Conversing as the transformative science of development
Sections:
Variety of conventional conversation challenges
Why converse transformatively?
Imagining an art of transformative conversation
Prefixing “verse” as indication of conversation potential
Transformative conversation in a multiverse
Versification as a key to conversational transformation?
Proposed universes and their conversation potential
Conversation understood through a variety of metaphors
Conversational vehicles: conventional and paradoxical
Transformative conversation in the light of interwoven metaphors
Conversing with “oneself”
Conversation, confidence-building and transformative development
A lawyer by training and a techie by inclination, Beth Noveck works to build data transparency into government.
How can our data strengthen our democracies? In her work, Beth Noveck explores what “opengov” really means–not just freeing data from databases, but creating meaningful ways for citizens to collaborate with their governments.
Mark Karlin: The Republicans don't just aim to steal elections in one way. They have a variety of methods to mug democracy. Can you explain a few of them?
Mark Lombardi (March 23, 1951 – March 22, 2000) was an AmericanNeo-Conceptualist and an abstractartist who specialized in drawings attempting to document financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general “the uses and abuses of power.
Lombardi called his diagrams Narrative Structures.. They are structurally similar to sociograms – a type of graph drawing used in the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree by earlier artists like Hans Haacke. Other important influences on Lombardi were philosopher Herbert Marcuse,, and visualization expert Edward Tufte
In Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations, and his drawings document the purported financial and political frauds by power brokers. For instance, his 1999 drawing George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90 shows alleged connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world.
The Essence of Lombardi's Work
The small circles in his drawings identified the main players — individuals, corporations and governments — along a time line. The arcing lines showed personal and professional links, conflicts of interest, malfeasance and fraud.
Solid lines traced influence, dotted lines traced assets and wavy lines traced frozen assets. Final denouements like court judgment, bankruptcy and death were noted in red.
Reading several newspapers a day, he culled his information entirely from published sources, keeping track of the articles with a card file that eventually held over 12,000 cards.
Mindmapping is a very serious and well researched subject, or art … or something . Whatever it is a map of the mind is definately something to be valued and this ‘instructionalicious' guide is no exception. Allow this infographic to simultaneously blow and map your mind.
Phi Beta Iota: Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on covert surveillance including the recording of all emails, telephone conversations, and other forms of exchange, but most of this is not being processed. Worse, it is not being processed toward making sense in the public interest. It is one thing to focus on the needle in the haystack threat warning. It is quite another to focus on harnessing the distributed intelligence of the public. That will be the next big leap for “national intelligence.”
As top American officials and a Navy SEAL who was on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden grapple over whether the al Qaeda leader “resisted” before he was shot, the SEAL said in a recent interview that in the heat of battle, the men on the ground weren't going to take any chances with their target.
It wasn't until other members of the team entered the room and saw a man twitching on the ground that they realized he had been hit in the head. Then, after shooting the man in the chest a few more times until he stopped moving, they realized it was bin Laden, the book says. America's most wanted man was unarmed and though there was a rifle and a handgun in a room nearby, neither had a bullet loaded in the chamber.
“He hadn't even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting,” Owen writes.
“The “Principled Societies” concept outlined in the book Creating Sustainable Societies is a blueprint for sustainable financial, economic, and governance systems, intended for local implementation. The book starts by pinpointing the central problems within our financial, economic, and governance systems that have lead to high unemployment, massive debt, environmental degradation, mistrust of Congress and big business, and hyper-inequities of wealth and political power. It then proposes a practical, bold plan for addressing these concerns and creating meaningful change.
EXTRACT: From the Foreword, by Bernard Lietaer:
“I have spent the past 30 years studying monetary systems, both conventional and innovative. During this time, I have written more than a dozen books, have spoken to thousands of audiences around the world, and have taught in half a dozen universities in the United States and Europe. Everywhere, I find dissatisfaction and hunger for a breakthrough to another way of working, of cooperating, of contributing. People are eager for change and are awake to the need for change, even if most public officials, constrained by politics or timidity, appear incapable of rising to the challenges of our time.
In distilling the results of my investigations, I arrived at the sad conclusion that the missing piece in all our monetary arrangements is appropriate governance. This is true for both the official money system (the Federal Reserve and all other central banks in the world) and innovative systems of complementary currencies. This missing piece is what John Boik brings to the table. At first glance, his proposal might appear to center on a complementary currency system, but more accurately it centers on appropriate governance. On the one hand, it proposes a means for collaborative direct democracy as applied to finance, corporate behavior, and social organization: the “Principled Society.” On the other, the very mechanics of the proposed monetary and corporate model, including its transparency, are a manifestation of democratic ideals.”
