Because not all Bushes are alike

making a 21st C difference

2006-12-31T06:33:00.000-08:00

A GENERATION FROM NOW WHOSE COMMUNITY TODAY WILL HAVE MADE A GREAT DIFFERENCE?

Not yet knowing how to manage a more open question for exploring our networking age, this one suits my inquiries (until you advise me of a better number one to spend my time with)

I had a transformative conversation at the start of this century when I interviewed Georgetown Scholar of constitutional law and social progress: Margaret Blair

By now I have interviewed lawyers, sustainability experts, heads of humanitarian networks, influential bloggers, a few of which are named below:

Margaret Blair, Original epicentre of Unseen Wealth Research

Paul Komesaroff, leading australian Professor of medicine, ethics, founder of the metanetwork: Global Reconciliation Network, currently working on Sustainability Medicine areas across Tsunami Coastline

Doc Searls, co-originator of www.cluetrain.com, editor of linux open source journal, a world renowned blogger and adviser on open trust-flow issues

Verna Allee, opinion leader of value exchange mapping systems of networks and organisations

John Bunzl founder of www.simpol.org - Simultaneous Policy for politics and democracies without frontiers; a member of the www.makepovertyhistory.org alliance

NormanMacrae, http://normanmacrae.blogspot.com Economist Survey writer and futurist concerned with Entreprenuerial and Intrapreneurial Revolution and fastest sustainable networkingways of changing global and local systems to support 6 bilion beings

Sir Adrian Cadbury, an early luminary in transparency and corporate governance issues, which have percolated through 15 years issue development at the Royal Society of Arts- the UK's largest network of socially concerned influences

Mark Goyder, coordinator of syndicates that open transformational and inclusivity learning across Tomorrow's Global Companies

Harrison Owen, origin of 50000 Open Space gatherings (a large meetings process connecting many millions of people in over 70 countries) and a key to the Practice of Peace

Howard Rheingold of Virtual Community origins

Dr. Ganesh Devi of Nomads' Human Rights across India and beyond

Prem Kumar of Microfinancing Indian Villages and grassroots community

Generally I am delighted to be contacted with requests on what I learnt from each interview and its connections with others. If you reason for questioning is humanitarian, I will try to answer on a pro bono basis. If it's commercial: 1) what are you offering in exchange? 2) what guarantee do you give me that you will not under-value my transparency of purpose?

Yours sincerely, Gillian Bush, NdP, North Bethesda, Maryland, USA

July Calendar of Trust Extract below seems timely if you watch Live8 or anticipate G8 this weekend

President Clinton: I expect that we’ll deal mostly with the need for both openness, honesty and transparency in the developing world, But if you look at the great business scandals in America in the last few years, it’s obvious that you’ve got to have good strict accounting practices and if someone can play with the numbers, you can have problems everywhere. But in other countries the need for openness and transparency are very important and beyond that I would say it is not just a question for integrity, it’s also a question of capacity. A lot of countries are incapable of growing rapidly or solving problems, not so much because of corruption but because of incapacity both in government and in the private sector. So I hope that we can deal with this question of integrity with the question of capacity and I think by in large the two will go hand in hand.
Stephen Evans: A huge range of different political philosophies about the heaviness of the hand of government on the economy. Capitalism is a marvelous system that grows very fast but it is driven by greed. And where you get greed you get lapses, how do you marry those two, what do you say to somebody in India or Africa who is wondering how you marry that greedy system, which also delivers the goods?
President Clinton: Well Lord Canes has understood a long time ago that unless there is some governmental intervention the system would destroy itself by its own excesses, both its cycles and its greed. The great genius in the United States of the New Deal and everything that my party, I think has stood for since, and very often Republican Presidents as well, is that we realize that in order to save the market economy there had to be some leavening of it, some intermediate institution, some attempt to equalize opportunity, some attempt to help those that through no fault of their own couldn’t help themselves. Now that is still the case today, and I think the real issue is that if you live in a global economy, if your economy is more services, relatively speaking more information technology oriented. What is the role of government and how do you fulfill its historic mission in a capital society, which is to promote both economic growth and social justice.

