a global sort of performance art installation via the ‘yellow arrow’ sticker that becomes a digital ‘tag’ for things in the physical world. place the tag in the physical world and record it online via cellphone, find a tag in the world and retrieve via cellphone the stories of others who’ve already been there.
• WorldChanging – weblog of Jamais Cascio and friends. Jamais told a fascinating story as his presentation at the conference.
• Chicago Craft Mafia – organized by Mark Smithivas and friends to represent crafts from glasswork to soapmaking, seems to be part of a larger network of local economy, all of which I find very heartening.
• i.c. stars |* – a learning program that teaches technical skills to young adults and then turns them loose for the benefit of community organizations. this kind of technology, social action and economic activity seems so very right.
• Also got a much better understanding of what’s happening with Flickr and del.icio.us. Looks like sCNN is going delicious as soon as I can find time to set it up.
• Need to check out blogdex.com to see what that is all about, moving more and more in the direction of diversifying and diffusing my sources of news about what’s happening in my world. guess that would be diversifying and diffusing my world!

This from Shannon Clark of JigZaw and MeshForum. I’ve added it to the new “Special Invitations” section of the PeaSoup sidebar, too.

Starting next week (May 24th 2005) and continuing at least for the next few months I have decided to work from Café Mud in Evanston on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I invite each of you, when and as you wish, to join me at Café Mud and work.

Café Mud is at 1936 Maple Ave, just 1/2 block west of the Foster Ave Purple line el stop and in a part of Evanston with fairly easy street parking. They have free wifi, large concrete tables, plenty of electrical outlets, and are relatively quiet during the daytime.

This is an open invitation, please feel free to share with other consultants and entrepreneurs. My plan is to take the purple line express in the morning, get to Café Mud around 9am and leave Evanston around 5pm on the purple line express back into the city.

The goal is to work, but to also have friends and associates present and in the same physical space. I anticipate that some of us will break each day around lunchtime and grab lunch together somewhere in Evanston.

See you at Café Mud, when I’m back on that side of the pond, in August.

I’m restructuring again here. Inside and out. And thinking about the mix of what I give attention to now.

I’m just finishing six months of volunteer work in a meditation center, grounding, in cooking, housekeeping, maintenance, and basic reception (space holding) duties. Grounding in community too, as resident volunteer. And still, never giving up on all of the reading, creating, connecting and consulting conversations that happen online and on the phone, usually at great distance.

Restructuring now means teetering on the edge of a very interesting organization that just might want a big chunk of my London time, and on the edge of a number of personal connections, old and new, in Chicago, that could bear business fruit. And then there are the community connections, like smallchange and ubumama, and a couple of listserve communities. Learning anew how to balance all of the information flow and connecting at distance, even local distance, without losing ground right here, in body, in home away from home.

Years ago I remember a Wall Street Journal advertisement saying that the average reader spent 51 minutes with the Journal each day. Add in some other reading, conversations that have moved from phone to email, a bit of blog posting, and it seems fair to devote at least a couple of hours to keeping up with the distant cloud of people, ideas and connections. Seems also fair, to devote a balancing equivalent to body and home space, cooking, cleaning.

Maybe local community connecting comes into this, too? Dinner with friends? Time with a partner? Somewhere this must cross into third and fourth or more balancing spaces. No matter which and how many, for now it seems enough to notice where base is, what base is. Do I rely on all of this wording and information to clear myself or ground myself? Do my blogging and emailing and other scribbling habits and projects make me who I am, or make me more clear and present and available as the local body who I already was?

For now, I just keep an eye on this balance between the daily information cleaning and clearing and the equivalent attention to body, home and spirit. Let the rest fall somewhere in between as the undifferentiated flow of working and living.

The weblog for UbuMama, a worldwide safe motherhood project, is finally taking shape. This is one of several community/technical projects I’m giving time and attention to these days.

[UbuMama is] …a Zulu word for motherhood, and an arts-based project dedicated to bringing mothers’ stories of giving birth in the developing world into public view, to honor the lives of mothers and to increase the commitment to saving the lives of women dying in childbirth.

Each minute, a woman dies from complications experienced during pregnancy and childbirth. More than 500,000 women die each year and 99% of these deaths occur in the developing world.

Almost all of these deaths are preventable.

Some good background on the project and resources links added yesterday. Looking forward to stories and images from around the world, as this movement gets born.

Dan Bassill posted yesterday on the need to connect so many different groups and efforts and datasets all focused on youth issues in and beyond Chicago. I offered this…

i hear a lot of networks overlapping in this, dan, but can’t quite hear a statement of a central theme or task or purpose that might serve to link them all. wondering if you might be able to name/shop/test that theme and if we couldn’t organize a day or two in open space this august while i’m back again from london.

the group could be large or small, the venue could be available for free. i’d work at some kind of mutual donation rate, i give my work and participants make small gifts to a facilitation fund. if the few paragraphs of invite went out to the groups you’re talking about here, then the whole invite process could be free. and lunch could be on our own in the neighborhood. recall that three days at depaul’s egan center ran something like $30 per head. any interest? any theme/purpose statement spring to mind?

