 Hello everyone, welcome back to Complexity Weekend. It's May, 2021, and it's Saturday where I am. It might be a different day whether you're watching live or in replay. Thanks so much for joining. We're gonna hear a little bit of music in the next 25 minutes or so from one of our great facilitators, Michael Garfield. And after that music, we're gonna hear from some facilitators and then we're gonna be talking about team formation. So if you're curious about Complexity Weekend and what it means to be on a team and how you're gonna register as a team, this is the live stream to watch. So we're gonna hear 25 minutes of some groovy cybernetic music and then we'll be right back here with some conversations with facilitators and talking about team formation. See you all soon. DING DONG MUSIC Okay, I can't hear you. Let me see. Greetings. I still can't hear you. Can you hear us? Bummer. Hold on. Let's see. Hey, everyone. Well, the live stream can hear us. This isn't my headphones. Always break this thing. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Well, Blue's here with us. And we're going to figure out our audio in just these first few minutes. OK, try now. Oh, yes. Can you hear us now? Yes. Use that one. Excellence. Say something. Excellence. Nothing. Fuck. I'm going to have to do it on my kitty ear headphones. Hold on. OK. Can you hear us now? Well, awesome. That's fun. That's live streaming. That is absolutely live streaming for all of you. Well, welcome, everyone. We're really happy to be coming to you on Saturday, at least where we're at. Hey, Blue, can you hear us now? OK. Well, you don't want to say anything weird at this point. I've got to get my headphones. OK. Blue's going to get headphones. Let's start off with just some welcomes and covering what we're going to do in this next hour. We're going to be just talking with some facilitators over the next hour. And then in the second hour of this live stream, we're going to be talking about team formation. So maybe Alexandra, you could introduce yourself. Yes. So hi. My name is Alexandra, Squasha on Keybase. If you want to message me. And I'm a facilitator with Flexi Weekend of May 2021. OK. I think we'll make sure our volume is a little balanced. We're live streaming in a new location due to new constraints and opportunities. So maybe we can just while we're waiting for any other facilitators to join. Squasha, what session have you been doing or how has that been going? So yesterday, we did a partner drawing for team session. And it was really fun. We used some of the affordances and gather, like whiteboards, and just had a good time meeting other participants while drawing on whiteboards collaboratively. And yeah, discovering what sort of complexity ideas people are drawn to. And that's just another way to meet potential teammates. Cool. What were some big complexity ideas that come into play with art? Because maybe people have heard about complexity in the context of simulations or dynamical systems. But where does art come into play? So, oh. Hey, Sean. Hi, Sean. Hello. Great. Glad that you can hear us. Nice. So in the context of art and complexity, I was really thinking about it as a tool of communication. So even though some people don't like to draw or think they aren't good at it, it's just another form of communication that we can bring to the table, just like we didn't really know how to use key base or gather before this weekend for many participants. We might not know how to draw. And given the chance and opportunity to connect with other people, we might be able to try it out. Awesome. So for those of you 20 or so who are watching live, you can definitely post questions in the live chat. The next hour is going to be facilitators and organizers sharing a little bit about their experience, which has been mostly in gather, which isn't recorded. And then in that second hour, we're going to be breaking down the team registration process and forms. So maybe, Sean, do you want to just share a little bit what's been something interesting or expected or unexpected that happened in gather over the last 24 hours or so? Sure. Actually, piggybacking off what Sosper was just saying, I've been kind of a recurring participant in her session type. And it's been really fun just using those shared whiteboards to kind of process together with others like as a means of communication. And I just find it's really helpful to start thinking about, hey, to start thinking about some complexity concept or some like team seed ideas, but through the lens of kind of drawing together and just kind of, you seem to ingest information differently when you're kind of doodling and sketching with each other while it's going on. And so I've seen so many kind of team seeds kind of come out of that. So if any facilitators are watching that, if you're trying to figure out what to do with your live session, the bottom right corner of the live session with those shared whiteboards and those small group spaces, those are really great breakout areas. So even just broadcasting maybe 15, 20 minutes about what information you're trying to bring or perspective you're trying to bring and then having participants either go to the right from the green mat into the shared whiteboard spaces or north to the one-on-one spaces, those are just great ways to kind of spend the second half of the session so that participants are interacting with each other, they're creating novel information, but based off of your prompts and your guidance. Blue, what about you? Like in terms of fun experiences so far at Complexity Weekend, May 2021? You know, I am trying something totally new in my live facilitator sessions, which is like learning all overcoming hurdles and like lots of obstacles and like building the gather spaces kind of new and different for me, but yeah, it's kind of been fun and a little bit chaotic so I appreciate like the patience of everyone who was there like last night while we were trying to get things settled out and then hopefully like it'll get smoother, I'm gonna run like three identical sessions so I'm expecting the process to get easier, but I mean it's been fun, it's like a game that like a game kind of team collaborative like problem solving puzzle like in my live session, that's the best way to explain it, but I just had a great office hour session and just lots of interesting people and conversation and it's always fun. Sorry, I wanted to kind of piggyback off what Blue's saying now like Blue has kind of pushed the envelope on interactions and gathered by the design of your interactive session, where from my understanding I haven't participated yet, it's people interacting with objects and playing a game basically or something like that. And I think that's so interesting and it's okay to have these hiccups because we're learning new ways of interacting kind of in the affordances of the gather space and similarly I kind of had a similar experience yesterday when I had my first session just teaching intro programming in Python, where we were using the upper right section of the live session room, which is a paired learning environment. And in that environment, it's just a small private space where pairs of people are encouraged, one of them to share their screen, open a browser based learning experience and then the facility kind of pops between the desks and just keeps nudging the pair forward and learning something together, but it's new, right, it's a new way of interacting. And so there's kind of, it's a little bumpy the first times we try out these interactions, but the more we kind of try out new ways of interacting and practicing them, it's just gonna be in our community's repertoire of like ways to facilitate great interaction at these sessions. But Dan Sasha, you think. What that makes me think about is kind of form and function or data and metadata. It's like they're leapfrogging each other. And if people were used to lectures in person and then the lecturer said, okay, now get up and rearrange and we're gonna be tracking where you move in the room, that would be new even when you're located. But when you're digital, all of a sudden in a spatial chat platform like Gather, that becomes something that's natural. And it's something that we get to interweave with the complexity ideas like agent-based modeling and all kinds of ways that we think about distributed systems. And then also to the point about the art session, Sean, you connected that to the team seeds. It's like we're not setting up the workshops or sessions to be team formation. This is where it's gonna happen. And if you don't leave this session with a team idea, then you failed that session. There's no test. There's no specific outcome needed for any of the given sessions, yet things do happen during them. Cool. And there's some questions in the chat. Will there be other art and Python sessions? I believe that there will be. One more Python session and I think Sasha, maybe one or two, how many more of yours? Two more art sessions today and I think a few tomorrow and many office hours. Nice. And Blue, I see your hands raised. Yeah, I'll also have two more like come play my fun interactive game if you want sessions, one today, one tomorrow. I was just going to piggyback off of what Sean was saying, but also like some of the advice I gave to Daniel as he's teaching people like how to live stream and how to broadcast. And it's like he handles technological hiccups with such finesse. Like, well, we're just gonna do this now. And so it's so important to like not freak out. Like I was like a little bit internally like freaking out last night and like my like technological hiccups, but it's like, you know, I mean, I don't know, people have to come to like a tech space. And I think after a year of COVID we're all kind of used to like, well, this AV whatever is not cooperating to like just right now, I couldn't even get my speakers to work. Like I plug in my headset and it like breaks my computer. It happens all the time. So just handling these technological hiccups and like just be ready for them to happen and say, oh, we're gonna take a five minute break now. Like, and that's cool too. I think that that's important for people to remember and that we've all been dealing with this for the last year. It's the yes and with human and technology. We're connecting internationally and there's lack. Not we're connecting internationally, but there's lack because there's no lag free way to do that. That's not how light works. It's not how the internet works. So we can just conjoin and think of all of these different frictions and constraints as being an integrated part of our total experience. And it's great just to see a bunch of people watching on the live stream. We know that there's also people who are still hanging out and gather. And there's those who are gonna be watching us asynchronously. So again, people can ask any questions because in this first hour, we just wanted to catch up