By Charley
“Peter Jones I have a pen pal in Zambia I have conversed with casually since June. Her profile on Facebook is where I found the Humanity Africa connection.
I have asked her to join here and am waiting for a response.
I’m nervous enough about being charged with conscription already, but I just don’t know another way to keep things moving toward my own goals.
I judge my own motives to be pure enough and I do my research before bringing someone new into the mix. However I detest manufactured consent myself and I try to employ the golden rule as generously as possible.
My personal maxim:
“I don’t wish to be excluded from the desirable nor included in the undesirable”
To me consent and consensus are inexorably linked within creative circles. The infractions that generate distrust are a threat to the generative conversations that we desperately need in the connected world.
I consider myself more of a community manager and less of a host. I am deeply appreciative of all those who are volunteering and time and risking their reputations going out on these limbs with me.
Trust is absolutely vital in every team, crew or cohort. Going it alone is plain stupid out here in open cyberspace.
Special thanks to @Aaron Perlmutter and @Glenn Gaasland for join me in the Slack space which I’ve been dying to utilize properly for crafting tools and equipment for future professional develpment phases.”
Glenn wrote:
“I already follow this and several other similar Messenger threads with many of the same people…I find that even if the volume is already high, it is amazingly interesting, and as an ongoing conversation messenger is very useful.
My suggestion would be to use the Slack space as an additional repository for interesting ideas and material formulated in the messenger threads as well as other places. There is something very dynamic about these messenger threads, I immediately see a part of what is posted, by whom, with messenger, no matter what device I am on. This is very useful. It is a living conversation that keeps on going, maybe by a few active people, an expression of thinking and sensemaking “on the road”.
The responsibility for each person in such a process is to be interested in learning, offer normal human support and encouragement to the great work done by other humans around the world, and try to offer something interesting / relevant / beautiful to the process at the moments when we engage.
Information overload is a very real phenomenon and a robust process must take account of this.
Each if us will always miss a lot of gold along the way, which may be re-traced later.
We will and must go around in circles, around the core insights and questions and ideas, gradually and organically getting a little bit wiser as time goes on.
Charley you are doing wonderful work with these messenger threads! Please keep it going. Most of us will miss most of the details, but that is inherent to the process, which keeps on giving nevertheless.
Its all about the few magic moments, and the next magic moments that build on them, and the slightly clearer formulations that periodically arise, as part of the living thinking happening between several minds around the world.
Slack, Basecamp, blogs and many other places, are places to capture some of the best artifacts and singular formulations, arising as a result of these magic moments, which periodically arise during the messy dynamic process of thinking together in real time.”
Charley says:
“I am naming us “inspirators” and the process “quantum sociology” — that’s this.”
Glenn said:
“Basecamp and Slack for projects that are well defined, yes. And also as a repository of certain complete articles which can convey complex concepts and relationships in an effective way, it should wrk well. Along with blogs etc, maybe also youtube videos, which I hope to focus more on in the time to come. One day we will put it all together in a way never seen before, we are not there yet, but we are moving closer every day as long as we continue with what we are doing.
A totally new informational platform is likely needed for it to reach its full potential ( a multidimensional information space which can contain anything of interest and the connections between them, with all relevant associations, as well as an ability to connect with other similar kinds of platforms in a kind of information manifold… is a part of what I see in the not to distant future )
“Quantum sociology” is a great way to describe it! We could also see it as an intelligence network of the commons, working on behalf of the planet as a whole, or an open source science of the people.”
JOSHUA BRIDGE 