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just a mini mindgrape this afternoon…
We’re tired of attending conferences and being talked at, when just about anyone in the audience could themselves be a speaker.
Unconferences are nicer, because we can all self-organize and make the event our own.
But there’s a next stage we’re ready for.
We want something action-oriented, and by this I don’t mean something where we create a plan of action.
It’s more about embodiment.
We want embodied experiences.
We want embodied action.
So much of the talk amongst the innovators and change agents is about how things could be or might be or will be in the future.
Sometimes we forget that all this change hinges on US CHANGING.
WE. OURSELVES.
We have to embody the language and behaviors of a different culture of people, if we want to see a different culture in society. We have to know, ourselves, through our own direct experience, what the new human OS is all about.
What are the new social agreements? How do we communicate? What are we doing?
There is a growing group of people, let’s call them/us culture hackers, who are living the new protocols and practices that reboot our heads and our hearts, so that change actually manifests on the outside. They’re all over the place, and they have working prototypes. They’re showing how it’s done.
I want to go to gatherings where I can experience that.
I want to learn by doing and being, so that group intelligence, creativity, innovation and passion are ‘unlocked.’
We talk about wanting new living infrastructures (societal, economic, technological, political, environmental, etc) all the time, and there’s plenty of frameworks out there that I’m sure would work just fine.
Well, who are the people using these new systems? What are they like? What is the story of their reality (ie – their mythology)? How do they treat each other? How are their actions reflecting the stories they tell themselves and each other about how the world works?
If we want a new society, let’s learn how to become one. Let’s have events where we can embody the kind of people we really are, deeply, and grow new worlds from that place of truth and authenticity and dare I say, love.
After the days of conferences, where we talked about the future state of things, come the days of events where we come together and just start being the kind of people we want to be surrounded by and then make sh*t happen together.
What shall we call such a thing?
emergent by design 
‘Living conferences’?
meh… i don’t want to use the word ‘conference’
it’s more of a playspace that i’m envisioning, something fun, experimental, interactive
At SFAgile last week we talked about the difference between a movement and a talkment, and how an unconference is not really much more than talking…
We need to act, to produce, to hack.
GlobalServiceJam is a good example, and they already created spin-offs on sustainability and government.
So why not include a hacker jam at the next conference?
Thanks for the inspiring post:-)
Take care and keep hacking.
Olaf
That thing that comes after conferences is Community! If the event attracted like minded people, provided a shared experience and enabled the attendees to interact sufficiently, then the next step is deeper engagement in the content and implementation of the ideas presented – at the very least a widening community of people speaking the same language and committed to a shared vision, using social media to communicate and create…
Nice question!
I’m going to pitch for the word “Congruences”
States of being where everyone comes together in a deeply congruent state.
Home.
awww
how ’bout a cultiva(c)tion or manifest/ival
i laughed out loud at ‘manifestival’!!
abs(‘LOL’) > ‘meh’ 🙂
a Being the Becoming Space…an experience that transcends and includes experience itself:)
Thanks for a great article, Venessa. I agree wholeheartedly. And hats off to whoever suggested ‘manifestival’. Very best wishes. Jack
How about a “be-in”?
Workshops
yes….. there will be workshops there…….. but i think we’d want to connote a multiplicity of things going on, many opportunities for interaction and engagement on a variety of levels… learning, art, music, dance, relationship-building, tools, practices, playfulness, FUN!
Post Warp
Hmm, new vocabulary to focus on the hard part, the getting shift done so that people know it’s done and well. Good proposals accumulating already in this global mindstorm.
I imagine like minded selves just doing that, brief unconference and go do together. It could be an Open Space event where the output is more than conference minutes and action plans, with actions already done and made shareable, so they scale. Like Atlassian’s FedEx day. Do whatever you want and deliver in 24h. I see us listen, learn, experiment, understand, prototype, review, improve, build, ship, share.
More meaning to mull about.
Do-ference (make a difference)
Come-and-goference
Co-building, barn raising,
Learning Man (homage to Burning Man)
Learning Man is hilarious!
See also Building Man – http://www.uniteddiversity.com, haver fun, learn, build an ecovillage, come back next year and evolve it…
In today’s “attention economy” the wisdome of Henry Ford is being contradicted. You can build a reputation on what you are going to do and a classic example comes from Harvard’s Long Term Capitalism Awards.