with some of our facilitators and just get excited about this next phase where we're now solidly heading into the team formation phase. So if anyone has a question here, feel free to raise it. Otherwise, I'm just curious, like, let's just say that somebody does wanna form a team or they're curious about what that might look like. How do they go about reducing their uncertainty there? Yeah, good question. I think I keep using this phrase team seed because I just feel like it's not intimidating. It's just like, you're planting seeds and some of them may bud and some of them may not. And so I feel like at this particular point of the weekend, there are some teams that even formed in the pre-weekend. There's a whole distribution to it all, but that's not the norm. The norm will be when we release a team registration form at the second half of this hour, sorry, the second hour of this live stream. That's when a majority of teams will start thinking about it. And from now until then, until halfway through today, it's really all about these team seeds and it's just to have fun interactions and keep these seeds in your back pocket. I'm like, oh, I interact with this person and that might be something fun to pursue or this might be something fun to pursue and really leverage the facilitators to kind of take it to the next level where a seed might pass through that registration form and then become an actual team. So leverage the resources you have, don't feel like you have to have it all figured out upfront and also don't feel like your team seeds or your team registration or any of that is locked in stone because I'm literally about to edit the form right now or just to make sure people can re-edit their submissions. You can always evolve. Yeah, seeds are many kinds of seeds, as many kinds of seeds as there are plants and plants have different functions. So there's all kinds of things that they grow into and some are oak seeds and they take 40 years to develop into something that scaffolds an ecosystem even in death. And then there's other annual plants where maybe three months later, you want to have something tasty to eat, something that's gonna sustain you. And yeah, they definitely don't all sprout but it's almost like a facilitator as gardener metaphor that gets evoked and an ecosystem metaphor that's evoked rather than facilitator as engineer or facilitator, especially as instructor or lecturer because if we knew the way to set up a team, we wouldn't have to have these unconventional connections and leave it to this bottom up creative force. We would just say, okay, great, you're on team A and you're on team B, but that's not how we organize teams or projects at complexity weekend. One question I wanted to pose to the organizers and facilitators out there is as we're having all these sessions and all these team seed possibilities, what kind of advice do you have for the general FOMO of it all? Fear of not joining the coolest team, not attending the coolest session, not meeting the coolest person that you saw on Keybase. How can we manage this influx of just, yeah, attention grabbing fun stuff that we have at this weekend? So maybe blue if you want to answer that, but I also just want to articulate any facilitator in the live chat thread. Feel free to answer these questions too. Answer them in the live chat and then in blue on the live stream. Do you want to take a shot? Yeah, I mean, it's a lot, right? Like I don't know, FOMO is like whatever, it's going to be there at any conference, right? Like so I remember going to like the Society for Neuroscience conference and I'm sure you've been Sasha, right? Like where they give you like maybe you've been going to you're too young to remember like, I mean, they give you like books, like this much books, that's all the stuff that's going on. Like there's a book for every day and then there's like one overarching, like don't miss this book, right? Like, and so you have to like literally go through with a highlighter and figure out what it is you're going to do that day, right? And like rip pages out and stuff. And so you make this big plan, but actually like having that big plan sucks because then you have no room for like spontaneity or like I need to go home and take a nap. Like I'm on input overload. So just go with it. Like do whatever you feel is right. And it's a lot of screen time, which I know like a lot of us are used to a lot of screen time, but maybe not all of us. And it ends like I have to move my position of my computer like several times throughout the day. Like I consistently do this to be able to like stay on the screen all day. But I mean there's ways that people can handle it. And if you can't handle it, like if you're not going to show up and be able to be engaged if you're just going to be like, that sucks and I don't want to stay on my screen. Like if you're going to have that kind of attitude, it's better to go take a nap or go for a run or do the things that enable you to, you know, participate in a way that's healthy and fun. Right? I mean, you don't have to be here. Nobody does, right? So just kind of leave space for spontaneity and just go with it and whatever comes out comes out. And there will be another complexity weekend. And there's also heartbeat events. So if you see somebody at the end and the final presentation is like, oh, the project's so cool. It's never too late to like jump on and participate even at the final end of a project. You know, your time zone or whatever may not allow you to participate live in person this weekend, but there's the future too. So, you know, it's all possible. I'll just say something that you kind of hit at the end, Blue, which was every time you do like a complexity weekend, for instance, you learn something new. It's a new experience every time because it's always different people, different interactions, different novel information being created through these interactions and the teams are all evolving over time. So this is a journey you can take again and again and again. And each time the principle of, you know, not having that fear of missing out is gonna apply because just like complexity in general, you're not gonna know everything about complexity. You can't physically do that. It's in every field. Like you just don't, you don't live long enough to be able to gain enough knowledge. So, you know, enjoy what you can experience in your lifetime. Enjoy what you can experience in each cycle of complexity weekend and over multiple of them if you'd like to participate in that one. Yeah, just one awesome comment from Sarah Murphy wrote, someone recently gave me this Jomo, J-O-M-O, the joy of missing out saying, I'm so happy that Carrie in the UK did an amazing session while I was sleeping at 2 a.m. for me. I'm really happy that she was able to hold it down while I was resting. So it can be reframed in a positive way. So thanks a lot for that, Sarah. And then also Rhonda asked, will there be an ethics team? So, we're in feedback with you. If you're listening and you're curious about an ethics team, Rhonda's the person to talk to. There's so many ways that it can go. And you're only gonna figure that out by connecting across different perspectives and talking on gather or connecting on key base. And that's something that we're gonna be talking a lot about in the second hour, which is how do we go from values and our guidelines for participation? Okay, well, those are the rules of the party or those are the suggestions of the party, but how do we go from that to going, okay, there's four of us, we're connected synchronously, and then there's three people who are curious asynchronously. How do we make that seven person, you know, 14 leg race? How do we go from everybody being excited and right here, right now into something that's gonna be working together through deep time? And that's something that we're gonna be, again, exploring in the second hour especially, but maybe Sasha, I'd be curious, what kind of a team seed gardening tips? Cause I know around the house, you like to have a lot of plants. So how is gardening a plant like starting a team or how could somebody go from an idea that they're excited about into something that's starting to sprout? Well, yes, I do love plants. We have a real live one behind us. Yeah, I would say team formation can feel a bit like you're on your own and it's maybe a scary journey to take on by yourself. And in order to help with that, I would say communicate to everyone who's in complexity weekend. So post in the key base and announce to others what kind of team you want to form or what mission or even idea you're nucleating around. And that's a really great way to get people exposed to your idea and get feedback because you might have an interest but not feel super confident or see the vision of it and someone else will step in and help you solidify that. So really everyone is here and super passionate about connecting over these complexity ideas. So just put it out there. And if you don't communicate it, no one will ever know what incredible team idea you had. And one other thought on that before Sean is like, at least in my background in academia, it had been on my radar to do certain kinds of deliverables. Okay, we're going for the peer reviewed paper and then whoa, maybe we're gonna do a preprint. Maybe we're gonna do an unconventional publication but it's by connecting with people who have really different backgrounds and worked on really different kinds of projects. It's like, hey, maybe we could do an interactive website if our purpose here is to be educating about this topic, maybe a journal behind a paywall is not the right way to do it. And yes, a preprint could be a great way to do it but what if we also get that DOI and that ability to site with an interactive website? Well, that's something that's new. It wasn't around 20 years ago. So even talking to somebody in your field who had experience from that past era, they might not suggest that but then you're gonna be bumping into somebody who says, yeah, you should make the NFT and it's like, whoa, that's a new idea with recombining the kinds of deliverables that we've worked on in the past. So yeah, Sean. Nice. I just wanna call back to what Sasha was saying with, you need to put yourself out there if you want to join a team. Our goal as facilitators and organizers is to make sure you find a team if you want to over the weekend but it has to be part of what you're doing too. You need to broadcast it. And as an example, Ron had asked in the live stream, is there an ethics team? Well, she also actually reached out one-on-one on Keybase which is highly encouraged, always reach out one-on-one. And on the live stream, I was just responding and I don't know any ethics teams that are forming but I know who might know and that's Jen who did a live session about ethics. So I just forwarded her to Jen and I said, talk to Jen, she might know and that type of information channeling