2005-07-24T00:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a conversation from that part of the European Union's Knowledgeboard that links social capital or deep cultural understanding that different countries' citizens are helping interconnect - in this case that of Londoners

Critical stuff Chris made the more urgent to learn about given Friday's police-chaotic- state execution of an innocent Brazilian
I think the clue may be that citizens and now in 3 systems:--local which is communally practiced--global, where worldwide learning in a profession or because of an interest or love of culture is also networked communally up wherever it is multiplying value for all who invest their time, tgrust and passion to make differences truly--national, where all the systems from time immemorial propagate hierarchy first; any system that is over-heavy with hierarchy cannot see how closed and controlling it is getting; it becomes the cancer to open society whilst using the people's media and taxes to shout the opposite imagery
Londoners as one of the most locally and globally connected peoples in the world are not being openly supported by their national system in ways that pattern love or joy or courage. (Bookmark us evidence if you disagree)
It's strange that in the 1990s , when time was plenty, the greatest thinkers about networking of knowhow flagged up the citizen issue as clearly as words can express- eg Manuel Castells: The global city is not London, New York, Tokyo or Jo'berg -- it is the part of each which is connected to an analogous part in each of the others. The global city is a distributed phenomenon. There is only one global city, and it floats on top of the others like lace.
BUT where is KM supporting citizens pracices now? Would that be a wonderful special interest group to be a part of? If anyone can send me links to where it is emerging or being openly explored for all people's sakes.
GB

Mr Chris Macrae23 July 2005 @ 15:32 PM reminscing: 21 years ago, on my first vist to India, an elderly citizen from Bombay hobbled across the street. I will never forget his greeting: are you from London? You poor thing- I hear you are ruled by an Iron Lady. In India, we have so much luckier.
As far as my being can, I have loved all of Asia's diverse people ever since.
Cut: A few months after Enron, I was sitting with one Brussel's main open minded budget holders. Chris he said it will take 4 disasters of the financial equivalent to Enron in the same year before the politicians wake up to loving the value of working people and innovation differently in a networked age.
Well Collaborative Londoners cannot wait any more whilst media manipulators and financial speculators profit from putting people at risk and other vicious volatility games

Personal fear of speaking about religion

2005-07-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

I do fear speaking about religion because I can look at myself and see I am not integrally consistent enough to tell others much about this subject

That said, I would be a much more confidently happy person (as opposed to just believing in positivism) if all major religions would get back to baics such as Faith, Hope & Love. Explanation:

First: I realise these are English words; by all means choose the trinity of most holy communal values in your mother tongue. Add them to this thread; let linguists help us translate nuances

Second: I don't like the question which is most important of these. In English speaking Christinaity love is often singled out. Yet as important a question to me is which of these is most frightening if it's been wholly lost. I would say the compound consequences of lost hope are the worst of all.

Third, maybe just maybe- the importance depends which dynamic you are talking about. In olden days where a place's leader needed to keep people together so they did not cut off each other's heads or his, the leader might have argued faith was most vital for people of one place

In slightly more modern days, probably the most positive instruction to individual beings anywhere is love - love they neighour; see everyone you relate to is your neighbour around some gravity; love every gravity, even ones you are exploring as a starnger; welcome strangers caringly if you too want to be loved by strangers. The greater our open trade in (valuation, learning, service and active love of) diversity the more riches we co-create

However above all, and across places in a globe of locally deep cultures, it seems to me that right now the most important of these 3 value flows is to ensure that no clusters of people lose all hope. It is when people are frustatrated whatever they try, lose hope that life will ever get better for their kind however honestly they work or toil, that cells of people go mad, literally commit terror in the name of what they have lost all hope of ever pursuing 'truths' they have ben brought up to identify with. Unless the world's leaders can ensure that their most powerful decisions never do "lost hope" to any communities of people, then being so intimately newtorked as technology has made us will turn out to the opposite of any of our salvations. Telling me that yours is the land of the happy and the free is not productive for 21st C global harmony unless you share that spirit with any other land in ways that are true through time's and nature's exponential consequences

Perhaps now I see another reason why I am personally not confident about speaking on religion, and yet wish that I could express this in a way that was not inhibited by my own fear.

Where did I read this view of community

2005-07-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

I read this; pasted it because I liked it; but then forgot the origin. If you recognise the origin, a word in my inbox would be lovely

If we are people who love truth-testing experience, the practice's context, the communal authority and freedom of being the difference, the pursuit of action learning then I suggest we wholly mislead ourselves if we do not know the ways hierarchy can always over-rule these flows unless we all look out for each other and open community's gravitational context:

HIERARCHY'S WAY OF CLOSING OUT LEADERSHIP
--Control the medium: make free speech very expensive especially for truth & reality testers
--Define the measures in a way that is not open to everyone questioning
--Write the law, the constitution in ways that one profession small prints

A few years ago, a friend did a grounded theory survey of what it takes to be a high flyer in corporations. (Grounded theory being a survey method that makes no prior assumptions). The key success factor that emerged was high flyers manage my visibility for myself

Game moves of this Personal High Visibility:
Don't be visible at early stages of innovation or experimentation; time your arrival to get maximum credit when someone lower done has done the hard work of proving an experiment is a success

Know which are the forces of power above you, and always blow their way

Play tacitly to the top person's prejudices, especially by tying up the time of anyone who dares suggest we could be exploring a way that connects knowhow flows instead of separating them around the school of authority/assumptions the top person comes from

And all sorts of Machivellian ways of walk and no talk. This is of course Western Corporation research. I imagine in the East, face and family lines sometimes brings more to the operations than the top's current might

IS THERE A WAY COMMUNALLY ABOVE THIS?
People who would aim to help facilitate grassroots CoPs so that deep experience and truly purposeful experimentation and openly shared learning wins out need to have seen how hierarchy so often rules the game, and to find a sponsor who truly wants to cultivate a different game, imo . A question which often reveals where a top person is coming from before they know what their answer systemically values: what is the one measure you require everyone to attend to of greatest future purpose to the organisation's context. (If you haven't selected the most purposeful measure, clearly the system will deviate far from optima purpose over time). This line of inquiry can make trust in walk and talk easy to predict across all the peoples being organised.

How Systemically Open are the Sources of Knowledge & Management?

2005-07-20T01:02:00.000-07:00

How Open is the Source of KM? There will always be hierarchy but if you value people in an organisation how do you make the most of hierarchy &people's greatest passions to make a difference. Clinton is calling for a 1000 leaders to come up with new interactive answers to this http://clintonglobalinitiative.com -the potentially the greatest global KM so far staged
or society's rights in an organisation (given that societies invest in learning, health, natural & cultural resources, safety of beings, infrastructures like knowledge cities and zero digital divides...)

and does a vibrant industry sector have organsiations that are great border players with other organisations (in effect synergetically mangaing each other). This is a knowledge flowing idea whose time has come if you want to make the most of the internet and globalsiation. The webbed like nature of the internet's most valuable innovations should be obvious. Globalisation's requirement that organisation's systems are great at their boundary interfaces is less well known. It turns out that quality of sustainability depends on realising that one organsiation's (waste) output is another's input. The business case for sustainability depends on whether you value life itself. Nobody is clearer about the economic and cultural necessity of designing this into the view you hold of knowledge managemnt of the world's largest organisations than Ray Anderson chairman of Interface here. Will we have the living system knowledge to share Ray's changes to economic strictures in time?http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/iadmin.cgi

At the end of the world, the way we chose to value people's productivity and transparency of diversity will be down to failing to enable every person's most productive connections in playing a trustworth role in KM. Will the largest policies be changed in time? When the likes of even George Bush says for the sustainability of Africa he will change America's agricultural policy if Europe will change its, many humanitarian networks, media, societal leaders, religions & superstars wait with bated breath to see what quaility of KM Brussels is truly capable of.

Evaluating Communities by their open borders and...

2005-07-17T03:09:00.000-07:00

..bridges across communities and action projects that need both deep context and meta-disciplinary connction of practice expertise

I survey communities for how well they enable members to participate deeply in other open communities. Number 1 in my current list of communities any deeply concerned person can participate in is GRN -led on the other side of Brussels' world by a professor of medicine and ethics who makes time to encourage hundreds of people to turn up at meetings and take on roles that seem to behave rather like 21st C David Livingstones- one of my all time knowledge-opening heros.

GRN's meeting in Sarajevo in August is here (400k pdf downloadable from EU web for open source knowledge sharing) with keynotes by the likes of Howard Dean . If you truly need to be there, I am sure we can find a way to get you actively participating. Of course if you can find me links to an open community with more gravity for its participants to act and share critical knowledge around, I am always open. Just because something is the best within my ken, does not mean that I dont want to learn of a better or diversely different space. Its only people whose interests are more closed than open who seem not to want to hear that there is a better space to volunteer their time or converse than the ones they yet know. At least methinks so.

Spiralling Viciously from Human Resources to Human Remnants

2005-07-16T04:03:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a mediator. A lady who gets called in when big corporations find themselves at the wrong end of employee suits. Here's one of the 5 worst HR practices:
It begins by asking managers to grade all employees say at 5 levels: A fast track to great rewards; E get rid of if you can find any way
This is a questionable idea anyhow, but it becomes rotten where all managers are given an E quota. You have to find 10% to put in the E-bucket otherwise its unfair if you have only A to D people.
This is an utter corruption of trust and abuse of hierarchical power. The probability that the idea originated, as many say, from one of the elite global managemnt consultants' war on talent does not give it a shred of value. It has in fact been proven time and time again to be one of the most value destructing HR processes ever put into place. CEOs who let it happen should now be sacked by their shareholders.
Now what other HR badwill practices can we know and bring out into the open?

death of virtual community

2005-07-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

Those who love the net know the enemy is closed, top-down rule or sponsorship as has so far throttled every powerful media humankind has tried to invent (apart from the air we breathe when we retreat to the mountains or the sea, and a few of our more vibrant cities)

About 7 years ago, virtual communities became touted, and were a huge bubble in the dotcom boom. Contrived by those who want to seel IT platforms or manage conversations. There are so few large, open, diversely intelligent virtual communities surviving that netizens should swarm into them and protest before their extinction. That's why I have worded the following sort of message. Can you help edit it? The purpose is to plant in the largest remaining virtual communities so as to flush out those who love open communities for grassroots diversity's sake and long-term harmonisation of purpose and productivity between peoples from those who wish to rule over us.

distinguish between communications culture of contrived and real communitiesIn contrived communities, exploration of conversational forms and themes is not encouraged and mess is abhorred. The top has a hierachy or political masters. The idea of uniformity is ruled - something that is pretty absurd if you want to encourage the diversity of conversational patterns 10000 people might enjoy.
In real communities, design always seeks to offer enough open space so if you dont like one thread style or focus you can take your positive energy to another without wasting time moaning at a thread you don't like. You can find your own peers - a choice of 10000 is rich indeed if knowledgeboard is for real transformation of the kind global and local village communications now desperately need to sustain. There is a lie in every economics text that preaches big works without evolving from community up. Over time this lie compounds risks both from nature and human spirits passions wherever hope of communing is lost.
Examples of the messiness of real commmunities:include the way so many neighbourhoods interface diversity in major cities; are everywhere among the 40 countries I have visited; especially vibrant in different messy (or deeply culturally coded) ways in India and Japan if you wish to clear your mind from artificial western laws
Self-organising champion Margaret Wheatley says the greatest challenge in getting top down political people to practice grassroots community systemisation is to take them into a mess and help them explore how to enjoy that;
Conversation is a wonderful innovative arena of humanity but only if you dont constrain the forms of expression; think how many different patterns for example could be enjoyed in a real meeting of 10 people then of 60 people; there are hundreds of different facilitaion formats , each renewing a community in a difeernt sort of way depending always on a belief that knowledge flows multipy rich experiential learning when they are free to go all ways round purposeful transparency as opposed to one-way (from the top) with hidden agendas or fear-diseases of questioning a hierarchical person's first opinion instead of iterative and integrative all way round understanding
I have learnt to ask this question first amongst those claiming expertise in community. Are you providing transparent advice that liberate everyone's freedom to speak and network or the advice that top management afraid of getting over top down control and permitting grassroot community learning streams to flow up and around and through the webs of time mediated by passion, gravitated by a unique reason for being.

