BeautyDialogues

Elemental Ceremonies Online

Many of you know my passion for a different, more heart-full and earth-connected way to be together online, and I am thrilled to be partnering in this endeavor with some of the most heartful and earth-connected people I know [a special shout-out to FireHawk Hulin, my fellow photographer - he took the photos that grace this post- and dear companion in the art of sacred technology].

Based on the premise that the digital realm, like all of life, is sacred, we've started something called Earth +Digital Wisdom to explore what this means in practice (check out the 2 min video that FireHawk and I made to describe what we are up to).

As part of this Grand Adventure, we have designed a simple series of four free online Elemental Ceremonies as our gift to Life. 

The next two are scheduled for Saturday August 2nd (Air) and Saturday August 23rd (Earth); from 10am - noon Pacific Time so our friends across all US and European time zones can be there. You are formally invited, and most welcome; I think you will really be touched and surprised to find an experience of true ceremonial space online.

Here's an invitation with more details, or you can register now for: AIR (August 2) | EARTH (August 23).

Gathering 2.0

Does anyone out there remember PlaNetwork? It was a fabulously geeky conference that had a good run back a few years ago now. I loved its combination of high geekery and values-based idealism. I remember meeting someone through pre-event communications that I collaborated with to build a beautiful altar/centerpiece in the middle of the conference room, and dancing afterwards to music I'd never heard before under a projected screen of Electric Sheep images. It was that kind of "happening". Definitely a bit "hippie" and not slick by any means, but deeply sophisticated on many levels, not least technologically, and extremely satsifying.

There's another event that has sprung up in the San Francisco bay area in the last couple of years called Wisdom 2.0, and I've been watching it with great anticipation.

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:

Clear Light Communication - Recent Projects

I've just completed a round of projects for people and organizations that are so fabulous I want to tell you about them.

BERRETT-KOEHLER PUBLISHERS, with whom I recently served as main consultant and designer for the launch of their new BK Community site. Read more about this brilliant company and my work with them here.

ALAN BRISKIN, a great friend and extremely talented thinker, writer, and photographer. I love working with him, and our latest project - his new web site/blog, The Power of Our Collective Wisdom - has been no exception. Read more about Alan and our work together here.

GISELA WENDLING I've just completed a creative collaboration with this remarkable German artist and academic who recently moved from California to Australia to immerse herself in Aboriginal culture. Liminial Songlines is the result of our collaboration and the product of her deep reflection and explorations. Read more about Gisela and our trans-continental journey together here.

CAROL HALLYN I've been working with this amazingly persistent and courageous woman for over 2 years now, as she has been her finishing doctoral work in intuition and new business leadership. On June 14th we launched her website CarolHallyn.com and blog IllamaSpeaks.  Read more about our story here.

The Power of Language

I have long been thinking about how language creates reality, and how important it is to be conscious of this in our communications.

I touch on some of the practical aspects of this for web communications in The Art of Words, a piece on language taken from my Beauty & Technology Squidoo Lens, but there is a much deeper study I would like to make on the subject. In particular, how to use language (in the widest sense of the word, including image and sound and movement) to bring an aliveness and awareness of the natural world into online communications which can otherwise seem disconnected and a little unreal. But that is a topic for another day.

Today I want to talk about a post I ran across recently by Kate Rutter of Adaptive Path. In it she says:

"I honestly feel that in order to create engaging digital experiences, we need to continuously evolve how we think about them. And this means we need to change the words we use to design them. What we need are new metaphors to play around with…words and terms that unleash fresh thinking appropriate to experiences in the Web and beyond. A language of experiences that can prism through different devices, objects and spaces."

My own interest in language includes but extends beyond this professional concern for design coherence between interactive devices, but what I really liked about Kate's thinking was her recognition of the power language has to effect our experience and to limit or extend our sense of what's possible. I love where she came out as a result of her experiments:

"It sharpened the realization that I was not a web designer. I was a designer creating an experience for the Web. And that’s a powerful shift in perspective. It’s one thing to say “I’m an experience designer.” It’s another thing to really think like one..."

"At the start of the Web, many of our approaches were limited by the technology. Now we run the risk of being limited by our metaphors."

Can you think of a metaphor that describes how you'd like to experience your online communications?