is something all the organizers, all the facilitators we're all here to help with. So just, but it takes you reaching out, reach out to facilitators one-on-one, reach out to other participants one-on-one, get that information going outside of your head so that we as a network can kind of support it and form those seeds. There's another really insightful comment in the chat from GA Sato who wrote, one of the strategies of corruption is the control of flows turning open systems into closed systems. And it makes me think about go with the flow and the river and somebody's standing at the river bank and well, this section isn't flowing the way I want to, cut it. Oh, now this section is not flowing the way I want to, cut it. And so going with the flow means recognizing that fluids can flow in all kinds of ways. Sometimes there's the middle of the river with a straight and laminar flow and just going as fast as it can. And then there's whirlpools and eddies. And yeah, if the goal is to get on the ferry boat from A to B down river, then you know that you wanna be in that carpool lane in the middle, but sometimes it's nice to dwell because that's maybe where the complex tangled bank is. That's where you have the amphibious insects. That's where you have plants that are growing the roots into the land and into the water. All these kind of cool hybrids that happen on the river bank, but that's not where you're getting the rapid flow. And so if somebody just wants to be trained up in a skill, we wanna be able to have a lane for that. But also there's space to be totally connecting. And we had that come up in a conversation. Somebody said, what I love about complexity weekend is the learning content and the goals and the scheduling. And someone said, I come here to escape that. That's not what I see here. They're looking at the same single source of truth. They're in the same gather URL at the same time and they couldn't have a more different understanding but what's important is that they're connecting there. So yeah, blue and then we can continue on. So like I think I have three things. So about looking at the same thing, it's all contextuality which we were just talking about in my office hour session. So like, we're all coming from a different context. So we look at complexity weekend in a different way. And then I just was reminded of Tim's talk last night talking about everything is either a stock or a flow. So like, are you building up a stock or are you flowing with the river or whatever? Are you building a dam or going with the river? And then the last thing was, speaking to non-traditional, like what are we doing here? Like do we need a publication or a grant or a website or what are we doing? A lot of what I am interested in is tool building. I mean, websites can definitely be tools but I love like the Dentropy project and the tools that come out of there and just how like, you know, when you're building a tool that can be used for any future experiment. I mean, there's some underlying utility there and that's kind of also where I'm seeking to go with the gather networking projects. Like can we build a tool that'll enable us to capture this information and use it to do different future projects? Nice, Sean. Nice. Yeah, you brought up Dentropy Daman and they're a really interesting team example because they came out of October and they focused on something that actually is a use case complexity weekend could use which is for communities of practice using Keybase for instance, can you understand a cohort's engagement statistics and how to understand the cohort through their activity in a Keybase team? And so people might have noticed in general, you might have to scroll up this a little bit but they posted, they ran their tooling on this cohort. You know, they came out of October but ran it on this cohort and all these interesting charts about, you know, who's engaging, what emoji is the most popular, like fun things like that. But the thing I immediately asked them was, is your team open for new members? Because that's kind of the way to think about teams with this deep time community of practice in the background is we're always gonna be here in the background and your team and your individual journeys are whatever they're gonna be but if you choose to interface, like for instance, many of their members are members of this cohort as well and they're representing their team, they have a team co-working space. The natural question there is, well, how do you want to interact with this cohort? You know, it's okay to be a closed system if you just want to develop with your team members that are present in this cohort during the weekend or you can choose to be open in which case just let us know and we'll find other members that might be interested in joining. So it's up to the team to decide what boundary conditions they want when they come back and interact. But I think it's just a really fascinating case study in teams. Yeah, Makayla, who's a facilitator bringing a lot of thoughts and experience on biomimicry, wrote, so facilitators are beavers, trying to manage flows and dams and that's this sort of complex adaptive system whispering, the CAS whispering, where you don't tell the water molecule where to go, you would spend all the energy in the world picking up water molecules and moving them and they would flow to where they wanted to flow anyway. So what is the leverage point in that system? Well, it might be changing the flow and also on that stock and flow, we talked about our energy and going with the flow. It's almost like when you rest, you're investing, you're in resting, you're building up that stock so that it can flow out authentically and for some people, depending on their computer setup and their context, one hour per day is all the outlet that we're gonna get and we're there for you one hour per day and there's other people who are just, they're tired but wired and they're up many hours and that is also a way that people flow and it kind of relates to whether people draw energy from being active or draw energy like more of an introverted style drawing energy from actually digesting because people are sharing links, you could be in Keybase reading papers, listening to videos during the weekend. So there's so many things to juggle and that's just like a little microcosm of learning complexity by doing because there's so many things happening. Sasha, you had something you wanted to add there? Yeah, a lot of great points here and I just wanted to touch on what Sean said. There's a lot of opportunities and roles in these teams so if you're watching this and you're in the weekend and you think, oh no, I can't start a team like that, that is so far out there, you don't have to. There's many ways to join teams and you can play different roles at different times. You do not have to be the trailblazer of the seed. There's just a lot of opportunities for people to learn about the other teams and even as we're watching the closing ceremony tomorrow, that's a great way to find out about the teams. And I just wanted to bring it kind of full circle and come back to the beginner's mindset about a third of the participants who registered said they were complexity beginners, like completely new. So in that sense, maybe a lot of us are also new to remote teams or maybe you've never heard the word deliverable before because I know I didn't until I started working with complexity weekend. So as people are kind of dropping these terms, feel free to follow up and ask, well, what do you mean by deliverable? Like what is that? And that might look like a different outcome for every team and maybe there is no deliverable that you can describe during this weekend and part of the magic is just the people that you meet and getting to know these people over a long period of time, like with weekly meetings and just getting to know the depth and complexity of the people that you've connected with and whatever comes out of that is also really special. And just one quick note on that before, Sean, it's like the river has bends and so maybe we know where we wanna go or we don't but we can navigate to a next turn. Say, okay, it looks like it turns in about 200 meters and we'll learn by doing, we'll cybernetically readjust, we'll navigate then, but what can we do now? We can avoid the rocks over here, we can avoid this very still section of water over here. Let's just keep cruising together, go with the flow and then we'll be able to learn by doing along the way. So Sean. Nice, I had actually a question for everyone. Again, in the chat, post any questions because this is just a great feedback loop to kind of establish because I'm sure if you have a question other people have the question as well. But the question that I have is from our experiences in past cohorts and how this cohort is shaping up, what are the dynamics kind of in these explore channels in terms of wanting to join a team and the team seed formation process that tends to occur in these, it varies by explore channel and people in explore channels and whatnot. But what are some examples you've seen? I'll give a first thought on that. Explore channels are those channels where in our cohort key base team people are connecting on their common interests. So it can be people who are exploring that topic in their day to day as a professional but it's titled intentionally so that it can include people who are truly exploring it. Like I always just think of explore quantum and our colleague Jason who's probably working with that every day posting a ton of resources and then I'm just there learning just seeing keywords for the first time. And then there's some explore channels where in a sense the territory has been mapped but we might be exploring it for the first time. And then there's other explore channels that are truly on the pioneer edge like explore blockchain. Does anyone think that that's a fully mapped out field or like that territory is mapped? It's not. And so there's some explore channels that because of the topic or because of the composition of the people who join in it's very educational and it's awesome to always return to like explore complexity and ask what is complexity and what are these basic terms or these repeatedly used terms that we're hearing? Those are those core anchors that connect us across different systems. And then there's the explore channels that are kind of on the edge and it's sort of when somebody sees the combination of an insightful question which often can come from a beginner. In fact, likely it comes from a beginner insightful question plus a path to maybe achieve a product related to that that is awesome but it doesn't have to be driven by the deliverable in mind and sometimes annealing too rapidly on what the end stage is gonna be it's not gonna help you get there paradoxically. It's like you think you're gonna go up the mountain but you need to do the switchbacks. So if each time you took a turn