Category: SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

My stint as a full-time volunteer here in London is winding down. I’m looking forward to getting back to work on SmallChange, starting with this updated explanation and orientation. I hope this is clearer for the serving and grounding work I’ve been doing these last five months:

SmallChange is a practice in noticing, inviting and supporting the gifts, giving, and other good acts by individuals, inside and especially outside of formal organizations.

SmallChange focuses on the projects and practices of people who are re-imagining how life could be and are moving directly, personally and generously to make it so.

SmallChange is one small drop in a new tide of activist philanthropy rising globally. The personal practice, the working templates, and the larger movement are only just beginning.

Please join us, and stay tuned… for individual gifts and giving to flourish.

Here’s the slightly longer explanation…

SmallChangeNews is a journal of gifts and giving in action, personal passion bounded by direct responsibility. It’s about what we all want and need, and what some people are actually doing about it. Organizations cannot give care and do not take responsibility. Indeed, most organizations are carefully structured to limit and avoid responsibility. And so, in every place, station and stage of life, organizations and communities need people, little individuals, you and me, to take good care and do good work.

SmallChangeNews is a story and a space for people who are taking care and doing good. Active givers, passionate folks who are taking responsibility, with and without formal not-for-profit status. If you’re looking to give your time, talents, money or other gifts to people who are making a difference, you’ll find good company and connections here. If you know people and projects like this (or run one yourself), someone making small changes, taking small steps, inviting and accepting small gifts in order to make a big difference in the lives of others, please email us — especially if they are blogging their story online.

SmallChangeNews is a working model and freely-available template for elegantly simple, powerfully effective, and organically sustainable work in organizations and communities. The main weblog offers and invites news people, projects and practices that are making a real difference in the lives of others. The blogrolls in the sidebar contain links to the project weblogs (local news) and groups of blogs (network news) featured here, in addition to some powerful (and free) resources and important acknowedgements. SmallChangeNews invites you to use whatever gifts you have, join with whoever you know, and start wherever you can to make good things happen — then post your own SmallChangeNews.

SmallChangeNews runs on your giving attention to passion and taking responsibility for action, large and especially small. It’s a voluntary process, an invitation to give, a practical experiment, and a growing community. Please do and give what you can to help grow the News and the Links offered here. Read the news, check out the projects, contact the people and tell your friends. Post your own links and stories. Make a small donation to SmallChangeNews or the projects featured here. Replicate this website for your group. Link, link, link and feed the good — one click, one post, one gift at a time. Thank you! And welcome!

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Progess here at SCNN has waned a bit as full-time volunteer duties here in London take a lot of time and the whole concept continues to morph a bit. The morphing is fed by my local, grounded, experience on kitchen duty here, and by the reading I’m doing online.

Chris Corrigan turned me on to this by Rob Patterson, who makes a convincing case for blogging as the center of the Evolution still underway everywhere. It says everything about why SCNN is important and has me thing afresh about its scale, grounding, and start-up process. Still noodling, and looking for a window of time to make the next wave of development here.

In the meantime, Rob’s chapter is fantastic bit of futuring and now. This too, by Gideon Rosenblatt, is worth reading on the development of what he calls “the Local Tail.”

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Chris Corrigan, PRINCE GEORGE British Columbia.

…facilitating a two day roundtable conference on economic opportunities for Aboriginal communities. There are people all over BC here, and we’ve been treated to a performance tonight from Juno nominee (and new friend) Marcel Gagnon as well as tastings of the wines of Nk’Mip, North America’s first Aboriginal winery. As fun and interesting as all this is, today’s proceedings were stolen by several acts of overwhelming generosity…

Now they are well on their way, raising money and finding a venue for a Youth Forum. Contact Chris(at)ChrisCorrigan.com if you have something to learn or contribute to this.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Thanks to Chris Corrigan for sending… “Have a peek at this. It’s Dave Pollard (in How to Save the World) on what the media should be: sCNN!”

