commonspace

Emergence, education and networked social change

I was just reading How Large Scale Change Really Happens by Meg Wheatly and Deborah Frieze. The short article starts out like this ...

In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time.  It changes as networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.  This is good news for those of us who want to change public education.  We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits.

Great advice for those of us working to build a more open, flexible education. The whole article is worth a read. It talks about how networks and emergence sit at the centre of social changes, both good and bad. A very helpful primer on this topic.

Talking about open education (Thursday)

I am scheduled to give this talk about open education in South Africa at the Seneca open source symposium this Thursday. The general gist of my talk is:

South Africa has tremendous potential, with a new generation of young people poised to become global leaders and innovators. Unfortunately, most of these young people are attending schools that are underfunded, lack teachers and have poor access to educational materials. Tapping into South Africa's potential will require dramatic improvements -- and innovations -- in how education works. The question is: can open source thinking spark these innovations? Would free, editable textbooks for every grade make a difference? Could students teach logic and analysis skills to each other? Can schools and local entrepreneurs team up to make sure students have access to the Internet? These are some of the questions that South Africa's Shuttleworth Foundation is asking. This talk will provide an overview of three Shuttleworth Foundation initiates that apply open source thinking to the challenge of radically improving education in South Africa.

This will be mashup of my Ubuntu Live presentation, the paper I did with Philipp and the emerging Cape Town Declaration. Oh, and bits from my talk on the broader meaning of open.

David Eaves and I are also planning to convene a lunchtime conversation on open source community management. The blurb we've written goes like this:

Open source. Open communities? What make open source communities work? What are the biggest challenges for community managers? Join us for lunch on day 2 of FSOSS to dig into these questions. Hosted by blogger David Eaves and Mark Surman from the Shuttleworth Foundation.

We're doing this partly because we're simply interested in community management, and partly because we have an instinct that open source community building techniques also have alot to offer outside the software domain.

You can still register for the Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium online. It's a great event. If you are in Toronto and have some flex time on Thursday and Friday, it's worth attending. Hell, I'll even offer to give you a drive from downtown if you need one.

Spooks, and ambient cyberspace

Having just finished William Gibson's new Spook Country, I have come away with one clear message:

Cyberspace is dead. Long live cyberspace.

This is pretty interesting coming from the man who had Case jacking into cyberspace way back in 1984. Wires into the back of our neck have been replaced by holographic helmets and  cellphones. The net isn't a destination anymore. It's everything. Everywhere. All around us.

I guess many of us already sense this happening. Example: Facebook feels like ambient media, with our friends brushing past us virtually, as if they were in the same room. It's no longer network -- or cyberspace -- as noun. It's networking as verb. It's all around us, and it moves. Constantly.

We are moving into verbspace now. I think I like it.

Reconsidering 'open'

I've been thinking alot about the broader meaning of 'open'. I've spent years working on and advocating for open source. I love running meetings using open space. I now work on open education. One of my job titles says I am all about open philanthropy. I organized an event about open cities. What's up with this? What is the connection? Is 'open' something bigger, something that has broad importance for our world?

As many of you know, my intuition says: yes, all the 'open' we've been playing with points quietly, albeit circuitously, to the future we want.

For the first time, I tried to tease out this intuition as a keynote to 250 amazing young people at the annual Millennium Scholars Think Again! conference. The general argument was something like: the principles of 'open' that we're familiar with from Wikipedia, Linux and even Facebook can -- and will -- help us reconfigure the worlds of work, education, government, philanthropy and social change for the better. For the purpose of illustration, I zoomed in on the impact of Internet-enabled mass collaborative and participatory media are having on how we work, think and consume. I stole alot from Benkler (with credit).

The presentation: I started with a 'who reads books vs. who uses Facebook' quiz for the audience; did a quick tour of the collapsing industrial information economy; introduced the Scholars to some important thought leaders of 'open' (Linus, Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Stallman); made the jump to open education as an example of a mainstream non-software domain built on the principles as the Internet and open source software; and ended with a link to Paul Hawken and the idea of a massively connected social movement that is acting as humanity's immune system. Phew. Slides are here on SlideShare.

The learning: a few of the Scholars thought that I was just talking about technology as our salvation. Of course, this is not the point. We can learn from the last 20 or 30 years of open technology, but this is really about seeing how the principles of 'open' work in a massive, connected, real world environment. The real opportunity is in taking these principles and applying them to all sorts of other parts of life. And, of course, the generation I was talking to is best suited to do this. Fluid, silo-less, chaotic, horizontal, p2p ways of doing things are second nature to them. If all goes well, we just need to encourage them take the way they already play and bring it into places of work, study and governance. 

Anyways, it was helpful to learn that I was coming across as too techie, and to remember that my natural inclination is to lean this way. Jane Rabinowicz from Santropol Roulant (also attending this event) was an amazing sounding board on this issue, suggesting that future talks should put equal weight on how people are using 'open' in things like meeting faciliation, organizational design and movement building. Of course, these are areas that I also play with, much more so than I play with software. So, it's easy for me to talk about these things, and to give examples the work I've been doing in the past few years (see: open education track at the iSummit). I just need to stop taking these examples for granted, and loop them into my spiel.

Riffing off this insight (thanks, Jane!), I am going to do a bit of a formal comparison of the values and rules that connect all of the kinds of 'open' that I play with. Who knows where this goes, but I suspect there are some patterns in it all. I will post here an let you know.

3 reasons for blessed unrest

I've been sideways referencing Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest in every blog posting, presentation and conversation I've had for the last month. However, I haven't really said anything specific on this page about 'why this is such a great book'. Here are three reasons:

1. Humanity's immune system. The subtitle of Blessed Unrest is: How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being, and Why No One Saw it Coming. Hawken points out that, despite the waning of the left (a silly obsession of mine), we've never had more active progressive political voices on this planet than we do right now. He goes on to argue that the hundreds of thousands of loosely connected environmental and social justice groups (very broadly cast) around the world are actaally a much more powerful and compelling force than the rigid ideology, leader based social movements of the past. In Hawken's words, this meta movement is emerging as humanity's immune system, and is one of our only hopes for survival.

2. Connectedness. In the book, Hawken says that this movement "...does not depend on its firepower but rather on the quality of its connectedness." For me, this is at the core of why we don't yet *see* the face of these new social movements in political partnership. They are not about winning, they about connecting, growing, enveloping ... taking over gently and deeply. If this is right, we need start thinking about about transformative ecosystems, not about political parties. We aren't good at thinking this way yet.

3. Small (and unknown) is beautiful. Amidst a backdrop of Western social movement history (mostly the environmental and civil right movements), Hawken tells a number of stories about how small acts triggered big changes in social movement leaders. He talks of the unknown Canadian publisher who renamed Thoreau's writing to have the title Civil Disobedience. About the Durban lawyer who shared Civil Disobedience with Ghandi in a moment of despair. And about the community organizer who shared Ghandi's autobiography with Martin Luther King at a time that he was subtley leaning towards violence. Hawken's point: we have never heard of any of the people behind these acts. Most real change in the world flow from people we have never heard of. We are these people. And we are more connected than ever before in human history. 

I don't know if it just me, but these are messages that I needed right now. Or, maybe more correctly, they are things that I am already feeling, and it is enlivening to read them in print.

The best news for me in this moment: Hawken has given me another hook in my current musings on the broader meaning of 'open'. More on this in the next post.

PS. If you don't have time to read Blessed Unrest, you should listen to this podcast lecture from Hawken's recent book tour.