you're like, wait, we're not going up the mountain anymore we're going laterally. That's lateral thinking. Sometimes you gotta move laterally so that you can make your way up the mountain. Blue? Yeah, so just to kind of talk about the beginner's mindset and complexity and like going back to contextuality there's no like expert in complexity. There never will be so like we're all just new at something and like so maybe complexity might be leading us to be more generalists but it's awesome like building a shared like what is shared information in this structure, right? Like so, we might know like Daniel and I have similar backgrounds like studying bioinformatics and Sasha and I both studied neuroscience but like what is my background with someone who is a geologist? Like no, so like I don't know a lot about rocks, right? So I think that there are places where and also like I have zero training in ethics or like philosophy I'm just kind of starting to like dip my toes into that water. So we all come from a very different space and it's important to like build a common language or framework so even if people are experts in their field, right? Like so if you're an expert software engineer you might not know anything about philosophy or geology, right? So there's room for everyone to ask questions not just beginners in complexity but to establish some common ground within your team or the people that you're conversing with like hey, are we really talking about the same thing? And that's what's so cool about the video space. Is video better than just voice? I think it is because you can really kind of look at someone like, they start to get this like funny look on their face like I am not really like like they just go blank, right? I'm not understanding what you're saying at all. So it's cool to really look and you know to try to be receptive to one another we kind of are without really full body language but it's important to kind of build that framework so that we can build on that, right? Yep, it's almost like there's one mindset where our areas of overlap are boring because we know about that already. And then the areas of non overlap are intimidating or they're gonna be ambiguous or they're probably not interesting anyway or we can flip that and our areas of overlap are like that's us, that's our shared identity or our shared perspective and then the areas that we don't share is our collective shared knowledge. So all the better, the Venn diagram it's either gonna be plus two or minus two and so hopefully we're all co-constructing a space where it's plus two. And Michaela wrote an awesome question. Am I right in that teams do not need to be built around facilitators. Participants can spark them too, right? Sean, what would you say about that? Yeah, I think, I mean, again, there's no one way to facilitate and definitely a mode of facilitation that is equally valid to all the others is facilitator as team lead, facilitator as team seed generator, right? And so that's equally valid as all the others. Other forms of facilitation are ones where the facilitator never joins the team. They actually only work on communication patterns within the team and nudging them, but not entering the team. Or there's facilitators across multiple teams, there's facilitators that focus on a subset of teams. There's so many different ways. And so I think that question is a great one because facilitators can build teams around themselves or their expertise or whatnot. And there have been amazing teams in the past where it just never would have started at that level if the facilitator didn't come in and just immediately dump all of their expertise into a team and people got excited about it and joined and they ended up publishing a paper or something faster than maybe you would starting from scratch in that domain. But equally valid, right? Are participants sparking team seeds themselves with each other? And there's no right or wrong way to do it. Also, the facilitator, it's an event specific role. It's not a kind of person. So it's more like a hat or a costume, like a come talk to me badge, but you could come talk to anybody. That's why we're showing up for each other in Gather. And so RJ, who's a facilitator in May, 2021, but there's been other weekends where he was a participant. So it's just, you'll find the team and align around something that's interesting and mutually agreeable. And someone might say, I'm really busy for the next three months, but then I'm looking forward to a summer where I'm gonna have a lot of time to work on something. That's why we all kind of have many hands making light work because some people can be carrying the energy forward and keeping the chat alive and reminding people that they're still developing on the ideas and people will jump in and out as needed. So we try to figure out a way where whatever the team is looking to get out of it, if they communicate it and also come to an understanding internally and hopefully externalize that, then maybe people are just looking to connect on sharing ecosystem resources from a complexity perspective. You don't need to write the end all be all climate science computational model, but who knows? Maybe you share some links, you connect some new dots and then you put out a small white paper or you put out a live stream and then a climate scientist contacts you because they're looking for that kind of perspective to be added into their project. And so these teams are sort of remixing and it's that healthy coming together and healthy dissolving that is gonna be really important. Sean? I have another question and a lot of others appear in the chat and this actually directs it blue because you did this kind of in October. What is the process like if you choose to join multiple teams? And how do you remain respectful to the different teams in that setting? So I don't know, it's hard. So for me, I am all over the place. I'm just some super whatever, I'm all over the place. So in October, I didn't really come in with like an idea for a team formation or a team could be really built around this like in the way that I have this weekend. So it's me kind of trying on a different hat. Like, oh, can we maybe build a project around something I can do during the weekend or can that be used to build a tool or whatever? How can that move forward? So, but in October, I just kind of talked about some things that were interesting to me and then I facilitated a team and then someone approached me about building up a team around my video. And so it's kind of like a different experience for me to be on a team. Cause I kind of just like, I usually see myself more as like a conductor and now I'm like, well, now I'm kind of like leading a team, which is like, that's like not my normal MO. So I don't know, it's fun to try on different roles and like the facilitation of interactions I think is something that it comes like natural to me. Like to just go talk amongst yourselves or like go play, whatever that is. So being on multiple teams is hard. It's something else that's, so it's hard just for facilitating like, for arranging, what time do I have to actually work with this team and what time do I actually have to work with this other team? So I did two teams in October and they kind of, neither one of them really has gone anywhere but they might be revived through Heartbeat or through this event or whatever. One of the teams was really big. So this is something that I want to talk about right now. Like big teams become very difficult to reign in, right? And so something that I tried to do with that team, like why I became so invested in that team was to kind of get everybody to agree or focus or well, what are we really talking about here? Like I mean, when it's like 12, 15 people, it gets a little bit out of hands. Like I like kept encouraging like, why don't we split? Why don't we spin off a couple of projects? Like just because like, I don't know. I tend to run with like maybe five as like a manageable number. I've done like six to eight before and still it gets like time zones and like that kind of can be crazy too. So it's hard to keep if small teams can go sometimes faster than large teams. And sometimes, you know, if you have a small team and you make some mileage, like we go mile one with like two or three of us, then other people can come in and help you guys get through the last, you know, five miles. So team number is kind of good to think about. And if, you know, if you're on a team and you're talking about something big, like I forget what the last team I was on was it maybe it was collective intelligence, maybe. So I feel like it was that like, and that was just everybody so interested in collective intelligence, like, yeah, we're so interested. But so if you're discussing in a big group of 15 people, but you see like two or three of you guys are having the same shared idea, then go with those two or three people and just break off, like, like just cut the cord right there and maybe like check in with the other teams the rest of the team and see what they're doing. But like a few and two or three other people like are nucleating and you can sense that, like go with that. So I just encourage you guys to kind of, you know, take charge and so to go with people who where you're really gelling. Right. I mean, that mitosis is a sign of health. It's not a sign of decay. When you realize, wow, this umbrella is so big that we actually have two projects. Wow, very healthy, not a failure of the bigger team. So Sean, raise your hand and then Sasha. Tully, I just want to reinforce that point that like if you, if you do end up on a bigger team, you know, that's not a bad thing. Just think about the purpose of your team, right? If it's a 15 person team and everyone's really into collective intelligence, does the team actually have to produce an outcome or can it not be a platform for sub teams? Like you're saying, you know, maybe that's the purpose of that 15 person team and maybe it's to meet every month or every month and a half to check in on the smaller teams, right? Like you are totally free to construct teams with any purpose and any configuration in this experience. And so just be thoughtful of that. If you have a large team, small team, you know, people split across time zones, just work that into your purpose and function and you'll probably yield better results. Thanks, Sean. So Sasha, and then there's a great question in the chat. Great. So all of this touches upon this concept of opting in. So complexity weekend is opt in. You're here whenever you want to. There really is no requirement. And the teams I like to think about as the same. So even if you're interested in a topic and you join their channel and you even go through and fill out the team form and then you realize it's just not really vibing, you can always opt out. You can always respectfully leave. And that is something I really kind of blew my mind and I learned from facilitator RJ is how to respectfully leave a team because there's any number of reasons why it's not the right time or it's not the right fit. But again, that's the sign of a healthy dynamic team and not a failure on anyone's part. So just to keep that in mind, how flexible it is. Great. And also Stephen Guerin wrote apoptosis, which is a cell death pathway, is a sign of health too. If no one's continuously joining a project, let it die. No one, sorry. If no one is continuously pinging a project, let it die. So our body during development, it gets the way it is because of cell death that's regulated. The neurons lose synapses and neurons die and the webbing between our fingers goes away. So function emerges from that creative energy followed by a healthy turnover. So here's the... I wanna add something, sorry, Dan, real quick to that. When your team dies, it's not a bad thing either for the community. If we're all plugged into this backdrop of this deep time community, then those people that were on that team are now freed up to re-engage with other teams, to form new teams and everything like that. So it's not a bad thing. It could be a sign of health in the community. Thanks, Sean. So here's the great question from Roger, which realistically could take us this next 15 minutes up until we start breaking down the team formation process. Roger's question was, are teams for now or for later, how can teams be sustained after the weekend? It really is an example of a question that cuts to the core because we're here now. And whether you're watching it live or in replay, there you are. But also we want the teams to be around later because we know that we're not going to write that program or that paper or that business plan. We're not gonna do that now, like in this moment while you're listening to these words. So it must be for now and for later. Okay, so it's yes and with now and later, but there's the key question there. How can teams be sustained after the weekend? So both Blue and Sean, I really want to know what you think about this one. Coverable. So I mean, team sustenance is kind of hard. I have not been on like the collective intelligence team. I think we met like, we tried to meet it. Maybe we met at one heartbeat after October, but you know, awesomely like I'm involved in other projects on collective intelligence that people I know from complexity weekend started and like got rolling and like, hey, you should come join this collective intelligence project. Like, okay, cool. So I mean, and that team sustains itself. I think it just comes to like the nature of the people on the team and also the bandwidth. And like, I think that that's, it's important to kind of be honest with yourself. Like what is your bandwidth? And like, I am all over the place. Like I love to do a million different things. And like, I feel like if I accomplish like 80% of the things that I set out to do, I'm doing pretty good. So it's just like, but not everybody's like that. So some people are more disciplined and diligent and like they put a lot of like small chunks of effort. Like I don't do that. Like I procrastinate. I wait until the last minute I need a deadline and then I'll just dump it all out. And so everybody works in different ways. And so without like maybe learning each other's work style, it's kind of hard to know. And everybody works differently. So if you have deadlines, like, okay, we need, you know, this is kind of like the agile methodology for people who know it, like, you know, you do sprints. Like by this sprint, this needs to be completed in order to finalize our project. And so when you have like a sprint deadline, like I work really well under that kind of guidance because it's like, okay, well, by this day, I need to develop this program that writes its code to do XYZ or make this annotated bibliography and review these 10 papers. Or what is my, what is expected of me? All right, so continuing a project, I think really it helps to clearly outline what the role of each person is going to be in the project, like where the most effort is going to be needed from them and like what they can also do in the launch phase and like what they need to do to maybe come up to speed on geology or philosophy or something that they're less familiar with. Nice, Sean, and then we'll give some thoughts probably. Sure, yeah, I think for a participant and for a team, the now portion is pretty simple. As an individual, do you wanna join a team this weekend? That's kind of the now question and you need to kind of make that decision personally. And what that means is you're gonna be engaging with the diverse team for the rest of the weekend, and then through until Sunday with a closing ceremony, you're gonna, if the team chooses, communicate something and produce a video together, do something to communicate and commit to some sort of wanting to continue the team or work toward that shared purpose in the future. So that's a personal yes, no, now thing. For the team, it's really the now is, and that now extends up until Sunday is do you wanna register, right? That's like the only now that there is is, and that registration is not set in stone, that can evolve. People can leave respectfully, people can be added. Nothing is permanent once you fill out that form. The purpose can change everything. You can just literally re-edit your submission. So those are the kind of the nows and then the longevity of these teams. The main feedback, or not feedback, but advice would just be to figure out a way to meet regularly. So that is probably the most important thing you can do. And so when's the first meeting after the weekend? What recurrence is it gonna be, if it's gonna be an active project with a deliverable, it should probably be weekly. If it's, maybe it can be every other week depending on when you want that deliverable done. It can be up to a month, a month and a half between meetings. If it's more of a purpose of a team, that's just a sub community that's kind of keeping sub teams together or something like that. So it depends on the purpose, but having that beep structure is probably the best advice I could get. Great point, Sean. Yeah, Blue. So just to kind of push back on that, because I think not always. As long as like, I don't know, Discord and like Async work for me has worked well. Like as long as there's some expectation of what am I supposed to do by what date? Like now where if like sometimes the meetings are essential, but it can be, in my experience, less than weekly. I mean, sometimes it can be monthly. Sometimes it, I mean, even with a deliverable. So I put out, yeah, so like I've produced results from teams where our Async work is very clear. And then like, you only have to kind of get together when there's like something to discuss or hash out. And many times the projects have these like in the very beginning stages and maybe at the end, like during revision stages, but all of those interim weeks, like here's my deliverable. I posted in my asynchronous Discord or Slack or Keybase or whatever, you know, framework that you're supposed to use, but just having the expectations of what each person is expected to do. As long as those are clear, I think Async work can work also. So just accountability is really the key thing. I sort of rebut, not rebut really, but just, I do think you need some combination of synchronous, asynchronous, because I agree with you, and I do this actually in my day job a lot. Once you maybe starting a new project, you have a lot of synchronous design meetings or whatnot, just to kind of get on the same page. And then you can have a big phase of asynchronous where you don't have to have regular meetings and you could just work on the agreed upon deliverables, assuming design elements don't change or whatnot. But I do think you have to plan for some degree of synchronous and it will have to happen at some rate, even if that's every three months or whenever you're doing a new, you know, pivot or design reconsideration. But I think the hybrid, for me personally, some element of both will have to be present. But what do you think, Sasha Dan, Lou? I love this back and forth styles of working. One thing that's underlying all of this is just agreeing on how the communication is going to happen, because some people might be using Keybase for the very first time and maybe only for this weekend. So we have to be cognizant of the tools that people like to use or have continual access to. So is that going to look like exchanging emails at the end of this weekend? Or are you going to meet on a Jitsie or Zoom? How are you going to organize all of this so that people have the right accessibility to join the team? Yep, so here's a few things. First, the tools. I mean, we always come back to tools, idea and people. So the team is almost defined by the people and also the ideas that you're pursuing, but the tools are important. This weekend, you've seen a full stack. You know that everybody's on Keybase, everyone's on Gather, and you've seen how they can be connected with your name and Gather. So you can make a new Gather space and make a new Keybase team. And in fact, we encourage registering teams to create their own Keybase team. So first off, you have the tools that connect you. And I think of that as the reverse online dating problem, which is like, it's a little harder to meet online, but we're in the working operating environment that we will be in, which is remote. Maybe in the future, you know, you get a grant and you can all fly to a sunfication location together, but for now, you're going to be working remote. So you're meeting in the right context. So making it work once is like making it work repeatedly. And then the question, use that word sustain. And so the two things that made me think of first was sustenance, sustain ants. And sustenance is like energy coming in and nutrients coming in. So think about almost that stock flow idea. Where is the energy coming into the team? Maybe one person is like, this is super aligned with my master's thesis. So I can spend three hours per day. The other people, they actually only have one hour per month, but that's gonna be fine because that's gonna be guidance, guidance. So you can have different roles and different energy flowing into the system, just ask if this team were an organism or a society, would it be sustained? And then the non-biological metaphor would be like feedback loops and signal processing, like a sustained pedal on a guitar, like Michael Garfield's song that we were listening to earlier. And so it's like, do you have the feedback mechanisms so that when one person throws out a note into the void? Are there three people who amplify that and say yes and push it back to them and say, again, it's really cool how you put that out there or will that fall flat? So can you design feedback loops in your team so that whatever your asynchronous and synchronous schedule is, whatever your platform is, you're building each other