The SNP and Scottish Greens have announced details of a power-sharing agreement in Hollywood. Two green MSPs will be appointed as ministers in the Scottish government, which will obviously be led by the SNP. It's the first time anywhere in the UK that the Greens have gained power in a national government. Patrick Harvey and Lorna Slater are co-leaders of the Scottish Greens, and they have this to say on the deal. This is indeed a historic moment. This deal would see the Greens entering government for the first time ever in Scotland or anywhere in the UK, and it couldn't come at a more important time. The last 18 months have been an incredibly difficult time for us all, and as we seek to rebuild our lives and our economy, we really must seek to do things differently. We must build a fairer, compassionate country, and we must do everything in our power to tackle the climate and nature emergencies and deliver a just transition for all of Scotland. And that's what this deal will do. And with the COP26 climate conference coming to Scotland, we are in a position to show real leadership on climate. We need to cut Scotland's emissions fast. Here are three ways that this deal would do that. One, we would deliver a radical shift in transport spending. 10% of all transport spend would go towards making cycling, walking, and wheeling safe and accessible for all. And we would invest £5 billion over this parliament in Scotland's rail network. Two, we cannot tackle the climate emergency without improving Scotland's homes and buildings. We have therefore agreed an accelerated and expanded £2.8 billion programme that would support everyone to make the changes that we need over the coming decade. Three, we would accelerate the rollout of renewables and double the size of the onshore wind industry, creating thousands of good quality jobs. Together, we would deliver a new deal for tenants, giving tenants more rights, introducing rent controls to help tackle Scotland's housing crisis. We would make bus travel free for young people, create a new national park, and much more. That was the green co-leaders underlining the policies that they've managed to get into this deal. Some pretty progressive stuff there. The arrangement also underlines both party support for Scottish independence with a commitment to hold a referendum in the next five years. This is what First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the deal represents for the Scottish independence movement. I am determined that there will be an independence referendum in this parliament. I said in the election this agreement reiterates that COVID permitting that will be in the first half of this parliamentary term. I don't want that as an end in itself or as some abstract ambition. I believe Scotland should be independent so that we can better equip ourselves to recover from COVID in the way that I think a majority of people across our country wishes to do towards a greener, fairer Scotland and one that learns the lessons of the past 18 months and more. And of course, a Scotland that looks outward to Europe and the world, not one that is forced to look inward by the Brexit-obsessed government of the UK. This agreement, I think, it's not about making it more likely. I think it makes it harder and indeed impossible on any democratic basis for a UK government to resist the right of the Scottish people to choose their own future. The three of us standing here and our respective parties want that future to be an independent one. But the core principle of democracy is that it should not be us or any other politician who decides the future that should be and will be, in my view, a matter for the Scottish people. That was Nicola Sturgeon reiterating she really does want a second independence referendum. Earlier today, I spoke to Laurie McFarlane about some of the finer details of the power-sharing agreement and what it means for the future of Scotland. We've seen two documents published, basically, which is the outcome of months of negotiations between the S&P and the Greens since the election took place in May. So the first thing is the draft cooperation agreement, and this basically sets out the formalities of how this is actually going to work, how the two parties are going to work together. And so it's not a formal coalition. What it is, is more of a confidence and supply type arrangement, whereby the Greens basically have been offered two junior minister positions in the government, one for climate and one for something else. And they basically said that they will support the government in confidence votes, and they've agreed to support them on a range of broad areas. So it's not a formal coalition government, but it's certainly the closest thing. It's certainly close to that, closer to that than perhaps people might have expected a couple of months ago when we saw their election result. The S&P having a minority in Hollywood and relying on green votes, that's been the case in, I think, multiple parliaments, or at least one, and they didn't go into a formal agreement like this. What's the motivation on both sides for a formal agreement? Yeah, so in May, the S&P won 64 votes, which is the same as all the opposition parties. It's actually more than they got in the last parliament. And obviously in the last parliament, there wasn't any kind of formal agreement. The S&P governed as a minority government and often relied on the Greens to get legislation through. So it's interesting, this time around, what's changed? Well, I think on both sides. So on the S&P side, I think Nicola Sturgeon probably sees something in having the Greens inside the tent. Now that part of that might be the sort of kudos of having a green party in government. You know, COP26 has come into Scotland in just a couple of months. Nicola Sturgeon is keen to sort of polish up our green credentials and having the Greens in government, whether or at least in a formal arrangement, whether we'll help that. A more cynical view might say that this is an attempt to kind of neutralize the Greens. So the Greens were in quite a powerful position in the last parliament because although the S&P relied on them to get legislation through, they had that power to wield because they could actually say, actually, no, we're going to side with the opposition parties to block things that we don't like. And so they were in that quite powerful position and did act as a bit of a thorn in the side of the S&P in the last parliament. And so by bringing them into the tent from an S&P perspective, you know, it might be a way of sort of trying to neutralize that sort of power from, at least in one sense. On the Greens side, you know, clearly there is some status to be gained by being a party that has, you know, in not a formal sense, but will be seen to be a party of government moving from the sort of fringes of the political landscape. This is the first time that the Greens have come anywhere near governing in the UK. You know, they'll see that as a major breakthrough. So what's just pointing out, important point to make though, is that this is not being finalized yet because the proposals need to be voted on by Scottish Green Party members this weekend.  So this has to be put to the members and the members will decide this weekend whether they want to back this or not. So that's a big unknown question as to whether that's going to happen or not. It's not being put to SNP members. That's just been decided by the leadership, but it has been put to Green members for a Green Party member, considering they are, as you say, very relevant in this situation, what can they look at in this deal and say, yes, this is a real victory for us. I'm imagining these people are slightly to the left of the SNP. What would they look at in this document and say, this is brilliant. This is going to be implemented. Well, the other document that was published today was a draft shared policy program, which sets out a whole range of policy proposals, policy areas, policy agenda where there's common ground, or at least on paper, there's common ground between the SNP and the Greens, and this is what they're going to be pursuing to implement this parliament. There's lots of pretty good stuff in there.  As you'd expect, quite good on climate, land reform, national care service, scaling up community wealth building. So there's lots of stuff in there that, you know, if you're looking at to try and get things done to improve the way that Scotland is operating at the moment, if the Greens can be part of making that happen and can help to push the SNP that little bit further, then you can see that that might be tempting. One interesting part, though, there's also in the documents an explicit annex which sets out policy areas that are excluded, specifically excluded from the cooperation agreement. And it's really interesting to see what they are. One of them is the role of GDP as a measure and the sort of idea of economic growth as a goal. So the Greens are quite a bit skeptical about the sort of growth growth paradigm and pushing against that and the role of GDP as a measure of progress. The SNP have said we don't want to basically we don't want to cooperate with the Greens on this area because we don't agree. Another one is financial support to defence and aerospace companies, which again, I think there's a fundamental disagreement there.  It explicitly said there weren't there's not that's not within the cooperation agreement because there's a big divide there. The SNP pro NATO Greens, anti NATO field sports, which is a very innocent name for what's essentially shooting sports. So deer stalking, grouse shooting, all that kind of stuff. Again, big divide there at sex work. The legality of sex work is another one. The final one is private schools, fee paying schools. So none of that stuff is in the agreement. So there's basically there's a there's basically agreement that they're not going to agree on this stuff. And so the Greens don't have to agree with them on this. And that's been set out at the beginning. And I think the key unknown question for for me and probably for Green Party members right now is they're thinking, well, where's our leverage? Where's our leverage best used? Is it actually in this formal agreement with the SNP? What leverage do we have there to actually change things? Or is it actually outside of that with the threat to be able to side with the opposition parties in order to block the SNP stuff? And it's a very tricky situation. It's a good position to be in for the Scottish Greens. It's a powerful dilemma to have, but it is a tricky one because they also can leave it, I suppose if it turns out that they have a disagreement with the SNP on one of those areas which isn't protected, they can say, well, we'll leave this formal agreement and we will still vote against your your budget. I presume no no agreement can commit them in the future against doing that. Yeah, exactly.  