 should conduct the entire meeting in Swedish chef. Exactly. Yeah. Make it to it there. Yeah. Hey, it's good. Hey, it's good. It's good. It's good. Yeah. It's good. Okay. I think in the past life we probably both were prisoners on a Viking ship or something. Either that or we were Muppets. Or Muppets. There is that problem. I'm here just for a while today because I had a pre-existing condition at 7.30. Another meeting. All right. Cool. Thanks for filling my head again. And when I shower, I don't have this, you know, it's not like I've got exotically long hair, but it felt completely different. Hi, Jean. Peter Van. Hey, Charles. I'll wait until people show up. And then we'll take us into the pool. Let us dive in. Why don't we just sort of quickly check in? And if there's anything in your head relative to OGM, like a question or whatever, go ahead and pose it. If it takes longer to answer, we'll do it in the main body. But if we just want to go around and check in. Peter Van, what's up with you? Very good. Very good. Related to OGM. I had a fantastic call with Anne Pendleton. And we planned even a next call to prepare what we want to discuss in this group. So it's coming together. That sounds fabulous. That sounds really great. Thank you. Ken. Good morning. It's a cool morning here in the Bay Area. It's one of those we had the fog in last night. And so it's kind of damp and cool. So I'm a little bit more dressed up than usual. OGM is still just kind of formulating in my mind. So I'm just going to go with the flow here. We are in the primordial goof phase and the planets are just being formed. Exactly. Totally understand that. Nancy. I'm just waking up by Skagit Bay in Washington state. And there's nothing in my head right now. Period. So we're working on it. And I'll only be here for about 25 minutes today. That is excellent though. We have your head in a state of primordial goo, which is so malleable and so fun. We can send you off to your next meeting full of very strange things. Ham. Hi guys. I just hung up with Peter van talking about something. I'm not sure I didn't hear the questions that came in late. So I'll just make answer my own question. My head is full. Of this idea of vicarious participation. We live in a world with these virtual things where we have to leverage vicarious participation more. Like collectivism is that vicarious participation? No, like, you know, we have this thing about how do you do an interactive event for 500 people, right? Like in virtual things and. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. This Peter, I'm sorry. I'm like, we're talking about that. But like, um, film some people doing it, right? And let the participants sort of imagine themselves being that participant where there is interaction happening in a small group, right? So can you, can you create these instances of vicarious participation so that you can sort of scale up. What is a very limiting format? This. Square box 69 world we live in. That sounds fabulous. So we're running a bunch of zoom calls with facilitators like world wide, excellent facilitators showing up, sharing practices like liberating structures and a bunch of other things about how to make this little zoom prison. Uh, more fruitful, more interesting, more dynamic, et cetera. I'm probably misstating the purposes of the calls Nancy. I'd love to see that. Hey Nancy, can you put a link to that in the chat anything if you have anything to share? I think the calls make most of the calls were recorded and recorded. You've put them online. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Judy, do you want to check in? You're muted. Sorry. Um, well, I'm coming in from Minnesota and we're having a actually a sunny sort of blue sky day, which is nice because we had four inches of rain a couple days ago and things got pretty wet. Um, I'm just sort of thinking about how to connect people in this crazy time of ours in, in kind of make the transition from virtual, which is more participation by observing to actually moving toward participation by doing. Love that. And I think, um, one of the nice things about this group is that we have sort of a bias for action. So we need to get on that and make it, make it happen with the group. Um, Jay. Great to see you. Do you want to just check in? Great to see you. Um, I'm really intrigued by collaborative storytelling and not just this, the ones that we tell, but the ones that we live. So your email got my attention. Jay is a master storyteller. So thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. Um, Kelly, do you want to check in? Oh, good morning. Excuse me. I haven't talked yet today here in Seattle. Um, I, this is my first OGM call. I flipped through the list of the amazing long juicy list of questions on the website. And so I'm super excited to be here and, and here with the conversations about awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Charles. Hi everyone reporting from Zurich, Switzerland. Um, better now after a shower. It's been a pretty intense time. Uh, news came out this morning that Switzerland will. Uh, acquire by law wearing masks on public transportation starting Monday. Why waiting till Monday? Well, that's just what it is. Um, this after, I don't know if it was specifically triggered, but I didn't have a chance to dig too deep. Um, there was another news announcement that came out on Sunday. In regard to an event that happened the previous, um, two Saturdays before that is two weekends ago, there was a super spreader event at a nightclub with 300 people. And so forth. Yeah. Um, last night there was a, the first of, um, I guess, a series of epic phone sessions with, uh, Tom Atley and a group that, um, has been gathering and Jerry started to miss you, um, in regard to, uh, launching into an exploration of the Polish BOL.is, um, decision-making tool. And we had Colin McGill, the founder and, um, Miss Barry, who, um, I guess heading up the, they just went nonprofit, if I understand, and she's involved in that and knows Tom and has basically, um, sort of donated, uh, an opportunity for us to play with. And so we can hear more about that. I think it's definitely has a direct, uh, bearing and, uh, opportunity for us here as well. And I'll add that Tom Atley, sort of the, the, the, the spark of that conversation is the longtime hero of mine. And, uh, incredible thinker about, uh, citizen about democracy and, you know, online liberation and a bunch of things like that. And that I really hated missing these, because I had a client that needed me on, on a longer call, but I'm going to go watch the, uh, the recording and all that. And the recording, Charles, do you want to share the recording to this group? Um, and, Yeah, I could. I'll find it. I think he sent it already. I have to check. It's probably there because he's like that. There was a follow-up email. There's a lot of things. I mean, go ahead. You had another question, Jerry? And there's also a Google Doc with introductions and notes taken during the call and all that. Uh, and, and, uh, and I think, uh, you know, I think I get a lot of questions about that, but I want to just go ahead and, uh, just, uh, I want to just come back to it. Um, and, and the, the fact that I'm doing this. Um, and Paul is is really interesting because I'm quite close or medium, medium close to the V Taiwan folks. Uh, Mika Sifri from a civic hall is actually really close to them. So I, I met them through Mika. Um, so yeah. Um, just two more things. One is a question, maybe we can come back to if we have time, so you might want to flag the calendar on that and it's not clear if that will be the regular time maybe but maybe it'll be adjusted because I think there's a doodle around that. There was a question that I brought up about V-Taiwan directed at Colin McGill and he completely evaded any response and it was weird. We can love to put some light on that because I'm curious if you or anyone has any insight into now how Polis or V-Taiwan is happening now. Thank you and so in my brain there's a thought OGM neighbor communities and V-Taiwan, Polis, Gov with a zero are all part of the same set of projects and they're all extremely interesting and so the conversation that they just had is a very OGM kind of conversation so I'm really super interested in what happened there. Yeah I think since we have it out on the table I just add very briefly I spoke with a friend kind of acquaintance who's Taiwanese who lives here in Switzerland but has family there and back and forth I brought it up and she had sort of very scathing comments which I won't sort of just pass along as here say however it does definitely call into question in regard to the bold moves that China's making these dates. Which yeah and if you're in Hong Kong you're freaked out right now because things have gone really south. Sorry thank you Charles. Gene check in. I missed the first few meetings because I double booked they let me off for good behavior today so I was interested because I have been pondering something that I labeled virtual asynchronous collaboration for five or six years now and we have done a number of experiments some with some amount of success and some with the great deal of failure and I'm continually looking for additional perspectives to figure out how to get it to actually be productive. That is the perfect kind of experiment for OGM. Perfect, perfect, perfect. So thank you. Anything else on that? I'm sure there's more but okay. Susan would you like to check in? Susan Stuckey? There we go. Unmuted now. Good. I'm here because and I'd like to build on what Judith was talking about there. I think we need new ways of new ways of actually interacting with each other and I'm in part of a beyond a beyond movement or something like that which I can talk about some other time. But I think one of the things that I'm looking to see is that we actually take the point about developing new practice, new work practice and trying to bring that into play. Perfect. Thank you Susan. George, you and I just met. Thank you for joining this call and thanks for meeting your mic right there. We were