Archive for June, 2009

Jun/09/09//Gibrán Rivera//Networks

The Hub

Emergence is an interesting thing; one might even argue that it is the most naturally occurring of all things – couldn’t we say that the universe itself just emerged and keeps emerging? As we approach the limits of the best laid out planning processes we could come up with we begin to face the fact that a world of increasing complexity cannot be managed like it is a big machine that will produce predictable and measurable outcomes. In this increasingly complex world some of us are seeking ways to align ourselves with the process of emergence, to foster and facilitate it, to serve it with sharp intentionality and to let go of command and control fantasies.

Here is where “The Hub” comes in. I had the pleasure of visiting “The Hub” in São Paulo and I find myself deeply inspired. Emergence Theory demands locality, it proposes that local micro-interactions are foundational to the emergence of new systems. “The Hub” is about co-location, it provides a physical space that is meant to “facilitate unlikely encounters” among people concerned with social change and social innovation. “The Hub – São Paulo” provides a beautiful creative space that is open, flexible and stimulating. Small teams or individual social entrepreneurs can make it their full-time home, or they can arrange to rent space there anywhere from 5 to 100 hours per month.

These social innovators may be focused on anything, and ideally on different things. In fact, given that the “The Hub – São Paulo” is still in start-up mode, I have learned that some of its tenants do not even have an explicit social mission. A space like this, without walls or fixed desks is a space where previously unthinkable projects can emerge, it is an ideal space for the intersection of fields that makes “The Medici Effect” possible – this is how innovation happens.

Hub Hosts are a lot like network weavers. Yes, they take care of details like shared printers and internet connections, but they also work to interconnect tenants using the space. Tenants are encouraged to host events and information sessions where they can share what they are working on and what they are learning. “The Hub” is a truly vibrant space where socially committed individuals can experience life in a network and begin to shed their organizational constraints. “The Hub” is just one response to the need for new forms of human organization, but it certainly is a great one, it is the sort of place from which a new world can emerge.

What other efforts to apply network theory do you know about?

For more on The Hub:
Creating an Ecology of Social Innovation
from the Kosmos Journal

For more on Emergence:
Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale
by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
by Steven Johnson






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Jun/08/09//Marianne Hughes//Spiritual Activism

Deep Change

It is Sunday morning and the last day of a conference that I have been attending called Deep Change: Transforming the Practice of Social Justice. We are at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the beautiful state of North Carolina. The South is a perfect location for this convening for as one of the participants said, “I long for the South to heal because if the South heals the United States heals and if the United States heals the world will heal”.

Eighty frontline organizers, intermediary organizations and funders have gathered here to learn together, deepen their connections to one another and thereby create a shared sense of identity and an expanded field of spiritual activism. This coming together is a fractal, a small slice of a movement renewed and re-grounded in “an ethic of sustainability, spirituality and a broader understanding of freedom’ committed to infusing spiritual practice into the pursuit of social justice.

I am one of the veterans here. My own activism launched 40 years ago as an anti-poverty community organizer on the Mexican border town of Laredo, Texas. Movement work at that time was inspired by and rooted in the spirituality of the civil rights, farm workers and anti-war movements. Many activists were animated by their Jewish understanding of social justice or of their Christian roots in the social gospel. As the movement and sector evolved political analysis and spirituality became disaggregated as the movement turned its attention to building effective organizations and leaders. This detour was probably an important leg of the journey but one that needs to be left behind as we seek new ways to build a just and sustainable world.

My own experience during that time had the wilderness quality of wandering and confusion for I could never understand how or why we had created this kind of oppositional thinking. I am so very grateful and inspired by this new generation of activists who are committed to re-integrating inner and outer transformation in the pursuit of social justice and transformative change.

As part of this extraordinary gathering we were enchanted and changed by our encounters with the artistry and talent of two of North Carolina’s best: Spoken Word poet, Glenis Redmond, and bluegrass musicians, Baby Cowboy.

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Jun/05/09//Cynthia Silva Parker//Race, Class, Power

On, Women, Revolution and Love

I’ve never been much of a feminist. In the crucible of my political coming of age, I internalized a strong message. I could either be a ‘race woman,’ devoting myself to improving the conditions of black people, or I could ally myself with bourgeois white feminists. There were no other choices, and clearly only one was acceptable. A small group of female African American seminary students was working out a ‘wymist’ theory that took gender, race and poverty seriously but I didn’t take them seriously at the time. I constructed my identity primarily around race. Like many African American women who’ve played a prominent role in the struggle for freedom and justice, I would advocate for the community as a whole—no particular emphasis on women. Focusing on women, and especially highlighting sexism and misogyny within the black community, was an especially hard row that I didn’t want to hoe.