And, you know, if the if the members this weekend do decide to back this agreement in good faith and are optimistic about it, you know, we'll see how it goes. It could well be the case that further down the line, it proves that it's not working and and and the Greens pull out. I mean, that's that's a possibility. But yeah, we just need to wait and see how it pans out. One policy area I wanted to ask about was the cambo oil fields. So at the moment, the SNP, I think are still supporting it or at least remaining very ambiguous. I would presume the Greens are going to oppose that. You're saying having the Greens and government is going to make Nicola Sturgeon look good at COP 26. Is there a possibility that this is something that's going to blow up over the next few months, whether or not Nicola Sturgeon will back new oil fields in the North Sea? Oil in the North Sea, sorry. Well, it's interesting because this is actually a reserved area. So the Scottish government actually doesn't have any power. Now, and there are some areas that are reserved with the SNP are very keen to talk about the very keen to say, you know, we would do this differently, you know, we would do that. Nicola Sturgeon actually did. I mean, following a meeting with I think it was Green New Deal rising a couple of weeks ago, did actually come out and say, actually, you know, I've listened and sort of acknowledged that further opening up new new oil and gas fields isn't the right thing to do. So she did kind of acknowledge that. However, in this case, in this specific deal, this is a reserved area. And so, you know, there's a bit of, you know, it's not really mentioned, basically, here, it's a bit of a fudge in this agreement because it's saying, actually, well, you know, this is an agenda for the Scottish Parliament and basically oil and gas is a reserved matter. And therefore, we're not going to say anything about it. But clearly, there is differing views, particularly between the two parties here. You know, the Greens obviously very, very much opposed to it. Some within the SNP, not so much opposed to it. So this is one of these tensions that's kind of bubbling underneath the surface. But there's a convenient sort of convenient reason not to explicitly talk about it here. And that's simply, oh, it's a reserved matter. We don't have competence over at the moment. And that's kind of what we've done. I understand in the deal they have committed to an indie ref, to within five years, ideally, in the first half of Parliament. That's another area where they don't have complete control because the government in Westminster can refuse to allow them to have that referendum. Does it say in the deal what would happen if the Westminster government does refuse? Would they have an unauthorized referendum, for example? It doesn't. It doesn't say that it doesn't say anything about that. I mean, this is another reason, potentially, why we were talking earlier about why would the SNP try and do this deal? One of the reasons could be to try and that it bolsters the case, the mandate for an independent referendum, because there is this view that prevails, I think, certainly in Westminster, that Green votes are not quite real independence votes, and that the SNP is the real independence vote. And because the SNP fell slightly short of a majority, then somehow that mandate is not really legitimate because the other majority, the other that makes a majority is the Greens and the Greens don't really come. And I think by bringing the Greens into the fold as a sort of formal partner, they're sort of, in a sense, strengthening the Greens as a sort of legitimate political actor as an equal partner, certainly when it comes to independence. And so I think the SNP will be hoping that if this partnership does materialise, if it does get the votes this weekend by the members, that this will put forward a stronger front, provide a stronger mandate to the UK government, say, look, we now have a government, a majority government here that has an unquestionable mandate for independence, and you really don't have any right to refuse. Of course, there's a big question. You know, the UK, the reality is the UK does can just refuse. And Boris Johnson, when you think about it, does you really have an incentive to grant a referendum? What's he got to gain from it? He doesn't rely on Scottish votes. He's got enough headaches on his plate at the moment. Does he really want to do that? So I think it's going to be a really interesting battle playing out. And of course, the question is, if it is refused, what what cards does the Scottish government hold? Could it hold a sort of a wildcat referendum? Does it want to go down that route? That sort of Catalonia route? You know, well, wait, there's been various sort of threats being put forward, but it'd be really interesting to see how that plays out in practice. I'm sure this is the kind of key question that some of the strategists will be thinking about just now and over the coming months.


It's just a stream that I passed the other day and now I see now it's fun to put video clips in the in as the background yeah totally I didn't know until recently you could do that totally totally hold on 18 seconds I'm gonna fetch my coffee from the microwave with you microwave sound is it really okay to use microwave it's it's the law in the U.S. you can only use microwave to heat is there no silent I can't hear anything we can hear you so Pete obviously you're making a joke I don't know am I completely out of the loop reminds me of a thread on Twitter I had a bunch of British people were just aghast at the way Americans prepare tea yeah including the microwave but there were you know other things too so story I heard years ago about tea historian friend of mine was like so look the British kind of take over the world and they have tea from Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka and they box it up in crates and they ship it under the horn you know under Africa and then it shows up in England and it's basically like dry and broken and like twigs and it's nothing a self-respecting Chinese person would serve themselves so what do you do well first you bag it so you invent little tea bags individual bags so nobody has to go through the ritual of of steeping tea and doing whatever else and then they had this new commodity sugar around etc so like select sugar and cream in the tea which no self-respecting like person in Asia would probably do except for maybe chai or something becomes the standard route for having tea in in Britain and in the King you know in the Commonwealth and so it's partly because of and this is a story I like so I have no confirmation for this but because of like shipment damage right and the availability of this newfound cool luxury thing called sugar anyway I have to share one oh good oh good story is that I sometime in the 70s scientists you know food scientists realize that the way that the standard way to make ketchup is that you have to you have to essentially burn the ketchup to get it to get it made right so so they figured out okay well we'll construct a process where we can make ketchup that doesn't get burnt so then they tested it and then people hated so it was actually the burnt taste that makes ketchup you know sweet Scott go ahead with your story um okay yeah so mine was about beer and I didn't understand that India pale ale is so bitter because of the high hop content and the hops were used to preserve over the long trek down to the British colonies and so and but that's the reason that it you know it was just the taste that they had because that was what the only thing that they had was high hopped beer in order to make them journey so like that similar and Rob has just posted about corona beer and lines to mask bad flavor max were you gonna jump in with with the story I could jump in with a follow on to the hops go story I was told could be just truthiness or fake news was that at a certain time during like the Puritan colonial moments in the US there was a decision amongst all the brew all the breweries of which bittering agent to use and hops was selected partly because it has phytoestrogens in it and it tends to pacify male aggression unlike other herbs and the word that you when you make beer and when you finally throw in it goes from being what is it mashed to wart wart is like the German word for weed I believe and it's just like that's when you throw in the bittering herbs to balance out the sweetness and add preservation value anyway jumping in on hops info that it's very cool Neil has one to go ahead Neil everybody while we're just talking about brewers hops and various other things nobody knows why anybody likes a veggie might from Australia but it's the thick dark brown Australian food spread made from leftover brewers yeast most people in Australia don't eat it but when they go overseas I have to because that's the cultural norm that's it sweet and then also another beer story way back when Carlsberg brewing was young beer was dicey because sanitation wasn't great and the east weren't very stable so the Carlsberg brother sorry the I'm totally spacing on the names but the brothers who started Carlsberg basically their scientists stabilized the yeast and then they gave this yeast away all across Europe all across the world they gave it away basically raising sanitation like raising health around the world and they continue to do that for a century so then instead of locking up the IP and selling an offer or having a uniquely healthy beer they just spread their their stable yeast everywhere so good stories endless food stories go ahead Kevin I've got a friend who formed a purchasing cooperatives for craft beers last year and they give them the buying power of Coors collectively purchasing products are super easy because nobody has to do the mind-numbing consensus of doing a worker co-op or a grocery co-op you just combine your your your purchasing like all the ace hardware it's our independent hardware that they buy collectively you know the same power as you know lows or those sorts of things so anyway that happened last year and they're all happy about it love that the name of the yeast from Carlsberg is saccharomyces pasturianus and I just put a link I just put a link to that place in my brain in the chat one more food related story anybody anyone beuler okay otherwise let's do it let's go just a quick note that yeast in the brain isn't a good look isn't a good look apparently it's the fermenting violence it's fermenting violence is that the male brain or so for a late round of check-ins we we we did a good job last last week of sort of zipping through our check-ins why don't we go Rob Kevin Hamilton Rob but it looks like you might be having your I'm good I you caught me off guard but I'm good to go so I wasn't on the last call so I don't know how brief you went but my my focus really has been a little on myself and my own practices around knowledge and kind of getting more clear on the things that that I think are true or important true true Jerry I know a part of your brain you have my beliefs so I've copied that structure and tried to to work with that there's someone that has the concept of evergreen notes and so I I've been trying to rather than just collecting stuff and hoping that something comes out of it trying to be more intentional about capturing my thoughts and my my point in time now whether that's around health or spirituality or world events you know just whatever whatever those topics might be versus kind of ping-ponging around different ideas and sources and and things like that so I have been spending most of the oh Andy Matt my to check yeah that's the evergreen note that I've been been watching and I've been spending most of the summer in South Carolina and just returned to Arlington Virginia for the next probably couple of months at least so I'm physically in northern Virginia cool I still live there then Kevin Hamilton max okay I'll go I've been mentioning this church-based credit union to wipe out payday loans and we pitched RSF social finance yesterday and they you know they want to work on racial justice so they're they're saying yes and what was funny and now they want us to put a lot of numbers in little boxes to help them believe in the future and so I always have somebody who can do speak that language and we're gonna do that but it's just pretty funny they bought this they bought the story they bought the team and now that if we put numbers in little boxes they'll believe in the future so we're gonna do that I think it's kind of a tall as many trained of things you know we're a pre-revening startup but sure we'll put numbers in boxes you can make a number you know what a hockey stick look you know what how to draw a hockey stick yeah yeah thank you thanks Kevin Hamilton max then Kim hi guys not much of an update I've been really busy luckily with clients work yes you know it's funny it's like I heard this and I heard this person say yesterday I hadn't thought about this is that that the companies are drawing on that everybody is sort of pushing in their chips of goodwill and they have been all summer of just like I'm willing to endure this and that people's stacks are running small and that a sense of belonging is really hard right and so I have really been just noodling on that around I mean we can all convene the tactics and the machinations of being together happen but the sense of belonging is really really hard and what's funny I think is it actually causes people to want to go to more meetings which fatigues them more right because you have this FOMO and you're like well then I'll just the only way I can belong is by connecting with more people and it's interesting so I've just been really thinking about how do