hearing a lot of ambient noise but would you mind would you like to check in? Hi, hi to everybody. I don't know what to say because I'm new in this. I was just checking the information. I mean, Google and everything you you just posted on the internet and I don't know why I just joined you because I also have great great ideas. I think that sounds great. Where's home for you? Excuse me? Where's home for you? I'm from Romania. Are you there right now? Yes. Yes, I'm living in Romania. Excellent. I did not know that and April and I were in Bucharest a few years back. We had a great trip there. Welcome to the group. I'm glad you're here. Thank you. Hank, do you want to check in? Yeah, sure. Honestly, just enjoying one of the first days of really beautiful weather here this week. It's been pretty rainy. I've been on a lot of these calls just in a smaller group and then in this big group. Honestly here just because I've been loving just listening to all these calls and hearing where you guys are coming from and the robes you're wearing as you enter this specific meeting perhaps. Then personally what I've been thinking about. I've been reading a book that Hamilton has recommended to me multiple, multiple, multiple times. Just reflecting on pauses if you guys remember one of the first. From Peter Bay. Oh yeah, Peter, thank you. A my screen that connects that way. Yeah, well I'm vicariously participating in your discussions perhaps by reading. Yeah, so I've been thinking a lot about just how does one take intentional pauses and again the focus being on intention and I won't get into this too much but I've been reading this book called the unfettered mind which is letters between like a Buddhist monk and Samurai warrior master swordsman has been. This has been really cool. So that's kind of where my mind's been this morning. That sounds awesome. Thank you, Bill. I think I got unmuted. Yeah, I've been just sort of struggling trying to get a mindset around, you know, actionable goals and futures posted a diagram tweet up around 9 0 5 this morning about 10 minutes ago trying to connect some different things sort of a two-dimensional love, you know, some big challenges versus some levels or places to intervene in a system kind of thinking trying to figure out where there's something that feels leverageable or, you know, outcomeable, not just not just pushing but actually having an outcome on things and the first challenge on that list is climate change because my college sons are home, you know, for the duration with all this funness going on and, you know, it comes up regularly in their sort of political conversations how much their generation views everything through a, you know, how much longer will we be alive kind of lens sort of like during the, you know, atomic test days of the 70s and things it's kind of the duck and cover kind of filtering of everything that goes on and then conversely running into blurbs yesterday about Michael Schellenberger's book which is re-challenging, you know, how scared should we be about that? Is that the biggest priority for social change and that kind of stuff and just the swirls of uncertainty and which I think comes heavily from a lack of clarity of language and assumptions, explicitness and stuff and so it just always gets me back to the shared understanding and semantic noise versus, you know, epistemology kind of question. So, you know, what's, what's true and especially if you're trying to predict the complex, the future of a complex system, you know, can you really settle that or is it just about knowing that people can have good faith disagreements about, you know, that future or is it really all driven by the tribal values based, you know, rationalization under the theory that a lot of what we think is thinking is really just a cover for fear and anger or whatever else is underneath as an emotional reaction and so, you know, how much of information is really information and how much it is just sort of chum. So that's it. Thank you. That's great. So just to riff off that, so how much misunderstanding wiggle room can we have and still get somewhere together? Because inevitably we're understanding everything a bit differently just because we're humans and, you know, different and come with different baggage and so forth. So we're going to have misunderstandings. How much of that breaks our ability to collaborate in what settings kind of thing, maybe. Right. And some of it's around, you know, maybe one version sort of the loosely coupled civilization that, you know, tries to really push down on, you know, which things can we let people disagree about and act differently about versus where are there truly, you know, hard side effects, you know, sort of my herd immunity question like, you know, vaccination choices aren't just about your choice, but are, you know, have strong side effects. On the other hand, there may be other things that we treat that way. Again, coming maybe from a moral or emotional thing that we think everybody should behave the same way, but maybe that's not the right goal and all that does is alienate people and create more tribalism. So I want to pin this thought for a second for us to dive into when we're sort of talking more generally, partly because one of the big early design questions for OGM is, what can we do that's actually useful right now? And one of the things we might do that's actually useful is address the question of mask wearing, for example, and riff on it in many different ways because, you know, one of the beliefs that started OGM is that logic doesn't actually convince that many people. And I think the logical arguments are super important and I want to build those. But, you know, what other ways of communicating is narrative and storytelling? Is it emotional connection to another person? What are those things? So let's pin that for a second. Shaming. There we go. You know, a threat of being put in the stocks in the public square. Yeah, I go back and forth on that because part of me feels like part of the current insanity is that a lot of things, people had the good grace to be embarrassed to say out loud 30 years ago, now has entered the Overton window, you know, and sort of become acceptable conversation. And that seems like a bad thing, but at the same time, you know, I'm always wary of shaming. Again, if you try and explicitly shame, you know, do you again just drive things underground and it comes up in a festering way someplace else? Festering is a good word for this era. And it's either Julian or Julian. We've not actually spoken. We've only interacted online. And would you mind checking in and informing us how to pronounce your name correctly? Depends on what language you're speaking. It would be Julian. And as you were born and raised, it would be? Well, then it was which side of the family. So, oh, my father's side, it would have been Julian. Okay. And your mother's side? Julian. Okay, that's so cool. Would you check in just briefly? Like, where's home and what's in your mind? So the fundamental question when dressing is knowledge and I'm trying to just whack away at it one bite of the elephant as the phrase goes. Most recently, I've been working on a couple of things. What I mentioned in email yesterday is a sort of summary of knowledge stores using with modern technologies. And this, I should have that summary probably in a few weeks. Things have been kind of slowed down because of the pandemic and the organization I'm doing it for is pretty much at a standstill. It translates over into the general question, you know, what is knowledge? How do you describe knowledge? And what I'm most interested in is how do you describe it to the point where you can put it into a computer? And there's a lot of technologies available for doing ontologies. But I want to make them something usable because if you ever look at stuff like Sparkle or Owl or any of these ontology systems, like you run away screaming. And I think humans interact with the world differently. We need to map how humans, that kind of interaction, we need to map that into a system. But in order to do that, we have to have stuff things codified enough that you can put them into a system. And this is a question that has been burning since ENIAC and Janiac and the early computers. It's like, how do we model human thinking? And that, you know, so this is a great and enduring question. Even back to the Greeks, they were the first ones to think about ontologies. Thank you very much. Pete Forsyth, thanks for unmasking. I thought you were Pete Kaminsky, who is also a participant here. Great to see you in the group. Pete's a good friend. Yeah. Oh, do you mind checking in? Sure. Yeah, nice to know that Pete's involved also. I look forward to seeing him if I join you another time. So let's see. I am a Wikipedia enthusiast consultant trainer, as you can kind of see from my background. Thanks for sharing my COVID hairstyle, which was as much a surprise to me this morning as it is to you. I decided not to try to calm it down too much just for everyone's entertainment. Anyway, I guess I'm new to this group and I haven't yet really absorbed sort of its convening ideas. But I think there I've got three things that I'm working on that may have some relevance all in the Wikipedia vein. I guess the number one, the reason why I think Wikipedia is so significant and important to pay attention to is that it's about to turn 20 years old. It's older than most of the websites that we deal with. But it's really the only top website in the world that is not driven by a profit motive by kind of a long shot. There's very few other non-profit or community-built sites even in the top 100 or so. And so because of that, I think it's important to look to Wikipedia for an idea of what the internet might look like. If it weren't driven by a profit motive, the lack of algorithms, the lack of data tracking of its users, I mean there's so many dimensions to it, but those are some of the things on my mind. Number two is using Wikipedia as a device to explore what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for