In the past two years, I’ve begun to take women’s work – organizing among and on behalf of women – more seriously. Why? Because I’ve begun to see a unique source of power I had missed before. I’ve worked with incredible African American and Sudanese women in the Sisterhood for Peace who working toward peace for the whole of Sudan. I’ve wept as I watched documentaries about the horrors facing women in Darfur and as I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, set in late 1980s Afghanistan. I’ve learned with great pride about Liberian organizer, Leymah Gbowee, who catalyzed the Women in Peacebuilding Network—a movement of women who were sick and tired of losing sons, brothers, and husbands to a 14 year civil war—and whose actions led to the war’s end.

From Sisterhood For Peace.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Jun/04/09//Curtis Ogden//What We Are Reading

Generation G

In the final chapter of “What Would Google Do?” (recently referred to by Marianne), Jeff Jarvis makes a provocative statement about the future and promise of a networked world.  Many of the points Jarvis makes appear to turn things on their head, at least compared to the way that many of us might first react to developments in our ever more densely connected and information-rich world.

A few things to ponder:

1.    This current generation is growing up with an ability to stay in touch with nearly everyone they meet throughout their entire lives.  Whereas those of us who grew up pre-Facebook may have lost track of old childhood friends and college buddies, this generation has the possibility of always being more directly in touch with the different chapters of their lives.  Scary?  This seems profound to me, and yet I don’t really know exactly how.  What might this do to the very nature of relationship?

2.    The flip side of TMI (too much information) is greater transparency.  Young people are putting so much more of themselves and their lives out for public consideration.  Often this gets construed as risky and/or a kind of exhibitionism.  However, if more people are playing the same game, then perhaps the rules will enforce greater overall acceptance and safety of full and liberating self-expression.  Jarvis quotes author David Weinberger  – “An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness.”  Wow.

3.    And what about all of that apparently inane information that people share about their bunions or the mold growing on the bathroom tile?  Well, how about the benefit of “ambient intimacy” (Jarvis quoting blogger Leisa Reichelt -www.disambiguity.com), swapping the small details of our daily lives?  This may just help us to develop stronger relationships as we come to know more about people who would otherwise be just acquaintances, or grease the wheels for the next time we physically see one another or talk by phone (less catch up time).

Throughout these and multiple other points, Jarvis seems to be suggesting that more integrated lives and more widespread trust are a result of living in the Google age.  Given that collaboration thrives on trust, and that collaboration may be our saving grace as a species (see Charles Darwin and my post “The Group Effect” – ), shouldn’t we all be striving to be fully exposed and (wireless) card carrying members of Generation G?

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Jun/03/09//Linda Guinee//IISC:Outside

Habit Mind

Yesterday was my birthday – and I’ve established a ritual I love on my birthday. Every year for MANY years, I’ve spent the day in a spirit of curiosity. I don’t plan it ahead, but spend the day noticing things that I’ve never done and trying at least one. It’s a way of spending the day being open to possibility. And I usually wonder, at the end of the day, why I don’t live every day that way. It has uncovered for me the magic of yoga, of bleacher seats at Fenway Park, of a manicure and pedicure, of many kinds of food and many other things.

So today, I started thinking about my little birthday ritual in a new way. I started wondering about all the things I do (and we do) because I know them. And started wondering what would happen if I spent more time in this curious unknown place. What if I didn’t spend as much time keeping ground under my feet? What if design and facilitation didn’t fall on the old tried and true quite so much? What if the stories I tell myself about why people (or groups) do the things they do weren’t true – or were only one version of what’s true? What if I spent the day noticing situations and what I normally do – and playing around with something else? What might emerge then?

I’m not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But merely wondering what would happen if every day was a little more fresh – and grew out of a spirit of curiosity? I think, as well, about the post Marianne made recently, in which she talked about our need to approach the current situation with new thinking, with a paradigm shift. In that spirit, I’m wondering what habitual ways of thinking and acting I have as an individual – and also what habitual ways of thinking and acting that we have as organizations and as a community working toward social justice and social change. What would happen if we paid attention, noticed what we usually do – and strategically tried something different?

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