you you know in this environment how do you connect teams how do they feel like they belong right you know and engaged so that's what's up for me thanks Amazon Max then Ken then Shimon update brought a puppy dog into my life into our life that's been it's been rewarding you might hear him having breakfast in the background been pushing along on the release of tag connector an app on like a plug-in to Miro onto their marketplace and in talks with the Miro platform team on some other applications to help facilitate workshops which kind of dovetails to this it'll be interesting if they can it'll be interesting to keep keep people posted on it had some really good conversations with folks at collective next as well love the work they're doing and go ahead Charles for a story a flow show and whatnot a couple weeks ago that was awesome yeah the flow shows are fun cool Ken then Shimon then Stacy hello everybody not much more to report than this kind of status quo still trying to do census making or making sense of the census everyone to put that still inside because of smoke here in the area the fires are getting under control but the wind has been in the wrong direction for my particular location I do have a question I've got somebody that I'd like to bring into the group and I was going to have her join today and I thought well this might be the best day to jump in since we're gonna keep interest was short and move on with some topics can we set up a like maybe the first meeting every month is a great time to bring new folks in so that we can you know have a little way to make sense for them to introduce themselves and just to just a thought of how you want to structure things that makes sense and I'm trying to find a rhythm sort of a balance between longer check-ins and short check-ins so we can get stuff done but but picking the first one of the month which which is has the unfortunate result of that means we'd have to wait a month to meet your friend so we can also just make a little room you're saying also for her it would be nice to hear longer interest from other people yeah because we can always make room for anybody who's sort of new to the group to that doesn't mean just to wait a month I just thought maybe today would be the best day but you know just maybe going forward making some kind of practice like that of having a space for this would be a good time bringing new people we can also do welcome newcomers kind of call a couple times a month or something like that just do a separate from our check-ins and that way with a smaller group they actually hear much more from a few people and then we get to meet some of the newbies whoever likes doing that which is which turns out to be you know a good a good chunk of the population so it's a good great idea Ken thank you was it Shimon then Stacy I think yeah yeah hi can you hear me today yes here you just right great so this has been a good week I actually took the whole week off from work so I've been able to move along some project the other day I jumped on a call with a different connected group that had a discussion with Tom Atley which was really very inspiring I also am moving along with my project on a citizen commission for COVID-19 there's been some certainly movement I've been able to sort of play around with it get some more people involved and actually connected with a group at Temple University who just came out with you know 30 experts contributing to a volume about policy aspects of COVID-19 from federal to state to global level they're having a conference September 16th to sort of like make public their report and I actually connected with them and they're somewhat interested in the project that I'm working on so I'm really looking forward to that but overall I have been enjoying getting to know more of the people in the group and really learning a lot so thank you to everybody thank you Shimon really appreciate it Stacy Julian and then whoever's calling in from 9-5 to area code this is my first time in the group I was glad to see that Judith showed up because I thought I was infiltrating some exclusive male group here alas alas you're not it's our wish that it not be this way but thank you for being here thank you I know most of you I know either from Zoom calls many of you from Facebook so I'm happy to be with this group and learn what's going on super thank you Julian and then mysterious phone caller and then Judy last week was the SIGGRAPH conference the and the big annual computer graphics conference which was held on Zoom of course that presented a lot of technical problems because many of the much of the material presented at SIGGRAPH is not something you can experience on a flat screen sometimes you even have to smell things and very often touch things and I think it was a challenge the organizers this year to try and replace some of that experience I had a great talk with Matt last week about putting it all together where it is kind of like close to the universe but we're all talking about putting it together it changes with to whatever you're talking about at the moment since SIGGRAPH have been trying to assemble some of the material from last week like Jerry I use the brain a lot except my purpose is to create some kind of little knowledge rates which then goes into my visualization process and since so much came up at SIGGRAPH and I've been trying to update those and hopefully we'll be able to figure out a way to show that some just bearing in mind the limitations I just mentioned to zoom that sounds great thank you and we've all been prisoners in these little rectangles now for months and liberation would be a lovely prospect so looking forward to these things getting more real flatland I know and VR AR XR whatever has not hit stride the way lots of people had hoped it would for a long time I know some extreme you know augmented reality enthusiasts and so forth and except for Pokemon Go it hasn't really permeated filtered through what we're doing we're certainly not all dawning headsets to get in these in these meetings yeah and I have a very extensive rant as to why that is and what needs to be done awesome okay that sounds like fodder for a future call and so let's go to whoever's dialing in on 9 5 2. Hi everybody this is Sheila. Hi yeah I'm dialing in because this time I'm just smack dad hi it's just smack dad in the middle of you know feeding the pets and all these other kinds of activities so I'm walking around my house and doing things so joining the video call wasn't wasn't going to work I actually don't know what these updates are about so I said this is my first call so can you tell me what I kind of have a sense but can you just kind of tell me what we're trying to do right now. Yeah exactly this is just a really short check in like what's new in your world and given that most of the people have been on one or several calls like is there anything OGM me on your horizon you know like visiting SIG graph or building a tag connector or things like that so that's it okay thank you. Yeah I don't know that I have an update other than to say hi this is my first call and I'm glad to be here and be starting to get to understand what this group is about. Yay thank you very much appreciate it. Yeah thanks. Let's go to Judy then Klaus then Neil. Good morning everybody I've been really trying to drill down a bit in the intergenerational seven generational thinking process from two particular dimensions one is actually building a bit of a body of knowledge that I can use for groups that haven't used it before so that they're just not hearing my verbal explanation in the crude of what it is and giving them some resources and more importantly trying to document practices that have been effective and different types of settings. I'm particularly interested in the K-12 process given the disruption of education and the opportunity for some significant changes and so when I say intergenerational I don't mean only sort of grandparents and through seven generations but also mixed age group learning and learning from others so kind of tying in pyrogogy with that and trying to figure out how to put together essentially two kinds of primers one for organizations that want to advocate for this and begin to develop their own frameworks to put it in place and secondarily actual examples that people can use if they're ready to put together X kind of a course or work with this particular kind of there have been some really good intergenerational webinars recently with groups that are doing it specifically for education right now large groups of volunteers from the community so much of the literature is actually on sort of senior citizen centers and kids and that blending which is not where I'm really wanting to focus it's a little awesome but that's what I'm doing well that's awesome Judy can I just jump in I'm around me I have a bunch of folks who are doing homeschooling pods who are really looking for things and we're finding that so if you could reach out to me I can get it out there the people who are hungry to try something because they often hire a teacher but have parents around who don't know how to be a teacher that's awesome and also Charles and Lauren have a bunch of stuff going on in Kiko lab which is related to that Judy do you want to respond yeah I'm involved with Charles and Lauren and others in that and we've been talking about that and Kiko labs has a kids cool laboratory with a K on Sunday where they're kind of building by doing and experimenting with different approaches I'm also really interested in not only traditional in quotes learning opportunities but tying in the sciences with the arts and other things in terms of creativity dimensions and co-creation of projects at early ages so that children have the opportunity to be in team experiences much earlier than most of our systems allow love that thank you you also mentioned Piragaji and Howard Reingold who's kind of the spark behind Piragaji was on the Kiko lab call on Monday which reminded me that Piragaji fits beautifully beautifully with the layer of OGM that has to do with facilitation and how we understand each other and bridging the cultural divide and all of that and especially as applied to learning so I'd love to sort of build the bridge and and see if we can't do a little cross-pollination nation there as we'd like to do with the peer to peer groups as Neil brought up on a previous call as well go ahead Judy just one other nugget that came across a really interesting treatise from at Alaska based on families which is the framing of families that are missing the parent generation which is very common in the Native American culture and so there's a fair bit of knowledge content there that I haven't worked my way through yet but I'll shoot it over to you Jerry so you can add it to the brain because it was the most in-depth sort of pragmatic family structured but it was with parents absence so it's sort of a unique dimension of it but I think most of it would apply regardless of the circumstances yeah thank you that's very sobering um class Neil Doug yeah I just picked up my son from San Francisco and he moved in with us food is better I suppose but his office extended the stay the work from home who until next august he's working he's a marketing manager for Kramily so that's sort of indicative how how companies are really digging in for a much longer the recovery time from from this from this pandemic in the food world there is a real uptake in energy I came across one file that I wanted to share here um and oopsie it doesn't want to let me do this hold on yep and actually I picked this up in Charles the workshop this week and and it is it is not necessarily where we would like to go you know because a lot of the ideas in there where the food system should go are actually structurally fundamentally the wrong path to take because it's a very top-down approach but it is indicative of how much change there is in the food system and how how that is really right in right on top of us thank you class um makes a bunch of sense Neil Doug then mark hi everybody Neil Davidson here checking in from Belgium update on the weather it's dropped about 10 degrees 15 degrees in the last few days and we've had a little bit of rain so it's reduced my hand watering load in the garden um but of course now the days are getting shorter and