We see foundations and corporations respond as if asked to ‘opine the change you wish to see in the world’ while the practitioners are censored
http://lnkd.in/zhKgHH
We call them Innotribe Labs. I you want to know my thinking about “events” of “conferences” check out my post “Exploring the limits” http://petervan.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/exploring-the-limits/
What about co-forences? (co-creating conferences)
Co-create-ference? Conforum? Co-work-shop? Con-flu-ence?
Hey Venessa, great thought provoking mindgrape 🙂
At West Lexham we call it a Convergence. Each one emerges out of the visions for a better way of living and learning that participants express at the previous one. Everything from what and how we eat, to where and how we learn is cocreated ahead of and also during the event by participants. Pop up content is all the rage alongside a curated programme of experiences and workshops. The Crowdshare Cafe and Our Daily Bread baking sessions make snack breaks interactive, participants bring ingredients, bake together and share with everyone. There are two our three tracks alongside each
other bringing in eco building and design, innovation and personal growth, bodywork and wellbeing and the arts. Attendees, facilitators and volunteers all merge and mingle and come from hyper local through to intentional background srange
haha phone blogging :$
Through to international backgrounds and include old friends and supporters as well as new ones. The power of these gatherings seems to lie in the diversity of attendees and content and the flexible and interactive structure of the weekend. The last event really benefitted from a degree of letting go by the core team to allow real cocreation.and spontaneity to.emerge.
See http://www.westlexham.org/summerconvergence next event31st Aug to 2nd Sep 2012
I think you hit the nail on the head with ‘unconference’, plus always love a Lewis Carroll reference.
I’ve always liked the concept of praxis, which I use as a shorthand for “informed practice.” Wikipedia has a decent definition: “Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practiced, embodied, or realised. Praxis may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_process)
And I’m a fan of fractals, too, as a metaphor for all kinds of things happening at multiple levels of scale and context.
Fraxis?
Practals?
How about PraxisCon?
🙂
perhaps simply – life.
or collaboratory. .. as ongoing being/becoming – our exposed emergence.
I really like “collaboratory”. Very clever, simplistic, and self-explanatory.
i heard it first from Venessa…
We (thanks for the shout-out, Olaf) call it a Jam.
This will come across as self-aggrandisement, but the things you hope for are the things folks say they find in a Jam. There’s a focus on action (we call it “doing, not talking”), a sense of meaning, and a community of purpose.
It’s also a heap of fun. 🙂
Adam
I second (or third) that emoticon 😀 – and what comes next is the Post JAM High (a euphoric sense of accomplishment).
JAM on.
Peter
We need to INTEGRATE many functions (designing, learning, organizing, planning, constructing, weaving, playing, promoting, etc.) that occur in INTENTIONAL GATHERINGS. In a RT/DT sys/net of happenings of different sizes and styles. RT/DT = RealTime/DelayedTime (synchronous/asynchronous). A new “system of platforms” for the emergence of a nu humanity.
Professional conferences have been long critiqued as grossly ineffective as learning environments. Serious effort in facilitating learning appears to decline from pre-school to beyond graduate school. It is well known that the educational function of top research universities is inferior (with significant exceptions) as their admissions policies select self-learners that claim not to need any facilitation. Can we imagine what quality learning facilitation for those with greater and greater competencies might generate?
A few decades ago, George Por turned me on to some articles about the need for new style conferences by Anthony Judge. I have not been able to locate them, but a read up from 1962 to today of Judge’s publications is “an education”. Note the titles and the dates, and wonder – what happened, or didn’t happen? http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/themes/alphayr.php Judge’s proposal for on-site conference communication for the Rio 1992 conference is an example of his thinking: http://habitat.igc.org/pims/pim-aj.htm .
The euphoria of powerful gatherings seldom results in intended followup; a phenomenon that cries for study. Tom Atlee’s Story Field Gathering at the Shamballa retreat in Colorado in August 2007 was the most exciting and productive I have ever attended. Everyone pledged to meet again; but when the next meeting was schedule there was not sufficient interest and it was canceled. On searching for the correct date of the 2007 conference I happily discover that the theme still exists in a future-history report from Tom on a 2015 Storycology Project: http://storyfieldconference.com/SFC-Atlee-Storycology.html .