Hope we get to do something on this. Resources in the pot may be few, but with so many people involved in the same issues, resources in the pockets must be many. Think OpenSpaceTech as Stone Soup or Loaves and Fishes. Let’s Eat!

Last week at MeshForum, Jamais Cascio presented a fascinating story of how ubiquitous cell phone cameras and other tech advances would make privacy obsolete. Somebody will always be watching or listening, and probably storing our every move in some sort of digital and searchable archive, via “always on” cellular and other devices.

Later, it occured to me that this outer development of awareness and memory must parallel similar awareness skills being developed internally in our bodies and beings. Then support for the science of this comes via email today: scientists investigating “mirror neurons” that we use when we move and do things, but also use when we simply watch others do the same things. In short, science may be suggesting that we learn and empathize by reading minds.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not
that it is an unreasonable world, nor
even that it is a reasonable one.
The commonest kind of trouble is that it is
nearly reasonable, but not quite.
Life is not an illogicality, yet
it is a trap for logicians.
It looks just a little more mathematical
and regular than it is; its’
exactitude is obvious; but
its’ inexactitude is hidden;
its’ wildness lies in wait.

This is G K Chesterton, via John Mauldin’s weekly investing letter. After I went to business school, I went off to become a wilderness course instructor with Outward Bound USA. That leap began a long journey and practice which continues to attempt (and more and more often achieve) a mutual sort of marrying of the spirit, adventure, learning and uncertainty of wilderness expeditioning with the bottom-line, critical thinking, business results organizations need to survive.

Facilitating OpenSpaceTech meetings and summits is for me a direct and logical extension of my wilderness trips leadership. My practice of Open Space allows me to invite over and over again the productive gathering of the reasonable and all that is yet beyond reasoning, in business and community organizations. What we used to do in groups of 12 and 15, and call teambuilding is now possible in groups of 120 and even 1500. I call that “organization building” — and it’s every bit an expedition!

Tomorrow is the 14th anniversary of my last salaried paycheck, my own personal open space for the depth of life and the business results that pay the bills. The daring has made all the difference. I offer a big, universal sort of “thank you” to the many many friends and family and colleagues who’ve supported this grand expedition. On we go!

this morning i was playing in and around a bit of recurring tension in head, noticing that eyes and controlling with eyes are connected not so far from jaw and controlling with words and story. when i somehow relaxed brain-brainbase-speech-eyes more than usual, the sensasation was that everything that i think/thought was real, was me, was solid and true became wet, slippery, clear, running away through my fingers, flowing… and then i sort of snapped back after but a few moments of this sort of knowing not very much or not as much as i usually think i do. it was fun. i recommend it. if relaxing brain is just too weird, try yawning 108 times in one sitting or napping. aaahhhh….

i’m on the plane today to chicago for MeshForum. come join us there, for a different kind of shift, finishing with Open Space on wednesday.

Got this the other day, regarding Bucky Fuller and the purpose of life:

My name is David and I am a student from Cleveland, Ohio conducting a research paper on the philosophy of the purpose of life. I have a few questions I would like to ask concerning the topic. Thank you for the time and appreciation.

1. What is your personal answer to Fuller’s own question, “What, if anything, could be done by a penniless, unknown man working on behalf of all humanity?”
2. Is the true purpose of life a precessional effect, not a direct goal of life?
3. Does it take an entire lifetime to achieve the true purpose of one’s life?
4. Is it true that no one will ever fully know his true life’s purpose?
5. Do you believe in fate and why?
6. What is your interpretation of “life is complex but simple at the same time?”
7. Are there any tips for attaining the true purpose of life?

I’m still working on my answers and will post when finished. In the meantime, post your own answers for David in the comments to this item, if you like.

Found in a book I was going to leave for the Jamyang Center library today:

When we have developed our own inner purity, inner compassion and inner love, we can then see the reflection of this purity and loving-kindness in others. But if we have not contacted these qualities within ourselves, we will see everyone as ugly and limited. For whatever we see everyday in our outer reality is actually nothing more than a projection of our own inner reality…

Lama Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra: A Vision of Totality. My first thought is to keep it and read more. My second thought is that I could work on just this one point for the next forever.

A couple of days ago I posted a bit about invitation, riffing on some online discussions and also my work with a global consulting business here in London. I’m still rolling around in my set of opening questions, still learning and refining the ways I talk about the things to be considered and addressed in the process of writing an invitation and opening a space in organization.

Here’s the latest list:

Invitation