the summer is slipping away so um the um in terms of what I've been up to had a wonderful conversation with Jerry over the weekend and Shimon about a week before that and also been in conversation with Michelle balance from peer to peer through several forums involved there and building that bridge that we were talking about potentially between him uh chap called Johann Branstad who's developed the Miro technology platform for mind mapping and moving things around and been invited to be part of a rethinking economics and twerp uh group that's um doing some work in the past but linking a whole bunch of other players and speakers into that including uh Michelle Holliday and Nora Bates and others Michelle is also giving a talk uh seminar on food type stuff class I'll ping you with the link afterwards I think it's uh uh this evening your time it's um uh wrong time for me it's going to be late later my time sometime your time um and finally oh sorry one more connection David Jago uh good friend of mine good conversation with him he's the chairman who's the technology of participation facilitator in Australia looking to link with the work that Ann and I are doing I've worked with him in the past and there's some really good stuff in what he's been doing but also in terms of how he's learning how to work online in China with hybrid meetings people on the ground in China and him uh zooming in from Australia and how to cope with the the emotional drain of speaking to a room without getting the energy back from it um and the zoom drain type process there's some rooms in learnings as well as the stuff he's teaching and I'll ping you on the chat here I'm presenting and I'm on a panel uh on an event this weekend around the theme social media competence and communication in times of crisis this is being run by uh Gita Payne uh P-E-Y-M and the Form Belt Institute and I'll ping you uh in the thing here so a lot of good stuff happening uh quickly in terms of this group the linkage of our seers people with good stuff good data good information struggling to find how do we govern internally to look externally uh without uh tipping all the eggs into one basket in one particular direction so similar dynamics coming up and we're all grappling with this in the context of lockdown but also how do we break out simultaneously so I'm good to see you too Stacey thank you that's really rich um you're reminding me that years ago back in the normal times I ran into a guy whose whose uh job it was to help bridge the cultural divide for groups that were working internationally across you know and and his typical scenario was American company with Indian programmers or something like that and and he was helping the sides understand each other culturally so that they so that they would know things like when the other side said yes it doesn't actually necessarily mean that they understood and they're going to comply it might mean something else entirely and and and how and when the other side says they want something this is sort of the structure of what they think they're saying and and so forth and I thought this guy has job security this is going to be an issue forever um so Doug Mark and Jay well three things um the first is I've been trying to come to terms with the whole body of work by Bruno Latour which is quite a spectrum of interesting stuff uh and it's quite challenging uh the second is I've been using Rome for daily notes and seeing if that's an effective thing to do the main thing that's on my mind is at Institute for New Economic Thinking where I'm a kind of consultant uh they've been doing a series of podcasts which are quite effective with members of his community but it's like Ted talks it's one person at a time uh so uh if that I think it makes them cautious so I've been encouraging putting two people into the interviews at the same time on the idea that they might encourage each other nudge each other to take stronger positions uh out towards what new economic thinking might actually be about it's a hard sell because people are so used to the idea of the the one person being the spokesperson uh at a time uh Ted talk like I like the idea that that might make them cautious and that's really really interesting it's it's definitely the friction that that sometimes loosens things up um thanks Doug uh Mark J then Pete yeah hi everyone uh Mark to both um actually residing in Oakland California so lately I've been it's really interesting and been really uh been present in so many different calls around education or learning and sense making and we are actually finishing the touch on a documentary that's called um that's going to be called Beyond Education and Beyond Education is a 14-year-old girl who confronts the absurdity of modern society and of an inadequate educational system she meets two indigenous Tsukuru teachers and I'll say a few words about the Tsukuru in a minute who invite her in a journey to explore spaces of transformation and um you know which which are offering harmonious learning paradigm alternatives to cultivate human potential inspired by the Tsukuru people's history of renaissance she finds meaning and purpose in her own life exploration and what's interesting about the Tsukuru is that they've been one of those tribes that have been recognized very late in Brazil and were still enslaved you know 50 years ago so they lost pretty much everything and and we learn everything to become a tribe again that's very inspiring thank you mark excuse me so many so many bad stories there um yeah and if if anyone is interested in the link to um to watch a documentary right now it's not public but I can provide that if anyone is interested I think several people would be very interested yeah myself included and if you have a link to the Tsukuru people I just did a really quick google search and they're not showing up as an indigenous tribe and usually things like Wikipedia are pretty good about that um thank you um and and if they don't have a page on the web that doesn't mean they don't exist I just have to remind myself of that um yeah it's crazy times so Jay Pete uh Hank hi there yeah I've uh one of the things I've been wondering about and where it fits in this group I had a great conversation with Ken last week about uh the role of collective initiation and and also the how we hold grief and where grief uh fits in with creativity because it's hard to operate um in great changing times without recognizing what is lost and what we're lot what's lost on a personal level as well as a collective level um also been having a some great continued conversations with uh collective next with Hank and Matt um and uh Mark as well um just continuing to kind of push the brain and consider how how can might it be able to gather stories either on individual level or collective level and uh and and what systems could be used for for our individual wisdom as well as collective wisdom and and works just kind of I guess with school it's just starting to really pick up so I'm kind of head down well thank you uh Pete Hank and Fallon uh hi Pete from San Diego California and um this week has still been about tools for sense making uh wikis are back in my conscious again and wiki wiki nature um and how the old old style wiki has really worked um I also had an existential crisis where I went oh my god I've I've been ignoring Rome for whatever reason and I have to go look at Rome again and and maybe it's better than Obsidian and I reconvince myself that I like Obsidian better um not that Rome is Rome just doesn't fit as well as Obsidian does for me um it's done for us uh also air table and Trello and an open source alternative to Trello called Wikan um and I've of course been doing video transcription working on preserving files archiving files especially big video files um and I'm also thinking about decentralized profiles and how that might work thanks Pete um Hank then Fallon then Matt I had to come out of the darkness um readings officially from Boston I just moved into a new apartment this week actually on Tuesday um so I won't give you guys the grand tour only because one it's not appropriate and two it's barely unpacked so um no I think you know my life as it's physically manifested isn't a little bit of a this is in disarray which actually kind of reflects a little bit of my mental state for the past week so um the next couple days I'm really just kind of focused on uh thinking about the things that I want to pursue and tackle over the next couple of months because I've been kind of laser focused on you know this move and and just kind of pushing things along and I want to kind of reinvest time back into some of those other projects so that's kind of where I'm at super um awesome Fallon and then Matt hey all um Fallon uh Carly in Brooklyn, New York yeah I I've had a lot on my mind recently and I've been having some very interesting conversations and been heavily involved in some serious doing around um decentralized sense making tools once specifically that I'm developing with a group of amazing folks and yes I I've been kind of diving into stories um stories that would allow the discoverability of some epistemological jewels that are embedded within communities and their collective narratives oh you did it for me too uh Ken do you mind muting your your line sorry go ahead Fallon yeah just some jewels that can be found within certain communities within communities and um how to share those awesome and I don't think you've been on a call where you've talked about this role called story threading no okay so separately I'll send you some links but we're we're trying to invent a role like that for events um that that you just described it quite well so I think that'd be really cool to figure out if there's a if there's a match there or how that might work I think there would be I'm very interested cool we will go there uh Matt and then Scott did you introduce yourself earlier okay good Matt then Scott hey guys um you know one of the uh the privileges of going last is you get or you know toward the end is you get to hear everybody's comments one of the challenges is you get to hear everybody's comments um you know maybe to bring us all the way back to um where this started and yeast um you know one of the things that I've been thinking about or at least off of this call is uh an earlier conversation Jerry we had about um you know sort of the kind of yeast starter right you know sourdough starter and how do we create something that um uh like the brothers that created calls for that we could send out um into the world and make everything more um healthy and stable um and maybe that's part of the you know part of the challenge for us at OGM is not to invent um a monolithic something that everyone comes to us but to create lightweight um interesting structures that spread out into the world and I um had a chance to be um to experience the flow shell um and um what that looks like and feels like and um challenging myself to learn some new skills of getting into flow with other people without sort of feeling the need to redirect um you know that flow so um thank you for that Charles and it's been nice connecting to other people on this call offline to actually start to build some things so um that's that's my check in Thanks Matt sometimes we facilitators have like a corgi dog instinct or pick whichever herding breed you want but it's like we need to nip at the heels of the of the sheep that are out at the edges of the herd and sometimes that's hard to hardly turn off uh Scott Hi everyone um you all inspired me to take a little deep dive with your your native land uh placements that you have so I found out that interlock and this is interlock in Michigan so we're between two lakes duck lake and green lake which sounds pretty boring but I found out those actually aren't the names of the lakes they were changed a very long time ago and they are still called duck lake and green lake but they are actually Lake Wabakaness and Wabakaneta which are in the Ottawa language and what they mean is water lingers and water lingers again and I thought that those were really beautiful nuggets of of language there um and you know they I think that they relate to a lot of the water issues that are going on because we really want that water to to linger in the right places and perhaps linger again um quick comment