📷 Day 5: serene
Remembering 2 Tone records.1 (I once met Jerry Dammers’ dad. He was an extremely proud father).
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HT Alan Ralph. ↩︎
📷 Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 4: foliage
#mbapr
💬“Peace of the sort that brings wholeness, harmony, and health to our lives only happens when chaos, confusion, and conflict are included and transcended.”
- Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology.
Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 3: Card. My daughter made this card for my birthday, to go with a themed collection of sci-fi novels.
#mbapr
📷 Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 2: Flowers. This extraordinary bunch came our way. What a beautiful gift!
#mbapr
📷Micro.blog photo challenge April 2024. Day 1: toy
How to set your own agenda
Harrison Owen, who died in March 2024, invented one of the most hopeful approaches to group facilitation I’ve ever come across. He called it ‘Open Space Technology’ (OST), but it was far from hi-tech. In fact, the main ‘technology’ was simply in how people in a group setting can interact fruitfully with one another, even when they really don’t agree.
“Peace of the sort that brings wholeness, harmony, and health to our lives only happens when chaos, confusion, and conflict are included and transcended.”
- Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology.
I first came across Open Space as a means of organising workshops in highly contested political spaces.
In the UK during the 1980s and early 1990s progressive social activity was constantly undermined by Trotskyites (or whatever they were) striving to co-opt social movements for their own ends. There was always a risk that as soon as you set up a committee of any kind, they’d get themselves voted onto it and turn it into a front for the true workers revolutionary communist workers party, or some such combination of those terms.
But what were the alternatives? The Labour Party had been hammered with this problem, and had settled on a full-blown witch hunt against anyone affiliated with the Militant Tendency, which like a monstrous baby cuckoo had nearly pushed them out of their own nest. We’d witnessed how the so-called cure was nearly as bad as the disease.
I think it was about 1992 when we organised our own small Open Space event. Of course, the entryists turned up, but the Law of Two Feet really stumped them. When they realised anyone could set the agenda they were delighted. This must have seemed much easier than having to take over by stealth! But when the discussions began they were confounded by the fact that, equally, anyone could just walk away and find something more important to them. To everyone except the entryists, the experience was delightful.
Image by Chris Kinkel from Pixabay
Of course, OST didn’t change the whole world, and it’s not useful for every meeting. But it was formative for me personally, because I could see how people could come together to identify, commit to and begin to solve their own problems, without waiting for someone else to do it for them.
Open Space Technology has also left a strong mark on facilitation generally. Unconferences, World Café, Bar Camp, the Art of Hosting, design sprints, and many other approaches owe a great deal to Harrison Owen’s pioneering determination to trust people to pursue their own agendas.
Vale Harrison Owen.
More:
Working in Open Space: A Guided Tour
Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers 📚
I found this almost too whimsical yet strangely moving. A bit like my life then.
When it comes to writing notes, how much mess is just enough?
Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, likes to keep his notes messy1:
“‘Messiness’, in this context at least, is just the state of not being so hubristic as to imagine that you know, in advance, precisely what’s required in order to do or to create something worthwhile. Which, of course, nobody does.” - The life-changing magic of not tidying up
I really appreciate the benefits of serendipity, but I also need some structure, which is why I’m happy with making atomic notes, densely linked. You might call it a Zettelkasten. Burkeman says he tried a Zettelkasten approach to his notes, but found it too organised.
That’s not at all how I’ve experienced it.
The image that for me best sums up this process of making short notes to create longer pieces of writing is that of my little worm farm. All sorts of scraps get dumped in at the top. And mostly unseen, the worms turn everything into nourishing compost.
It’s almost magical.
So instead of being obsessive, I just have a few simple rules that I mostly stick to.
- Plain text (Markdown) notes.
- Each note is a single idea with a unique ID.
- Each note deserves a clear title.
- Notes link meaningfully to other notes.
And while this little system might not result in much tidiness, it’s still really neat.
Really looking forward to forward to photoblogging in April. It’s simple: just post a photo every day for a month. But I’ve been surprised to find how much I like it. Thanks to @jean, who has some thoughts on whether or not it’s a ’challenge’.
Don't make a Zitatsalat out of your writing
Zitatsalat? What does that even mean?
Yes, Zitatsalat. I found this lovely but rarely used German term in the title of a book by the journalist Stephan Maus. The book’s name is Zitatsalat von Hinz & Kunz.
I love the rhyming rhythm of this compound term, but what does Zitatsalat actually mean?
Well, Zitatsalat translates as Quote Salad. It’s not a compliment.
