Category: Miscellany

The trip over here was a snap. Smooth flight, extra seats to sleep in, an easy time with huge bags, and some much needed downtime to sleep like crazy when i got here. only three hours sleep the last night in chicago, so i had no clue what time it was once i got here.

in the last few days, we’ve gotten new bed, blankets, spaceheater (was 51 degrees in jill’s room on saturday morn!). moved most of my gear into the jamyang center today and worked my first day. my first days off align perfectly with schedule for my tibetan teacher visiting here this weekend.

it’s late now, my fingers are freezing, and i work the morning shift tomorrow. off to first sleep in my ‘cell’ …literally a cell that used to hold folks in this 1869 building once used as courthouse for high profile crimes. seems many an ira terrorist bunked here, waiting to be officially charged and processed, in the 5×7.5 foot stone cells with thick wooden doors reinforced with big metal bolts and hinges. complete with eye holes for peeping in on the prisoners. must add that the energy here is totally shifted from those days, but i’m not sure it’s any warmer at night!

Thanks to Jill Perkins for tipping me off to this amazing site as it combines population data with election data to come up with the truest possible blue-red view of the US as of November 2004. If I wasn’t newly arrived in London, and newly connected now from my residence for the next 3 months here at Jamyang Buddhist Center, then I’d paste the images here directly. It’s all good here, though, and more news will be coming once the email is up to date.

Election results (by state, as reported in mass media) look an awful lot like Pre-Civil War Free and Slave states. Then this shows results by county, which doesn’t look nearly so divided. Too bad we don’t have the slave question reported by county…

Not ever as simple as it looks, eh? (I’m practicing my Canadian just in case!)

An interesting offer from Penny Scott in Vancouver…

Kind of takes the edge off John Mauldin’s open letter to Karl Rove, noted in my last posting. [grin] More interesting to me for the remapping more than the renaming, as I was blogging similar thoughts last February… but I didn’t have this map, at that time…

Tax map via Red Harvest. Full size and fine print.

Opening disclaimer, I voted (as I usually do) and I didn’t like it. Next confession, I’m a bit of a markets and economics junkie, not hardcore, but more than a little interested and fascinated by the movements of people, goods and numbers. I’m much more interested in progress and productivity than politics. I read John Mauldin every week. His latest newsletter is an Open Letter to Karl Rove.

It’s a remarkable view of what could be coming down the pipe now… and touches on income tax and social security reform, putting responsibility for business cycles back into the laps of businesses, the Bush recession, the falling dollar, tort reform and the cost of healthcare. He’s a former insider in the Texas Republican Party, but this letter has something to bother everyone… and therein lies my hope that we might yet all come together in a more prosperous and responsible world.

Missing from this are notes on things like environment, but arguably some of these major issues that have been so long ignored (the economic ones) are likely (only temporarily, I hope) to squish the environmental and social type issues into the background in the next, likely deeper recession. The important thing seems that we come through it more together and better prepared to do those other next things next.

The one item I’m most suspicious of here is swapping the income tax for sales tax. Horribly regressive, but I’m willing to consider and would be glad to see how this change might (dare I say) trickle down in the same way that tort reform eventually aims at making healthcare cheaper and employment easier. In the meantime, I think I could cheer for a future like this.

This from Harrison Owen, of OpenSpaceTech fame, via the OSLIST international email listserve…

…seems to be suggesting that “muddling through” may be our last option. I rather think it is the only option, and always has been. And becoming good “muddlers” should be our first priority. For those of you unacquainted with British-speak “Muddling through” is what happens when all plans fail and still a positive result emerges. It seems to be mysterious, particularly when one assumes that careful planning and detailed execution is the only way to move forward.

I am by no means suggesting that planning and good execution is irrelevant, but I think it is incredibly important to fully understand the nature and limitations of both planning and execution. There are those who see planning as an exercise in creating the future — and therefore execution becomes the implementation of that desired future. Implicit in that understanding is the assumption that we could actually comprehend/understand the myriad forces and variables in our world and therefore come up with an accurate plan leading naturally to effective execution. Nice idea, but fatally flawed.

I think the good news of the moment is that the limitations of our capacities are becoming painfully obvious. We do not, will not, nor have we ever had sufficient grasp of the complex and fast moving elements in our world/country/company/organization (what I have called “raplexity”) to enable the creation of effective plans which lead naturally to elegant execution. This is a real blow to the old ego (individually and collectively) but, I believe, an essential first step towards dealing with our lives, to say nothing of our sanity. When reality and our perception of reality are wildly out of phase, that is indeed crazy making, and may in fact be the definition of insanity itself. We call that a “break with reality.”

Plans (at best) are rough approximations of the territory that lies ahead. They are man-made maps, and like all such things — good as far as they go, but never mistaken for the territory they depict. To think otherwise is to invite disaster — as is painfully exemplified by the current…

This seems a good fit, popping up just between yesterday’s election and my flight to London next week. Living beyond the plan.