effective collaboration. So both on a technical level, what are the software features? Well, they could be software features or even features of a space created in the physical world that permit people to sort of act on their own without having to go to someone else for help to get involved in collaborating on something together. So I have an essay that I just published about that. If people are interested, I can share that. And number three is a more specific project, which is we're calling News on Wiki. I'm seeking funding right now for a second round of it. The basic idea is that when people see a news source that they've never heard of before in a social media post or anywhere that one of the first things that they'll do is Google it if they're trying to determine if it's a real news outlet. And Google is generally going to present a knowledge panel if there is a Wikipedia article with an info box, but otherwise it probably won't. So this project is just to get a basic Wikipedia article about ideally several thousand news outlets in the US. We're estimating there are about five or six thousand that meet that likely meet Wikipedia's inclusion threshold. And there's only maybe about 2,000 that have been created. So just kind of working on a sprint to get just, you know, and this is really about just a pretty straightforward article that just gives some grounding of like when was it founded? Who owns it? Just a few basic facts that will then permit Google to present a knowledge panel that distinguishes it from something that was just created yesterday. That's super interesting. There's a little backstory behind the Internet archive. You're probably all familiar with the Internet archive. The Internet archive started by Brewster Kale as Alexa, which was a tool belt that you would sort of add to your browser when you were wandering around the web in the early days. And the Alexa tool belt would tell you this site is currently registered properly. It has this many average visitors and it was collecting a bunch of data along the way. And then Brewster had the genius idea, or somebody had the genius idea, to sell the tool belt off, I think, to AOL today. But a condition of the sale was that the crawl that this tool belt was always doing, the data would be donated to what becomes the Internet archive. So he gets a pool of money, which is enough to start the archive. Basically, he gets not only sort of financial footing for the archive from the sale of this commercial tool belt, but a feed for it at the beginning to start the crawl. It's super interesting. It's really, really an interesting story. So that's amazing. I know, I mean, the Internet archive is something Wikipedians, you know, we work with very closely. It's so important to our work and I've been to a bunch of events there. And, you know, I know Brewster somewhat, but I'd never heard that sort of origin story. So thank you for sharing that. Awesome. And Brewster is a friend and Wikipedia and the archive are both communities we'd like to serve. I mean, I think OGM is a container for these sorts of conversations, the kinds of things that have been coming up naturally in the group. Who did I miss? Where you hold up your hand if I didn't ask you to check in? I think we're good. Awesome. Any questions at this point just before I dive into, I wanted to pick one solid thing to just dive into and present and then head into the questions of how should we collect up and group our efforts, but anything else right now? We're good. Okay. So let me talk for a second about story threading. Let me just explain it and present it as a thing we could do. And we don't have, if nobody loves this idea, nobody has energy around it, we don't have to do it. There's no need for it. But I'm going to share with you a Google doc that I created a couple of years ago when I had this idea for story threading. And you can go read it. And the doc is an invitation to potential story threaders to join a conference that was going to be held that never got held. So this is a wishful thinking document, but it explains the idea some. And the idea starts from my frustration with graphic recording at events. That's a Zoom link. Never mind. Sorry. No, that's Charles's link. Let me know if my Google doc link doesn't work, but it should work okay. Charles is sharing the call, the next call for the Paula's conversation. That was the call from yesterday recording. Awesome. Thank you. So this starts from my frustration with graphic recording. And graphic recording is when people are listening and channeling what's being said in the meeting and drawing it really, you know, and usually very lovely graphics on large sheets of paper. And I was realizing because I was already using the brain that, oh, my God, they're sort of capturing it, but then they're going to take a picture of it and we're all going to get, if we're lucky, we're going to get a PDF of the wall of the murals after the meeting. And nobody's really, two people out of 100 are going to look at those drawings. And the drawings are not connected to any of the ideas. And whenever I use my brain, if I connect to an idea, I'm connecting to the idea and to the best of everything I've ever seen. And anyone who wants to dive deeper can go dive deeper. And as I get insights, I put them in there. It's sort of like I'm note taking into one big tangly, inter twingled notebook, right? And the power of that wasn't present in graphical facilitation. So my frustration takes two different, two different approaches. One is, what if we could use the brain to take notes during meetings? And that is kind of a big piece of OGM is like, what if there were a, an open source, better, more collaborative version of something like the brain that allowed us to talk in that way together. But then the other side of this was, what if we brought more people with very different tool, tool skills and perspectives into the meeting and invited them in and gave them some time and a little bit of budget to sit down and listen for what's happening in the meeting and not to record as best they can everything that happened in the meeting, but opposite thread to find shiny nuggets that are interesting to them that might be a minority report. Because one of the things that really distressed me about way too many meetings I was in was that in the early going, you'd be like, oh my God, this is an amazing collection of people. And then in the, in the early check-ins, you'd hear that is really cool. I hope that turns into a big project. And that, wow, that's a really, and then those little sparks would get snuffed out by group process. That usually in the place where you would putting, you're putting post-its on a wall and somebody was aggregating them into collective nouns or we were all dot voting on something. Don't start me on dot voting. Like, like the bright, shiny little sparks of ideas would get snuffed out and they'd never make it to the final report. That the cool stuff that was in the meeting didn't make it to the consensus or the pro whatever happened in the process. So the notion of story threading is, let's invite a whole bunch of people who have very different skills, artists, poets, simulation programmers like Nikki Case, super game developers like Jane McGonigal. Let's invite a bunch of people who have really different skill sets, give them a charter and give them some freedom to participate in the meeting or to be far away listening in, whatever they want to ask questions of the attendees. And then afterward, at some period, two weeks a month, whatever, to report back in some way what it was. See the bill already dropped off. Yeah. So then afterward to drop in and show a prototype of what it is they came up with. And if the prototype is good, then let's find some funding somehow and let's fund it to completion so that it turns into a thing. And it might be a deck of cards. It might be a super game. It might be, and there's a paragraph in the middle of that invitation letter that I really like where I larded the paragraph with examples of all kinds of crazy stuff that would be sort of inspirations for what a story threader might come up with. So I say all of that because I have an instinct, and I think it's a reasonably good instinct, that this could become a job category in a couple years, that we could start a story threader practice where we invite people in. We run this for for profit events and we get people paid for being story threaders and it becomes its own little business kind of hosted inside of OGM, which is something that for me seems logical, legitimate, and interesting. And the story threaders could use the platform as we figure out what this platform is and evolve it. So right now the OGM platform is a few parts that exist today that a few of us are using in different ways. So Gene is a black belt in Kumu, Kumu.io. I'm a black belt in TheBrain, TheBrain.com. A few of you have used other mapping tools. Some of you are building tools or have experimented with building tools. As we build the platform of tools out, the story threaders would be able to have access to any and all of them and they would be involved in the design of the next gen of tools because they'd be actively doing some manifestation that's interesting. And I think that by inviting a series of really creative people into meetings, we can really enrich the meetings tremendously and create a requisite variety for how this goes. And Charles is mentioning this thing map whispers. So I'm part of the Digital Life Collective, several of you are. So is Charles. And Christina Bowen is also a black belt Kumu user. And one of the things that came out of our conversations was I bought the domain mapwhispers.com because we were thinking, why don't we invite people in to create a guild of people who understand mapping? And there's a series of different kinds of mapping tools. The brain and Kumu are two of the to me the most notable but map whispers would be and map whispers I'm sort of hoping might be the name of the mapping guild inside of OGM. So the idea is to draw that idea in here and I was going to explain map