The job of the media is to make interesting what is important. That was Bill Maher’s challenge to CBS’s Lesley Stahl on his show last night. He’s exactly right. What the legacy media do mostly now, an indication of lazy, cowardly, chintzy, risk-averse journalism, is try to make important what the lowest common denominator of viewers find interesting — irrelevancies like celebrity trials and sensational crime stories… So what are the media to do? Change the model.

1. If a news item is not actionable by the audience, it isn’t news and should not be reported.

2. News items should be long enough to inform the audience what needs to be done.

3. Reports should be assessed on their position on Covey’s urgent/important grid, and only items in quadrants I and II (HIGH Importance, regardless of Urgency) should be reported.

4. The media should abandon the pretense of objectivity.

5. Every story should be followed up on a regular, scheduled basis.

…recall that newspapers started as broadsheets — partisan, single-subject reports cranked out by activists, and that at one time people were so engaged in long-term thinking that they flocked to meeting halls to hear advocates, philosophers, scientists, and writers talk at length about one subject, and then retired to the local bars to debate about what to do.

Now, think about the current model for online journals (blogs). Let’s see, we write mostly short articles talking about events we read or heard about in the legacy media, those articles are displayed in reverse date order, and after a week or so, they disappear into the ‘archives’ never to be seen again.

Never, that is unless they are chock full of good project ideas, like this archive could be, as we start to post news of the projects we know about where little individuals are making SmallChange add up. Send your news?

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
 

Lenore Ealy and friends had a fantastic little comment thread running here, leading Lenore to conclude:

I increasingly think the answer to this dilemma is to move away from viewing government itself as either a bete noire or our savior–getting our focus off of public policy and more onto the ways we ourselves are giving and encouraging one another to give.

This is what sCNN is wanting to invite and support here. It’s also what I’m seeing happen in a number of different flavors at Omidyar.net.

The interesting thing is that these various little eddy spaces for gifts and giving occur in the midst of, in spite of, and without much reference to the larger questions about large donations and projects. Things like 1 Tin Cup, Mini-Action, Fridge Magnets (all Groups at Omidyar.net) and sCNN are feed directly and exclusively by individual care and attention. Precious and powerful in the same moment.

Despite some years now of attending to self-organizing meetings and movements in Open Space, I am still working to sift out just how best to tend this sCNN space, how to balance content, framing description, open posting and tech/editorial necessities. Recently, I’ve been focusing less on sCNN policy and more on what I have to give this space, convinced of the power of this process and still aware of this being only the fragile beginning. Your comments and contributions for posting are welcome!

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Thanks to Vince Monical, founder of ABCfree.com, for sending this in reference to our listing of other SmallChange working models.

I saw your link to freecycle on your giving model links page, and I want to request that you also put in a link to www.ABCfree.com. Both sites let users give and get all kinds of stuff for free. However, ABC Free also helps local schools in two ways. First, schools get a first look at all items posted. Second, ABC Free donates a portion of its advertising based revenue to local schools.

ABC Free has some product features that freecycle lacks. For example, you can build a “wish list” and be emailed when something on your list becomes available in your area. This way you don’t get bogged down with lots of emails that you have to sort through.

I may sound a bit biased; after all I am the founder. It is a great site, and I hope that you can check it out. If you like what you see, then I hope that you can put a link from your site, it would really help us to grow.

Send your own SmallChange giving into action news to mailbag@smallchangenews.org.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
 

The last week of silence here belies all of the work I’ve been doing behind the scenes, mostly at Omidyar.net, where that emergent online community of 5000 has been trying to decide what to do with $25,000. Some just want to post up some projects and vote. Others, like me, have been designing various ways of leveraging the existing eBay-style feedback points reputation system into a self-organizing, self-funding community micro philanthropy system. Some fantastic people there and still not sure if it is a place to do real work yet.

Reflecting on my last couple weeks of intense work there, I am more clear than ever about some things:

• Small groups are the bedrock, clarity and funding will follow soon enough
• Smaller, immediate next steps will get us where we want and need to go
• Actors and Activities are more important than projects, proposals and organizations
• Tags are important, del.icio.us is amazing, and I’ve no clue (yet) how to use it here
• Whatever we create to support the kind of world we want, it has to scale to the largest whole
• Sleep is not a luxury.

sCNN wants and needs to have partners! This experiment wants to be a community project. If you’d like to be part of a smallish (but growing) group of passionate and responsible Actors, blogging and tagging small change, email me or just go start tagging!

