G'day All Here is an item from my friend Tom Atlee which may evoke your passion - and participation!
With love Alan Adelaide Co-Intelligence Institute Associate Dear friends, The National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation Wiki -- an unprecedented participatory website. I have done dozens of hours of work on this project. I've sent you little hints that it exists. And now it has finally been officially released. This is a monumental, ongoing co-creative party/project to which any and all of you are invited. Together, we are making the world's most comprehensive resource for participatory, democratic, co-intelligent practices anywhere on the web. It will grow deeper and wiser as more people participate, sharing their knowledge and experience. Follow Sandy Heierbacher's suggestions, below. If you want to join in, give yourself 15-30 minutes to get the hang of editing wiki pages. And then there are no limits to what you can do there. If you know anyone who is interested in group, organizational, community and democratic process, please let them know about this. We need all the hands, hearts and minds we can get. Note also that this is a fabulous research resource for scholars and students. Thanks so much for co-creating a world into which this can be born. As you can tell, I love this project. I think it will make a tremendous difference. Coheartedly, Tom _ _ _ _ __ __ From: NCDD Discussion - Sandy Heierbacher <[email protected]> Subject: Important message about NCDD's new wiki Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 07:39:07 -0400 Introducing the NCDD Wiki Wikis are the posterchildren for online collaboration, and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's new wiki (at <http://www.wiki-thataway.org>http://www.wiki-thataway.org) is thriving - before we've even officially launched it. NCDD members are already using the wiki to work on projects together, and Tom Atlee (President of the Co-Intelligence Institute for those of you who don't know him) has been spearheading several exciting collaborative projects on the wiki. Our wiki is open and available for anyone involved in the dialogue & deliberation community to work together on projects, share ideas and post information. A huge thank-you goes to Lucy Perry of InfoVisions and John Abbe of the Sandhi Institute for making our Wiki a reality. What is a "wiki"? Wiki is Hawaiian for "quick," a word that accurately describes the process for editing pages on a wiki. Basically, a wiki is a set of pages on the web that anyone can change. Anyone can also easily create new pages on wikis, and they often do. Most wikis in use today are used for collaborative group activities. People write pages together, often with little regard for who has 'ownership' of the words. You can think of a wiki as a book, with dozens to many thousands of pages and potentially infinite more. The content of the pages is limited only by the imagination of the participants, because everyone can edit everything. Explore Wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_P age) for a mind-boggling example of what a single wiki can become. NCDD's wiki, pre-launch, has 270 pages. That's more pages than we have on the rest of thataway.org. I encourage you to go to <http://www.wiki-thataway.org>http://www.wiki-thataway.org and do all of the following things: 1. Explore. Click all around the wiki, seeing what's already up. To see a list of all of the pages in the wiki, hit your enter key while your cursor is inside the search feature. 2. Learn how to use the wiki. Editing pages, adding comments, creating new pages - all of this is easy. But people tend to be afraid they'll mess up. I'll include some basic instructions below, but know that even if you delete all 270 pages of the wiki by accident (which you won't), we can easily get the pages back up. 3. Create your own home page on the wiki. By typing your name like this - BuffySummers - with your first and last names capitalized and squashed together, you've just created a new page that has your name as a title. Then you can add whatever details you want people to know about yourself, your work, your organization, etc. 4. Initiate a new topic or project on the wiki, and use this list to get others involved. 5. Participate in one of the exciting collaborative projects Tom Atlee is spearheading on the wiki. Here are short descriptions of the three projects Tom considers to be the most compelling. - PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES - ParticipatoryPractices is the page's name - Here we have the potential to create the most comprehensive, useful participatory process resource on the Web. Already there are almost 200 approaches listed. Ultimately, with your help, every process any of us knows about will be described -- with links to websites, practitioners, books, articles, stories, and analysis of everything about that process and the conditions for its effective use. And since this is a Wiki, all this will continually evolve as we learn more and as more people's viewpoints are included. - EXPLORING BASICS OF DIALOGUE AND DELIBERATION - ExploringBasics - Here we can delve into the underlying and overarching dynamics of our practice, moving deep into and beyond all specific methodologies. What are we trying to accomplish with D&D? What factors make for success or failure no matter what method we're using? Can we find common language and descriptive tools for discussing our efforts, across our various disciplines? To these ongoing inquiries we can all continually contribute our insights and deepening questions, for the enrichment of one and all. - PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES ANALYSIS - ParticipatoryPracticesAnalysis - Here we can delve together into what various methodologies are good for -- and not good for -- and how we might use them together synergistically for greater effect. In combination with the previous two Wikis, this Wiki dialogue will become a great weaving and mapping exercise to guide us in connecting up with each other in our practices and in helping to build the collective capacities of groups, organizations, communities and whole societies. Here is where we find out, together, how it all fits, and how powerful it can be. PARTICIPATING IN THE NCDD WIKI Okay, I'm pretty sure after reading that you want to participate in the NCDD wiki, so here are some basic rules to get you started: 1. Adding a comment to an existing page on the wiki. This is the easiest way to participate in the wiki. Just scroll to the bottom of the page you want to add a comment to. Type your text into the comment box and click on "submit your comment". I suggest adding your name after the comment if you want people to know who it came from. 2. Editing an existing page on the wiki. Maybe you found a typo or want to make things sound a little clearer. Maybe you disagree with a statement and want to change it in a way that feels right to you. Maybe you want to add to a document or delete something you think shouldn't be there. All of this is OK - this is a wiki after all. Just click on "Edit this Page" at the bottom of the page you want to change, make your changes and save. 3. Creating a new page on the wiki. Find a logical place for your new page to be linked from. If you're creating your own home page, add your name to the WikiParticipants page, for example. To create a new page, think of a simple, logical title for the new page, then SmushWordsTogether to create the new page (making sure the smushed words are all capitalized). Then click on the question mark that appears after the new TitleName to create some text for the new page you've just created. Sounds tricky? It's absolutely not. After you try it, you'll know that. Instructions on how to edit pages and format text (bold, italics, etc.) can be found at http://www.wiki-thataway.org/index.php?page=FormattingRules. Remember, you are writing directly onto a webpage! You can play around in the wiki's SandBox, which is at <http://www.wiki-thataway.org/index.php?page=SandBox>http://www.wiki-thatawa y.org/index.php?page=SandBox. If you have questions, let me know. I hope to see you all on the wiki! - Sandy Sandy Heierbacher Convenor, The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) <file://www.thataway.org>www.thataway.org 802-254-7341 [email protected] -- ________________________________ Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute * PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440 http://www.co-intelligence.org * http://www.democracyinnovations.org Read THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY * http://www.taoofdemocracy.com Please support our work. * Your donations are fully tax-deductible. ________________________________ **************************** FAIR USE NOTICE This message may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not specifically been authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this for research and educational purposes. For more information on fair use, please go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes of your own which go beyond "fair use," we suggest that you obtain permission from the copyright owner. * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