whispers just as I'm explaining story threaders right now and kind of offer it to everybody collected here and see what has energy. And if a piece of this has energy and anybody says, okay, let's go talk about this and do something about it. And and maybe if any of you are like, I'd like to run that business. Like, you know, this is kind of like a modern speakers bureau, but it's not. And this is really a well tuned thing for zoom meetings. And like now that meetings have gone virtual, participation from your barca lounger works, right? You could get somebody sitting any place in the world participating in meetings quite actively, they could watch recordings, they could ask questions, they could do whatever. So I will hit pause and go to Charles. Just a quick question, because I haven't really been, I reconnected with Christina Bowen recently, but super briefly, and she was on to something else, which I forget, but it'll probably come up here in another session. But what, what about sense compass? Because that was the kind of the business arm of mapping stuff. And so six or eight of us got together and formed a little company called sense compass, which was going to get mapping projects. And I, we sort of stalled at that point of who is going to pay us to go do our, do our thing for people. So I think it still exists as an entity and would be one of the communities that I would want to bring in here and see if we can't prime that pump and make it work. Yep. Other thoughts, reflections on story threading, anything at all. Um, like even what the hell or how do I become one or who would want to do this or any, like any questions at all. Can it looks like you had a question earlier, I think. Nope. Okay. I have a question. Yes, please. Susan. And I was thinking that perhaps, um, I seem to have disappeared. Your video is not active. Yes. Yeah. Oh, anyway, um, um, and I was thinking it would be wonderful. I have a, a fledgling design language for interaction. And, um, and it would be lovely if one could bring one's, one's, um, fledgling mappings and things that need to be mapped to such a group and say, you know, what are the, how does this strike you and which of the tools that you have that you think might be, uh, that in the group would be a good way to go. And then maybe set up a kind of a collaboration. I don't know how one gets paid for that. Although, I don't know, some kind of virtual currency comes to mind. Um, so anyway, I would, that would be great. Because I suspect there are many of us who don't have the skills of building those tools, but who have, um, something that could be helped by that. Exactly. And I think there's several different models for, for how to do this, uh, ranging from, Hey, let's throw a small party and get together and riff on this, just jamming for free together on somebody's seat of an idea or concept or, or whatever. And just let's, let's, let's all try to express what this thing sparked in our heads in the tool set and skill set that we care about. So that, that's easy to do because we just set up a call. But then a company, a corporate client could say, Hey, this sounds pretty interesting. Let's, let's implement this in our next meeting. And then we would be invited into a meeting and go participate and get paid. Um, or we could, um, find some form of crowdfunding. We could set up a Patreon page for story threading and say, or, or some other form of ongoing funding and say, Hey, if this sounds like a good idea, um, you know, donate some money into this and we can pay some of the participants that way. And I think that Patreon is a hard, it's hard to get a good pool of money going, but it's ongoing revenues and, um, and could actually be, uh, be interesting for a couple of people. So, or practitioners could have put up individual Patreon pages, which might work a little better because then it's distributed. Hamilton. Um, I feel compelled to say, since a part of our business is graphic recording that, um, and I know you're not saying this Jerry, but I, um, just really understanding the intent of it. I think of it really good. And I, and I would, I would hate to say, let's replace graphic recording with story threading because there's a big part of visual learning, right? And in real time mapping there, which helps the processing of it, right? When you're in the room together. And so, but what I think is interesting is could we, could we sort of find both, right? Could we do better jobs of mapping real time, right? And doing that and giving people the tools to map both sort of cognitively as well as just like with, with mapping tools. Um, and then also, um, that's one part, right? And then there's the other part where this story threader allows for this skip learning in some ways, right? That Peter talks about and how like I can, I can be a part of conversation that you and Charles have been having for eight months and I can jump right to the spot where and pick up because of a good story threader. And that's not just you and Charles, you and this whole group, right? And that's the, that's it. So I think that there's, um, I wouldn't want to lose the experiential part of mapping and visualization as part of that experience for trying to do something that's got, you know, longer legs to it as well. I think both are great. So, um, yes, yes, yes. And part of it is, um, and zoom, you know, everybody's lives being shoved into zoom has, has affected the sum. Um, it took forever for graphic facilitators to be using digital tools. It really took forever. I, and I love, I've got some really good friends who were black belt graphic facilitators. And it was the pastels and markers and large sheets of butcher paper and rolling them all up and figuring it all out after an event and all of that. And I love tactile things and I love paper, but, but none of what they were doing was connective and connected. And so what if we found an open source drawing tool that was actually quite good and then, uh, change the code so that when you start drawing words, those words are connected with an AI or through some, some other interface to the concept. And what if the final drawing was clickable, like an old image map way back in the day, um, that would take you deeper into the same or some other medium where those ideas were actually curated and taken out. So how, how might we turbo charge the task of graphic facilitation? Because I think the act of being in a meeting and representing what's being said visually is key, is like the center of story threading. And one of many flavors of story threading. Um, so, so how do we put little rocket boosters on those people's ankles so that all of this is, is really amplified? You're muted Hamilton. And it has more permanence, right? It has more permanence and nests into exactly something bigger than just that artifact. Pete and then Jay. Yeah, just, um, just to clarify if in the document, and I think verbally you said that they are not rapporteurs or graphic recorders. Um, and I'm not sure, I didn't really grasp, I was just wondering if you could, if you could kind of go into a little bit more of what the distinction is from existing practices. So what I meant by that, and you're right, I was inaccurate in saying they're not graphic recorders, because some of them are clearly graphic reporters. What I meant by, by saying they're not rapporteurs is that their task is not to record everything that got said, uh, in the meeting. Their task is to find the minority report, the, you know, the threads, the shiny nuggets that might not get picked up and then to thread them together into a narrative that makes sense, that might be compelling, and that might represent an idea that would have died normally in the meeting. So that, that was the thing I was looking for was, was that their job is not to report everything faithfully that they heard. They're not, um, uh, what's it called a fair witness from Heinlein, right? You, you can bring a fair witness along to the meeting and their job is to, is to remember perfectly what was said in the meeting. That's not the task for story threaders, although there might be, there might easily be story threaders who love doing that and who are really good at doing that, but that's not the mission. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And I mean, I, it seems to me that there's like some common, uh, sort of DNA with, um, you know, even just like the, the concept of minute taking, as I understand it from Robert's rules and, you know, that's, that's like, you know, I've dealt with a number of organizations where there's, there can be kind of a tension between, you know, some people want what you're describing as a faithful rapport or a, uh, I, I forget the Heinlein name that you just gave where it's like just a, yeah, fair witness of every single thing. But I mean, I think there, I think there is also a strong tradition. Like this is usually what we end up with in the organizations I've dealt with, is that, you know, people interpret the mandate more as like, you have to record every decision that was made. You have to record every, you know, substantial bit of dissent, you know, but, but skip all the, you know, it's actually your job to weed out the stuff that is not likely to, you know, to be useful down the road so that you end up with a more organized document. There's a, and you've just brought up something that actually had not occurred to me in the process of thinking about story threading, who takes notes in a meeting, has a lot of control over the meeting, what gets reflected in the minutes or what doesn't, people scrubbing things from the record. All of that is political and difficult and often quite stormy. And is, is really interesting. I don't want to, I don't want to avoid those issues. I think those issues are really important and interesting. So maybe what we do could inform and improve that process somehow, possibly. But thank you for, for bringing that into the conversation. Jay then Judy. Yeah, it's, it sounds to me like kind of dimensionalizing more than anything is taking an idea that had one strain of interpretation