Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Here are some notes I took during Larry Harvey’s description of BurningMan and the gift economy at my March 2003 workshop…

“Self-expressive art was its own reward” the power of raising the effigy- “I” comes as individual, “we” raise it, and then “it” becomes the focus…

the context of the group was that it had no context… the value of greeters to introduce newbies to the community.

Suggested reading Louis Hyde’s book, “The Gift” — the erotic life of property and its unruly fecundity. ”

Larry gives an Aha! to Louis – example of Aha! metric…

“as gifts move through society, decentralized cohesiveness emerges in their wake”

“the true value of a gift is in its passage.”

at some point, gifts consume us, oversoul reaches a critical mass

community starts with survival, moves up from there

uplift metaphor: transcendance is like a chimney, the hotter the flame, the stronger it becomes.

value of BurningMan is in the sense of working and doing

story-telling is an social/community process, not just a transcript

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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We had a great GivingSpace workshop in Ben Lomond, California, in the Redwoods north of Santa Cruz. Mac Odell facilitated it with his Appreciative Planning and Action (APA) which adds a “Do It Now” component to the Standard Appreciative Inquiry model. We were privileged to have Amer Araim attend, an Iraqi Imam of the Concord Mosque. Bliss Browne from Imagine Chicago was there, too. One idea which bubbled up was to connect school kids in the US and Iraq via a gift exchange, and within a week, Jon Larson had organized the effort, put up a web site, Love To Iraq, and we had our first shipment on the way. Our next workshop at Ben Lomond will be July 20-23, and there will be a two day workshop by Richard Gabriel on the topic of an Uplift Pattern Language.

Imagine a mother bringing her newborn baby into a room. People cluster around, and expressions of joy, love, happiness, jubilation, peace, wonder, and hopeabound. This scene could happen in any country, with people from any political, religious, or cultural background. The feelings aroused by a baby in a room reflect the positive core values of humanity which exist in all of us.

Gary Gunderson has pointed out to me that over the past few centuries, the positive side of human nature has somehow become usurped by religious dogma. Our language for the positive has been inhibited by this, while the language for the cynical and negative has thrived. Trying to reclaim the language of the positive without becoming enmeshed in the language of a specific church is quite a challenge.

Naming a pattern BabyInRoom is one way of evoking and discussing these positive feelings. Those of any particular faith can still interpret this pattern in their language, but at the same time, those of other faiths, or none at all, can still communicate with each other and have some shared meaning across the various barriers keeping people apart.

Another pattern might be JubilationOfTheCommons. This is a flip on the Tragedy of the Commons, the typically depressing economist’s view of what happen when the selfish, greedy “homo economicus” approaches a common free resource. A little reflection, however, will discover that most of the most humanity’s progress has come from our ability to band together and work together as a group. The commons should be something to be celebrated, rather than viewed as a looter’s paradise.

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I had a wonderful dinner with Mac Odell, Jane LePointe, and Jean LeVaux in Amherst, Ma. last Sunday nite. I wanted to tap Mac’s ideas about how to move forward with the Uplift Academy idea. We spoke of the lessons learned from the Imagine Nepal program, an offshoot of many of the ideas explored in the Imagine Chicago project by Bliss Browne. Jane was also working on an Imagine Boston project, and there were other groups forming around the world, focusing on the use of appreciative inquiry to connect people and communities around the positive.

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I had the pleasure of spending a day with Mac Odell recently. Mac is one of the most cheerful and optimisitic people one could ever hope to meet. Waitresses, hotel clerks, toll booth attendants, and colleagues were all left smiling after meeting him. This is not an affectation, he simply loves the universe and lets it show. I met him at a Fetzer Institute meeting for the Valeo Inititative, a Dee Hock-inspired chaordic approach to health care reform. We were paired with each other in one of my first Appreciative Inquiry group sessions.

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Joi Ito recently published a message from Dee Hock about “Chaordic” thinking.  
I had the pleasure of working with Dee in the early days of his health care reform efforts, with a now-defunct group called the Vvaleo InitiativeHere are some whimsical notes and photos from the 1999 Vvaleo meeting. This was my introduction to the work of David Cooperrider and Appreciative Inquiry, which had a more lasting influence on my thinking.
Some background: I have been involved in health care information systems for 30 years.  I was one of the original designers of both the VA and the DoD hospital information systems.  About 10 years ago, however, I came to the conclusion that there were so many perverse incentives in our health care system that anything I did with computers to make it more efficient would only make it get worse faster. This lead to a bout of introspection, and my simultaneous discovery of the Santa Fe Institute and Tim Berners-Lee as he was just beginning the rapid growth of the web.
Dee has many good ideas and a fresh perspective, and I enjoy talking with him, but I am afraid that I was one of those who he called the “Internet Afficiandos” he mentioned in his letter:
“I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally
flawed…I gave up arguing such things with Internet aficionados several
years ago, for the vast majority were so intoxicated by their new toys that
they defended its emergence and lack of governance with zealotry bordering
on religious. Do you think many have sobered up enough to raise their heads
from computer screens and enlarge their perspective?”