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

There has been a huge discussion and debate going on at Omidyar.net recently, regarding how to allocate $25,000 of potential funding. In one of the downstream conversations, springing from Tom Munnecke’s micro philanthropy notes I posted a few items back, Tom was made the distinction between old (macro) philanthropy and the new (micro) philanthropy we’re working to invite and support:

…one of the major differences between this approach and the other award/proposal models is that it is driven by the process of giving and attracting attention to what works. The proposal and grant-giving/fundraising approaches are driven by those seeking donations and promoting their causes… [and] cash donations are but one tool in the Better World Toolkit – money is an amplifier, not a motivator in this model.

This is such a critically important distinction and shift, this focus on attention as the primary source of power in philanthropic giving and receiving. Each of us, with the power of our attention, has something to give to the process of making good things happen. This power is, of course, inside everyone, already distributed through human birth, but allocted or available only in direct proportion to one’s ability to direct and refine, focus and expand, move and sustain — and act — on one’s own attention.

The opening of sCNN to public posting is intended to be an open and direct invitation to refine our individual and collective attention in order to support smaller and smaller changes for the good.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

…added to the News You Can Use links roll in the sCNN sidebar:

• Bloglet – a free service that will email weblog updates to subscribers. See the new Home Delivery subscription option in the sidebar, left. And try it!
• CivicSpace Labs – CivicSpace Labs is a funded continuation of the DeanSpace project. We are veterans of the Dean campaign web-effort and are now building the tool-set of our dreams. We are busily completing work on CivicSpace, a grassroots organizing platform that empowers collective action inside communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters.
• Drupal Platform – A dynamic web site platform which allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage and organize a variety of content, Drupal integrates many popular features of content management systems, weblogs, collaborative tools and discussion-based community software into one easy-to-use package.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Tom Munnecke has posted his ideas on Micro Philanthropy at Omidyar.net, to get “more and more people discovering their own power to make good things happen” for several years. Notice that sCNN is already embodying what Tom is proposing.

Here are some goals:

• Involving many more people in the philanthropic activity by efficiently supporting smaller interaction. Any act of giving has uplift value, not necessarily proportional to the size of a gift. An inner city impoverished mother in Chicago who can help a woman lift herself out of poverty in Nepal with $25 may find this far more personally rewarding than a rich donor giving $1 million to the same cause. Creating the opportunity for 40,000 people to help has a much greater net value to society.
• Exploit the power of our network technology to allow greater interactivity and communication.
• Develop a web of trust mechanism, by people and activities can thrive by “trustraising” as an alternative to today’s fundraising model.
• Develop a continuous process by which we learn from our activities – successful or unsucessful. The more we uplift patterns we try, and the more we learn from their use, the smarter the network grows.
• Create a scalable means of growing the network. Success should breed success. The more people participate in the process, the more valuable it becomes for everyone else in the network, and the greater our diversity and knowledge of what works.
• Give people with limited time or resources the ability to feel that they are doing something to make the world a better place.
• Focus on activities, not organizations, as the building blocks of the model. As we trying more and more activities and get feedback from what’s working, we are able to adapt our organizations to doing more of those activities.
• Reward cooperation. If an organization successfully teams with another, that cooperation should attract more attention. In the current fundraising model, cooperation can damage the organization’s ability to attract resources.
• Be self-organizing. Rather than having an authority controlling the allocation scheme, the community would self-organize around a social network model based on reputation.
• Amplify people’s contributions The micro philanthropists contribute something themselves as a way of attracting attention to their chosen opportunities. Other funders amplify this contribution, empowering the individual donor as well as leveraging the overall effectiveness of the philanthropic network.

The basic premise of micro philanthropy will seem disruptive to the existing non-profit organizations which are based on the fundraising model. On the other hand, it will be liberating to those seeking innovative models of uplift, or who wish to participate more meaningfully in the philanthropic process than just writing checks in response to fundraising solicitations.

