Sunday Open Thread – March 25, 2007

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

Finding & Working With Others: Instead of working alone, connecting and collaborating with others, on our own terms, in our own context, developing our own plan of action. A billion diverse people doing our own thing but in sync, in community. Some early thoughts on this, sure to stir up controversy:

The mechanism for finding others won’t be a website, database or other online technology.
The mechanism for finding others cannot be one of agency, because person-to-person connection agencies are fatally flawed by their intrinsic conflict of interest.

The Fourth Turning: The coming dark and turbulent era. (I gave away my copy of the book, so this one will have to wait until I pick up a new copy).
The ‘M’ word.
Squatter Communities (in struggling nations, which now contain as many as 1.5 billion people) as Model Intentional Communities.
New Developments in Innovation: Disrupting the disrupters; Next-gen biomimicry; New fields of peer-to-peer technology.
Knowledge Management: Common-denominator low-hanging fruit.

What I’m thinking about:

We live in a world of specialization and communication. So why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists?Bad practice?

What do you think?

Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams. He and I will both be in Denver presenting at SLA 2007, June 3-6. Oh, Al Gore will be there too.

4 Responses to Sunday Open Thread – March 25, 2007

David Zinger says:

March 25, 2007 at 15:48

I appreciate your interest in finding and working with others. I look forward to your post as I am quite interested, actually more than interested, I am working/playing at moving from me to we. When you can show a black lab go nose to nose with a bird you are moving in the right direction!
Mike Bennett says:

March 25, 2007 at 15:48

I’m interested in your topic of finding and working with others.There’s an old African proverb that says a lot about partnerships:
Jim says:

March 25, 2007 at 16:56

David,Earlier you wrote about collobaration within communities, I think the keywords were envisioning and forward thinking, perhaps such as http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/04/15.html. That is the not the article, but one of them recently inspired me to think about what sorts of virtual and physical forums can help to bring people in a city together to discuss issues and ideas for improving the quality life within that city. And how do we bring it beyond ranting and raving toward productive dicussion and collaboration with either legislation or community efforts to make those ideas be implemented. I’ve been poking around, looking at social networking software and other things. My biggest concern is getting beyond the rant & rave and beyond partisan politics and really coming up with solutions together. So if you have any ideas on this or reseources, I’d appreciate seeing something in your blog in the future on it.
Brutus says:

March 25, 2007 at 17:52

You ask, nonrhetorically I presume, “So why are there so few excellent craftspeople, and so few excellent conversationalists?” And I suspect you propose to answer your own question. The essential reason, in my view, is that what’s dominant in our information environment has gradually shifted away from verbal forms to visual forms, which has the concomitant effect of dulling verbal acuity. There are still plenty of good writers/conversationalists out there, and lots of folks developing their verbal skills through activities such as blogs. But the general public consumes more and more visual information and less and less verbal information. So the audience for those good writers and conversationalists demands more simplistic quality simply to understand. I don’t expect the trend to reverse any time soon.