I was reading the spectacular, “When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice” by Terry Tempest Williams and this quote jumped out at me.
“Perfection is a flaw disguised as control.”
Terry Tempest Williams
I’ve been working on a writing project with Keith McCandless around Liberating Structures and time and time again we reflect on how control shows up. Perfection is one of the ways. When trying to work with emergent ideas, this is a huge, wet blanket.
Open Space Technology and the amazing people who stewarded it in the world were and are some of my most important teachers. One of them was the person who birthed OST, Harrison Owen, who passed away earlier this month into the largest Open Space ever. There will be an online OS to celebrate and remember Harrison. Here are the details, shared with encouragement to share widely.
“Camden by the Sea, Virtually and Globally”
April 8th is when it starts… 10AM Eastern USE Time/7am Pacific US Time
Place and Space: on ZOOM
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5694939869?pwd=YUY3Q3puekZ5THljNjFoU2dCTjNuQT09
Greetings!
It is time for us to gather and to honor Harrison Owen; to share stories and to express our love for him and each other.
Two weeks have gone by since he died on March 16th, 2024.
Such sadness and grief we have all felt and are still feeling.
The expressions of love and gratitude from around the world for Harrison have been overflowing; the stories of Open Space moving and inspirational. In planning this upcoming virtual gathering, Barry Owen carried the Open Space torch for his dad. Trusting we should leave the space open, not rushing too fast in setting a time and place for us all to meet. It’s how it is when we sit in a giant circle, with lots of space in the middle, writing and announcing our topics. It’s what people have done, head and heart, with such passion and emotion.
Barry also reminded us in the planning: “to not work too hard”. It’s what dad would have wanted, he said.
So, he, I and others, have waited until NOW, until the right time to invite everyone. Day by day, the pieces for this future reunion came together.
Why not create a Virtual Gathering that has the spirit of Camden by the Sea? Back then, Harrison would simply rent a space, tell people where and when, and that was it. The stories from those days live on, beautiful memories of Camden Maine, the place that Harrison called home to the very end.
We then called Lucas Cioffi at QiqoChat. Can you help us? We wanted to take a minimalist approach. As always, Lucas was quick to support our ideas.
Together we imagined the Law of Two Feet in action with multiple Zoom breakout areas for conversations and blank spaces to write notes and post pictures. Nothing more. No formal facilitation or hosting, just us, welcoming each other together, holding, and opening more and more space. Trusting this beautiful process of Open Space that is so much more.
Harrison’s presence would be felt, as our official facilitator. After all, he’s already opened the space for us and is holding it still while napping along the way.
The date of the gathering came to us in a flash. Why not April 8th to get this started, on the day of the Solar Eclipse. There seemed to be such significance to that date, as if a cosmic inspiration, the 8th day of the 4th month of 2024. Harrison at age 88 being the pure expression of an infinity symbol. And indeed engaging 8 billion people in meaningful conversations is a timeless endeavor.
We also decided that there would only be a start time (10 AM, Eastern Time), no end time, again in the spirit of Open Space “when it’s over it’s over” which implies that life in Open Space will never be over.
The intent is that people from around the globe will flow in and out, on their own time zones for a day or two or more. As for every closing circle, it will be over when it’s over.
Everyone is invited: Harrison’s family and friends, our global Open Space community and so many other colleagues and friends from around the world.
Please help us spread the word ~ everywhere, anywhere and in any way.
With love,
Barry, Suzanne, Lucas, and many others
The implications of our online lives as been in my mind since I first sat in awe of my first online community, Electric Minds. Over the years I have seen great good, but even greater swaths of harm. I’ve never thought it was all about the technology. Nor have I experienced technology as some neutral platform upon which we act. Technology is NOT value neutral. And everything that is wrong cannot be blamed on technology. Today a piece by the brilliant danah boyd nailed it. (And read the whole thing. It is superb. It leaves us with the question, why aren’t we centering children in every aspect of our ecosystem. Tech is not the solution.)
The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.”
danah boyd
One more snippet…
By all means, go after big tech. Regulate advertising. Create data privacy laws. Hold tech accountable for its failure to be interoperable. But for the love of the next generation, don’t pretend that it’s going to help vulnerable youth. And when the problem is sociotechnical in nature, don’t expect corporations to be able to solve it.
danah boyd
I was so, so, so sure I had blogged about this wonderful online practice shared in 2020 by the amazing Beck Tench. But when I went to find it to reshare, I could not find it in my archives. So today I am getting this on the blog!
On Zoom we have all these little windows into others’ faces (if their camera is on). It is oddly a great place to do portrait sketching as a way to see, to pay attention, to shift out of monkey-mind. Beck pulled this practice from her reading of Frederick Franck’s The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation.
Go to Beck’s post and read how to do it. https://www.becktench.com/blog/2020/7/26/the-zen-of-zooming
Then if you get to try it with others, I’d love to hear your impressions.
I found it really helpful to get out of my “solve the problem now” habits. To really look at another which I’m not sure we do as well online as we might F2F. When we HAVE shared our sketches with each other in all their glorious imperfections (you sketch WITHOUT looking at the sketch) we laugh, we wonder, even blush. It is a very human moment for me.
I’ll put some of my sketches below.
One of the first lessons I learned about hosting and facilitating online conversations was “Assume Good Intent.” As I read someone’s words online, this approach was practiced before I reacted, to assume the writer “meant well.” A breath before reacting. I have to say, it did keep me from writing overly reactive posts…sometimes.
This practice came out of hosting in the Electric Minds community, and later on The Well and other online communities. In his tip sheet on The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online, Howard Rheingold talks about “assuming good will.” It made so much sense to me that it became one of the cornerstones of my online facilitation workshops. My assumption was that if people practiced good intent, gave each other the “benefit of the doubt,” all would be well. Or at least less bad. 🙂
What I missed so blindingly was who gets the power to assume good intent. And that someone’s good intent could be coming from a well of white supremacy. This all blossomed into my consciousness with a post on LinkedIn by the astute Tara Robertson.
Tara pointed me to Megan Carpenter, who wrote something much more useful.
“I’ll give you grace if you give me effort”
Megan Carpenter
That feels like it makes the responsibility clear for each party, and not excuse a lack of care or grace under the flag of “good intent.”
It is funny, now I’m seeing the words “good intent” everywhere I look, and I am consciously trying to reshape my language towards grace and effort.