for Doug oddly enough my son just graduated as an engineer and is into physics and things and you know so he's he's in his 20s and I I passed along your garden world site to show some of the things that that you have been part of and he said he was blown away why he said that is that is a list of people that that he's been connected with that are basically his heroes from his school and education and so I just thought I'd say you're you're continuing to inspire inspire the the youth whether you know it or not so um I just want to pass that along um so the thing that I was thinking about that relates to this group specifically is we talked about memes and what we can do and what I what occurred to me was there's been times in the last 50 plus years where there's been spontaneous organization and action by government and the collective holes and and what I thought is like we have uh you know y2k we have the you know the the 2012 Mayan calendar thing we had uh the world war two rationing we had the whole two minutes to midnight concept um and those things once they were turned into a you know a couple word phrase activated people for some reason and I thought maybe there's a way to say what is it that we're we think is is something worth working on is it co2 is it water is it food and turn it into one of those things that feels like that kind of easy to share easy to at least understand at a basic level and that also turns into spontaneous organization and action um so I think that's what I oh um so for example just really quickly I've been unemployed for a little over a year doing freelance work and one of the metrics the thing that I did my little three word was days until broke okay so how many days do I have until I'm broke and then what I did was I just kept taking how much are we spending every day how much money do we have and it creates x number of days and as long as I can keep that the same or growing I'm good now I don't have to understand the whole system or anything like that but if I just keep the my eye on that one metric I'm good and I'm proposing is there a way that we could say what's one metric I know it's really really complicated but can we make it y2k can we make it something that everyone says okay I understand what this is and I need to do this about it so that's it for me um Scott thank you um and that that clicks into many things for me and I think also for like Lauren and Charles uh who've been thinking and working on memes a lot and and I think a lot of us are either part of communities that are trying to solve huge thorny problems and so forth and one of the goals is to find what is the what is the shortest phrase that travels well what is the retellable story as Jay might say that that sort of it's kind of self encapsulating it's it's got its own little little shell like a snail that then set down someplace can trigger positive behaviors right and and what are the small things we can say or do that travel well and that are contagious in a in a good way and if we could if we could only crack that code then maybe we could catalyze larger scale social change um so I uh yeah I like that a lot and as Pete posted in the in the chat uh startups call this runway what you were describing is days until broke that's that's like how much runway does the startup have which is you know cash cash in the accounts to be able to pay salaries or do you know do whatever to keep things running um did I miss anybody in the in the check-in I think I think I made my way around my grid in both screens uh Charles go ahead oh that's right sorry Charles no worries um kind of overflow but uh a lot of people already mentioned a number of things that I'm excited about and was going to mention anyway um the flow show it's Mondays it's the next two Mondays it's part of Kiko Lab uh collective intelligence Collaboratory um um ongoing Monday series and and uh for another two episodes I'm in charge and so that's the 7th and the 14th um on the 7th we have um any of you who are welcome to pass through of course um I think Jay golden maybe you're gonna be there I hope um join us back in the story room possibly we talked about that and um Peter Dowson of the story canvas will be back also and we have um Odo Honin will be sharing his uh learning and doing maps and this week we had Howard Reingold also Jerry and uh Matt and Pete and Judy and other regulars um who are here we also had as as as uh some of you were also participated in the Tuesday Metacogs call with Tom Atley starting to share um uh about his collective sense making ecosystem model and he will be back on the following Tuesday on the 8th of September um so yeah I'll put some some info on the link links in chat and the clue laboratory the kids clue laboratory is Sundays and anyone um kids kids 6 to 12 um welcoming here go to you for kids thanks awesome thanks Charles um and Kiko Lab is um is a sister organization to OGM we're sort of inter twinkled already and part of what we're trying to figure out is how to inter twinkle more and better what what do those connections mean and how do they work so everybody feel you know jump jump into their events as you as you like um and we'll see what that goes um and then I haven't checked in so I'll do a really brief check in the thing that's top of mind right now for me is I'm doing I'm trying to finish a speech uh like a 20 minute speech for unfinished which is a conference run by some young people in uh Romania uh and if you go to the site it's pretty interesting uh two of the other speakers are Anand Giridharadas and his wife Priya Parker who are kind of heroes of mine uh and I really like them I really like the whole thing they've created with some software developers a new platform for the event so it's not going to be in zoom it's not going to be on hop in they've got the kind of prototyping something that I got to test drive a little bit uh last week which is really pretty nice pretty interesting it's it's still how do I how do we chat how do we see each other what do we do but they've but they've done a few things that I think are really quite interesting um and historically they've had they've held this conference for a couple years not that many but a few in person so this is the first time it's gone completely virtual and in in person they make people apply to join it's free it's free to attend um they're they're funded by the Eidos Foundation um it's free to attend but they make people apply because they want participants to sort of really be all in and really be be participating so so they're doing the same sort of thing now and they were going to send me a link so that anybody in OGM would sort of automatically be be let through but they haven't done that yet but if you want to attend I recommend you apply and mention OGM um they should still be sending me a link um and I've been convincing them I think I have to just live stream the whole thing anyway because there's a difference between being able to be mixed into the event and being part of the conversations and all that and not um so uh so that's kind of the setup for it it's going to last a week it's going to it's a virtual conference for a week starting at the end of September um and I and the talks are going to be mostly pre-recorded so I'm doing mine pretty soon it's only to finish what I'm actually going to say but but my talk is basically titled trust is the way forward and uh and roughly I'm saying hey I think trust is actually the way out of all of our thorny problems uh even though I live in Portland in the Pacific Northwest which is like apparently a hotbed of anarchists who are trying to melt the world actually it's not uh and you know and and sort of walk into the issues in that way um so it goes back to a lot of my work on trust which uh which I still really love which is still threaded through a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here it's just not uh front and center for me um and has a lot to do with the work of you know democracy that Tom Atley works on and as I just think about the different topics that we're touching trust is so so deeply involved everywhere how do we organize how do we organize learning for you know intergenerational learning uh has a lot to do with trust uh how do we tell stories that that travel that uh that has a lot to do with trust so there we are any any reflections on our check-in for a second I I have a a couple things I'd love to try to achieve in the call but just any thoughts back on the on the check-in or what happened hey Jay this is Sheila I've got a quick one yeah please so I can't remember who it was who who was talking about um you know not necessarily recreating the wheel uh but how do we get things out into the world I just wanted to mention something that that triggered for me I was uh I used to work at T-Mobile I'm in Seattle Washington I didn't say that earlier I used to work at T-Mobile's headquarters and a couple years ago T-Mobile partnered with the Ashoka Foundation to run what they called the change makers challenge and the idea was to get people who were I think um I think it was something anywhere between like 13 and 20 who were doing change in their activities and basically for their organizations that they had created they basically were oh they were basically applying for grants and it was in a contest form and they brought the and it was amazing what some of these people were up to I just was blown away but they brought the 30 semifinalists into Bellevue for a couple of days and one of the events that they held on campus was a mentoring session and I was one of the volunteer mentors and one of the groups was this group of kids from um Savage Minnesota who had organized these events where basically they were community fairs but they uh but they also had some things like they made sure there was a blood drive truck there and they made sure there was a food drive going on and there was a um like a clothing drive and things like that so it was a community fair that also did a huge amount in terms of collecting all of these things that that the community needed more people in the community needed and one of the problems that they were seeing is that they were looking for grant and support and mentorship on was um um people were calling them from other communities and saying we need your playbook um how did you do this we want to do a similar thing and they were just looking at it going like we don't know how to do this um and so there was just several kind of things around like getting stories out there and you know getting things that are already created out in the different way to different communities that that just kind of resonated for me as like a real world example um and that's it that's what I wanted to say um Sheila loved that and I think I think a big piece of what we're trying to do is how do we replicate what we know and share it out in ways that are useful to other groups uh and a playbook uh is a great kind of capsule for for what that is uh and I think most people don't know I mean what strikes me a lot is when groups convene and decided to go take some action they're still faced with a bunch of really weird techno platform questions about okay where do we save stuff do we just a thing that struck me at the start of lockdown was the proliferation of google docs and google spreadsheets for useful bodies of work like like there were just dozens and dozens of them as people were trying to self-organize uh around the country uh so how might we create a better platform for sharing what we know um so that's very central for for what we're talking about um anybody want to riff on it yeah jerry I mean I think um you know one of the things that just sort of for the for the new folks um what's interesting about ogm is um we're simultaneously having conversations about ogm-y stuff right um which is what this check-in is about is sort of what are you working on what are you thinking about but I think jerry you know to kind of bring us back to the core of this is there's so many good things going on in the world right um and there are so many playbooks that are already written or being written as we as we speak the question is is what's the what is the meta-layer that lives on top of it um that allows those things to be easily accessed um and communicated and shared um and those things are um multi-generational or