All over the place and focus

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I suppose to some people my interests appear to be all over the place: philanthropy, currencies, technology, visualization, mapping, marketing, coaching, leadership, process arts, community development, art, creativity, and some other issues too like globalization, the bottom of the pyramid, social entrepreneurship, etc. And most of these areas I have enough understanding to listen and ask good questions…but not enough to debate academically on the finer points or the history. Coaching might be the exception. Maybe. I am not a specialist. And some say it is a world where we ought to be specialized. I don’t know about that. I think it is a world where we ought to connect and have engaging conversations.

Sometimes, in our lives, we find the varied paths we lead all connecting down the road somewhere. All this leads together…

How? Field building. I will post soon a longer explanation of field building, along with some tidbits of conversation and great links for those who are interested. For now, let me simply explain that field building is the conscious collective development of a network of purpose (both the nodes and the space between the nodes). And I see this as being critical for our evolution. We need to adapt to survive and for the planet to survive. We need to understand our world in more useful and appropriate ways. And all these interests of mine lead back to the many tools, processes, and systems that play a role in field building. An example–Social Network Analysis is an emerging field…It is defining itself, the practices, examining what distinctions are valuable and which are not. It changes how organizations work, and values human connection. It requires message management for maintaining a cohesive set of meaningful terms. It requires leadership to grow the edges and community to build the depths. It takes funding and marketing to keep thriving. It takes mapping and visualization to track and analyze itself. Other examples are Digital Media and Education, Currencies/Flows, and Thrivability (next evolution of sustainability). Sometimes fields are in transition too, like the work we are doing in Philanthropy to democratize giving, promote giving while living, encourage micro-philanthropy, etc.

We need to change our world, to understand it in new ways, to work in new ways. I see my work as building fields that help with that process. And why? It comes back to my core purpose–to help people transform their lives and live with passionate purpose.

Kimberly Olson and good copy for a writer’s website

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My cousin Kim, always an inspiration and mentor to me, put up a website recently. Beautiful, clean, great copy (of course). I really like her naming of pages and how she positions things so clearly.

I must find the time to read some of these articles…

Kimberly Olson.

I also love that she highlights that she is a 1% for the planet alliance member. Awesome Kim.

Now I better get mine revised!

Giving and Partnership

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Always a source of wisdom, insight, and fantastic probing, GiftHub posts:

Some of my favorite people, including Anne Ellinger and Tracy Gary, are written up in the Chronicle of Philanthropy for raising the question of how much wealthy families should keep for themselves and how much they should be giving back to society. This is the conversation of fundraising, philanthropy, and donor circles. What will facilitate the mega-giving is better partnerships with the advisors who in many cases control the wealth, as a practical matter, unless the donor bestirs herself to lead or partner. That is the gist of what I am trying to do here, and with Tracy at Inspired Legacies: build inspired donor/advisor partnerships for self, family, and society. In that way we can convert ideals plus wealth to positive social change.

Yes, indeed, when faced with information like this:

Americans have doubled their incomes in the past 40 years, but the share of giving has never climbed above 2.4 percent of the money they have left after paying for basics like housing and food, according to Giving USA, the annual yearbook of philanthropy produced by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

We have to recognize our abundance and contribute at higher levels. My admirable friend Darlene Charneco and her partner Brent Timbol, also encourage giving, they suggest at the tithing level of 10% and joining the 10% Club.

No matter what our income levels, we need to ask ourselves, can I give more? The world needs you now.

Endings and Beginnings

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With Omidyar.net soon to close the doors piled on top of my frustration at the lack of self-governance and community-nurturing practices, I am looking for new homes. Have been looking around for a few months.

