Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Listed just below Doonesbury, ?The Guide to the Patriot Act, part 1? and ‘I became the profane pervert Arab blogger,’ the September 12 web site hit #25 on the Popdex popularity index this evening, two days after it was announced. Given that there are over 900,000 blogs out there, this is quite a respectable showing. We had inputs from Spain, Lithuania, Portugese, and Kazakhstan within hours after announcing the site.

We have lots of new stuff on the wiki as well as messages from Sci Fi writer/Optimist David Brin and ?Pay It Forward? author Catherine Ryan Hyde (www.september12.org/uplift)

Many thanks to Jerry Michalski, Antonio Rodriguez, Jane LaPointe, Heather Wood Ion, and other GivingSpace folks for helping to pull this together.

Maybe there is something to this notion of scale free networks after all…

September 12 experiment is launched. We have set up a web site www.September12.org to encourage people to do positive things on September 12. It is an attempt to discover scalable small things which can make a difference. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for designing the site, and Antonio Rodriguez for technical support. We hope to grow our mailing list from the activities at the site, and use it to develop other activities in the future. Please visit the site at http://www.september12.org and circulate it to your friends and other mailing lists. The site includes a Wiki and a Blog with which we hope to discover and communicate patterns and ideas for uplift.

Images and Voices of Hope World Summit Meeting in New York, October 2-5. . This is a great meeting, applying the notions of Appreciative Inquiry to the media. This meeting three years ago triggered my interest in starting GivingSpace.

The Love to Iraq Project, led by Jon Larson as an outgrowth of our May workshop, shipped 1000 kits to school children in Iraq on August 31. The initial idea of delivering the packages via the US Marines didn?t work out, so Jon has merged efforts with Church World Service to handle the logistics. Hopefully, we will be grow this idea to include two-way communication, as a means of establishing a web of trust.

Uplift Scholars Program. Last December, during a breakfast meeting with Jeff Ashe, we both noted how powerful the title ?Visiting Scholar? was (he was at Brandeis, I was at Stanford). We wondered if there was some way to replicate this among the poor, soliciting Uplift Scholars from among the poorest of the less developed countries. If we could figure out a way to connect the one-in-a-thousand most creative, community-oriented folks among the other 4 billion, we would have a pool of 4 million scholars. Jeff, now with Oxfam America, sent me a note suggesting some ideas: ?Although most of the “stars” are completely illiterate, or at have a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing, most of the NGOs do have some computer and network capacity (although e-mail works at a snails pace in Ethiopia). The glue is what we have been talking about. Identifying a number of these “stars” through various NGOs, providing them the opportunity to come together to exchange experiences every couple of months or so and having someone, perhaps the most literate, collecting the stories and sharing them. Costs would be minor, but if a number were identified within the context of a single city or rural area costs would be low. If you identified a few sites in a country like Ethiopia, then representatives could meet together two or three times a year. You would need a good facilitator to moderate and build on the process.? We are looking at ways to pull this together.

Pattern Languages. Richard Gabriel, Mac and Marcia Odell, and Jane LaPointe had a meeting in the Boston area to talk about directions for Pattern Languages. Richard will be convening some pattern folk at the OOPSLA conference (for geeks) in Anaheim, and we?ll be examining what we can do to participate in this federation.
I?ve update the GivingSpace web page www.givingspace.org with an acknowledgement list, naming the 150 or so people who have generously given of their time to GivingSpace. This was an amazing list to collect and think back on all of the contributions and ideas you have made. I suspect I missed quite a few names. Please let me know if I accidentally left off your name.

May good things come,

Tom Munnecke
munnecke@csli.stanford.edu

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I’ve been invited to participate in a seminar at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management, entitled, “New Designs for Transformational Cooperation.”

I started out thinking about philanthropy and humanitarian uplift, and kept running into the same issue: the conversation inevitably devolved to money and monetary transactions. Philanthropy = Fundraising, it seemed. Certainly, giving money is a form of philanthropy, but does it have to be the lead question?

This attitude connects directly to the “so many problems, so little money” view of the world. As Gary Gunderson says in Deeply Woven Roots , “We don’t know how to value things which don’t come with a price tag.” So, we define things as problems, and value them according to the cost of the solution.

This links problems to solutions like soup to sandwiches. We don’t have enough money for all the problems, so we need to prioritize them. If something doesn’t rank at the top of the list, it doesn’t get any money. If a problem gets really big, we declare war on the problem, making sure that it gets our money – look at the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on HIV/AIDS. This fuels a problem addiction loop; we measure “progress” in how fast we spin through the vicious circle.

A flip from “so many problems, so little money” to the positive perspective leads to “so many good things, so little appreciation.” But how do we talk about the good things? Fear and cynicism sells newspapers; disease sells health care.

Appreciative Inquiry is one way of doing this:

Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives ?life? to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system?s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential.

We can see the positive core values of humanity when we look at how people react to a newborn baby. We can think of uplifting activities as those which amplify these positive core values.

I’ve invented two terms to describe this “flipping” from the negative to the positive: Malgnosis, a way of knowing based on what is wrong or failing, and Benegnosis, a way of knowing based on what is successful or beneficial.

Combining swarms of little uplifting things, knowing what we know about networks and their behavior, could have dramatic aggregate, triggering a cascade of uplift…

I was just reading David Weinberger’s book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, and found some interesting quotes: “By removing the central control points, the Web enabled a self-organizing, self-stimulated growth of contents and links on a scale the world has literally never experienced before… what the Web has done to documents it is doing to just about every institution it touches.” (p. ix )

How do we apply this kind of thinking to humanitarian uplift? Is there some way to have lots of self-organizing, self-stimulating uplift activities which link to themselves?

It seems to me that in order to do this, we need to see that the uplift activities have some common properties:

1. They include a sense of reciprocity or mutuality.

2. They are based on a sense of expectation or hope for a better world.

3. There is sufficient, but not stiffling, organization or linkages to bring people and ideas together.

4. Successes get replicated.

I’m ramping up the September 12 idea to experiment with this now…