BeautyDialogues

The WWW conference

As I prepare to attend this year's Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco week after next, I find myself curious about the possibilities (I still find the name Wisdom 2.0 extremely evocative and I guess I harbor the secret hope of having my mind blown at the conference and discovering hundreds if not thousands of "lost" members of "my tribe").

One of the pioneers of extraordinary gatherings is Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED conference, and apparently that was just the beginning of his ideas for super-human gatherings. His wwwConference in September 2012 paired particularly interesting duos, placed them on a comfortable couch in front of an exclusive audience (tickets were $16,000 - where's that Press Pass when I need it?) and set them loose with each other.

I have to say I'm impressed by Wurman's courage and his faith in the power of conversation. According to Dan Munro in Forbes, the results were truly inspired. I look forward to hearing these conversations myself and hope they will be made available, as one of the great innovations of TED was making those equally expensive presentations available free to the public.

Wurman's new ideas include Prophesy2025 in Spring of 2013, and the multi-generational Geeks and Geezers Summit in the Spring of 2014, which sounds particularly interesting.

Gatherings Online Again!

I thought it would never happen, but finally I have updated and revitalized Gatherings, the ecopsychology e-zine I helped launch over 10 years ago. It has lain fallow for the last couple of years, but people have never stopped submitting articles, poetry, photographs and news, and now they are all published online again! Have a look, and if you like - submit something yourself!

Innovation and Participation

I'm inspired and encouraged by an article in Fast Company called "The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again". The author, Warren Berger, describes a creative turn-around for TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, who is designing a new kind of conference that will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”

It sounds amazing, and I'm excited to see new creative thinking emerge about the ways we can gather online. Here's what Wurman's website says about the conference:

WWW.WWW will be a gathering of the greatest, most interesting & curious minds in the world engaged in immersive & improvised conversation. It will celebrate the 21st century while drawing attention to the new patterns & convergences affecting our health & that of our planet.

This attention to pattern and convergence sounds like it's right up our alley at the World Café, and perhaps what's most interesting to me is the app they are developing to "harvest" the event:

"The app will be a new modality, perhaps equal to the pivotal changes that have emerged in how we interact with information and each other. It will not merely archive presentations, as is currently the practice, but will offer a unique way to navigate, learn and understand information based on ones own personal journey and vast online resources."

Now all they need is interaction with their "audience"... That to me is the real revolution and innovation happening in the world of conferences. Imagine the possibilities if there was a way for people to really participate in the conversation at this event! Give me a call at weDialogue, Mr Wurman, and we'll set something up.

By the way, the Shift Network is getting wise to the value of audience participation and is bringing me in to host a World Cafe for their online Enlightened Business Summit with Chip Conley, on November 10th. This is actually a fabulous week-long series of free online sessions featuring people like Daniel Goleman, Daniel Pink and ... me! :-) Come join us!

The Art of Online Hosting

With all that's been going on lately I forgot to mention that a paper I co-wrote with the crazy and wonderful Adriano Pianesi was published in the March edition of Systems Thinker: "The Art of Online Hosting" (Download Onlinehosting).

Announcing Conversations for the 21st Century

I'm excited to share the launch of a project that my new company weDialogue has been working on for several months now in collaboration with the World Cafe. You are all warmly invited to participate, and I'm serious about that because it will take all of us...

weDialogue

Sneak Preview: I just finished the website for a new business I'm starting in association with the World Cafe and my partner Ben Roberts. It's called weDialogue and it's a virtual event hosting and consulting service with the capacity to engage up to 2,000 people at a time. As part of our offical launch early next year we're planning to host a series of free public World Cafe conversations on key 21C issues. Look for an announcement of dates, topics and our "conversation starters" (thanks to Heartland Circle for this term) soon.

Ben and I have already been hosting some fabulous weDialogue online events - yesterday we hosted a FourYearsGo training session with Lynne Twist, and a few weeks ago I had the priviledge of supporting a call for President Obama and one of his regional consituencies. This work builds on the sucessful online World Cafes I've been hosting for the last 2-3 years, and I'm excited to see where it will go.

Last night I spent a few hours obsessing over a Wordle for the front page of the weDialogue website. Here are a few of the candidates I considered (you'll have to go to the website to see the winner - hurry because the way this is going it will probably change again before too long!):

Cosmic Benjamin

I've been having so much fun working with my fabulous World Cafe intern, Benjamin Aaron Degenhart. He is so bright and interesting, always thinking of new and innovative ways to present ideas and activities and people in the World Cafe online community we host together.

He's also a great creative lover of beauty, as you can see from this video he recently made and posted on his blog:

What Motivates Us?

On the off-chance that you haven't yet seen this intelligent video illustrating the ideas in Daniel Pink's latest book Drive, about what really motivates us, here it is (it's longish at almost 11 minutes, but sooooo worth it):

Vision Nest Studio

The final Summer Intensive Worldshop videos are all up now, in the new Vision Nest Studio website!

While you're there, check out "What is Vision?", the little introductory video I created to start us off this summer, and one of my all-time favorites "What's Your Vision?" - with a surprise ending and an animated version of our logo.

Vision, Storytelling and Digital Media

I've been falling in love with Salinas, a sleepy fertile town that has been growing on me ever since I moved here at the beginning of the month to join FireHawk in teaching a summer intensive course in Vision, Storytelling, and Digital Media at Hartnell College. I was head over heels in love with my class from the first day...

I've always dreamed of having a room-full of bright young minds to explore with, and the reality has been all I could have ever wished for. My kids (I say kids but they range in age from one impossibly capable 15 year old to a deeply thoughtful and ex-homeless man in his 40s, with most of them bright sparks between 19 and 23) are incredible - sensitive, intelligent, curious and creative.

The course we've designed for them is a bit unusual; it's a multi-dimensional fabric of social, spiritual, technological and vocational threads -  but they have taken everything we've given them and made full use of it. Let me take you back to the first week, for example, where we asked each of them to begin thinking about what having a vision might mean for them...

For many it was the first time they'd been asked this question, and we spent the time it took to uncover a vision for each student - first for their lives and then their community, before beginning to create digital art from what they found. Each student, whatever their background, level of education, or expressive style, threw their heart and soul into communicating their visions through video. With their permission, I'm proud to share the results of their work on the Vision Nest Studio video channel we created.

And that was only the first week! Stay tuned for more about Vision Nest Studio Productions (the "brand" that has come from this adventure for FireHawk and I), and to see the class' final video project - done in teams each focusing on a vision for (one of) the Agriculture, Health, and Construction industries in the Salinas valley in 2020.