Tag: Miscellany

…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.

Why not??? …a weekly sort of TV series built along the same lines as This Old House, where Bob Vila goes poking around big old houses turned into worksites as master craftsmen rebuild them into stunning new places. The show I’m imagining has somebody poking around community organizations that are getting amazing results on barebones sort of budgets. Little people making big waves… all told as a sort of “How To” story that others could copy. Of course, this is totally in line with my recent work on the Giving Market idea.

I’m reading again from Sherry Marshall’s Devotion, a beautiful collection of stories about westerners who have become senior students of some of Tibet’s most famous teachers. I pulled it out because I remembered that one of those students is in London, where I hope to look him up later this year.

This from the opening of his chapter of the book…

A meditator undertaking a retreat was endeavoring to realize the nature of emptiness. He was attepting a practice to conquer the projections of his mind, in the form of demons. One night in the dark, he returned to his hut, not knowing that his sister had visited and left him a jug of yoghurt. He mistakenly thought he saw, by the faint glow of a butter lamp, the large eye of a demon, which of course was merely the top of the yoghurt pot. Deciding not to be afraid, demon or not, and convincing himself that demons were only in the mind, he yelled and hit the demon. The yoghurt spilt everywhere and suddenly, in the dim light, he thought that there were now many demons staring at him with their white eyes.

Determined to overcome his terror at the thought of numerous demons waiting to attack him, he kept hitting them all with his shawl but they kept multiplying. Suddenly, cutting through everything, as his meditation practice had taught him, he realised he had yoghurt on this hands and stopped and laughed. There were no demons to destroy and the whole episode had been created by his overactive mind and foolishness.

–Adapted from “The Evil Eye,” in Surya Das, The Snow Lion’s Turquoise Mane: Wisdom Tales from Tibet.

It seems that the trick for getting through Nepal in October, and then on to London for six months starting in November, will be resisting the urge to flail around in the yoghurt!

A Zen poet said…

Masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their minds and their bodies, their education and their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which and simply pursue their visions of excellence and grace, whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them, they are always doing both.

Just when I thought the Giving theme was over here… I go catch up on Chris Corrigan’s blogging and he connects my last two posts, quoting The Gift by Lewis Hyde…

A gift economy allows its own form of individualism: to be able to say “I gave that.”

Yes, of course. Giving is another way to find individual power and ground. It travels well, too.

As conversations continue around the Giving Market ideas, it’s time to move beyond the Giving theme here in the weblog. My attention starts to take on all of the large and small details involved in moving to London for as much of a year as I am able. Primary focus is bouncing around Giving conversations, coaching models, travel logistics and some really wonderful things happening in my personal and practice lives.

London logistics are getting to the point of taking apart houses and selling cars, starting to sort through files and box things up. As the cars both sold last week, I have gladly returned to my bicycle for transportation. Then over the weekend, my sister Theresa led me through a couple of excellent private sessions at her yoga studio in Urbana. I’m getting ready to leave my routines at the gym across the street and dusting off yoga routines I can take with me as I travel.

Riding up North Avenue this morning, I caught myself relishing the sense of personal power that I get from biking and yoga. How strange and reassuring that a decision to uproot almost everything and move across an ocean can turn out to be so grounding.

This notion of a GivingMarket emerged for me in the process of hosting and facilitating and participating in the GivingConference last month. I’ve had a number of conversations with friends and colleagues and digested my current thinking here.

The essence of the idea is that an eBay-like online auction space might be opened for individuals to bring social service and community development projects and for individuals to offer funding and other resources, all for the common good. This sort of a market would have immediate implications for organizers and givers, and could have tremendous long-term implications for philanthropy and the global money supply.

The most interesting discovery thread so far is the InterraProject, an attempt by Dee Hock and friends to reconnect human values and the marketplace via a new kind of community-based credit card system.