up and sustaining each other because sustaining each other and the relationships on your team, it's the whole thing of it. And also doing a vibe check. We're meeting once per month, but maybe we could go a little faster if we met every two weeks or, hey, two weeks I'm just, I'm showing up a little bit late to meetings because I'm really overwhelmed at work. So could we pull back to once a month or do you all want to continue meeting and all come to every other meeting? All those options are on the table. So blue. So just in terms of like different energy and workflow and work style, something I've talked to Daniel about before is like, I think that there are different types of people. There are people that like to start things. There are people who like to work continuously and diligently on things. And then there are the people that like to destroy things and build new things. So it's kind of important to like, and this is very archetypal, right? Like the creator, the maintainer, and then like the agent of change, right? Like, or the destroyer, right? And so it's kind of important to have all three of those people, right? Like, like, or those three kind of archetypes represented either within two people or within all of the members of your team. Like for me, I love to build things, but like I need new things all the time. If I have to do the same thing, like I'm super bored, I'm out. Like if I'm doing something familiar, I'm not engaged, like I'm bored. So like it's, I just know that about myself. But there are other people that are uncomfortable working out of their, like what they know, right? And so there's not everyone is like me and like I appreciate working with those people because they're the ones that will get it done. Like when I'm like, that's too boring for me, I can't handle it. So like, like it just takes all types of people and it's kind of cool to really feel your team out. And like that's a lot of what the facilitation is about really, like getting to know one another and like what is your work style or like what is your, like, I mean just leadership styles and who's gonna like take charge in a team. And so these facilitation sessions, the interaction with the other participants is a chance to kind of get to know them and think about who you will work well with, right? As opposed to who might be the same kind of energy as you and like, are you guys just gonna be really hot at the beginning and burnout? Like if I worked with someone like me, I would be like that, right? Or it would change too many times to produce a real result. So I need to kind of work with different archetypes to produce that in the end. That's the power of teamwork. What if somebody was just throwing out ideas, adding line after line in a brainstorming document and someone else is reorganizing and categorizing and somebody else is connecting citations and references that they've read, someone else is tweaking it and reordering it so that it makes a little bit more sense to an external pitch. Well, that's not one plus one plus one equals four. That's like four times one equals 50. So how can you work with people who have different perspectives, different skill sets, different approaches to teamwork so that the team gets the job done? Sean? Last point I'll make in this segment is just that there are so many roles in teams and those teams, those different roles can basically meet at different frequencies, asynchronous or asynchronous, the ratio could be different for the different roles. You could have a team of five where two or three meet every week and the other two meet once a month with the team and they have different roles. And the thing you have to do in that situation is just make sure the stake in the project is appropriate for people's commitment levels and whatnot. You want to be fair to everyone, right to the people who are doing the weekly work, if it's different enough from the other work, there needs to be an asymmetry. That's something that you need to work on this weekend or figure out the earlier, the better. But they don't all have to be symmetric contributions or roles in terms of timing and asynchronous synchronous. So true. So Sasha, if you want to give any last thoughts for the end of this hour, then blue and then Sean and I are going to continue talking about the team formation process. So go ahead. Just really exciting and I hope to meet more of you in the gather, have fun. Thanks for coming on Sasha and blue, go for it. So one last thought on just about what Sean just had mentioned. So I mean, it might be important to realize like upfront, if you're going to have like a different stake in the team and if the outcome is expected to be a publication or a patent, like who is going to be first author. So maybe like that's a discussion if the project seems to be gaining some traction, maybe to have right after complexity weekend is over, if you're definitely sure, you definitely want to write a paper, this review article, who's going to put in the most time, are you going to divide it equally? What does the authorship look like or what is the ownership of the project or the patents? What does that come out to be? It's just important to have those discussions, not to be like a jerk, but also to establish some clarity. Like I'm going to have a peripheral role in this project. I don't expect to be first author. So. Yeah, the sooner you know that the better, but also other side of the coin, you don't want to do it too early too, because a lot of the times you, especially in like the startup world, people will fight over equity, right? That's a particular way of giving up stake in a project in that world. And they'll fight about it so much that they dissolve. So like there's also the counter where you want to make sure you're getting the work done and having something to actually share with other teammates versus focusing so much on that upfront. It reminds me in the area I've been in, in academia, people arguing about who's going to be the first author. So it's kind of like, I had no experience with that conversation. Sean had just described about splitting equity before, but as soon as we realized, oh, there's a similar dynamic where people debate about who's going to be first author in a two author paper. You know, it's going to be A and B or B and A. And then neither person gets the job done because they were focused on how it would appear rather than what really needs to happen. And so that's why we take it slow. And that's one way we really sustain is we focus on what needs to be done and then we'll co-evolve. And we have ways of thinking about and reallocating the assignments through the process. So Blue, if you want to- If you can all evolve, sorry, real quick, you can all evolve even in the equity situation, the board can vote on new shares and stuff. It's all evolvable in these different scenarios. Right, so maybe the best thing to do is to develop the method by which that will be determined, right? Like, are you going to clock your hours and track what you did? And maybe like the person with the most time invested, they win. Or is it going to be by vote? Like if there's five of you, cool. Like the team will vote on who gets to be first. Not everybody is allowed to vote. No one is allowed to vote for themselves. Help them. Right? Nice. Awesome. All right, you guys, I'm out. Have a good time. Enjoy the rest of the weekend everyone. And we'll see you in gather. Thank you, Blue. Awesome to have the conversation. Cool. So for this next section with our guest stars exiting stage left, we're going to turn to this Jamboard that we just posted. So for those of you who want to play along interactively, you're absolutely more than welcome and we've just posted it in the chat, the link that you want to use. And then for those of you, you're on mobile or you don't want to do an interactive Jamboard at this moment, you don't have to because we're going to be sharing it on the screen. So just while people are loading that up, I'll just point to the Jamboard on the left side. You can click that sticky note and that's where you can add a sticky note like hello. And then that will save it and put it onto the slide. You can also do things like you can draw. So you can draw lines and things like that. We're going to be walking through this Jamboard and just it's going to be editable. But again, if you want to be editing, go to the link I put in the live chat. If you don't want to be editing, you're going to see exactly what everyone else sees at the exact same time. Sean, what is this Jamboard going to be about? This Jamboard is basically going to be, so if you think about it, where we are in the weekend. We've got the opening live stream that was really fun yesterday and then all the sessions started. And I went through the night and now we've got this live stream where we're starting to talk about teams and team seeds and do you want to be on a team as part of your experience? That's the conversation we're in right now. The team registration form we're going to release with this Jamboard. It's in there, you can already go to it right now and click it if you want. And then the next live stream, right? Sunday AM UTC, that's going to be more about, okay teams, do you want to present Sunday? How are we going to do that? How might you be able to record a video? Like we'll start talking in those lines. And then the last live stream at the end of the whole weekend is the closing ceremony where the teams that did decide to form and did decide to present, we get to hear about them all. And that's the close of this awesome experience. So that's the flow we're in right now. This particular live stream or this segment is just about do you want to join a team? How do you go about doing that? Cool. So we're on the first slide and we'll head over to the second one. So on this slide, you'll see a couple of notes that were added several events ago by one of our awesome facilitators, Monica Kang. Innovator's Box is in associate. And the tips that Monica suggested for online collaboration. Active listening. So really be paying attention and be focused when others are speaking because you want to be listening in between the lines. Be curious and be open. Assume kindness, especially if there's a technical difference. Yes, Blue mentioned, if there's a facial expression, you can interpret it, but also you can read into it because maybe their video lacked. So just assume that you're working with a kind-hearted person until evidence suggests otherwise. Let's play by our strengths as well as come to know what our strengths are and over-communicate because what's the downside of over-communicating? You just let someone know that they're important to you and that you want to communicate with them. So that's the signal we're sending when we over-communicate is that we care about communicating. And any other thoughts on this, Sean? I think my main thought is everyone, we have 22 already in this Jamboard and