or indigenous wisdoms that that lasts those things are new things that are being invented um and I think that's what you're going to find with this group of people um you know and I think about some of the work that julian's doing which is just um uh this comment that we you know um if we only knew what we already know right um and how do we get that to happen because I think you know the googles of the world and um those things have been so almost like corrupted by you know information that's useless um that's they're designed to um to feed the numbers in the boxes kevin right um right and so that's you know that's part of the problem that I think we're trying to solve in addition to sharing the problems that we're trying to solve like you know the food system and the education system and those things it's more of the you know the meta the meta kind of stuff that I'm interested in seeing if we can make some progress on I have to jump in on top of that man I I think you know talking about a playbook and talking about a meta level what judy is doing in terms of inner awareness of intergenerational learning it's really well now on something new that's happening that people don't understand because you know I have one grandson who's in a virtual school and it's really not working socially but we've got a big tent like literally no walls uh four kids for the six-year-old four kids for the nine-year-old at distance in a bubble and it's really working but the parents have to be involved and they aren't aware of thinking of themselves as teachers you know they're they're in a new thing and so this is I think things get meta when you add a level of meta thinking to a thing that's already happening that people are trying to think about and can't figure it out and judy's doing making all those periods I'm surrounded within you know a half a mile here we probably have at least six tent like uh teaching pods of people that are in networks that I know about right they've hired a teacher or whatever or or some expert and they don't know how to think about it and the parents were involved in it so I mean adding a meta level to it to an emergent phenomenon you know emergent you evolve to a higher level you know when when the bacteria becomes a bacterial phase duty things can make all those parents more aware of themselves because they're thinking about themselves in a way they don't know how to put together so I think that's really cool I sent you an email I'm really interested in your work team cool there's also um organisms like slime molds that that change into a different kind of organism at different scales and a different yeah environmental circumstances so you know when there's just a few spores it's one thing but when they collect up they can actually turn into a a thing that looks like a like a slug and can move around uh things like that um thanks Kevin that's what Celine Dion you know she was bacteria became that anyway I love that Doug go ahead so I have an observation and a hypothesis the observation is that we are not very good at keeping our introduction short it's like we don't have the discipline of collapsing it into a nice little poem and I'm going to propose that that weakens our ability to communicate the general messages we're concerned about outward into the broader community and that we need to learn how to speak much more concisely in an interesting way I I think I mostly agree and then there's a part of me that's that uh thanks is this is replaying a couple of the check-ins I'm thinking I'm not sure how that would have been made more concise um partly also we have no separate outlet to figure out what each of us is doing so this is this is sort of our ongoing quest about where do we where do we put our profile pages for example and what is on them so that so that the check-in can be you know it's really hot outside I'm tired next uh you know as as we get to know each other as well so partly we're we're doing a whole bunch of different tasks here because we don't have the the support of where our general interests are not my email sig is a now page you know slash no w which lives on my website which I don't keep updated often enough but is an attempt to say here's the here's generally the stuff that I'm working on which is which is a try at that a swing at that but we need we need much juicier now pages my brain is actually the best version of that but I don't really I don't think that my now page is reflected in my brain which is something that just clicked in my head and I'm like oh I should do that better uh because then someone could wander through not only what I'm interested in but each of those contexts and go deeper but we're doing a little tiny bit of that here Neil go ahead just picking up and forgive me I missed a bit of what Kevin said but just picking up on Jerry shouldn't have to defend the the check-ins um a complex adaptive system learns by watching itself in motion right and so we have to see who's moving where at what speed with what baggage you know with what capability I've had four or five amazing conversations with people from this group because of things that were said during check-ins and so the connections are being made not just here but beyond here and I think that as Jerry and I talked about the other day we need a process for this and recognizing are we ants in zigzag find the resource mode or are we ants that have already found the resource and are taking it back to the burrow mode because they're different models of the same uh same organism and I think my sense is we do need this sort of rich check-in I think this has been relatively short for a really good check-in and I've got a bunch of connections already that I'm going to pursue and see where to from here so yeah as I didn't hear exactly what Kevin said I heard the last little bit so forgive me and and my hope is exactly that that when I hear that you all are having up you're having meeting up and having calls and and sort of starting to conspire to take over the world like pinky in the brain I am thrilled like that makes me really really happy because because it means something sparked currently well uh during our check-ins or during our conversations so partly what I'm hoping is that we get to know one another and then go do stuff together or talk together and then come back in and say hey when this got said over there you know it came back and I we just went crazy and and have built this thing and here's here's like the mock-up of the of the new spaceship that sounds really terrific and then also I think we need to do more other calls other than our Thursday morning check-ins because then we'll get the sense that the other calls are actually project calls and there's no problem with a project call just going running off and doing something right so and and the topic that I was hoping to turn our attention toward but it's already past an hour here uh was this idea of story threaders and I think I'll spend a couple minutes on it and then I'm going to set up a different call so that anybody who's really interested in helping frame off story threading can come join us on that or and then anybody who can't make that call can watch the video later but I think I think we just sort of need project calls and to not worry about it and so there'll be more calls but then people can opt in and the check-in can be the what Neil just described really really eloquently the sort of idea for for us to watch ourselves go ahead Charles. Just quickly just to give another invitation to the the story room at the flow show I mean and I think it seems it'll be sort of in a weekly institution within the Monday Kiko Lab calls will have this story room it may not always be limited to an hour and we're not so so hard-ass about the schedule but but just to say that's that's a great place to to explore all these things as well and kind of go into story and this the use case that we're looking at is this online learning imperative that's not the learning part anymore but but evolving so just to welcome story threaders there as well. Cool. Other thoughts where we are right now and also other thoughts about check-ins? I have really complicated thoughts about check-ins because this is so you know they're important yet they're they take a lot of time go ahead Kevin. Oh okay yeah I was just saying that you know there there is an assumption by some folks that this is a group that should be collectively working toward goal I wonder if that's true. Um my own dream is that we can you say that again? I can you I heard collectively working toward and I didn't hear what happened with what Kevin said after that. Yeah you wanted what I said. Go ahead Kevin. Okay there is an assumption that this is a group that should be working collectively toward a goal in this format and I question that. Go ahead. Yeah I mean Kevin I agree on on it depends on what level we're talking about and what goal we're talking about if we're talking about you know banking black or we're talking about the food system or we're talking about the education system or we're talking about you know the work that you know I'm doing with Jay and and folks then then the answer is probably not right because we're all working on different things and that's part of the beauty of this group. If the answer is how do we create systems and structures and platforms and you know playbooks and things that allow the working on a goal to be a more impactful um kind of effort then I think you know that sort of that again that meta structure I think is what the hunt is here and you know we sometimes get lost in the this kind of the pursuit of our individual goals and and miss the conversation about the structure which this is so I you know I agree that um you know with with Neil and in in folks which is this is the these these are the moments in which we can find areas where we can then partner together on projects and things and then when we partner together and do that work we should also be thinking about what makes what would help us make those partnerships more effective and how do we build you know those things on top of it it's almost like the scaffolding that allows us to reach that higher you know higher level right um so that's the I think that's the shared hunt versus the shared hunt being our individual passions which need to be pursued as well and I'll add to that um drawing on some of the original metaphors as we were starting to kick around these ideas for what OGM could be that we're sort of a mushroom in that in that a mushroom is sort of what happens to mycelia when they come up as a fruiting body in order to sort of reproduce and go out elsewhere but to borrow the metaphor that the Judy really likes um our project ideas or what we're doing are kind of like mycelial links like hyphae running out to find other other mycelia other mycelia networks or to pop up mushrooms in new places or to do whatever and then the second natural metaphor that we used early on was this is an estuary an estuary so where salt water meets fresh where rivers run into the sea estuaries are zones of high nutrition high creativity and mixing zones basically where different kinds of critters meet and that's kind of what our check-in that role our check-in is playing right now because not so much other things maybe the the the google group is doing this a bit because we have different kinds of conversations but but the the reason to choose estuary is that just shit happens in the estuary new kinds of critters emerge because there's hybridization there's you know opportunism there's other kinds of things and and partly i'm interested in the emergence of multiple goals that are coherent with or consistent with or resonant with the overall mission of ogm and so if one goal is how does roam like roam obsidian notion all those kinds of things all those funky tools that are coming out right now um which what where how do they work but how do they cross over to this other world of brain kumu other kinds of visualizations because i'm sitting here thinking i don't like roam because i live in 2.25 dimensional land of the brain and when i go to an outliner it makes me sad i just get sad and all the outlining tools i feel like i've taken a giant step backward but the brain has this notes field that could just just very very easily be one of these outliner tools with super