The process might also appear to be chaotic and out of control, letting a huge number of people make many small gifts. This situation is analogous to the beginning days of the web. Tim Berners-Lee created a chaotic mess of URLs with no search engine, experts to approve web content or control duplicate entries. Over time, however, search engines emerged… out of this “chaotic mess” emerged Google, which offers greater meaningful access than any previous library or classification scheme.

sCNN is an invitation to use the blogosphere as network, technorati.com as search engine, individual commitment to action and blog-based documentation as social capital, the aggregated wallets of all potential givers as social venture fund, inbound links as reputation points, and wide open self-organized, self-selected blogroll sharing, in order to focus more attention, energy and resources in the direction of activities and actors, instead of organizations.

Given Tom’s years of work on these ideas, I’m taking his list as a real validation of sCNN’s invitation to Micro Philanthropy. Question of the moment: Is it enough to invite the ideas or does sCNN need to be able to claim that $xyz have been donated because of postings here. Would it be enough simply to return our focus to human-scale, everyday giving here?

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Lenore Ealy commented in an email this week on “the role of individual actors and organizations in a complex system,” quoting Michael Polanyi:

Whether his calling lies in literature or art, or in moral and social reform, even the most revolutionary mind must choose as his calling a small area of responsibility.

This does much to sum up the spirit and action of sCNN. Please send links to blogs about small revolutionary projects.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

sCNN is envisioned as a more-or-less self-organizing network of weblogs, each one focused either on one project (Local News) , or a group of projects (Network News). This initiative by Aleah at Toronto Design bucks that model because it’s not a project blog, but a blogger’s project. Other than that, it’s very much fair game and deserves mentioning. Here’s her plan:

In the next 2 weeks I will be encouraging other business bloggers to do the following:

1. Contact a favorite charity
2. Conduct a short interview with one of the staff members and get the following information: Description of program work; What they believe their biggest limitations are to achieving their program goals; How they believe businesses can help (make sure they give a good list of ideas), etc.
3. Post the interview with your thoughts on how businesses and nonprofits can successfully work together to achieve a better community (in whatever way that manifests itself)
4. Notify me so I can link back to your findings

Thanks for the linking, Aleah!

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

It’s a campaign and coalition being held up with the likes of the sufferage, abolitionist, and anti-apartheid movements that have already succeeded in much of the world. Today, it was Nelson Mandela in Trafalgar Square rallying a crowd of thousands to support fair trade, not free trade, just trade, not charity.

He was introduced to the cheering crowd as the President of the World and he joked about coming to speak here publicly after recently announcing his retirement from public life. In his short speech he suggested the willful and conscious continuation of the current state of extreme poverty for so many at the same time that some others live in extreme wealth is equivalent to a crime against humanity. That we have the means to end poverty and do not can never be acceptable.

The day was damp, gray, and chilly. A hard day to ignite crowds and a sedate crowd by my own American standards. And what are so many little people to do in the face of this story of about global trade and G8 meetings of national finance ministers, anyway?

The answer, the small change answer, was given by the guy who opened the day, I got there after he was introduced, so I don’t even know who he is. What he did was invite everyone to take out their mobile phones and text message Tony Blair. He called out the number and thousands of people punched it in and sent a message to “Make Poverty History.” Personally, I am reminded again that I need to understand better what some of these “free” and “fair” terms mean. I want to for myself what really makes sense for all of us, and within that, what I can actually do now.

The most exciting part of the day for me was riding my borrowed bicycle back home, negotiating a number of major roundabouts around the bridges that cross the Thames. My thanks to the bus driver and the truck driver… you guys know who you are… who were looking out for me! Maybe bicycling and looking out for each other, person-to-person, in everyday traffic is the best start.

