Call Four Plans

Wednesday the 12th of October at 10am PDT, 1pm EDT, 5pm GMT

Downloadable MP3 here --> http://nancywhite.audioacrobat.com/download/e6f3e626-0e30-a765-fda4-2fb78c2962ee.mp3

Dennis has rough call notes under OrcNotes

Nancy has IRC notes; they have been transferred to OrcNotes.

nancy has to say. THIS WAS A GREAT CALL. I learned a lot!

Planning Notes Below

Suggested themes: Who might like to host this call? Bill will host this call.


 * Nancy and Bill have some thoughts about this call (also in the e-mail sent out):
 * This is call number 4, and we'd like to explore our own process. Our scheduling and topic selection has been fairly impromptu; some might call it disorganized. We know this style can be both generative and exclusive. So ...
 * How do you feel about the conversations?
 * What are the us/them dynamics of our own conversations?
 * Although the wiki is supposedly a space for collaboration, it's more like a collection of individuals.
 * What are the influences of the medium and the technology we've been using?
 * Nancy and Bill would like to set a fixed time and frequency. We would also like to rotate leadership and organizational roles. What are your thoughts?


 * Work on a scenario (via Bill via David -- one of you say more?)
 * the devil's advocate
 * I think I'm predisposed to be one of those, at least according to my propensity to come through as eneagram type 6 [;<). I'm not sure what it means here.  Who can say more?
 * free speech and civility (see http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=967 )
 * I like this, especially the Q&A format. I'm aligned with it.  And I still reserve the right to remove comments on my blog that I find are hostile to the climate of discourse and conversation that I want to cultivate (not as if there is much commentary other than spam anyhow).  I have also removed a comment on my blog by a person who is indeed using comments to impugn someone else wherever they or their institution are mentioned in any way whatsoever on blogs.  I refused to be a party to that weird form of stalking.  I haven't had to deal with ideologically-opposed ideas, and I will simply have to be attentive if and when that arises. orcmid
 * One thing I would like to be able to do is take material I have chosen to remove and place it on a place that others can find and review if they so choose, but without giving it standing in the conversational space I am host to. I haven't found a good way to do that yet, partly because my blog host is not all that flexible. orcmid


 * Dennis, can you set up a separate blog that is only comments or conversations that you have chosen to remove from your main blog? (like an orcmid 2.0)?  With a link made public on your main blog?  Even setting it up on a different bloghost if you need that separation?  Debra.  Kind of clunky, I'll admit.
 * AH, the bulb lights! Interesting idea, Debra.  You got me thinking and I figured it out.  My first problem was I couldn't find a way to delete the errant comment without refreshing the page from backup. It had something to do with my browser settings and the delete button never being available to me because it looks like adware on my web site.  But I got around it -- if I initiate a comment on my own, I can manage all the comments already there.  It is easy to find a place to put them, now that I can delete them in a way that is civil to everything else.  The blog is hosted on my own site, via FTP, even though it's content is managed by Blogger.  I can make a web page that holds deleted material related to the blog, without too much trouble.  I can even make it specific to the blog entry.  (It would go in the same folder as the archival blog entry.)


 * What I like most about this is the early claim that civility cannot be legislated. Exactly. Civility is not about legislating behavior; it's about being involved in the conversation, or interaction, at hand. For me the best guide I've read on civility is "Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct" by P.M. Forni, Cofounder of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project. This book educated, challenged, and enabled me to, at the very least, look at my own behavior. I recommend it highly. - Bill
 * dialog now http://www.dialognow.org/
 * I am not sure what there is to make of this. I don't know what it is meant to be illustrative of.  There are expressions of tolerance (i.e., not to consider that calamities are some sort of punishment of God) and compassion, and there seem to be more-inflamed positions (i.e., with respect to Iran).  These voices seem to be from a culture that I have no perspective on, from my cultural background, and I am left with nothing to say.  I don't mean to disown this conversation or it being given voice.  It is simply not a conversation in which I have a stake or anything like a legitimate voice to offer.  There's no ground for me.  orcmid

Debra Roby (http://astitchintime.blogspot.com). I can be there either time, but would prefer the earlier.

I am being regularly stricken by the observation that when a comment is made by "them".. and my feeling is one of being excluded... the negatives emotions I experience will color the rest of the conversation on my end. This was brought up by Dennis for the last call. I've been dealing with concept all day today, so that might be the reason it's on my mind. Nobody intended to sound exclusionary.. but they wrote without a more careful examination of their words. What are the rules for public communication? Well, there aren't any, really, but what should be advocated if anything?

And Bill, from a wiki-novice this is so easy to use. Thank you for setting this up. I'm feeling rather geeky!!

Please note: I've changed my email. debroby@sbcglobal.net.

Dennis Hamilton (http://orcmid.com/blog) also prefers the earlier time and is happy to be able to participate once again.
 * For those who haven't noticed yet, once you go through the trouble to go through the Preferences and magical incantation stuff, the Wiki will store a cookie on your machine and you will be automatically recognized (and authorized to edit) on return visits. I just went through that because I'm operating on a new computer and I observed it doing that.
 * There's some conversation about finding a better way to have recorded conversations other than the e-mail exchanges we are using, such as the ones right now on fixing the time and date for call 4. I think this is a good place though not so nice as a shared blog or something that gives us our own copies.  (I can save these pages to my computer, but that doesn't let me know about more-recent changes.)
 * I am having an archetypical system-incoherence experience right now, struggling to get a message to David Wilcox to let him know that, thanks to the way a spam filter works at his end, I can't get a message through to him. I've wasted a good 40 minutes fussing with that and you can't imagine how pissy I am getting with it. I know it's not David, it's some geek who created a system that unilaterally makes bounce determinations and doesn't let the intended recipient know anything about what happened, or not anything useful -- I have no idea what indications David gets.  Normally, after a few tries like this I shrug and walk away.  That's an interesting thing about what strike people as barriers to participation -- sort of denial of engagement at the front door -- and that, unfortunately, is something that people may be clueless about.  And I do mean clueless.  I've been engaged in working through these in places where it is pretty clear that the intended recipients don't care.  Grumble, mumble, grumble more.  I suppose there's an anti-pattern in here and it would be great to find a humorous archetypical image for it.  All that comes to mind is "Have you heard the one about the guy with the banana in his ear? ... "
 * If we could get decent, full-content RSS feeds off of wiki pages, that would be cool. I've commented about that elsewhere.  David, if your wiki-bliki-content-management thingie will do that, I will move heaven and earth to use it in collaborative settings of mine.
 * Have you noticed that an upset brings every previous upset like it careening out of the past and into the present moment of anguish and frustration? Right now, not only am I pissed at the spam filter near David, I am upset at the IT department of the University of Liverpool, Blogger and Google, the IT school at RIT (sorry Liz Lawley), and whoever put up perimeter filters at a few other campus organizations.  It's interesting where I run into this cluelessness.  Then I make myself even more cranky over that.
 * Raymond Chen has posted a nice anecdotal account of how us/them was dealt with at his workplace in bygone days, though the beer continues.

Random Nancy Thoughts
 * As this project is taking up a little life of it's own, maybe we should spend a bit of this week's call on process - tools, our agreements with each other, next steps
 * I personally would love to see others in the group take responsibility for organizing a call. Pick a leader, they suss out the topic, set the date and time and facilitate the call. I don't see this as something that Bill and I "own"... nor do I have enough personal bandwidth to support it on an ongoing basis, but I do from a community/collaboration basis, make sense?