great backlinks and all that and i'm like that would be hot that would be fantastic why does that not exist and how might that work and that could be a goal oriented project that could turn into some new code could turn into something that we all wind up using so i'm really interested in emergent goals that that resemble the little high fay that are poking their their their little noses through the soil to find other networks and bringing other projects that are already working things like that and then the zoom chat is it is brutally inadequate agreed i could jump in go ahead sheila and then judy yeah i was just going to say a couple of different things going back to what doug said i i feel like there's a sort of a i'm experiencing the conversation around the check-ins being either or when i think there's actually to me i would frame it more and the way i experienced it is more in the frame of an interesting challenge the thing that doug said that i think really resonated with me was the idea that you know maybe not knowing or maybe not doing things or challenging ourselves to summarize things really quickly could have an adverse impact on how we explain ourselves to other people and i just want to just say i i think that there's a real i agree with that i think there's a real i think there is a real challenge in that i think anybody who has at least in my experience at any time i've had to explain myself either as someone who's seeking a job or as someone who's trying to sell my services as an independent consultant if you know there the reason why they call it an elevator pitch is that there is a need to be able to get across fairly concrete things or fairly not concrete but to get across things in a fairly concise manner and i think the idea that you know so i would kind of riff on what doug said and kind of say there's an opportunity here to potentially practice getting conceptual thoughts across very briefly that i think is a really interesting provocative statement so doug i don't know whether that's what you meant but i just wanted to say that to me that's the way i heard what doug said the other thing i would say is that i i similar to what kind of what i just said about doug's statement what kevin said also is is something that i've been grappling with over the past couple of days as i've been kind of getting more involved in what the group is doing is i don't get the sense that there is actually agreement on what this group is trying to do which is fine and also at some point i feel like there needs to be some sort of agreement for me to even be able to understand how i might contribute it's quite not quite frankly right now i'm just sort of like well i'm interested i'm listening to a really interesting conversation but i don't necessarily have some thoughts about how i could contribute productively yeah thanks jila i'm duty then lauren you were muted so we have to prevent background noise um i think this question is really complicated and it comes down to different roles of people in different settings and different groups in their function um i see this initially as just a network of connecting like-minded individuals with very diverse skill sets and very different talents as a resource pool for networking for more specific tasks and so it's kind of like to me this is a communication hub and from that we would then break into a group that's really technical and can do stuff in enabling the technical aspects of virtual that i'm totally incapable of doing hopefully in a way that someone who is only moderately at this can learn and secondarily taking the ideology that a lot of people have very different levels of knowledge and moving it to the next level by sharing it with other people getting feedback on that and expanding and refining the scope and context so it's kind of like an expand contract expand contract in a way because you take in a bunch of stuff and then you you sort of try to get to the real nuggets of truth and then from those nuggets of truth you expand again and build some more things and i'm not very good at verbalizing this but it's a complicated thing and i think we need to sort of in a way separate the philosophical ideological academic piece from the action piece but they're both really important and our attempt with setting up the discourse forums uh is to create space for all those conversations to happen happen in parallel without any of them individually drowning out the outings of this google group which and the balance between those things we haven't sort of really figured out and one of my hopes is to make it so that newbies coming in can quickly find their way into the conversations that have juice for them particularly where they can apply their skills and their interests and find some help to get things done that they're trying to get done that are still resonant with the the overall vision here that's that's still on the wish list but that's that's really what we're trying to get done. Lauren over to you. Well i think that there um i think with a group of people uh who are this smart it's actually incredibly difficult if we think we're going to have like the ogm mission yeah that's not going to happen anytime soon but one thing that i think would be extremely helpful and i think that kevin was talking last week about how he um was involved in purchasing cooperative if and judy totally set me up if ogm is kind of the communication uh hub what i think would be extremely helpful is uh instead of deciding the overarching story is just to take one small step together and that would be to set up a purchase purchasing cooperative so that we can use a variety of software such as um muro and frelo and these kind of things to have more interoperable communication that's a great idea i'm muted found that you want to jump in don't say that's a great idea cool and partly partly what we're trying to do here is rethink and remix the tools because one of the more ambitious goals of what ogm could do is help us invent the next communications medium right i mean we've been we've been on the inner tubes kind of as the web since tim tim bernersley kind of created the web and then corporations turned it into a magazine and a movie theater and whatever else and we have a possibility here to actually step through into some new way of communicating um and we're not going to get there like next week and we're not going to get there by drawing uh a flow chart of what that looks like right now we're going to get there by experimenting and testing a bunch of new things out and having enough freedom to roam into what that might look like other thoughts on this topic maybe this is the room where we apply the sorting hat can you go to other rooms uh exactly i love the sorting hat metaphor it's one of my favorite things out of harry potter uh and the sorting hat is in my i think it's in one of my talks about education in that it would be great to you know to have some kind of a sorting hat to help any learners find their way into the group and the topics and the methods that work best for them kind of thing yeah and i i don't know if i'm hufflepuff first liver in can't tell um so let me talk first we're we're actually near the end of 90 minutes so we should probably wrap soon what i'll do is i'll schedule a separate doing call about uh framing up story threading uh uh as what it is but i'd love to just ask the question um we have this organizing thought that that we're going to use guilds to try to figure out kind of crafts or trades that that that fit into ogm and we've i've been sort of brainstorming a couple different kinds of guilds we like guilds because guilds have this idea that there's an apprenticeship model where there's juniors who come into a guild who can learn uh the craft of the guild by having seniors anybody who's ahead of them at any at any level sort of help them into the into the guild that guilds also in some sense certify validate vet uh in some in some other ways sort of test and improve the skills level of the participants in the guild so that when they go do work in the world uh it's at a it's at a particular level and people keep you can keep improving the skill level so that's nice about guilds and then guilds are also you know strange attractors in that oh here's a story threading guild what on earth is that and then you sort of discover it and so there there are an attractor for people who need that craft need that skill and can hire people from the guild and the guild doesn't now have to be about being hired that work can be done for free or not but uh but framing it up as a guild creates that that sort of opportunity so I just love to put that in in front of the group and say what do y'all think about guilds and what would it mean to operationalize guilds as ogm like how does that uh how does that connect with how do we get things done uh together whoever would like to and if you hate the idea of guilds say so too like uh I I'm I've always liked guilds I I kind of I can I can think my way past the restraint of trade and other kinds of problems that guilds had uh back in the day but I think a modern guild can be actually very productive Neil go ahead uh you're muted you're so muted I must unmute it as you as you as you are muted I haven't tried okay in that case I missed completely um two types of guilds I'm aware of one is of like-minded people like silversmiths and there's different levels in this apprenticeship process and there's a how do we work together and how do we improve our craft the other is a permaculture guild which is deliberately diverse players planted together for companion plantings which is this check-in and so this check-in allows us to see who's got fertile soil who's who's producing what sort of nutrients what's what's coming back into the ecosystem that I can use how can I integrate that in a way that works so this check-in to some extent is a little bit like a bean pyramid you know you tilt the canes up and you say broadly roaming for that point there but each of you seeds is growing in a different way a different rate and we're going to try different things with each of those so to me a guild could be any particular bean vine right but the the TP we're building is something which I think has a bit more structure which says ultimately and I'm assuming this we're aiming for something which has a higher purpose than an ever individual purposes and it's going to create a structure it's going to create an ecosystem of players that can coexist together be resilient together and do benefit to the farmer slash humanity and so I can see how a growth metaphor allows that to happen and if one seedling isn't performing do you rip it out or do you encourage it to reach its potentials and if so what's it lacking and this is where we start to feel that in collective presencing circles and collective alchemy circles they also check in on what is the barrier that's preventing you and what is the grief that you need to burn off and what is the alchemy that needs to occur here and so as if and as these conversations get to that deeper level what is it that's preventing you personally and you collectively ask collectively from achieving things better than we could do alone because otherwise you don't need to be in a diverse guild and I think also Neil what you just said is a great topic for a separate OGM call just this idea of collective sense making collective alchemy and grief and and how do we hold grief what what role does grief have I think that's a great great topic for us to talk about just in a focused way so I'll I'll frame up a talk about that who else want to jump in on guilds etc and also Neil thanks for thanks for the like about the ecological meaning for that sorry Bellin was that you jumping in just a comment on guilds I like the idea of having zones of expertise and people who can help individuals who want to acquire additional skills I get a little nervous with the guild in an isolation sense or an exclusive sense and so having it be very permeable would be important to me and lots of maybe some satellites then that would expand the guild concept so that it's more readily spreadable without putting too much of a workload on one particularly highly skilled person thanks Judy and in some weird way this here check-in is like the guild of guilds you know strange way and what we want is a lot of