Has there even been a goodwill outcome of rushing into new media?

2005-06-28T07:16:00.000-07:00

Media folk should always start from the holocaust case of what Hitler did with new media to that time

So far nothing that bad has come from fast burn attempts to rule with network media but dotcoms sure were the most wasteful exercise in recent memory (not just the lost investors money but all the youthful energies and beliefs of what could be seem to have evaporated with many trapped owing large mortgages etc doing whatever they are now told - command and control has thus got stronger than ever in many of our biggest organisations, even though it was command & control's favourite professions that made dotcoms still born and built to flip)

This suggests to the people I network with who love the net that we are getting ever deeper into a battle between open and transparent, and closed and murky. As Europeans have clarified for 21 years and counting, the compound consequences of failing in practices to Make Poverty History may not appear as dramatically targeted as Hitler's evil, but over time they show how compound ignorance across the globe can result in ever greater tragedy than evil's ten year reign out of one locality.

Moreover, in a networked world the two types of system attract and multiply each other's powers. If the blind closed murky ones win out over the next 10 years, Orwell's only error in his storytelling of Big Brother will have been to timestamp 1984 a few decades too early.

We suggest that wherever you are invited to participate in large communities or powerful networks, you question them as early as possible. Edit some version of this post, actually sent out to probe what Knowledge made in Europe is intended to be 5 years on from extraodinarily optimistic millennial visions, which as Romano Prodi decently admitted on retiring have so far got further away from being accomplished or communed

To whomever wrote the front page greeting of knowledgeboard and all involved as a modeller of media and community rights activist, I do not understand what self-moderating means without more information on such connections as:
who ultimately judges what self-moderating means (eg 1 person, 1 committee, all 10000 members); has this definition also changed from what could be reasonably interpreted from founders declarations? If so, how many times and by whose instruction?
who owns this space? -the equity if community flourishes- now, and in all forseeable futures such as those that appear to be governing from 1 Jan 2007?
What is the amount of cultural understanding between those advocating self-moderating and the idea that any open community of the scale that a million Euro investment of European public money implies depends on its inter-community boundary capabilities? What other virtual communities or networks of excellence value the existence of knowledgeboard and how is it made easy for their members to carry open dialogues across all networks? To what extent is knowledgeboard intended to be an open sour community brillinat at partnering other seriously connecting professional and local communities, or a very closed community?

Who are the most trusted people in this community in the sort of way that social network mappers evaluate whether a community of 10000 people has high interactivity or high separation? For what is each of these most trusted people trusted by those who mail them?

goodwill to all - human reality; or faith for dreamers and the scared?

2004-12-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

I begin with quoting from Father Matt's final sermon to a rich Maryland community before being sent off to instruct the American military in ethics in a training camp in Missouri

The purpose of our church is to evangelise, ie to make Jesus better known so that people can help make a better world. To achieve this end, the church asks us to know, through every rhythm of our life, the conflicts we are responsible first, because until our own behaviours are as conflict-free as humanly possible: we cannot truly expect that our advice, however well intended, will be up to Jesus's challenge of making the world a better place everywhere that people be.

QUESTIONS
1 Since organisations are a construct of man, how could any person or democratic state knowingly excuse an organisation systemised not to make the world a better place whilst claiming faith in Jesus?

2 Do you know the current data on how many people around you believe that as many as half of the world's largest organisations are governed to be responsible for making a difference in making the world better over time?