…weeks of the year are when the leaves turn colors. I’ve been marvelling a bit here at the fall colors — and trees in general — after four weeks of the green, rice-covered, relatively tree-less walls of the Kathmandu Valley.

I really like this picture my sister sent of her house in Urbana, all the better that they’ve just finished too many years of renovation work. Congrats and thanks, teee!

Some more things seen here in Boudha…

• We go to the store, a fancy new 3-story supermarket where you can buy packaged food from around the world, luggage, shaving cream, produce, fresh breads, housewears… the works. Our bill comes to 159 rupees, which is just more than $2. We pay with Rs200. The cashier makes change, Rs40… and then reaches behind her to the candy counter, pulls out a pack of gum and opens it. She hands us the Rs40 and one stick of gum. The rest of the gum she empties into the one Rs portion of the cash drawer. Later, we buy some CDs. In that little shop the shopping bags we are given to hold the disks are small sewn fabric bags with little drawstrings. Go figure.
• On the way back to the monastery, we pass an small vacant lot where two guys and 5 large snakes are putting on a show. One guy herding the snakes into the center of the space, away from a big circle of onlookers, mostly locals. The other guy (you got it!) is playing little tunes on the pipey thing you see in cartoons and he’s doing his best to herd Rs into a bag of donations.
• I’m still amazed to walk down to the stupa in the morning and find doughnuts frying, whole huge sides of beef being cut up with cleavers that have been sharped to half their original size, women sweeping dirt streets out in from of their shops with small handbrooms made from dried rice plants (i think), and then walk into this shop and sit down at a brand new computer. Rs30 per hour.

Less than one week left here. Plenty of practice and shopping and eating still to go.

more pictures…

Reporting here from Boudhanath, Kathmandu, with some random observations…

• little kids playing frisbee here in the street, using a 6″ square of cardboard for a frisbee
• whole chickens sitting out on tables in front of meat shops, heads and feet still attached, proprietors shooing flies from the tables
• a teenager passes by wearing a black t-shirt with a farrah fawcett blond on the front, with a gold nosering inserted through the fabric
• reading jonathan schell’s the unconquerable world and sitting around talking with maggie camfield about her travels in india and tibet, and the future of india, china, usa, tibet, nepal
• we stop in a tibetan carpet store i visited last year, the owner is napping but jumps up when we enter… and says, “hello, michael!” as we’d just talked yesterday
• the smell of garbage and incense, the play of little kids in tiny school uniforms and big backpacks, beautiful eyes and smiles, old lamas limping along dragging malas and chanting mantra under their breath
• a chorus, nay veritable cacophony of dogs erupts at one a.m.

This is some of what it’s like here. Some other observations posted in LondonCalling and also my NepalConferenceJournal is posted in the wiki.

That conference was conducted as a blend of Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology. The results are summarized and translated from the official declaration that was reported in national and local media and delivered to important government officials here.

• Initiating support to concerned stakeholders for conflict transformation and peace building, to protect and to muliply the past achievements and present life energies of Nepal, as identified in the Discovery phase of the conference.
• Protecting and multiplying the district-level Imagine Initiatives in all 75 districts of Nepal, as a movement for peaceful development.
• Developing an organizational structure for Imagine Initiatives and regional and national networks that supports egalitarian and autonomous functioning, on the ground and on the internet.
• Adopting Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology as theoretical guides and grounding principles of all AI Networks and Imagine Initiatives in Nepal.
• Organizing regional AI network summits in all five development regions and a Second National Summit of Imagine Initiatives of Nepal, in Palpa, West Nepal, in the Fall of 2005.
• Inviting, respecting and appreciating the contribution made by each citizen, private organization, and government institution as our primary vehicle for peace and peacemaking, community and development.

We also set up a suite of weblogs there, so that now they have a leading edge sort of web presence that we’ve linked in to the sCNN as well. It’s all good.

I’m traveling and working in Nepal with Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World. Early on he says,

What were the causes of this democratic revolution? Almost anything you cared to mention, according to it’s most profound expositor, Tocqueville. “The various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy,” he wrote; “all men have aided it by their exertions: those who have intentionally labored in its cause and those who have served it unwittingly

I often say that with so much of my work living online now, in blogs, wiki webs, and the like, I can work from anywhere. It’s a nice theory, mildly reassuring as I leave home for weeks or months at a time. And something, like fire sprinklers, that I never really want to test.

This morning, however, I arrived Bangkok en route to Kathmandu, checked mail and needed to make some changes to the site. Having navigated a bunch of Microsoft apps here (delicate stuff for a Mac guy), yielded a few passwords to this trusty (I hope!) PC, and hacked up a very little bit of code… it seems that all is well again in my online world… even after accidently blowing up the wrong page the first time. Phew. Enough field surgery for now! I really should be sleeping.