we posted it in Keybase, I assume, Dan. I posted it in the live chat for YouTube but I'll also post it. I'll post it in general. Everyone is here, great. So we just created an aloha, post it. Practice right now, just create a post it because we're gonna be interacting this whole Jamboard for the next hour. So get in the habit of using this particular tool. If you see on the left-hand side, there's create a post it, there's draw with a pen, right? You can draw a little heart. You can do whatever you want. We're gonna be interacting a lot. So if anyone has any advice on online collaboration aside from these five points, let's drop it now for each other and let's co-create something over this hour so that it's not just us broadcasting some understanding we might have, it's a collective understanding. And also this is yet another way that those who are synchronously showing up here are having fun. It's super fun because we can read out these comments like on the blockchain, no one knows you're a human but I think I know who posted that. And then those who are going to be watching this live stream in replay are also gonna be able to come to this Jamboard link and add new post it notes. So we're including people who are here live, it's special and we appreciate it. And then those who are going to be enjoying it asynchronously, they're also 100% included. So that's kind of another hybrid example of using synchronous and asynchronous together. Let's go to the third slide which is our first interactive one with a big wide space. What is your intention today? So again, you can go to that, add a post it note and just add something you're thinking about. Sean, what is your intention today and I'll maybe add a post it note for you. Mine I'm about to drop is, or feel free to create for me actually, is catalyzing team seeds. That's my goal right now. I'm just gonna be going around, if you bump into me and gather, I'm gonna be bugging you about what team seeds you might be interacting with or want to interact with. Great, I seconds that one. I think my intention for this live stream, well, on a technical note was the first time I've live streamed in this location. So I was just hoping that it would work smoothly and it's good that it basically is. And I think also as the sun rises where we are, my intention is also to enjoy that bottom of the bathtub. From the beginning and the end, those are really clear signals, but we're in the middle of it. It's totally complexity weekend, we're in the midst of it. And that means that we're just going to be in our sort of steady state, our non-equilibrium steady state. We also see some coming in like learning, having fun, spreading the meme of biomimicry. Look at how fast, oh, it's upside down, fun. Yes, me too. So people are concurring and this is what's fun is we can share and we can recognize that it's just like the teachers used to say, oh, if you have a question, other people probably have it. Well, go beyond the question. If you have a purpose, other people probably share that or if they don't share it exactly, they're going to share something complimentary and that's going to be even better than just one person's individual perspective. I really like how, and the bottom right, the yellow post it, dentropy, key base username added it to the post it. That's something we're going to be doing in the later slides as well. But if you really want to connect to somebody on this jam board right now, put your key base username. That's the way we know in this community how to actually connect because once you're talking asynchronously off to the races, right? So put that if you want that direct connection. Yep, and also for me, it's really important that when people want to be contributing like anonymously, that that's an option and that when people want to be connected to their real identity, that's an option as well. So for example, become part of a team with no other information provided. So that's everyone. They are every participant. Well, not every participant, but you know what I mean. And then if there is somebody who really wants to be specifically messaged, they can also include that information. Understanding generators of multipolar traps, learn how to leverage learnings in the real world, giving good feedback, learning by interacting with others. This is so fun. So just imagine this is the tip of the iceberg. This is just a few of the top of head thoughts that people are just dumping into post it notes. But this is just the tip of the iceberg because we still have half of our cohort who's resting right now. So it's just great to see all of this distribution of intentions. Let's hone our own intention and also be inspired by other people's intention and connect with them directly with these key base usernames that we're seeing posted here. Or just know that maybe there's a probability that the next person you speak to could have been that person who would have put that post it. So awesome to see. Let's go to four. So four is a little bit of us coming to understand ourselves and we talk about multi-scale identity and multi-scale agency and we're individuals, we're embodied, we're people, but we're also starting to come together in relationships and in teams and in community especially. So who are you and how did you discover complexity? Again, you could write your key base username because some of us are gonna have really similar stories and connecting all the similarity is awesome. Like I was in academia, I was hearing about how complexity science could explain everything, but I wasn't seeing it applied. So maybe there's people who have a similar type of story and then you connect on a similarity. But then also there's gonna be people who have a totally different perspective and you can connect on that difference. So just like we were talking about earlier with a Venn diagram, we can have a mindset and a mode of working where our similarities and our differences are strengths and that is gonna prevent us from a mode of working where our similarities and our differences are perceived as weaknesses. So Dr. Proton right here said, frustration with linearizing independence, equilibrium, assumptions and science. What does that mean? How did you feel that way? I just remember, so I have a certain way of learning and it actually gets in the way of me learning a lot. And I just remember being in college and high school of some degree. And as soon as somebody says something that relies on some assumptions I don't agree with, my brain shuts off and I just can't follow them anymore. And it kept happening in college for me where I would be in like, I did mechanical engineering and physics as my background. And it's so common in mechanical engineering, for instance, where things become mass spring damper systems or just because it's like the way we know how to solve it. We know how to set up linear equations and solve like a system of them. And it's the analytical affordances but it's based on shaky assumptions about real world systems some of the time. And whenever I had a question about those assumptions I just, my brain shut off and I just started doodling in my notes about like this can't be the only way things are like are there other assumption bases to kind of work off of? And that led me to complexity. Cool. So here we have John, software engineer, philosophy, value systems and people starting to build an intelligent global communication platform. So John we've spoken before and has just tremendous experience in applications and in systems thinking. And then we see other narratives and other experiences like complexity, science, beginner want to see what this really is and how to apply it. So that's also cool. Maybe this is the first time that you've heard of complexity and maybe you think, wow, I've been doing this. I didn't know there was a word or maybe you think, how can I be doing this? There's so many questions that we can ask. Wow, lots of great post-its flowing in because it's a live stream but sometimes there's a few seconds of delay. So after a long history of failures trying to promote development of technologies that are in areas important for public policy that's something that a lot of us have experienced Sean described that sort of frustration in a learning environment but take that frustration in your mechanical engineering undergrad class and now let's imagine we're building a bridge in a country that needs help. If we're not taking this kind of perspective into account we're gonna be not making something that helps. So even when we're mobilizing resources we're just not doing it in a way that's effective and that is tragic actually. So how can we have a situation where it's not just like, oh, well we could have learned more but when we think about applied complexity and the failure to learn complexity it's like, okay, well you didn't learn something cool you could have learned but the failure to apply and recognize complexity is bad. Being frustrated in non-resilient environments there's just so many to read a Swiss generalist through biomimicry and systems innovation, that's Makayla. How people carry forward the right way to contribute and innovate in the systems and are there more ways to bring everyone's perspectives? Can complexity talk about it? I hope the answer is yes, Alhaz and these are just such awesome answers. What's one more that you wanna highlight here? I actually wanna ask you a question, Dan. Yeah. So in the world as you've observed it ballpark what percentage of systems that you've ever interacted with or observed would you say are complex and what does that mean? Well, it's a tough question and I'm tempted to take the non-linear answer which is because complexity is an approach and a mindset it's not about classifying systems as complex or not going around with the marker. Yes, this is complex, no, this one isn't it's about what we're modeling it for. So when I look at and also I'm not as familiar with Snowden's frameworks I know that complex is just one quadrant or one operating mode. So I don't wanna put a specific number unless it were imaginary number. What do you think? I think my answer would probably be majority. Okay, I agree. But what does everyone else think? And either the YouTube live chat or as opposed it? It's true, but these are the patterns across systems. So almost by definition they're the kinds of things like phase transition happening in my water bottle right now, phase transition on the slide in terms of graphical design. Maybe there's a narrative phase transition maybe by seeing so many of these experiences someone goes from thinking five minutes ago I'm an outlier here to wait, there's so many beginners here, that's awesome. That's like a conceptual phase transition and complexity is where we can talk about those phase transitions and maybe it is like melt, thaw and resolve itself into doing, learning by doing. Let's go to slide five. I wanna mention something while we're going to the