and then giving it multiple perspectives. And, and I've been working on this storytelling framework for the last 10 years. And it's been really helpful in a lot of different ways. But what I find is that it also can be limiting because it only provides kind of one way of thinking about how you take an idea and translate it into a kind of change framework. And if there was access to a collection of those that multiple users or participants could engage in that I think you could maybe get a more of a 3D form of, of what that experience was that was passed. A lovely observation. Partly, partly I'm inspired by things like the story of Stuff and the Leonard's video, which was just one form of animation that cost like 110 or $150,000 to do. And it was her walking around in a drawn hand drawn story about how we have too much stuff and it creates pollution and all of that. But another inspiration here is kind of satellite archaeology, where what's happened recently is people are taking a series of different signals doing sensor fusion. And then when you, when you actually do the sensor fusion, you discover that where you thought there was, you know, Chichen Itzai, it turns out that there was a minor metropolis that was there. It wasn't just the temple complex, but in fact, there was a city there that was as large, that was larger than Paris of its day kind of thing, right? And so what you just said makes a ton of sense in that if we, if we let people sort of veer off and go express things in different ways and take different pieces of it. But we do this in a way where these things are integratable by third parties, by the people who did the work, by whoever. But if we preserve the addressability, the integratability of the tool, the process and the projects, then we get what you were just talking about. We get the ability then to reassemble the narratives to tell a story in a new way, to bring new insight. And those are the goals that I had in mind for story threading. So that adds a whole bunch of the idea. Thank you, Jay. Judy, you're muted again. Apologies. Part of what strikes me in this storytelling and what we're discussing right now is the difference between what you capture and how you capture it, because frequently a bunch of things and words end up being a nugget. And it may be a nugget that everyone agrees is a nugget, or it may be a nugget that has dissension and opposing nuggets. But when you start to put it up visually, it has a very different impact, because you have the opportunity to refine the nugget with the input of people in the group. And then you're kind of as a facilitator in a crossfire between, do I want to generate a lot of nuggets without full definition, or do I want a limited number of nuggets that seem like the most important nuggets that are more richly detailed? And I don't know how you capture that in the story threading mode, but I think that's pretty critical to what we want to organize as accessible information that goes beyond accumulated knowledge and becomes actual wisdom because of the interpretation and possibility for action. I'm totally on board with that. And I think that I think where my intention in this was headed was toward collaborative sense making in some, I was trying to provoke a different way of doing collaborative sense making. So that idea of how things are manifest and what comes up for attention and what doesn't, whether one person would just create a whole series of nuggets or whatever, I think those are fabulous design questions and I would love to experiment with them. I would love for us to riff on those and figure out how this is useful to make better decisions together. I have to switch rooms, so I'm going to pass the mic to Ken and mute myself for a little bit and I'll be right back on. Actually, before I speak, I see that Susan said her hand up several times, so I'd like to have Susan go first and I'll speak. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks. Yes, and one of the things that I would like to lay on top of everything, I don't know if it's a meta point or not, this business of people's different stories, I'm thinking of a graphic facilitation experience that I had quite a number of years ago in an organization that I was in and we were having the usual organizational difficulties and so we got a graphic designer to come in and tell our story. It was the story of the director and what happened was that it was just interesting and the group was sort of like appalled. They expected their story to be told. So I guess I'm thinking that one of the requirements for this also, and I don't know, design desiderata, that's it. It's part of that list would be that we have a way of making sure that there are multiple perspectives that are brought into bear and that we have a way of kind of representing those. Almost like an open global mind. Yes, exactly. Right, but it's something that if you don't design for, I think you don't necessarily get. And even if you have it, you don't necessarily. There's a lot of power there. There's a lot of social barriers. There's a lot to all kinds of boundaries around that we all know perfectly well. So I just, I don't know if I'm going to commit to this and maybe if I say it out loud, I will, which is that I keep seeing these beautiful in these conversations. I think if I have time, I will go back and go through the tapes and the tapes. Listen to me. And actually pull out what I hear as design desiderata for OGM, whatever comes out to wherever we start. So let me try it and see if it's impossible. That's a great idea just mining these conversations for this kind of style. And I'll mention before passing it to Ken that when I watch a documentary, read a book, see a good post, whatever, I'm debriefing the interesting nuggets that I find into my brain constantly in a consistent way. And one of the things I love is that I can go back and look at a great, an article I thought was great way back when and I can refresh my buffers pretty quickly about what it said. And a whole bunch of stuff that I forgot that it said will re-enter my buffers because face repetition because I made the notes in my brain, but I didn't remember that that was actually in that particular book. So then giving other people tours of my brain is a really good learning tool for me because it refreshes my neural paths. So representing all of this in collective memory and then folding in the power dynamics of, oh, the chief executive seems to understand the power of controlling what the graphic recorder is doing and has implemented that as a plan. That's like kind of sneaky and underhanded and really interesting. Right. And part of the motivation for inviting in a series like I was thinking of four to six story threaders for a 200 person meeting. That was my instinctive ratio was to have enough different points of view that you could get a couple of radical ones in the room in some sense that there would be a requisite variety that they couldn't all be controlled by one voice or that they wouldn't all be reporting on exactly the same story. That was kind of the goal. And I think that my naive impression up front of how to do this is being elaborated wonderfully by this conversation. There's another list that being a linguist among other things makes me also think that we should be careful about our usage of point of view and perspective in the design activity. Can you say just a little more about that? Well, I think point of view is more like a mindset and perspective is from where you're standing. And so when all of us understand that we participate in these many different groups, these many different communities, these many different kinds of kinds of groupings that we're in that we actually can take on. You find yourself in one setting with a certain people. You will automatically kind of adjust yourself to them if you like them. And you will find yourself looking at a different perspective, looking from a different place in the system. And so I think you're raising like eight really interesting issues. No, just two. No, just two. I've got like four in my head on top of this. Including the issue of sometimes the shinier demo wins, right? There was a website visual complexity.com that Manuel Lima was doing and he collected up a whole bunch of visualization examples. And everybody's like ooh and ah. And I go through a lot of visualizations because I care about this and I've been looking at this for a long time. And most of the ones that are really pretty visually are useless in terms of insights. Like it's like the big hairy ball of traffic looks great on a first snapshot and tells you almost nothing, right? But it's sexy and everybody's like oh we want that visual. And it's really, you have to make your way through this. And I think we need a variety of visualizations and maybe at different logical levels of the system in different representational modes because I think like the brain really well. Gene tried to help me understand how to use Kumu. And I was a worthless student of Kumu. I could not switch my brain over into thinking like Kumu thinks. And Gene is really good. He's got a series of videos online that will tell you how to think like a Kumu. So I think approaching this in a way that lets us do the collaborative thing and get the better decisions as an intention might help us pick our way past the interesting sort of landmines and obstacles that you've just put in the conversation in a lovely way. Ken. I love that this conversation has shifted around to the design questions. In my experience, one of the things, and I saw Charles wrote something here about slowing things down or was that Charles. But in my experience of designing meetings, it's really difficult to get the time at the end of the meeting to actually have people stop and reflect on what's been accomplished and to ask them, so what are the things we agree on here? What are the things that are still nebulous for us that are ambiguous for us? What are the things we have to chew on further and digest more? And that's a very challenging thing in a business sense because most businesses