I leave tomorrow morning for Kathmandu Nepal, where the first order of business will be to facilitate a four-day conference for reimagining the future of that country. We’ll have about a hundred community leaders coming in from every district of the country. Given the difficulties with travel these days in the midst of the conflict there, I expect that these will be exceptionally passionate folks. My connection to them is the Imagine Nepal program, a replication of Bliss Browne’s Imagine Chicago.

The design is interesting. The practical question is how can they do more Appreciative Inquiry in Nepal, but the desing is four consecutive one-day Open Space events. Four Appreciative Inquiry subthemes: Discovering, Dreaming, Designing and Delivering the best possible future for Nepal. On the last day, we’ll do a bit of an OpenSpaceTech training and spend a good chunk of the day considering how OST can support and inform the Delivery of the Designs made on Day 3.

In case you haven’t heard, things have been pretty rough in Nepal lately. Sure hope we can do some good in the midst of it all, and don’t know what else we could do other than Open some more Space for Appreciative Inquiry.

Developing…

The GivingMarket has just morphed into the Small Change News Network! See the blog for the latest development news, or the wiki for deeper history and working space.

Something a little strange about blogging oneself, but now I’ve gone and done it. Once the new Network gets up and running, I’ll figure out all over again what this here GlobalChicago weblog is all about.

For now, the action is all over there in the Network wiki and blog. Please join us!

I talked with Phil Cubeta yesterday about the GivingMarket in what turned out to be a great lesson in blogging. I came to blogging as a writing practice, and certainly it can be that. What I am slowly coming to understand, or to understand how to practice, is blogging as listening and linking. He reminded me about using Technorati to follow who’s linking to me.

I’m still working on some good BlogLines and Technorati habits, learning how to use them without effort and especially how to weather the ups and downs of being in and out of the office for chunks. It used to be that a few days or weeks away and there would be a pile of email. Now there’s an aggregator pile, a technorati pile, a couple of wiki piles, and and and… it gets to be a pile of piles. Until one finds a rhythm, or is it discovering the right filters?

And now there’s the GivingMarket blog to weave into the mix as well. Getting ready to leave for a month in Nepal and six in London. Nothing like a little time on the road to strip away a whole bunch of stuff and get back down to essential rhythms and practices. Deciding and re-deciding where to give attention and what to make real.

Things heating up enough with the GivingMarket to justify starting a separate blog for that project. Taught myself a thing or two about style sheets today in the blogger template… [eek]. Migrated the last month or two of Development Log postings. Looking forward to continuing in proper blogging style now.

Chris Corrigan, of ParkingLot fame, gave me a little gift this evening. I mentioned that we’ve got tickets to see Utah Phillips in a few weeks here in Chicago. Chris, of course, had a story. And since it’s way too late here, I’m going to skip to the punchline:

If you ask people about the things they know about, they’ll always tell you the truth.

This, as opposed to asking them about the stuff they merely absorb from books and media and such. The stuff they do is the stuff they know. Ask the cowboy about cowboy songs, not politics. Ask the rancher about his work, not about Indians and treaties. Ask everyone about their own work and such, and then find the connections to your own process and the rest of what you know. Chris says he learned this from Phillips. I’m looking forward to the direct transmission next month.

Did another round of thinking and writing about the GivingMarket this morn. I’m feeling especially satisfied with the current shape of things there. This thing really should happen. The world really should have one of these things. [grin] And I’m finding that it’s the kind of project that I could spend a lot of time on, talking about with folks in church basements, corporate board rooms and everywhere in between. I mean that I could feel good about spending a lot of time on it. And it feels good to have specific pages starting to take shape. Your comments and questions welcome here.

Been talking about the Giving Market idea with Jon Ramer of the Interra Project and Penny Scott at BALLE-BC. Hoping to develop a Giving Market into one (or two, or even three?) of the Interra launches next April. Thanks to Jon for setting up this gorgeous new online working space for us!

On the broader Giving front, it seems that next year’s Business Alliance for Local Living Economy International Conference, hosted by BALLE-BC in Vancouver next June, wants to add a one-day Open Space Giving Conference to their program. We started the BC network last year, in an Open Space Tech conference. They continue to hold that Open Space shape and grow like crazy, so it will be great fun to go back. Would be even more fun if we could have a number of other Giving spaces opened in other places that same weekend, all posting into the same wiki and one big blogosphere.

Tech guru Howard Rheingold recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek’s Silicon Valley bureau chief…

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you’ve been talking about going next?
A: It’s too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action…in which the individuals aren’t consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren’t saying, “I’m contributing to the market,” [they say they’re] just selling something. But it adds up.

Q: Can you give me some specific examples of what you mean, beyond the market?
A: Google is based on the emergent choices of people who link. Nobody is really thinking, “I’m now contributing to Google’s page rank.” What they’re thinking is, “This link is something my readers would really be interested in.” They’re making an individual judgment that, in the aggregate, turns out to be a pretty good indicator of what’s the best source.

…more at OhmyNews

As markets are at the center of the Open Space Technology and Inviting Organization stories I’ve been telling for some time now, I’m looking for Rheingold’s Smart Mobs.