fluid conversation across them all I'm hoping for with a guild structure is to have places attractors so that people know where to go to have a conversation about or better still to learn some skill really deeply right so so one other dimension I worry about the I mean this group is very generous and so people will say just call me or send me or you know I'll send you or whatever but that one-on-one is intention really rich but can be draining on the experts and so it seems to me that within our own little culture we could be priming the pump for the actual ways to create disseminatable information so that there's little primers or a link to use to get to a certain point then come talk to me because you can learn some more from me kind of thing and that's that's moving the guild to the virtual realm and one of the nice things about martial arts and guilds the two models that I know of is that juniors of any level kind of take responsibility for people just a step or two behind them which is the best way to learn anything anyway like you know that's when we had one-room school houses when we had several hundred thousand one-room school houses across the US we had a pretty educated population then we industrialized schooling and separated the kids from each other which which creates artificial scarcity in a moment of abundance very very weird but we decided somehow we somebody convinced us that the pression military school system was the way to go to train up large bodies of humans and to me that was what like one of the steps we took that broke education as as kind of a learning mechanism Charles and Charles I will just note that your really interesting background made it harder for me to see your hand was up so my apologies go ahead okay my apologies too just to chime in I maybe this is useful it's something that's been coming up with with Lauren and me in the Kiko lab and a few of our conversations around dashboards and I was some kind of talk about building a platform or questions about that's a good way to go and somebody's got their volume up I'm getting an echo from somebody who has an open mic but I don't see anybody whose noise that's coming from go ahead Charles again um let's see this came up um in relation to our cool laboratory with the with the kids and the feisty moms and also with interestingly with Tom atlee the other night um in regard to his collective sense making modeling and how it's sort of vast and how can we ground this into sort of using it in a practical way and some of us here today were in that call as well and so I just came on this idea of a dashboard of dashboards because you said something about a guild of guilds and I'm trying to connect this idea of guilds with the possibility of thinking in terms of dashboards kind of bridging that tech piece and so yeah we're thinking about what we need for the cool laboratory for the moms or other parents guardians of learning as a dashboard and then approaching something so vast and meta as the ecosystem of collective sense making but in terms of dashboards you know toolkits sort of interfaces anyway over and I think we're I think we're talking our way around individual and collective sense making artifacts that that how do we get oriented how do we share what we know how do we show progress how does all this stuff work given we have a rich digital medium that could be representing so much more than project management software and blogs Pete do you want to jump in and explain what Laurence pointed to in the chat yeah sure use net was actually really interesting I don't know if I can tie this to anything else right away but use net was a really interesting transmission medium communication medium it did a broadcast thing so this was before we had instant always on connections between computers and things like that so there were tons of channels and threads in each channel so you can kind of think of it as a huge massive slack but it got the whole thing all of the data of it got shipped around asynchronously around the world so one of the cool things about this was that there wasn't any centralization news kind of flowed all over the world another interesting thing is that nobody no centralized person could see what you are reading so you could dump stuff in the stream of use net and it would kind of bubble across the world and then you could pick it up locally so your local sys admin could see what you are reading but but in general people didn't have the purview that google has or facebook has that oh pete is reading blah blah blah about this and you know you know I don't want google or facebook to know that necessarily so this is in relationship also to I think I'm looking for decentralized and federated ways to spread information particularly so the good first thing is profiles lauren has also got something that she calls hash bands where she wants to decentralize and kind of federate thoughts kind of like the brain thoughts that's probably a good enough love to talk to to I could talk on and on about both the nuts and bolts of use net and why how it ended up evolving to that there were a couple different you know takes at it over a decade or two of getting better and better and better and by the end of it it was a pretty sophisticated and amazing system it's one of those parts of the early introduced that many of us miss go ahead julian I just want to point out use net is still very much alive and then in use yeah very cool we we're going to wrap in a couple minutes any any concluding thoughts on where we are my to-do items and also any any things that that people would like to to do from this call and Judy I'm sorry I mean to remember to reserve 10 or 15 minutes at the end of our calls to do that these calls are less do calls but I will set up a couple of different separate OGM calls one of them for framing up story threading one of them about collective sense making and grief and there may have been a third topic that came through that was heading that way as well but at least those two for right now anybody else closing thoughts as we finish up this call jay yeah I just just coming back to the check-ins I would love to support moving the dial on that I feel like I come in and I'm I'm talking about the things I'm doing but not the things I'm dreaming and not the things that I'm feeling and wanting to change on which is really a part of a bigger story and I feel like everybody's got a bigger story they're working with and they're moving the dial in specific ways and trying to speak about it in a way that might be relevant to the group which is very hard to guess on so I think I'm not complaining about it I think it's got a lot of value but I I would like to kind of come back to that idea that we could have either a micro story that we can drop into that's part of a hash bin if I'm understanding that correctly it's it's it's hashtagged or just you know you could spend five minutes scanning to see what people are up to what's related to you what you want to move the dial on and maybe make the conversation more sophisticated um I love that Jay and it would be lovely if I could just say okay good everybody set your filters to plus two or minus two and we'll just bump to the meta level and everybody just share that part and I actually think that that meta level part is hard for a lot of people to get to and and then articulate and it requires trust we could probably get there with a light group process and a little bit more time like if we could slow things down I think it's really I think it's hard to get to that and maybe projecting here but I think I think I think mine's probably pretty accessible just because I'm always chewing on that and likely that's top of mine for me a lot but for many people we kind of need to explore our way toward what our own meta is and that would be a really fun group process to do um and does that and I feel like I'm exploring even as I'm saying that does that resonate for you well it could be both you could still have a story of the week or a haiku of the week or whatever I just think a little more framing that would illuminate where the what dial you're moving as related to your bigger picture I think could be helpful cool uh Neil then Matt yeah just picking up on that Jerry the the conversation that we had and looking at how do we get what I call vertical integration because it's this issue of what level are we getting off at and to operationalize things you're obviously down in the specific project but at the high level you're still operating within a set of cultural ethics norms as defined either within the organization or within the culture or within the globe so ultimately global system ethics are critical um we are getting we are getting a little bit of an echo uh Sheila it might be your phone yours was it was one of the fuse that that's not muted um so I just just reminded me of many years ago my father took me to an open day at the Queensland University and they had a early days digital recording device that actually allowed to play back a split second afterwards and the phrase they got us to say while listening to our own words was I'm not a pheasant plucker I'm a pheasant plucker's son and you should have heard the laughter in that booth that is awesome and and it turns out that there's some delay like 300 milliseconds which destroys our ability to communicate like like a little we can tolerate a little bit of delay in hearing ourselves back a little more and just it's really really hard to focus on what you're saying yes and one very quick thing my partner and has been listening into elements of this conversation and when we have the breakout session on grief and those other collective presencing type elements I'd like to invite her along into that same session if that's okay um I just want to say there's an open invitation to invite anybody to any of our calls this is all meant to be completely open please invite people into ogm at any level this is like wildly open and what I really want is as we wander through this if if you're like oh my god you know Sue should be here like please like immediately invite folks in Matt then Ken then we're out of out of today's call yeah I'm just wondering and I'd love to I'd love to hear from people you know if it's time for us to have a longer duration collaborative session something that's multi-day where we work through a design process to sort of sort some of these things out and if we're ready to do that you know if we feel like we started to assemble enough interesting and interested people you know maybe it's you know maybe it's time and I would be happy to you know design that and you know to work with this group to kind of figure out what it's going to be and then and then we would take a few days to actually work through some of these things in in earnest and in greater levels of detail that's a lovely idea Matt and if we framed up a couple different things we'd like to do in those days we could probably get a whole bunch of of parallel things done so maybe I'll start in a thread in discourse just to get people to send me some objectives knowing that ultimately they'll they'll have to be some choices made and some refinement so let's get that going that sounds awesome thank you um Ken Matt took the words right out of my mouth that's exactly what I was going to say is maybe it's time it feels like we're we're hitting this this critical mass point where okay there's so much on the table we need to spend some focus time sorting it out because I don't think we can keep doing it on these these hour and a half calls so thank you Matt and thank you everybody makes sense to me as well yeah thank you all um let us wrap today's call there that's a really nice ending point um see you all on the list and I'll on these separate calls and please invite anybody who comes to mind into these conversations this group whatever that that would be great can I just say I love the way that Ken comes in in a very reclined state with those dulcet tones and just says here I am reporting in from where I'm at the line on the couch and it's just such a great time to be here with you all I love you all you know it's just beautiful to be here I love you too Ken you're gorgeous and thanks for inviting me into this group it's like Elvis commuting with us thanks I'm still in the building bye guys so hugs to everyone thanks Judy