Thanks to a tip from Beth Kanter, I played with Tweet Clouds today. I tried three options, shown below in screen shots. The first is just my tweets, the second my tweets plus @replies and the third adds my del.icio.us tags. Fun! Notice any patterns? What I find most interesting is the difference between my tweets and my tags!
(The larger size images are easier to read, but too big for the blog page!)
You get by with a little help from your Twitter Friends, tweeting extensively from the Online Community Report gathering in Santa Fe. ocbf2008 – twemes.com. Thanks tweeters! There a lot of interesting stuff there. I haven’t looked, but I wonder if anyone talked about Slow Community?
Today I cross the half century mark. I am turning 50 on a typical Seattle spring day – the birds are singing wildly, the tulips are waving in the morning rain and the sky is just lightening. I won’t be online much today, but already I wake to a queue of well wishes on my Skype and even – a first for me – a blog post birthday greeting from the warm and wonderful Holder – Change Management Blog: Happy Birthday, Nancy White.
I am blessed and happy to be alive. My sister called earlier in the week and asked how I was feeling. You know, in my culture, turning 50 can be intimidating – some morbid “one foot in the grave” theme. But I feel very alive, and that life is full of love, meaningful work, and always a learning path in front of me. So as I head out to the last day of the Seeds of Compassion with the Dalai Lama, I’ll be carrying all of you in my heart. Here is my birthday gift to you for being in my life, both visible and invisible – some flowers created by Seattle youth for the Dalai Lama yesterday.
A couple of weeks ago, Peter Block said the qualities of successful community initiatives were, in his experience, being slow, small and underfunded. We all laughed, but looking around the room, his bravery in saying it seemed to resonate with many of us.
Have we been “communitied” to death? Has the abundance of choice, the speed with which commercial ventures have yet again jumped on to the “community” bandwagon anesthetized us to what “being together” as a community really is in our lives?
I was on a Skype call with a friend and colleague from Germany this morning and he was reflecting on how much he was enjoying working on an unfunded project. Used to the structure of organizations and businesses, he found the passion a wonderful, refreshing experience. I paused, then laughed and told him about hearing Peter Block. Something resonated. Bing!
Then, for fun, I said “what about a ‘slow community’ movement — like the ‘slow food’ movement?” We laughed, but again, that bell went off.
I thought I was joking, but now something is blossoming from that moment of humor. A few minutes later I read an email from Jay Cross recommending the article, Freedom to Learn :: Unitierra in Oaxaca by Gustavo Esteva. The article talks about the work of communities in Oaxaca who are eschewing schools and centrally designed learning experiences to take learning back into the hands of the community – on it’s own time, terms and tempo.
In the rush to colonize the possibility of community on the internet, with its characteristic speed and fleetness of metaphorical foot, we may have lost sight of the fact that some many of our most precious communities are slow, small and underfunded.
What kind of magic is this? What should we be paying attention to?
Is it time for a “slow community” movement? What would that look like to you? More importantly, how would it make your world a better place?
(Edit: Vanessa DeMauro had this thought in March. A good sign! )
Today I head over to do graphic recording in the Compassionate Listening Room at Seeds of Compassion. I have been cruising flickr to encourage people to put their events into the The Seeds of Compassion Pool. I have uploaded the graphic recording team’s work from Friday and Saturday there (limited access for the recorders at Qwest field, but they did small drawings on paper) on my Flickr stream. Just to be clear, the images are the amazing work of Keith McCandless, Patti Dobrowolski, Steven Wright and Timothy Corey. (The one to the right is from Steven Wright.)
If you are not in town, there is streaming video of many of the events on the Seeds website.