Sir Bob Geldof, of rock and roll and Live Aid fame, introduced Nelson Mandela and made reference to centuries of gatherings in Trafalgar Square, of little people showing up, shouting out, linking arms and working for human rights. It seems that there is now the opportunity for a new kind of linking — of keyboards, blogs and people, signing on, posting it up, and blogrolling others. These small changes seem bound to make a world of difference.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

At this point, this whole idea is only six months old, and more than half of that time I’ve been out of the country. Good news is that I’ve been able to make connections that can make sCNN an international phenomenon. Bad news is that everything’s been moving more slowly than I’d like. Here’s what we have discovered, created, invested and received to date:

• A Simple, Powerful Concept. The idea is to create an online Center for the Common Good, where active givers and gifted activists can enter into conversations that help small change(s) make a world of difference. The discovery is that we don’t need to control or capture your giving transactions, project information, or even your contact information. All we need is the URL to your project or network weblog, in order to grow a central and totally public/shared listing of weblogs associated with community-based, common good projects and organizations.
• A Working Template and a lot of Free Services. The format that we’ve developed here can be quickly and easily applied in any community, organization, or network that wants to support wildly organic growth even while maintaining the kind of clarity and coherence required by major funders and other supporters. sCNN is built almost entirely on free services, so even though the template could be used very effectively by cash-rich corporations, it’s simple and free enough that any youth group can afford it.
• A Good Name and a Good Look. Well, a lot of people seem to like it, anyway, which is important because we’d like to grow it into a bit of a brand name. in the course of developing the idea of a “giving market” we looked at a lot of what was out there already. we didn’t find anything quite like this, but we did notice that small changes, small gifts, small upticks, like in the stock market or sports scores, or even daily horoscopes, seemed to hold our interest more. we think small change has great potential to hold and leverage interest and attention. Stay tuned for a couple of buttons we’d like to start spreading around on supporting weblogs everywhere.
• Blogrolled Links and Personal Connections. sCNN is linked and connected with active givers and gifted activists around the world. The conversations we have had about this idea specifically are starting to bear fruit in the various blogrolls. These developments are made possible by 15 years of personal and online facilitation, networking, contribution and development work, by partners who’ve given generously of their time and attention to work out the simplicity of the design, and by financial sponsors who have covered initial costs and pledged more giving in the future.
• A Plan for Wide Open Public Access. We have the infrastructure in place, and again, it’s all running on free services that any corporation could replicate, any community organization can utilize and any youth group can afford. We’ll soon make open posting of project news, project support, and project blog urls possible via email, so that anyone who’s got something to give to this Center can get the attention they deserve.
• A Mailing List. Occasionally, when something very good or very bad happens, we want to be able to invite all our members and friends to look up and join the conversation for a moment. We’d also like to be able to make quarterly reports to all members, friends and supporters. To join the list — which will never be shared with anyone, for any other purpose — mailto:smallchangenews@gmail.com. We will not send more than a handful of message each year.
• An Invitation… Join Us! Membership is easy and self-organizing. Here’s what Members do: Read sCNN. Link to sCNN. Follow others’ links. Refer project and network blogs for the blogrolls. Surf the sCNN blogrolls. Make contributions of time, attention, expertise, contacts, funding, equipment and other needs — to sCNN or the projects linked from here. Make requests to support your project(s). Ask to be added to the sCNN project or network blogrolls. Post those rolls on your blog. Replicate the template in your organization. Help others find sCNN, make their own gifts, start their own blogs, and add their links…

And more than anything, we have the belief that the most powerful leadership position you can take is participation, in the flow, in community action, and in the blogosphere. We have a way to get connected, get support, get partners, and get things done. Now you have it, too.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

There’s something messy but interesting happening at Omidyar.net. A number of other small versions of sCNN-like thinking. That’s heartening. And now there’s a brand new workspace for sCNN there too.

Omidyar membership is up to 4000+. It’s not an easy space to navigate, but there’s lots of stuff cooking there. Also not likely to go away, given the Omidyar (eBay founders) Foundation backing. Worth keeping an eye on, and getting involved as the organization continues to evolve. Looking forward to what the crowd there might have to suggest and add to sCNN.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork

Claire Chaundy starts a brilliant post about the benefits of blogging with this question: What happens when you replace the word “blogging” with “thinking”?