Never going to MySpace…no way, too cluttery, and too little community feel.
Second Life…went there…but it seems my computer can’t crunch the info…waiting to get a new one…but I am not sensing that SL is good for project management. Created profile: Yes Bright.
Tribe…seems interesting, but it just didn’t resonate with me. Created profile.
Facebook…ummm, has some interesting tools, but I quickly got overrun by friends asking me to add applications, and I wondered if conversation was really at the heart of it or if it was something that happened on the side…too profile based. Created and maintain profile for the sake of advocacy.
Ning…have a profile there, created a closed community for a philanthropy-related project, nice use of tools and such, but I hear it gets more frustrating the more you get into it…good for the surface work and not so good for building visibility. Created profile and group.
Zaadz…well I went there moons ago, bounced around, found way too much fluff, although the site arrangement was fun and interesting….more focused on conversations…why don’t they have the super nifty conversation tracking tools of Onet?…Created and sorta maintain profile. Thinking of deleting everything I can now that they got bought out.
Linked In…well I have been there a long time, but the only thing I do there is connect to people…and that seems pretty dull. I want conversation, innovation, and better world building! Created and maintain profile.
Razoo seems interesting…does have more of the project management tools that I had wanted at onet and seems to bring people together and balance profile and action…I am still checking it out…will see what population emerges there and if they really mean action and have some good intellectual capacity. They do seem to have a more advanced reputation tool, which I am excited to see.Created profile, joined groups and causes, started cause.

For the most part, I suspect I will be hanging out more here and at nurture.wagn.org or at the transition and beyond wagon for onet members at o.wagn.org.

You can also find me at AboutUs.org or transitioner.org…and probably a dozen places I am forgetting today as the search has been long and involved!

Community Management

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I was over at Fast Wonder today, and Dawn has a great list of roles for a community manager to play. I find it interesting how languages of different groups play a part in how we describe things. I agree with her role descriptions as things we need in community, with my background, however, I describe them differently or focus on different concerns.

She specifically mentions: ongoing facilitation, content creation, evangelism, and community evolution.

I replied to her post:

Wonderful role descriptions. I also find it critical that the manager model the behavior you want in the community. An effective community manager understands the boundaries of that specific community and will take fire to defend those boundaries.

And a piece of evangelism and facilitation is letting people know where opportunities for connection are–which I think you are calling cat herding. Good “Network Weaving” is helpful to tighten the space between nodes/participants. It also helps so people don’t miss content that interests them (lower threshold to participation).

You speak of content creation and evolution, and this to me is part of the flow of community. Creating flow to encourage participation, uplift visibility, and encourage activity whether through conversations, practices, or tools. What flows do you want to enable and what, as community manager, can you do to encourage them. (And conversely what flows do you want to discourage too.)

What do you think the role of a community manager includes? And in what context?

Network to Communities: the evolution of omidyar.net

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If you are not already familiar, omidyar.net/home/ has been an active online community sine July 04. It was created and opened up by Omidyar Network LLC, tracing back to Pierre Omidyar of Ebay fame. The purpose of the network space was to help more and more people discover their power to make good things happen. This attracted a particular crowd interested in making the world a better place, some through entrepreneurship, some through tools, and other opportunities. And this network, with some 100-200 active engaged users and nearly 20,000 sign ons is being bumped off the platform. The hope or strategy perhaps is to foster communities of purpose to move beyond the limitations of the network and the platform to scale up and out more good things.

There is much I can say about this network, having been a highly active member for several years. I can speak to the philanthropy on and from and to the network. But that belongs in another topic space. What I want to address here is the movement from network to community. What distinguishes a network from a community? What are the advantages of a network? What are the advantages of a community? What are the disadvantages of each?

I have some answers of my own. And I would love to brainstorm this with others (you) as well.

My sense is that a network is a grouping of people through loose or weak affiliation. And that affiliation may not be the same across all relationships. As has been noted in network theory there is a great strength in weak ties. I consider a community to be a more densely woven connection of people who are joined by purpose or interest. You may not realize the scope of your network(s), but you likely know the scope of your community. There is a greater sense of self-awareness of the group within community. In fact that awareness is part of the distinguishing characteristics, in my mind. To know itself. To know what it holds in common.

I very much look forward to seeing how the network on omidyar.net/home/ moves to new spaces and creates communities (or not) in the coming months. And I am eager to understand how others see both the evolution and the community/network distinction.

OYA at Burning Man

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Donations for OYA can be made by paypal or online through IHCenter.

Community Inclusion

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On one of my favorite online communities, Omidyar.net, I have seen great debates about inclusion in community. There are those who suggest that everyone should be heard and everyone has a right to say whatever they want to say within community. And those very people suggest that if what is said offends anyone, then that sense of being offended says something about that person. Sometimes I wonder if I agree. Perhaps to some degree.

But I think the whole argument stems from a blurring of the line between what a society is and how it should hold itself and what a community is and how it should hold itself. Societies can and I think should be comprised of diverse individuals within broad geographical shared space, functioning as large scale loosely connected citizens working together across differences for common good. Communities, while they can also be diverse in many regards, also are groupings of choice. One may live within a geographical perimeter of a community area, but can choose not to be part of that community. One may live far away from a community and still feel a part of it. It is a grouping of choice. And that makes all the difference.

Communities are collections of individuals (or families) that are tightly woven, usually of relatively smaller scale, bound by some commonality–often of interest or practice.

The practices that makes a society thrive, I suggest, are different from those that make a community thrive. For a community to flourish, we need to have commonly agreed practices. What is acceptable and what is not? And those things need not be, indeed must be, different than those that govern society as a whole. Who is inside the community? Who is outside? That critically determines the safety of the space for community. That determines what conversations can take place inside the boundaries of the community.

When Resource Generation brings together young affluent social justice activists, they create a safe space for conversations that could not happen elsewhere. Those conversations would be more difficult or impossible in a mixed generation community or a mixed wealth community or a community permeated by raging capitalists. And when that safe space opens up, then sharing happens. Sharing in a safe space opens people up to sharing more than their ideas. They share of themselves, forging their identity. They may share their belongings or other resources as well. Sharing follows from trust.

When community members slip into society-defending postures, justifying safe space destroying activities as free speech or other critical freedoms in society, that slippage makes false argument at the cost of community safe space. While we all may deserve the right to free speech, a community deserves to be able to construct norms around what is acceptable and unacceptable within that community. And they deserve to have the power to enforce exclusion. Within the Omidyar.net community, the cry for free speech has allowed any activity that is not completely clear spam to be allowed. And the cost of that free speech has been the safety of the community. Where raging loons rampage against multiple individuals and addressing them in words merely feeds the loon or troll with attention, then safe space and conversations of trust disappear.

For online community to evolve toward great collaboration, trolls must be addressed. Wikipedia attempts this in several ways–trolling comments are removed. Content that is contentious is marked as such. Debate over content is available while not marring the output of the site. When we see trollish or spamming behavior in other communities that fail to moderate or govern themselves, navigation of the space gets mired and difficult (Facebook, Tribe).

I look forward to discovering spaces for community online that have self-governing tools, as onet does, and community practices that foster safe spaces for conversation, collaboration, and community identity development. I suspect one way this may be possible currently is through smaller communities focused very selectively on shared interest as can be developed on tools like Ning.

As I said on omidyar.net

Goddess, please grant me an online community with conversation tracking, project management, acknowledgment, knowledge management, and high quality transpartisan collaborators trying to take action toward a better world for all of us!

Yes, and acknowledgment includes one with tools and practices that will help create effective semi-permeable boundaries for community to self-regulate effectively.

Localizing Global Change! Chicago Conference July 20-22

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You are invited to co-create the 4th Annual Chicago Conference for Good. PLEASE join us, bring friends and add spirit! Share this invitation with neighbors and colleagues, people you’d like to connect or reconnect with this July!

“…cuz people who do stuff need to know more people who do stuff.” – ted ernst

Localizing Global Change: Issues and Opportunities

July 19-22 in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago, IL USA

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us! …for More and More.

More and more people. More and more resources. More and more easy. More and more connected. More and more green. More and more power to do good things, in more and more local neighborhoods and organizations.

Three years ago, some of us convened a small but national conference on the future of philanthropy, technology and community action. Two years ago, more of us joined in to create a second and international conference which was also the first-ever omidyar.net members conference. Last year we did it again, and along the way these conversations have sparked half a dozen more conferences and action on at least four continents.

All the while, you’ve been busy doing all the things you do to try make the world a better place, and you’ve been noticing that more and more people are getting together for global community good. This year’s global gathering in Chicago is going to focus on “doing”. All good work. All kinds of local action. We welcome good people from everywhere to join with people we are actively inviting who are “doing” in Chicago neighborhoods. Bring your own local doing to share. We want to do more and more in all localities, and to do it more together.

This year’s conference will follow the same simple and active format as all the previous conferences. We’ll gather for one big opening, create a working agenda that includes all of our most important issues and questions, meet with friends and colleagues to actively address everything on the agenda, document and publish our notes online, and head back out into all the things we are doing with more energy, more clarity and more connections.

The momentum of community is rising. Please join us!
…for more and more global good on the ground where you live.

WHEN? July 19-22, 2007 …music and barbecue on Thursday night, conference all day Friday and Saturday, finishing by noon on Sunday, with airport drop-offs or excursions for out-of-towners on Sunday afternoon.

WHERE? General Robert E. Wood Boys & Girls Club, 2950 W. 25th Street, Chicago IL 60623

WHO SHOULD COME? Anyone who wants to get more and more into community, technology, environment, and other social justice kinds of work and practice. Anyone who wants to make more and more connections between all these sorts of things. And anyone who wants to have more and more fun and friends in the process of community leadership.

WHAT TO BRING? Food to eat/share, materials to show/share, ideas and questions, issues and projects that you care about and want to inform and be informed by others AND a total of $40 (scholarships may be available) to pay for basic costs of site and materials for all three days of meetings.

NOW WHAT? Send an email to nurturegirl@gmail.com, make a payment at paypal, forward this invitation to friends and colleagues, people you work with — and people you want to work with. we’ll send you details about places and times and be glad to answer any other questions. Stay tuned to www.GlobalChicago.net for more information.

CO-CONVENERS? Ted Ernst, Hermilo Hinojosa, Kachina Katrina Zavalney, Michael Herman, Michael Maranda, Jean Russell, Dave Chakrabarti, Pierre Clark, and You…

Discussion

What kind of stuff
have we been doing?

* hosting and attending green dinners,
* community gardening,
* blogging,
* digital excellence & inclusion,
* chicago conservation corps training,
* growing food,
* organizing block clubs and parties,
* depaving your yard and inviting neighbors,
* restoring a riverbank,
* planting native prairie in your local park
* organizing your neighbors to work with the alderman or CAPS to get a camera,
* or get one taken out,
* recruiting volunteers,
* organizing safe routes to school,
* buying organic foods,
* experimenting with new tech ways to connect people,
* and living with less tech
* driving less,
* recycling more,
* ensuring all differently brained people are seen as human beings,
* seeing to it that the ADA laws are followed,
* making social activists are supported and nurtured,
* urban chicken egg farming
* block clubs
* traffic calming
* peace parks
* “doing.”… ,

Leadership in Participatory Culture

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What do we mean by leadership when we talk about it within the frame of participatory culture?

In May, Ode magazine published The Power of Many, an article about our participatory culture (rather than top down hierarchies). On the website, they also post another article about the We mentality.

Whereas leadership in hierarchical organizations, by definition, seems to be a relational position within the system, participatory culture surfaces a different filter for leadership. What is that filter? How do we know it when we see it, especially if it does not include an organizationally designated title?

Leaders within this context display, I think, the following characteristics. And I would, of course, prefer to think of them as nurturers. But to bridge from one paradigm to the new thrivable participatory one, we will use the past terminology. Leaders, then, in participatory culture, noticeably portray the following:

  • trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
  • draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
  • demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
  • act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
  • show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
  • listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
  • instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
  • defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
  • hold each participant to their greatness
  • open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
  • willing and ready for new opportunities
  • able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty

Leaders in participatory community foster a sense of tribe/community as something each individual serves, uplifts, and is in turn cared for by. They presume that people are capable of being a contribution beyond their own individual wants to act for the improvement of the collective. These leaders are not afraid to be a strong example to embody the moral code of the group.

Leaders in participatory communities do not function in a top down dictatorial method–they facilitate emergence within the collective. They do not direct: they bring forth. They distribute power to the individuals, empowering them to be their best, give their best, and be given the best. They encourage positive reinforcement to get more of what the collective needs to flourish. These leaders see their role as bringing out the best in others, as responsible for people harnessing collective expertise, wisdom, and creativity.