Calling the Internet “fatally flawed” seems a little harsh. It strikes me that it is one of the defining transformations of the twentieth century. Dee and I clashed on this topic in our health care reform issues. I thought that we needed to start with a concept of an information “space” within which healthy things and organizations would thrive. He wanted to start with governance; the Internet to him was a passing fantasy. The group once produced a two page paper which used the word “governance” seven times, including an annotation that it was not trying to “overgovern.” He wanted to gather stakeholders and do his chaordic thing with them.
The Vvaleo summit meeting in Cleveland was an example of this approach. nbsp;About 200 folks were there, representing a wide range of stakeholders.  I soon realized that these were the very people we needed to disintermediate.  Asking them to “streamline” themselves and jumping off the gravy train was not going to happen.  Of course, we need new forms of governance as we scale things up, but as our industries are driven by perverse incentives – their metrics collide with their goals – we are only trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper.
Tim Berners-Lee started with an entirely different attitude. From his book, “Weaving the Web,”
What was often difficult for people to understand about the
design of the web was that there was nothing else beyond URLs, HTTP, and
HTML.  There was no central computer ?controlling? the web, no single
network on which these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere
that ?ran? the Web. The web was not a physical ?thing? that existed
in a certain ?place.? It was a ?space? in which information could exist.”

This idea has lead to billions of pages of information being posted worldwide, and entirely new ways of finding things, buying things, finding people.  It is the simplicity of these initial conditions, not elaborate forms of governance, which made the web the globally transforming technology that it is.  Had Tim gone to world leaders to ask permission to create a world wide web, or to blue ribbon experts to “organize” the web, or to database adminstrators to “normalize” information on the web, it would have never happened.
Dee has written a book and lectured tirelessly. But after a decade, he has yet to create a successful “chaordic” organization.
The Commons pours out torrents of words, but where are the actions? Perhaps he should stop throwing rocks at the Internet, come down off his (lonely) pedestal, and use the Internet to his advantage.
Yes, from his perspective, the Internet is “fatally flawed.” The Internet will never be Dee-centralized. I continue to be an Internet afficiandos, and will continue looking for those simple initial conditions which can trigger beneficial effects for humanity.

Business Week Online, Linux Uprising tells of the amazing story of how an open source software effort has changed the computer industry. A Microsoft executive in his retirement letter warns “Microsoft is in danger of being swept away by open source.” How can this happen? What is the energy driving this revolution?

My friend Mark Watson (I took that picture of him and his wife at the Taj Majal) effused on his blog,

“Why is the Internet so COOL? One reason is that people help each other. I try to spend about 30 minutes a week answering peoples questions on my favorite Usenet news groups. Today someone helped me! I needed to do an SQL query against a database that I just created with information on board of directors for a sampling of US companies. I am a little rusty on my SQL and was having problems. So, I posted to comp.databases a question and within a few minutes Bob Badour (who I do not know) was kind enough to help me out.”

Mark is not a newbie to the Internet. He has been publishing software since the Apple II in the late 1970′s, and written 13 technical books.

But something has changed. We are seeing the emergence of a gift economy, and we have reached a global critical mass within which an entirely new way of thinking is emerging. Two weeks ago, John Graham suggested the notion of using the Aha! as a reputation mechanism. A week ago, I posted a note on Zope.org describing our effort. And yesterday I got a message from Zope Guru Kapil Thangavelu offering to help out with the project. It turns out he has an open source package for rating which looks like it might be a foundation for doing the Aha! rating. This is an amazing sequence of events, and driven by people working out of a sense of generosity, collaboration, and cooperation. These energies are autocatalytic. The more we see them evidenced, the more incentive there will be for others to act the same way.

Can we channel this kind of energy and connectivity in other ways? Can people work together for humanitarian development, education, health, environmental issues, peace, and many other pressing problems of our times? Can we apply this energy in autocatalytic ways in which everyone is uplifted, and in so doing, uplifts everyone else?

I think so. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, thinks so, too. In Business Week Online he said:

“That’s when it hit me: You know what, people really get a good feeling themselves when they can give praise to people who deserve. That is more powerful than the need to complain about somebody. It was a wonderful revelation.”

All we need to do is give people the chance to connect at their positive core values. We’ve shown that it works in open source software, now we need to make it work in a cascade of uplift for humanity as a whole.

Stay tuned…

John Graham came up with a neat idea in our GivingSpace conference call this morning for rating objects called the Aha!. Similar in some ways to Friendly Favor’s ThankYou complementary currency, the Aha! would be given by someone who wishes to recognize a person, idea, or other object that has given them an Aha! experience. Objects which collect a lot of Aha!s would bubble up to the top of various listings, allowing future people to find the sites which have been most enlightening to other people.

This could be used in many different contexts, such as allowing Appreciative Inquiry groups to rate the questions they use for their inquiries. A database of questions could be established, and their effectiveness could be rated as people explored the question and its effect. As questions evolved over time, people could see how an original question got started, and then was changed to meet different contexts… part of an evolutionary attribution thinking of Douglas Engelbart

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