This weekend I experienced a snowcrash; a moment where the seemingly disparate pieces of information floating in my head came together. A synapse fired, a new connection was made, and I was brought to a new level of consciousness, a new way of seeing the world. In reading this over, it almost sounds obvious, but it took me a while to get here. I hope that by sharing with you, it’ll help you “get it” too. So let me take you on my thinking trail.
EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world.
It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.
The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.
VOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal.
A large and growing body of knowledge exists about how to carry on powerful conversations — methodologies, facilitation know-how, dynamic understandings, and more. This knowledge informs professions ranging from therapy to diplomacy and conflict resolution, from organizational development to creativity and innovation, from community revitalization to activism and deliberative democracy, from family relationships to education and spiritual development.
At the leading edge of the deeper understandings of conversation's power are innovative contributions like Peggy Holman's recent book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity, and her related earlier paper, Engaging Emergence — and the ambitious project to create a “pattern language” for group process now nearing its first stage release by Tree Bressen, Co-Intelligence Institute president John Abbe, and many others (including me).
Stepping back from the leading edge, we find a wealth of incredible knowledge, broadly useful in many aspects of life. Over the last year I've found some excellent resources about this, compilations of pathways into and around the world of powerful conversational practice. You'll find these resources in this email.
Click on Image to Enlarge
One amazing compilation is the “Best-of-the-Best Resources about Dialogue and Deliberation” compiled by Sandy Heierbacher, coordinator of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD). Read over her list below and, if you find something interesting, go to the original URL. There you will find active links to virtually everything on her list.
Building on Sandy's work, I've developed an additional list, given first below: “The Best Online Compilations of Conversational and Participatory Processes”. Together, the sites linked there describe and link you to well over a hundred different processes.
May this information serve you well in your efforts to serve your groups, your community, your organization, your world and the unfolding future we all share.
CHINA has blocked the word “Egypt” from the country's wildly popular
Twitter-like service, while coverage of the political turmoil has been
tightly restricted in state media.
China's ruling Communist Party is sensitive to any potential source of
social unrest.
A search for “Egypt” on the Sina microblogging service brings up a
message saying, “According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the
search results are not shown.”
Throughout the week, as the crisis gathered storm in Egypt, the
administration had otherwise been slow to react, seemingly always one step
behind events. This was partly because neither the U.S. intelligence
community nor diplomats on the ground foresaw how swiftly the protests in
Egypt would gather momentum—even if everyone realized that virtually the
entire Arab world is a tinder box of pent-up frustration, with despotic
regimes unable to meet the needs of, especially, their youth.
Phi Beta Iota: Advanced Cyber/Information Operations are primarily about being in close touch with reality inclusive of history and culture as well as a full range of future holistic projections firmly grounded in a mature concept of intelligence that fully integrates “true cost” information for every service, product, and policy, and clearly appreciate the value of the human factor. Cyber-security is largly a scam (think back to the Y2K scare), and to the extent that cyber-security vaporware reduces the commander's attention to substance (intelligence), it is a cancer.
Scientists say video games can increase concentration, help with learning and even improve decision-making skills. Now, in an effort to improve the work of spies, the intelligence community may also resort to using educational games.
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing the secret world does in gaming can be called serious, and that includes the ridiculous DARPA initiative to model a world so as to influence what real people think. There is no game that can help those put into IC leadership positions or those who continue to allow $75 billion a year to be spent on technical collection and contractor butts in seats that produce “at best” 4% of what top commanders need. The insanity continues. The ONLY “serious game” any intelligence community should be funding (and ideally all together in the aggregate) is the EarthGame designed by Medard Gabel. Medard was co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and the only person truly qualified to create the EarthGame in the context of a global Strategic Analytic Model that allows to design a world that works for all. Anything less is a corruption of the possible.
Posted with permission. Provided by Dr. James Spohrer in response to a request from Phi Beta Iota for a “snap-shot” overview of the “soul” of IBM going into the 21st Century.
1. Cities: here is a short IBM video (YouTube 4:15) on cities as the nodes in the planetary system of systems
Features Mike Wing, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Julia Grace. Cities as planetary accupunture points of intervention. Cities are HUMAN–computers cannot handle the unpredictable. Dominos analogy–everything is interconnected and knowledge or information are the “energy” being exchanged among individual people, the HUMAN element. It is the mixture of people and hardware, and software that is so elegant and exciting.
2. Universities in Cities: My current job at IBM builds from the notion that universities are the knowledge batteries of city/regions… see slide #34 in this presentation on Service Science: Progress and Directions (64 Slides), connected with Handbook of Service Science (Springer, 2010). NOTE: Downloading presentation enables viewing of Notes for each slide.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Overview of IBM University Programs focusing on 5 R's (Research, Readiness, Recruiting, Revenue, Responsibilities); Quality of Life balance between local and global optimization; Ecology–study of all things in relation to all life forms; and Holistic Service Systems with cities and within cities, universities, and the fundamental “intelligent” building blocks. Emphasis on information information exchanges and life-long learning. Slide #34:
3. Connecting Universities and Cities Locally and Globally: My global team at IBM University Programs is funding connecting the universities locally with their cities, and globally with each other – networked improvement communities in Doug's language… Really connecting service systems, see Slide #16 in this presentation.
