Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

A few days ago I posted about CultureCon (Philly 9/12 and Boston 9/14), an upcoming event hosted by Agile Boston that’s focused on culture analysis, design and implementation in the workplace. The objective of the conference is to “bring to more popular awareness how culture is the gating factor in satisfaction, productivity and learning at work.”

The premise is that agile and self-management principles are essentially a culture hack – meaning that if a group of people decide they're willing to align around a set of values, principles, practices and processes, they can upgrade themselves to a high-functioning learning organization that continually adapts and upgrades itself. Next I could say some kind of sentence about how “in today's fast-paced world, we can't afford NOT to” …. etc etc. You get it.

I’m personally really eager to level up in this domain, and plan to attend both the Philadelphia and Boston open space unconferences.

If enough friends and enthusiasts in our global tribe join in, we can rent a party bus that connects us from location to location! How fun! I’ve never done that before, and the excitement I get from imagining a roadtrip filled with discussions about culture hacking and social evolution just shows what a nerd I am. 😉

Anyway —

The Call for Speakers page has just gone up.

Some sample topics of what they’re looking for include:

Continue reading “Venessa Miemis: Agile CultureCon 2012 – Call for Speakers! Let’s Hack Culture!”

The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism

One community's pioneering effort to make its materials of worship more widely available and remixable.

Alan Jacobs – Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com.

The Atlantic, 12 June 2012

New technologies are naturally and generally controversial, but perhaps nowhere more so than in religious communities. For many religious leaders (and their followers), recent digital technologies are corrosive solvents of community life: the old ways are surely best. For others, new technologies offer opportunities to extend the reach of religious bodies, to draw more people into the fold.

One might think that a highly traditional religion like Judaism — whose core practices are so ancient and burnished by custom — would be inclined to techno-suspicion. But Aharon Varady doesn't see it that way: for him, digital technologies can come to the aid of traditional practices. Varady is a man of wide-ranging gifts who, among other things, runs the Open Siddur Project. A siddur is a Jewish prayer book containing the daily prayers, and the Open Siddur Project is working to create the first comprehensive database of Jewish liturgy and liturgy-related work — and to provide an online platform for anyone to craft their own siddur. In this way Varady hopes “to liberate the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice as a commonly held resource for adoption, adaptation, and redistribution by individuals and groups.” For him, openness is key to the success of the project.

The Open Siddur Project strikes me as a deeply thoughtful, innovative way of trying to make new technologies and modern religious life reinforce each other, instead of being inimical or at cross-purposes. So I proposed that Aharon answer a few questions about the ideas behind his work, and he readily agreed. Here's our conversation.

You describe Open Siddur as a project in “open-source religion.” What do you mean by that?

Read full interview.