Tom Atlee: Wisdom of the Fringes

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence
Tom Atlee

Counterintuitively, the highest evolutionary wisdom lies on the fringes of business as usual. The fringes are fringes because they are different, dissident, dissonant with business-as-usual – both with the mainstream and even with our own personal or group business-as-usual. The challenges presented by the fringes can expand our view of what’s really going on and what really needs to be addressed. But, of course, that is easier said than done; there’s something to know about including the fringes creatively so that greater wisdom and possibility result rather than folly and destructive messes. Luckily, we know a bit about that – and could learn more…

The wisdom of the fringes?

In the end, I believe that those who call forth the most collective intelligence and wisdom will be those who can manifest – and help others manifest – two vital capacities:

1. the ability to include more of what is normally overlooked and excluded and
2. the ability to use diversity and disturbance creatively.

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Tom Atlee: Michael Dowd’s 55 Interviews on the Future

Cultural Intelligence
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

The Future is Calling Us to Greatness

Without even realizing it, I’ve become part of an online conference made up of amazing interviews with amazing people, put together by my evolutionary friend Michael Dowd. I didn’t know I’d be in such illustrious company, but now I do and I’m delighted to introduce you to the opportunity to hear Michael’s interviews in which 55 really interesting (and often famous) people speak about their work, their worldviews, and their visions. It will all be free for two weeks starting late January into early February and after that will only cost $25 for the full set (including transcripts). Read more.

Tom Atlee: State Banks, Debt Renunciation, Other Populist Cures

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

Dear friends,

Below is an excellent summary of a very high leverage economic system change opportunity – state banks.  A single example already exists in the U.S:  the little-known but revolutionary state-owned Bank of North Dakota.

State banks simultaneously address the problems of unemployment, lack of financial resources for state and local governments (including rising government debt), and the economic inequity generated by Wall Street's colonization of our economy.

The essay below also alerts us to the dangerous erosion of democracy represented by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors.

State banks are no long term cure-all for the economic disruptions likely from climate change, resource depletion (especially peak oil), and various technological developments.*  But they constitute a powerful sea change in our current economic business-as-usual, reducing dangerous concentrations of social power and buying us time to co-create more sustainable economics, politics and governance.

The article below features the work of Ellen Brown, who is showing up more and more in economic innovation circles, especially in efforts to revolutionize our financial systems.  I've recently seen two other remarkable articles by her:

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Review: Empowering Public Wisdom – A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

Tom Atlee

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Tom Paine of Our Generation,October 10, 2012

I first met Tom when I sought him out after discovering his first book The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all and invited him to speak to an international gathering of information and intelligence professionals. In my view, his words to that group were as powerful as those of Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow, themselves speaking to the same conference a decade earlier. Since then I have read Tom's second book Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change, and written my own manifesto, the second book in this series (Tom's is the third, the first was Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness (Manifesto Series). To the extent that I have been constructively radicalized toward open everything and the core principles of transparency, truth, and trust, I owe a great debt to Tom and the Seattle wizards that I met because of him, not least Jon Ramer, Susan Cannon, and Sheri Herndon.

By way of contextual appreciation, I would also mention Harrison Owen, whose first book tom cites but whose most recent book I am compelled to present here, Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, and Peggy Owen, whose most recent book is Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. I am delighted that he also honors Jim Rough (Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People) and the team of Juanita Brown and David Isaacs (The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter among many others.

Tom provides both an appendix of key concepts with links for each that I have remixed and posted to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and an excellent list of books that I am also posting with links. The triad is easily found online by searching for Tom Atlee Public Wisdom Trilogy.

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Tom Atlee: Public Wisdom Practical Links

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Links (Global Security)
Tom Atlee

21st Century Town Meetings

Appreciative Inquiry

Argument Mapping

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)

bCisiveOnline

Canada Maclean experiment

charrette

choice-creating

citizen consensus councils (CCCs)

citizen deliberative councils (CDCs)

citizen councilor forums

citizen panels [By Popular Demand]

citizen reflective councils

 

Amazon Page

Citizens’ Assembly

citizens juries

civic journalism

Community-Based Watershed Management Councils

community quality of life indicators

Commons Cafés

Community Forums Network

Community vision programs

Consensus Conferences aka Danish Technical Panels

Consensus Councils

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Tom Atlee: A presidential candidate signs the Co-Intelligence Institute’s Politician’s Pledge

Uncategorized

Dear friends,

Robert Steele, a long-time colleague of mine and presidential hopeful with the Reform Party (see PS below), has just become the second politician to sign the Co-Intelligence Institute's Politician's Pledge http://bit.ly/SteelePledge.  This pledge commits the politician to take seriously any properly convened and facilitated citizens deliberative council – to post its results on their website and either follow its recommendations or publicly say why they can't or won't.

This seemingly low-commitment pledge – which requires nothing from the politician except an authentic respect for a legitimate voice of We the People (as described in my post yesterday) – has been declined by a number of politicians.  The only politician to sign it in the past was leading Hawaii Democratic state Senator Les Ihara http://1.usa.gov/LesIhara back in 2004.

Given that we are entering a major election year and the phraseS “the people” and “we the people” are being tossed around a lot, I invite you to consider asking the candidates seeking your support if they will sign the Politician's Pledge and, if they decline, asking them why not.

Imagine if a few dozen politicians in the U.S. elections – and elsewhere where elections are going on – why, imagine if a few hundred or a few thousand signed the Politician's Pledge….  Suddenly there would be a political “market” for citizen panels of all kinds – Citizens Juries, Consensus Conferences, Wisdom Councils….  And if a leading candidate made a big deal about their willingness to listen to the authentic, thoughtful voice of We the People and challenged their opponents to do the same, it just might become hard for other candidates to resist signing the Pledge.

And when 20% or 40% or 60% of the politicians signed the pledge – I mean, why not dream big!? – then suddenly the people would have a powerful voice to speak through, to make a difference, to get their collective wisdom pushed into political conversations and public policy.  And suddenly the ball would be in our court.  It would be up to us to convene the citizen panels that would tell the politicians what to do.  And if we did they, the onus would be on them to do what we said.  And if they didn't, I suspect there would be other politicians ready to say that they would.

And after a while, it would make little difference which party a candidate was from, because the standard by which they were all being judged was how well they honored and supported the informed, thoughtful, creative will of We the People.

Think about it.

C'mon.  Dream with me.  Below you'll find the pledge and the original “Listen to the People's Wisdom” campaign, for your consideration and enjoyment.

Coheartedly,
Tom

PS:  Robert Steele's campaign http://bigbatusa.org (he's planning to hit a home run) is focusing on Electoral Reform, a Balanced Budget (don't presume you know what that means until you see the specifics), True Cost Economics (one of the highest leverage approaches to transforming the economic system), and a Coalition Cabinet (no matter what your politics are, you'll probably be boggled in both directions by the diverse people Steele is proposing for his cabinet).  I have any number of concerns about a number of his proposals, but in a sense that's almost irrelevant.  I mean, I've never seen a candidate I didn't have *some* real concerns about.  And his platform is one of the most radical I've seen and he's determined to push these potent ideas into the political conversation.  I had issues with him calling his campaign “We the People” because all the ideas in his platform are his and his advisors', rather than coming from citizen deliberative councils.  But now that he's signed the Politician's “Listen to the People” Pledge, I feel he can make that claim.  If he got enough support, he'd probably drum up a few CDCs just so he can play out his Pledge.  He's a bit wild, I must admit, but he's extremely high integrity and very dedicated.  Take a look and see what you think….

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http://co-intelligence.org/PoliticiansPledgeCampaign.html