like we've got to move, it's move, move, move, move on. You've mentioned this numerous times, Jerry, about how we don't have a collective memory. I've found that most graphic recordings are useless to people who were not in the meetings. They're great if you were there because they help you to remember. But you can look at a graphic recording that looks really pretty and go, I really don't get what happened to this meeting. So using multi-modes of everybody's got smartphones now. So you can just have people say, okay, here's the three things that I got from this meeting that are really useful. Here's where I still have questions that need to be answered. Here's those questions are. They can be uploaded to a library and sorted through and sifted into, okay, these are the things that are still open. So I think all of these are really important design considerations. And the other thing is, when I was doing a lot of World Cafes a few years ago, my graphic recorder said, don't call the graphic recorder at the end of the design process, bring them in from the beginning. This woman had remarkable insights on how to shape the meeting so that we really got what we wanted. And I think it's a big mistake facilitators make to design a meeting and then hire a graphic recorder say, we want you to record this. So get them involved from the beginning. Can I have you record that for our website? But you got to wait until after until I get a haircut. And again, I mean, I will to believe at this point, I mean, like my origin story for graphic recording, as I understand it, is it came from, you know, mind mapping, which came from David Strauss and interaction and associates, which is just like in a room. And I'm sure there's, that is a very simple story. But it was and they called it group memory, right? That was this idea of what you just said, Ken, our group was together, this is our memory together, it connected these ideas that we have. And so together, we share this memory as representable. But it was never intended to be a communication vehicle. It was never intended to be a skip learning thing, like you weren't here, here's the meeting encapsulated. So that's where I think the story threader idea now, building off of that, or maybe it's just separate, like a couple of people have said, there was a way to just carry a dialogue through where it is, it is intended to represent whatever the artifact is, video art pros, it is intended to catch somebody up or to represent what happened. Yeah, in an ideal world, one of the benefits of doing what we're talking about in GM is that somebody can step into the conversation later, and be more or less up to speed relatively quickly with the sense of the meeting with the things that are going on with what's up. And I'm extremely curious on how we represent that, and how we manifested what the tools are, and how we implement that Julian Ben-Suzan. I wanted to make Susan feel a little better about saying tapes. My son has a video production company, and his generation has never even touched him, but they still use the word footage, and you have to go back quite a ways to know what that one means. On the subject of communication, there are two observations I wanted to make. Years ago, I was an intern at Xerox Park, and I found that it was the living embodiment of a group mind, as we would see expressed in science fiction. Whatever I had to know, I could ask somebody if they didn't know, they'd know who would, so it wouldn't a hash index of one, if you know what that means. But I thought it was kind of amazing that there wasn't digging to get information. I noticed that I lived in Denmark for a few years, and I found the same thing going on there culturally. It seemed like everybody had talked to each other about something that needed to be done, so I frequently find I talked to somebody about something, and then a couple of days later found that everybody knew about it. So this brings to mind as we talk about communication is with, there are already examples of how a group mind kind of technology, well, not technology, but process have been implemented and was a working part of whatever culture it was. The other observation I wanted to make goes back a little bit to where we were talking about communication, and I'm thinking, well, okay, so we're doing recording. What about the stuff that was going on unset? And you very frequently see in cartoons about the characters are saying something and above them the cartoonist has a thought bubble as to what they're really thinking, you know, Bloom County used to be great at this kind of stuff. And in member in high schools, we studied literature and we learned about metaphor and what the writers or the poets were actually driving at, you know, but those things are what goes unset, even though they're a definite part of the message. And how do you capture these kinds of, these ethereal kinds of things? And I think I need to call in Peter Van, just to just whatever's in your head about how artists might see the kinds of things that we're talking about, and riff on them and add to the conversation, because this is this whole other dimension we haven't really touched in the conversation. We've been kind of playing at the logical visual as maybe storytelling side of things, and we haven't talked that much about that. Thanks, Hamilton. And Peter, do you want to just riff on that? I don't know what to say. Can you give me a hint on what you think I was going to say? Well, you were on my list of potential story threaders to invite in to be in meetings and perform this role to play this role, partly because you have a lot of acuity for what's happening in a group and what an idea is and how it connects to others. But then you have a whole aesthetic dimension that you have really intentionally built up, improved, given yourself space for that few of us really, I think, have the time to do. And so I just wanted a little bit of that sense in the conversation. Okay. So there is one aspect in the conversation that I would like to add. I think there's one way of looking at what is in the open global mind as these are facts. These are checked facts or these are objective. It's objective data of what happened. I'm not sure that's what we want. I think the role of a threadweaver, it's to add opinion to it. It's to give direction to what the designer, I mean, I think that the threadweaver is a designer of opinion that he or she wants to share with the audience that can participate with. So in that sense, I found the article or the newsletter from Alexis Lloyd, who used to be a part of the Innovation Department of New York Times. And I put it somewhere in the chat. She's writing about particles and bonds. And I know that Julian, we had a conversation in the group about that I thought that objects and links were not the appropriate way of looking at it and that maybe foam would be a better metaphor or maybe it's, but I'm not thinking in technology or in how you put this in quote unquote database or into whatever technology it is. So I think we have to add, so I like the eating of Alexis about particles and bonds. I think that's richer than links. And what if we could qualify opinionate the particles and the bonds and then let some search engine or connection engine connect those dots and have, you can start mixing particles and bonds. So to the work that I did before and still do today, so you can bring content to a group of people with a graphic facilitation. And so usually the graphic facilitator is, as we said before, is recording what happens. But I think we want more from the Threadweaver than just recording what happens. I think the Threadweaver is creating and is opinionating and is steering the conversation in another direction than what was going on. I think it's not about objective recording, it's about subjective recording. And so as we are at the level of subjectivity, I think what I try to do with the physical events in the past is to resonate with the audience, with the reader, with the viewer, with whatever you want to call it, at the level beyond the conscious. So at the level beyond what is going in between the ears, but also resonate at any emotional level. And I think artists can be very helpful in support of the content to resonate at that level. So what if you would bring in a digital asset of music or piece of life music that has been designed specifically in support of that content. So we're not talking here about artists as entertainment. I mean, you see a lot of events where in between the breaks, there's somebody playing music or there's a dancer doing some sort of performance, that's entertainment. But what if the soundscape that has to reflect anxiety has been designed to call that feeling. So if we start mixing those pieces of information on top of the objects and links or the particles or bonds, etc, etc, then I think we have something richer. With Ham, we have been discussing also other formats, if you want to push this whole idea, like 100% online, 100% virtual, what is needed. Then it's this strange mix of recording, video recording, what's going on and documenting it in tools like Mural, who have all these whistles and bells where you can have clickable objects on your on your whiteboard, including video, audio, links, etc. What if you could record a session, what's going on and then in a post-production to start cutting it in different ways and offering them as a independent, I mean, English is not my native language, independent nuggets or pieces of resonance that you want the audience, they can mix themselves. They're smart enough to connect the dots. So part of our discussion with Ham was also and also with Anne Pendleton, by the way. If we want to create something, then we can offer a number of lenses to a particular topic and we are not connecting the dots for them. People are smart enough to make their own interpretation of how dots have to be connected. I'm going to go to Pete next. It's like a shame that there was nothing in your head about this, Peter. It's just too bad that you had nothing to add to the conversation. Thank you for that. That was fabulous. You nailed something that's important here that I had not brought out at all, which is that the subjectivity of the story-threaders is really important. Inviting story-threaders in who have background and context and a point of view in the world matters a whole big bunch because they're going to pick up what's being done and said in the meeting and represent it in some different way. Then you said four other different things that are equally important here in this conversation. Pete, over to you in the booth. Yeah, I want to speak in defensive text as a format. And I think there are things that are really worth calling out about text, primarily that it's editable and I won't dwell on this one as much, but that it's searchable. But I think in Wikipedia often there's a thread of people who really want Wikipedia to have more video and in a sense I'm one of them, but I think this is something that comes up there as well. One of the things that's made Wikipedia thrive and one of the things that I think can help an organization thrive in terms of keeping a record of its past meetings and activities is that if someone is reflecting on, just in the example of minutes for a meeting, if someone takes the minutes and they miss something either because their attention lapsed for a few minutes or because they have a political bias or because they're actively trying to advance a certain narrative or something like that, the sort of the boring Robert's rules type practices that have them bring that text document back to the group for discussion and approval before it is considered official, that gives everyone somewhat of an opportunity to influence that. If you want to add a paragraph to it, it's pretty easy to copy and paste it and drop it in. If you've seen a draft before, you can do that on your own time during the meeting, you read what it is, everyone hears what it is, everyone understands what it is, you copy and paste it, boom, you're done. But if the story is told in video or in audio or in music or or visual images or something like that, that editing process becomes much more complicated. It's a higher threshold. Some people won't have the requisite skills or the requisite software and it's also even if they do, it's just more time consuming to do it, so it's less likely to get done. That's not to say that those things don't bring value, but I think it's important to keep in mind that a lingua franca where everyone can operate fluidly, it really has a lot of value. This is a lovely long conversation as well, because it's text to temporary hack. I think it's Danny Hillis who has an essay out saying, yeah, text is just a temporary human hack. We're going to be in some post-textual communication environment. I look around and I have not seen the post-textual environment that actually manages to communicate any of that kind of stuff. I want to say a little thing about timing, a meta comment in our process. My goal is to have these conversations run an hour and we've now run over the hour, partly because longer calls are hard for people to catch up on later. I want to keep the energy high, but I love these conversations, so I'm going to take us to the half hour if that's okay with any of you. Feel free to drop off. No worries about that, but I just want to say I'm trying to aim for an hour long calls. It's my bad habit that I love like the 90-minute framing, because at 90 minutes people start to poop out and they need some somatic breaks. They need to pay attention to the body and go somewhere else, but of course what they have is yet another Zoom call to sit in on. So we don't get that either, like workplaces are not understanding that. With that said, I will go to Julian. You're muted. Having agreed with the first Peter, I want to disagree with the second Peter. You know, many media besides text are searchable and have been for some time. I agree that the tools can be cumbersome, but that shouldn't be an impediment to trying to move forward. It's a fact as human beings communicated with not text for millions of years, and to force everybody back into that anachronism, I don't think is a good way to foment communication, but rather to hinder it. Just to be clear, I'm not denying the value of other modes. I'm just highlighting some of the advantages of text. And when I said earlier that there's a long conversation to be had about this, and it's a conversation I love being part of, and I learn a lot every time, I'll point to Leonard Slain's book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, in which he says, when the linear alphabet shows up in country after country, region after region of the world, it changes the conversation and linearizes our thinking. And strangely, his plot point, which I agree with is, it marginalized the divine feminine. Basically, it basically reified or deified linear syntax, logic, et cetera, et cetera, and got rid of other really interesting things that were going on. And I had this weird moment many years ago, where I had read Leonard Slain, I got to meet him too. He's his daughter is Tiffany Slain, who does the Webby Awards. So I knew her. So I went to an event he did in Porta Madeira, or Mill Valley, I think. So at the same moment, I read Leonard Slain's Alphabet versus the Goddess. I read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. And there's a plot point in the middle of that about the marginalization of the divine feminine, apparently given to him by his wife, Sherry. I'd love to know more backstory. And then I've been chasing the word consumer by that point, probably for 15 years. And I've arrived at the same sort of general notion that, hey, Yang, and my own interpretation of that, borrows Yin and Yang from Daoism. And my shorthand into that is that Yang won. That basically the masculine side won and had a scorched earth strategy on Yin. Basically said, Yin is heresy. Don't pay any attention to Yin. Screw Yin. Let's stamp it out and make sure it never rises again. And so we have a world designed for the young principles only, which is a world out of balance, which is Croyana Scotsey, which is another lovely film with music by Rob Steve Reich. Rob, yeah. So over to you and your booth, Ken. So just a little bit about Leonard Slain was, he wrote a book called Art and Physics. And he was traveling in Europe. And he noticed that all of the current cathedral sites were built on pagan sites. And that got him really interested in what went on, what changed the sex of God, what changed the gender of God. And that's the impetus for his book on the outfit versus the goddess. Thank you. And that, by the way, is a whole other really, really interesting conversation. It's a deep and lovely thing. And the balance of Yin and Yang or however you want to frame this notion is important in the world today, goes back to me too, but goes, you know, touches everything else that is happening right now as well. And touches, I think, how we see and steward this little planet that we share. I think all of those are incredibly important issues. Jay, were you going to jump in? Yeah, this is wonderful. I just want to include this idea of bottom up mythology. Because we've been in a very top down mythology territory. And I know it's been emergent, but part of it does, after all of the data and the insights and the imagery and the sound and all these pieces, it does in some form come back to how we create a not distilled but aggregate or immersive story that this all can take form into, which also comes back to the question of what we mean by story. So those are the pieces that are coming up for me. And just to go back to this text versus other forms of communication thing, there was a nice documentary called remix culture several years ago. It's in my brain. And we're in remix culture. Just yesterday, I saw Joe Biden gave a speech, and he didn't flub things. He didn't make a lot of mistakes in the speech. So what happened was the far right cut a video of his pauses, just the pauses, right, trying to make him look like he doesn't know what he's saying or just, you know, the breaks in between. So you can remix, and you've all seen it, you can remix anybody to say anything. And with deep fakes, you can make anybody say anything you want with mixed media, alternate media, et cetera. And we have little, because nobody put digital notary stamps on the chips that record so that the recording as faithfully recorded by the lens on the chip is actually notarized and filed away somewhere, because that does is not a thing, which I always thought would become a thing. We don't know what's real anymore. Reality itself is fading under assault. And so we're in the middle of the post-truth, post-fact era. And one of my worries, one of the reasons for OGM actually, is that I want the post-truth era to be a short detour, not a 200 year epic in human history, right? So romanticism is kind of backlash against the Enlightenment. I'm glossing history a little bit. But we have these large movements back and forth where something's happening and then cultures that don't want it to happen and say, nope, nope, nope, we're going to go over here. And then we go over there. Like, Egypt does art like this for 2000 years. And it's not because they don't know how to draw. This is my art history teacher at Irvine who showed us that, like, the cave, if you look at cave art, you'll realize that people were perfectly capable of representational art. It's religion and norms and culture that limit, change, or tell us what art is supposed to look like for long stretches of time. And 2000 years in terms of what humans are doing to each other is an incredibly long span of time, right? So I think one of the experiments that's happening here in OGM is, what does the next literacy look like? I'm frustrated by books in particular, I'm frustrated by the intellectual property protections around books that don't allow us to get the juicy nuggets that live inside of books and remix and reuse them and populate them into a landscape of what we believe and why we believe it so that we can compare it and mush it against someone else's landscape of what they believe and why they believe it. And these works are all cut away from intellectual discourse by the attempt to give the author a profit which became the fact of, you know, perpetual lockdown by owners of intellectual property who just wanted to make money. Because the sales of a book happened really early and then they kind of taper off. But you know, Jack Valenti famously of the Motion Picture Association said, you know, the proper length of copyright should be infinity minus a day, right? He was like the owners of intellectual property should just own it forever. And for me, there's a whole conversation to be had here about what happened there, how do we get, what do we do about the lockdown of ideas when we're trying to let ideas have sex out in space here? So sorry, that was like five things in a row. And what I'd love, just as a preamble, what I'd love to do for next Thursday's call is go into how do we divide and conquer this? How do we organize our conversations a little bit so that subgroups can form up and go take the conversation about what is post-literacy, what does the next literacy look like? That may not be an early conversation, but it's an interesting one. How do we do projects that are relevant to the world so that OGM is actually helping somebody and how does that go? I'd love to have that conversation. There's a bunch of others. And I'm realizing I have to go filter the chat afterwards because I haven't been able to pay attention to it as much as I'd like and there's awesome stuff going on there. So let me pause and we have maybe 10 minutes left. Let me see what any reflections on where we've been in this conversation. This conversation is a little too typical of my MO of hosting conversations, which means we went quickly. We covered way too many things. It was stimulating and a little exciting. And I'd like to do it again, but how do we improve the conversations? I would love that instead of Zoom chat, we would be curating the open global mind together as we talk about this so that whenever I mentioned the alphabet versus the goddess, I was taking that note in my brain, sharing it with you so that you could connect it into your brain equivalent or your kumu or whatever, so that this was actually an active conversation of curating, gardening, sculpting this stuff, these ideas that we share together that we disagree on, that all of that. I'd love to see that happen sooner rather than later. So how do we get, how to get to that is probably an interesting conversation for us to have. And then always to sort of try to elevate what we're doing so we don't get caught in long interminable debates that have been had over time that are super juicy and interesting, but that could hold up our bias to action, our goals of trying to get things done in the world. So thoughts. Ken. One thing we might do is try to apply some of these design principles to our conversations. Like, you know, how are we going to start the conversation? That's really, I love a check-in because I love to hear everybody's voice and know where they're coming from and there's new people. So, you know, if that's brief, it's wonderful. And then at the end, having a little time for reflection of okay, what, you know, what was really good about today and how do we improve it, stuff like that. So those two bookends, I think would be a fantastic way for us to move forward. Totally agree. Thank you. Other thoughts? If we get the chance, I'd like to harp on the notion of just what is a story because with technology today and where it's going, we have finally the opportunity to change the narrative from something that's just text-based to much, much more than that. And in addressing the notion of what is a story, it also hits on the idea of what is knowledge, how do you manage these things in that progression? Amy Kaufman, Amy, what was her name? At MediaMoo, she's in my brain, anyway. Amy Rucker, I think, wrote something really pithy, which I loved. And the early multi-user environments were text environments, like you're in a dark forest, they're a path north and south. And she was writing about participating in a MOO and she said, Amy, she typed in as her response to something that had happened. Amy bites her lip and looks at her shoes. And it was this crisp little sentence that communicated emotion and presence and a whole bunch of things that were carried in little line of text. And so sometimes text is this beautiful carrier, sometimes it's this limiting factor. And now we have multimedia craziness because things that used to cost $300,000 or $1 million are now available as $30 apps on our machines. It's nuts that we have 4k, high def, whatever, recording capacities in the home. That's really cool. But we haven't moved forward from the YouTube video and the book and the blog post and the whatever. And I'd love to know what that frontier is. Go ahead. So actually, I disagree with that. The thing that line about the text about Amy bit her lip and looked at her shoes, that's great because we need to separate the tool from the content creator because whoever wrote that was able to use text in order to convey an impression. Other people would instead say this would be in a movie clip because they would not, they don't have the talent to express it well in text. We've all seen poorly written prose versus well written prose. And the second thing is I would say the exploration has already started. I used to work with a guy who made movies and he was really good, Oscar nominated. And for the last few years, there's been pretty thorough exploration of omnipresent, not omnipresent, omnispherical and VR movies. And what Dan Fung was really getting into way back then was how do you tell a story when you can no longer control where the viewer of the movie is looking? Because historically, it's been you look where the cinematographer said you're going to look. And now you watch a VR movie. Not only can you look anywhere you want, but where you are looking can affect the story. And Dan Fung's questions or directors, how am I going to tell the story in this kind of environment? So he's been pursuing that. And we're going to see the point you brought up about the democratization of technology because of its cheap cost. We're going to see people who have these ideas, but we're economically prohibited from experimenting with them years ago. And we're going to see them experimenting now. And this goes back to my earlier point about is what is the story? Now that tech is changing the way we can tell stories, what is the story? And now we go even further back to this text of now we can do this thing where instead of writing a line of text that Amy looked down at her shoes, we can express it in many different ways. And we're in remix culture. We're hip deep in this remix world. And the tools are out. And we're all just trying to sort of figure out what the next thing is. So I love that. Thank you. It gets me excited about where we're going. Yes, Charles, go ahead. Coming on, sorry for my weird audio. There's an echo coming from you. Everybody would me a place. Two devices. So I just wanted to comment on the third mind, which is fascinating to me. And one of the earliest, well, among the earlier sort of cultural references, William Burroughs and Brian Geisen. And it's literally sort of their discovery in making visual art in collage with mixed media, using a bunch of newspaper on the on the floor and cutting cutting into it, sort of taking magazine pieces and other scraps. And then realizing that the newspaper below, when they rearranged it, it sort of emerged into literally a third mind kind of, kind of mess messaging and poetry and so forth. So I just wanted to flag that as something really rich and for me, fascinating and holds a lot of potential in kind of just a more in depth consideration of this remix culture. Love that. There's also, I know, and we know, as a group, a bunch of VR, XR, AR experts. Eva Haining comes to mind here. She's way deep into XR. And I would love for there to be a group that's exploring what does that mean, you know, using the tools. It would also be nice. I don't think many of us in the group right now are machine learning experts. But I think that there's a huge role here for what role does machine learning play in what we're doing? How do we have listener apps that are busy watching what we're doing that are helping improve what we do that are suggesting things that are that are quickly enacting the things that would normally be manual labor to do? You know, if I when I learned about an author, I've never heard of before, it takes me 15, 20 minutes to go Google them, put them in my brain, find their books, clean up the links. It's all manual labor for me. The good news about the manual labor is that that embeds their works in my head. I wouldn't want that fully automated. But I would love to have the drudge work of cleaning up the dam, you know, the dam advertising part after the question mark and the links. I would love to and I have a bookmark, I have a bookmark app that's supposed to clean that up, but doesn't, you know, like that stuff could easily go away. And I could be focusing on the ideas and the weaving instead of the production. So I think these are all interesting places for us to go. Other rapping thoughts for today's call and you don't have to say them in rap. That pun is for you, Ken. Anything else? There being no further additions to today's really rich conversation, I thank you all from the bottom of my little heart for this conversation. Let's take it to the OGM list. I will set us up so that next time we start to organize ourselves a bit. That'll be the full content of next week's call. If anybody wants to propose a call between now and next Thursday, any of these topics, say so and we'll just pick a random time and put an invite out to the OGM list because I'm happy to start the sub conversations on this. Just let me know and we'll go do it. So thank you very much and see you in a week at least. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thanks for the new people. Thank you.