Zitatsalat, by Stephan Maus (2002).
But what’s wrong with quoting other writers?
Hugo shortcodes in micro.blog
Here’s a quick test of Hugo shortcodes. I’ve been reading some tips for making the most of the Hugo web rendering system.
But it turns out I can’t use those ‘box-tip’ shortcodes in micro.blog
More research needed…
Perhaps I can just do the same thing with HTML and styling.
Info! Yes, here’s a basic information box.
…well so much for the styling!
🌊 A blissful Autumn weekend swimming and surfing #pacificwavewednesday
Surf Beach at Kiama, New South Wales
Work as if writing is the only thing that matters
“Work as if writing is the only thing that matters. Having a clear, tangible purpose when you consume information completely changes the way you engage with it. You’ll be more focused, more curious, more rigorous, and more demanding. You won’t waste time writing down every detail, trying to make a perfect record of everything that was said. Instead, you’ll try to learn the basics as efficiently as possible so you can get to the point where open questions arise, as these are the only questions worth writing about. Almost every aspect of your life will change when you live as if you are working toward publication. You’ll read differently, becoming more focused on the parts most relevant to the argument you’re building. You’ll ask sharper questions, no longer satisfied with vague explanations or leaps in logic. You’ll naturally seek venues to present your work, since the feedback you receive will propel your thinking forward like nothing else. You’ll begin to act more deliberately, thinking several steps beyond what you’re reading to consider its implications and potential.”
- Tiago Forte’s summary of How to Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens
The card index system is ‘a thing alive’ - or is it?
Niklas Luhmann, the famed sociologist of Bielefeld, Germany, wrote of how he saw his voluminous working notes (his ‘Zettelkasten’) as a kind of conversation partner, which surprised him from time to time. But he wasn’t the first to suggest that a person’s notes might be in some sense alive.
At the end of the Nineteenth century there was a massive explosion of technological change which affected almost every aspect of society. People marveled at new invention after new invention and there was a tendency to see mechanical and especially electrical advances as somehow endowed with life. The phonograph, for example, was held to be alive and print adverts even claimed it had a soul.
How to make Mastodon even more fun!
Here are a couple of fun websites that will make Mastodon (and possibly the whole fediverse) even more fun. I know, it hardly seems possible. And if you know of others, please let me know about them too.
Just my toots
Do you sometimes wish you could see all your posts on Mastodon in a long list with no distractions? Of course you do! Every day! That’s why justmytoots.com is here to help. And yes, it shows you just your toots.
For the record, I hate the word ‘toots’.
At least where I live no one thinks of flatulence when they hear it, but still, it somehow manages to sound even more stupid than ‘tweets’, which takes some doing.
Now, above the cacophony of all the tooting I can almost hear you ask, “What’s the alternative?” ‘Posts’, that’s the alternative, and that’s what I’m sticking with. Why not join me, world?
Until then, you can see just my toots at https://justmytoots.com/@writingslowly@aus.social
RSS is dead LOL
Now this one really is cool.
You know how everyone at the Internet always says ‘RSS is dead’, right? It’s so annoying!
But anyway, just type in a fediverse username into rss-is-dead.lol and up pops a list of RSS feeds for that user and every account that account follows.
Its amazing! Nearly everyone I follow has an RSS feed! Wow!
Pretty much proves RSS still ain’t dead. Take that, haters!
Bonus fact: it turns out you can use RSS to ‘boost your productivity’. I don’t know what that phrase means, but it sounds great!
Meanwhile, check out my graph, or whatever you call it, at rss-is-dead.lol.
💬 “The real issue with speed is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.” - Walter Murch, In The Blink of an Eye.
Found at Austin Kleon’s post, Hurry Slowly
How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
An organized collection of notes (a Zettelkasten) can help you make sense of your existing knowledge, and then make better use of it. Make your notes personal and make them relevant. Resist the urge to make them exhaustive.
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Don’t build a magnificent but useless encyclopaedia
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Document your journey through the deep forest
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Avoid inert ideas
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Converse about what really matters to you
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Imagine, then build, new knowledge products
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Where (and how) you go is more important than where you start from
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An example
💬"At what point does something become part of your mind, instead of just a convenient note taking device?"
A question discussed with philosopher David Chalmers, on the Philosophy Bites podcast.
🎙️Technophilosophy and the extended mind
So much of this depends on what ‘the mind’ means. Meanwhile, we do seamlessly interact with our note-making tools, to achieve more than we could without them.