Yes! …or “blogging” with “taking action”? And what if you mix the them instead?

Claire goes on to offer this list:

• Blogging helps you to notice what you are noticing in the world and leads you to question why that is
• Blogging tests your commitment to what you believe your passions are
• Blogging expands your own and other people’s minds and ultimately contributes to the learning and development of society
• Blogging removes boundaries and traditional sources of power and introduces a new currency: your thoughts
• Blogging is about thinking, not necessarily journalism.
• Blogs are the chaff not the wheat. What you post in your blog isn’t necessarily the most important thing, it’s that you’ve done some thinking.

Translate these into project terms… Blogging helps you and others notice what you’re accomplishing. It tests your commitment, and demonstrates it. Expands your own and other people’s action. Blogging removes boundaries and invites new sources and forms of support. Blogging is about showing up with your passion, not necessarily your credentials. And the news you post in a project blog may not rock the world, but it will show that you’re doing what you can, making an effort, taking a stand.

I’m especially partial to what she says about blogging introducing a new currency. I wrote a lot about this in the early days of developing sCNN. If a market like sCNN really works, it means that individuals bring their story into the world and couple it with a request for readers to become supporters, sponsors, direct funders of their projects. This literally turns story into currency. Cash. Project funding.

This is what the central bank of every nation does… bring the story of the nation’s needs for project financing, the project being the running of a government and a society, and ask people to fund it. In the case of those markets, we talk use words like offerings, debt, bonds and interest.

So many of the words work here in sCNN terms, too. A blogger offers a story about a project for the common good, asks for support, for funding. When money is provided, it’s not a gift… it’s a loan. There is a debt. Action is due. Some return provided. More news. Action. Bonds are made and must be serviced. If interest can’t be sustained, the pool of funders dries up.

sCNN is a blogging market for the common good, where project stories can be offered and funding requests floated. Bonds created, interest paid, debts serviced. What do you have to offer? Links can be emailed for posting here. Financial support can be provided via the new DropCash campaign link in the sidebar.

If this all seems a bit of a linguistic stretch, then consider a simpler version at Fourobouros: blogs are the new business card.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews

Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
 

Mostly I think of sCNN as a website development project. Mostly I think that it’s made easier because of blogging and blogger services. Mostly I’m wrong.

I had a good long first chat with Heather Sim, who’s developing something called Space Unlimited under the wing of Scottish Enterprise. She’s bringing groups of young people and business people together on real business projects. The learning and value being created are tremendous on both sides. In the course of conversation, I realized that sCNN is really a blog-based template for organizing wildly organic community development initiatives and movements. The weblog describes the project. But the blogroll is the project.

What we really want is to grow and share the blogroll, to fill it up with projects like Heather’s, and like the projects of her young people. If we can do that, especially the sharing of the blogroll, sCNN can blossom as a global brand name for active givers and gifted activists. A global community asset, beyond the control of any one person or organization.

Space Unlimited doesn’t have a website or blog of its own, yet. We talked about how the sCNN template could support much of what wants to happen in the next wave of their evolution. That journey begins with one weblog. Which made it clear to me that sCNN is not so much a weblog development project as it is an online community and organization and leadership and project development project.

Most days, it’s just easier to think of it all in terms of technical tasks to be completed. Global community development is a daunting task, especially for someone currently spending 40 hours a week as a resident volunteer. We could make it very technical. Search out project blogs. Mass mail them. Pile them up in the blogroll. But that seems to miss the point.

So I’m starting to realize that this might take longer than I thought. Or, as Chris Corrigan never tires of reminding me, I’m in deep here. Which is fine. This might just be some sort of business model emerging. A free and public asset that supports a professional business practice that helps leaders and groups move into an open, blogging, business-as-never-before working and living space. That’s a specific as I can name it just now. But stay tuned.

What we have for now is a name, a template, and a story that is resonating with all kinds of people. We have a good bit of experience bringing people together, getting work moving, and capturing the essence of it all in pixels, too. What we need is places and people, like Heather, to play.

UPDATE, October 2005: the tags are the project.

technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews