Gurteen Knowledge-Letter: Issue 94 - April 2008

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a monthly newsletter that is distributed to members of the Gurteen Knowledge Community. You may receive the Knowledge Letter by joining the community. Membership is totally free.

Subscribe to the Gurteen Knowledge Letter

Traveling through the world produces a marvelous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose. This great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves. There are so many different tempers, so many different points of view, judgments, opinions, laws and customs to teach us to judge wisely on our own, and to teach our judgment to recognize its imperfection and natural weakness.

Michel de Montaigne (French Philosopher and Writer. 1533-1592)

Conversation needs pauses, thoughts need time to make love.

Credit: Theodre Zeldin

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared - from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos.

FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed.

And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

First an update on your item about Kiva. We asked our family and friends to send Kiva Gift Certificates instead of cards and presents at Christmas after reading about Kiva.org in your newsletter. 15 Kiva certificates have now been redeemed and we receive regular bulletins on our portfolio of micro-finance investments from Cambodia, Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Nigeria and Kenya. Each of our investments is thriving and the most rewarding part of watching their progress is the sense of solidarity which I think is also a feature of the human touch you were talking about.

We have started convening Parent Cafe's too. The purpose here is to facilitate knowledge sharing around the development of parent and peer advocacy for families with disabled children (http://www.parentadvocatestogether.org.uk). We also have used the time-discipline you talked about so that each person has the same amount of air-time.

We have not intentionally set out to create a therapeutic knowledge cafe, or I suppose what would be a support group session, but to simply borrow from a framework of ideas (which we do use to promote emotional support and 'discharge' in other parent support groups convened for that specific purpose). I suppose that when everyone knows that they will get their own space, their own air time and their own opportunity to think and listen out loud, it makes it easier for us to relax and to listen and to process on what what each speaker is saying.

While we didn't deliberately set out to do this awarely; solidarity and mutual self-help and assistance are what we seem to be eliciting in each of our own knowledge cafe ventures. It is very satisfying and rather beautiful both to see and to experience. It is rather that the experience of using co-counselling tools in that setting that has enabled us to cross-pollinate some of the ideas. We have noticed that they have been useful in promoting an emotional safety allowing people to enjoy and even to revel in the human touch you talked about.

You are absolutely right to claim that it is this human touch which is the key distinguishing feature of the knowledge cafe phenomenon. Essentially, we now set out purposefully to cultivate, nurture and promote every opportunity for creating that human touch you have described in every knowledge cafe where we participate. From experience we can state that 'the human touch is also the magic touch!' As far as culture change is concerned; this is simply a smarter way to work.

Best wishes,

Larry Gardiner
Secretary - Parent Advocates Together

David uses a specific, distributed, what I would call "emergence" format where 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts' for encouraging knowledge transfer amongst participants. No leaders, no report outs, no death by PowerPoint. Everyone matters, every voice counts.

Credit: Colleen Carmean

The closing moments of a Knowledge Cafe reminded me of a Quaker meeting. You don't speak unless you're compelled to share an important thought, realization, or theme that emerged from your multiple small group discussions. Some participants violate the framework and just need to be heard, but like the Quakers, everyone listens respectfully and reflects on the thought without the need for comment or debate.

Credit: Colleen Carmean

• We work on something small and build trust.
• Having built trust we work together more and the trust grows.
• Its an iterative process: work together; build trust; work together build trust ... but this is key - it always starts by working together.
• If at any time either of us lets the other down badly or abuses the relationship then the trust is pretty much destroyed and its unlikely that we will ever work together again.

Trust is an emergent property of the process of engagement not a precondition.

Credit: Dave Snowden.

The trust question is a classic confusion of symptoms with cause, just as creativity is a symptom of innovation not its cause, so trust is the symptom of interaction over time. If that interaction is not testing, then the trust is fragile. If the trust is simply the result of few contextual exercises (throwing yourself backwards off a brick wall is the classic) then it is temporary. Focus on the process, rather than trying to preset emergent outcomes and you get a more sustainable solution.

Credit: Dave Snowden.

Media is moving from a source of information to a site of action.

Credit: Clay Shirky

The Gurteen Knowledge Search Engine is a customised Google search engine that searches over 800 KM related websites and weblogs.   Web gurteen.com