Making and editing recordings of sessions and providing free access to them would make many of those spontaneous sessions available to many. Some gatherings should not have “presentations” but require participants to have processed material online before the gathering – and the gatherings should be facilitated by the best practices, as used by NCDD. Most gatherings should include some explicit plans for what participants will do after the gathering. Very serious efforts to do this at the Story Field gathering appeared not to work.
Given the long history of many small experiments that go nowhere and no real improvement in gathering for (designing, learning, organizing, planning, constructing, weaving, playing, promoting, etc.), I doubt that what is needed will simply “emerge” for the same experiments suggested today. How do we emerge major enterprises/societies that meet our needs? A weaving of gatherings with a cycling of design/action for the emergent holarchy of a nu humanity cannot be a fixed program; but neither can it be ignored because it is “too big”.
In a holarchy of systems, holons can be both more creatively autonomous and productive when they are well integrated with higher (and lower) holons. Gatherings-for-Whatever can be much better if viable parts of a larger, emergent system. The types of gatherings suggested in these comments can only become really viable (to our larger mission) in the context of concrete action at “higher holon” levels.
Design and Action at these “higher holon” levels will occur at the level of gatherings at our holon level. Such gathering should not attempt to dictate, but provide alternative contexts as scaffolding for higher levels of synergy and collaboration. The “higher holon” action will occur as INTER GATHERING PATTERNS OVER TIME.
Over the decades I’ve participated in a great variety of intentional gatherings and found many experiments quite exciting. But each was a singular happening with a short tail of continued action. I wish I could say that I see something new on the horizon. Maybe we need to imagine beyond our horizons.
We could call them distributed jams or gatherings or work sessions. We need to do the same work any start-up does: map and identify goals and needs, and see what the patterns are, i.e. geographically and topically, because we are not going to get together in large groups until we make money and can afford it. We need to learn to function as a virtual consultancy / manufacturer / services provider. I suggest we do something like a quadrant analysis to see what big hairy audacious goals we gravitate toward collectively, by the numbers. To include intensity of commitment, we could use a sort of Bayesian logic: I wanna do this goal or / and I have this need, which is way out there (0.1) or close at hand and relatively easy for our unique combination of skills to do (1) — that’s the stated result — and then self-rate our intensity of desire and commitment from very low to non-existent (0.1 or less), up to full-on commitment (1). Then multiply the result for a composite index.
Then we look at the patterns and see what has high composite numbers from significant groups of people who can afford to meet face to face because they are nearby. That is what’s important, until we are connected to a highly profitable sustainable business and can take on things with lower numbers.
There have been some very good posts about what others are doing, like Goteo, and http://www.villageforum.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=115&Itemid=120, which offer part of the solution. I am starting a health product company, in order to fund starting a sustainable economy in a real place with a real population and wild animals in Africa’s safari country, and I would like people to do distributed work to organize and refine tools and information we can use. We will go beyond the demonstration project to mass-customize the documentation, so the people in very different places can select from among that which supports their eco-region and culture to get the best choice for them without searching through everything that does not apply to them.
This will include organizing part of the Maker movement to develop the specific manufacturing technologies and products needed to solve specific problems faced by communities in one eco-region or another, for cottage and village cooperative scale use. It will include demonstrating the use of GIS to identify where the larger production needs to happen (the principle is simple: drive it down to the the smallest place that can support the technology — distribute production, and have it owned by communities. See villageforum for the general concept, but then modify it so it fits living on $1.25 per day per person income. To wrap your head around that one, let’s set up an area where I and others who have studied or lived the kind of work needed can discuss it with those who have not and want to learn, virtually, to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible.
Part of the idea is to treat this like a business we want to love. I certainly love Imagine Zambia.
They’ve had many different names historically: Hackathon, Jam, Make-a-thon, ideathon, do-fest, sprint, volunteer weekend, talka, etc. I think the key to futuring this is imagining a set of Goals, Purposes, Missions for the event(s). Mark suggested Learning, which is a nice broad category that could work at academic conferences. But, if the goal is to truly do, then super focused events with activated invested stakeholders have been shown to be very effective – barn raising, camp cleanup prep, constitutional convention, main street cleanup. Different purposes will different associated demographics will prob jive better with different terms. Maybe they will all be reduced to broad terms like leveling up, higher use, or +1ing.
Actfest
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See/Change
(…into something rich and strange)
Potlatch – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
Especially if the ‘gifts’ are in kind, of the mind and heart. I’d love to attend a ‘work’ potlatch.
My $.02.
Bloom Sessions?
The conference could give the opportunity to all kind of “seeds” to meet and listen to info and change ideas in a great humus and create positive circumstances to grow together, also afterwards, at the rhythm of “sprouting” in the follow-up “bloom sessions” to make new systems and patterns flourish, make us live the new life infrastructures and by doing so, we nurture our new worlds.
Tx!
little contribution: currently participating in ‘labsurlab’, http://quito.labsurlab.org, an event with artists and activists of all sorts in south america.
we’re exploring the concept of “minga” (in one of the many indigenous languages here): community work, done helping each other in indigenous communities.
this approach could be adapted to events: the host organizing the event formulates a need, e.g. a necessity of the local community or a specific problem. then calls for the event, and people participating contribute work in solving the need, necessity or problem. hackathons in the software community also go in that direction. instead of meeting and “only” cross-pollinating between ourselves.
I’m still thinking of names…
–Chrysalis – an environment that nurtures transformation
–Butterfly effect – infinitesimal changes are at the heart of change on any scale, and: effective change is breathtakingly light. (maybe not a great festival name though…)
–Difference engine
We are all living/saying “No more conferences” and I’m inclined to leave it at that…because what comes after ‘No more conferences’ is a different way of connecting with one another that is unique to any given moment/circumstance…if people have events to come create together, each event will be distinct – emergent — let our connective spaces emerge as they will without a label, no?As you say, we are talking about an OS (love it!!!) not an event or a single happening – people coming together in the course of life, living together compassionately, creatively, collaboratively and in connection. Isn’t this, really, the Art of Living (to borrow from Buddhists)? And I’m also thinking, if we are embodying the change we we want to see, then every moment we can be learning by doing….so no single event stands out as our learning opportunity…or? Looking for a single label for what comes beyond the conference feels like we are keeping one foot in the old OS….Love this post – thank you very much!!!! May we all walk in Spirit.
Maybe we take the crust of formality off it and call it getting together, or gathering? Does that help to hold it in a different light?
We call it a Jam.
The last one: http://www.globalservicejam.org
The next one: http://www.globalsustainabilityjam.org
48 hours, locally face-to-face and hands-on. Globally networked and collaborative. DOING NOT TALKING.
Quotes:
“the best weekend of the year”
“I did 4 weeks’ work in 48 hours”
“transformative”
“why can’t work always feel like this?”
“we had a blast!”
Join us? 🙂
From insight to action… it’s called pioneering.
Hello Ray Wang and all,
In pioneering, Daniel Boone and others like him grew up in the forest, or joined bands of trappeurs who were like a 24-7-365 boot camp, and could usually survive in teams of 2 or 3; some extraordinary ones could make it alone on their own skills, but even Kit Carson was killed at about age 32 if I remember correctly.
Daniel Boone led a team of road-builders, who made the footpaths and game trails through the Appalachians passable for wagons. The families who came to settle were called pioneers, but they were really early adopters who literally followed the pioneers across the wilderness to favorable farming areas. These families were given shopping lists for supplies and equipment, and instructions on organization and survival for the journey. They were trained to pull their wagons into a defensive circle and unhitch their oxeninto the center of the circle in the shortest possible time, in event of an attack.
The analogy is to scoping, planning and coordinating; the threat is probably not death on the journey, but it certainly is the fizzling out of the enterprise, or outright defeat at some scale of operations. Scoping, planning and coordinating are what comes between insight and action.
Regards,
Mark Roest
On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 12:29 AM, emergent by design wrote:
> R Ray Wang (@rwang0) commented: “From insight to action… it’s called > pioneering.”
which can help you through an urgent financial problem in addition
to simply converting monthly payments into a onetime
payment. The fact is you get only $1 to $5 when completing
a survey and another fawct is you will only get several surveys a month,
every month. Then they will go back to the three aforementioned
companies and see if any are willing to beat their best offer.