next slide and it's somebody made a comment at some point during the weekend where they were saying like children are natural complexity thinkers kind of like you've probably heard before children are natural artists, children are natural scientists like all that it's like when you become an adult for some reason you lose a little bit of this seeing the connections between everything and being more drawn to silo based understanding and disciplines which can be networked again back into a whole picture. But when children are just learning about the world they just kind of accept the world as it is and a lot of times that's messy and a lot of times that's highly interrelated interconnected systems and so it's just a natural I don't know approach to see the world. And as we go to five. What is something you're curious or wondering about? So just to go to that children point while people are posting on Jamboard slide five it's almost like maybe children start with that understanding but no one is born knowing network science, knowing topology. And so what we're doing as all ages of learners in an intergenerational community is kind of connecting that mode of messy is okay that's so natural for children with certain things that maybe didn't even exist 50 years ago like the ability to do simulations on networks. And so how do we have yes and with those two modes and how can we integrate that in our self as far as being okay with a mess but also knowing that maybe there's network science tools that could help us navigate. And then we're gonna integrate it in some way in our own mind but also the real integration is gonna be on the team not to always come back to that but you're gonna have some people who are gonna know more about network science than it's possible for any one of us to know in the short term. So maybe 20 years down the road, who knows but today the way that we can integrate is across our minds on teams and one way to align there is on purpose and values which we're gonna be talking about in just a few minutes and another way is with shared action. So these are some of the questions that people are really curious about so this is cool to read. Is humanity sustainable? How do we navigate complexity in an inclusive way? Really important question. Finding awe in self-organization. How will this complexity weekend process ever actually produce anything? Also great questions. How to leverage complexity thinking effectively? Yesterday in Gather, I learned about Kolmogorov complexity. Now I am wondering about whether that relates to the world at large or only to computing. It's almost like I wanna connect these two and also CB's comment. How to model power dynamics in agent-based models? That's kind of what we're all here to be exploring. Maybe not the exact specifics of this kind of model and this kind of a social situation but how are we going to connect ideas to applications? How are we gonna go from abstraction generalization and the patterns that transcend any specific system through a process to an outcome about a real-world system and making leverage and making impact in that system? How is this scalable? Similar question. What do you think about that, Sean? I wanna actually respond to a YouTube live comment but first I just wanna say do put your key base username if you want this to be like a team seed. Everything in this moment is kind of a team seed so is humanity sustainable? If you put your key base username there someone might reach out to you right now and that might be the seed of a team. So keep that in mind. But this comment I think is really interesting and I just wanna share my experience with it in again like a mechanical engineering physics context. So John in the YouTube live chat said I wonder if most parentheses all things are complex but sometimes it can be useful or adequate to think about something in simple linear terms. And so for me when I hear that I think about the times in which mechanical engineering's approach has been successful where you can model a system and you can ignore interactions or ignore non-linear effects because empirically or experimentally they're not as significant maybe as the driving forces for the output of your model of what you're trying to predict. And there are lots of situations where that occurs where you don't need to take in everything's connection to everything else into account to have a successful model or something useful coming out of it. It's only when you apply models and you're ignoring mathematical terms that are not insignificantly small or things that you just kind of go with the baked in way of approaching where you can ignore the interactions. You can ignore the non-linear effects where we get into trouble a lot where complexity thinking is really needed and where we're over-applying linearizing equilibration like those types of assumptions. And one other comment on that is with a complex systems perspective we can imagine situations where out of many interactions you get a linear outcome or we can imagine for many interactions their separability of subsystems but if we start and we have separability and linearity as the big idea then we're gonna be scratching our head on these edge cases. Now maybe those edge cases are 1% maybe they're 99% but the point is let's go for the fundamental framework that's gonna allow us to dive into linearity and pull back when we're getting systems that are giving us information that we didn't expect rather than go in with a simple linear approach and then have to ad hoc create a totally new way of thinking when non-linearities do happen. And also- Can you describe non-linearities? Yeah. I'll describe the equilibrium. Non-linearity I think the funniest way that I heard it when I was at Santa Fe was it's like non-elephant animals. So it's all the animals other than elephants. A linear model would be something where as you change the input of one variable by like one unit the other variable responds proportionally. Like you add one it goes up by one. You add one it goes up by half. That's like linear regression. And a non-linear is every shape of line every shape of graph that has any curve at all is non-linear. So it's a lot of things. Yep. And another way to say that would be a small effect in the system could actually have a larger output in the system dynamics. Whereas linear it's kind of proportional. You'll do a change in the output to the change of the system behavior will be kind of proportional to it. And it's not a big surprise that you'll have some chaotic event that totally the pandemic for instance, right? That's a non-linear effect. A relatively small starting condition blew everything up, right? It expanded non-linearly to affect the whole system. Blue had a great comment. Think about this. Most of us who have taken two semesters of calculus or joined a team with somebody who has no more about calculus than Newton. So we're going fast as a group. So remember that we're building on. It's yes and with the past. We're not just wiping this lake clean and saying now complexity is year zero. We're taking the information and the perspectives of the past and we're trying to bring them together in a bigger way. So look at how colorful and how many awesome ideas are on this slide. Nice. I want to share one thing about equilibrium. This is another thing where non-equilibrium you'll hear a lot as a term relating to complex systems. And equilibrium is just when, for instance, you have like a gas with a divider and an empty chamber that if you lift that middle divider the gas will equilibrate, it'll fill the whole space and then it won't change anymore. That act of not changing anymore is reaching an equilibrium in the system where certain properties just they're not changing anymore. And that's a comfortable thing to think about with things being driven toward equilibrium in different systems with different dynamics. But nonlinear is something, for instance, like the economy where it's really hard to say, oh, we're all working toward a supply-demand equilibrium that once we hit that balance it'll stay at that balance forever. Does that ever really happen or do conditions keep changing to where you keep being driven toward different changing equilibrium points? And that can happen a lot with these complex systems. Nice. And so if you're watching live or in replay check out these key base usernames how to leverage complexity thinking effectively, Dilek. Great, I'm curious. I wanna message you right after this live stream. Okay, so that's fun and that's the first little interactive part. Let's go to slide six and for these next few slides we're gonna be going from these really evocative or provocative questions that got our energy flowing let's talk about that process and remember that post it. How are we gonna take this process and connect it to real outcomes for those who want outcomes? Because remember that not every person is looking to make a startup not every person is looking for a paper to publish in the next year. So what is our gather space looking like, Sean? Sure, and I think the approach to these coming slides is let's keep that energy going of interacting. So this is the gather directory. What do you want the gather space to look like next cycle November, right? You can start writing comments about that while and adding post-its while I'm talking about the existing gather space. So if everyone has seen this or hasn't seen this in the gather space, there's little posters those little blue screen looking things. If you press X on them it'll expand images such as this one. They're embedded all throughout the gather space to kind of give you helpful information when you needed specific to the room you're in. And this one, this directory is actually in multiple rooms. I think the lobby, the cafe and then maybe the welcome house. And it just gives you an overview of the whole space so that when you're in a room you're not stuck there, not understanding how it connects to the larger space or how each room has kind of a function that we're gonna inhabit over the course of this weekend. So the ones everyone's probably familiar with at this point, welcome house. That's where you first spawned. There's usually a welcomeer there. Hopefully that will be there just to onboard you. Say welcome to the community. Use the arrow keys, go to the right. The cafe is kind of the hangout spot. A lot of office hours happen at the barista stand in the middle. There's just private spaces to kind of talk about as teams form, there's little cubicles in the corners to maybe your team can hang out and go talk to the facilitator, bring them into the cubicle, go back again. North, the lobby with the three identical live session rooms where A is usually populated and then in priority order, B might be populated if two sessions are going and then C is usually the last to be populated or in the case of Blue's awesome session, we customized that one for her. And then South, we actually had a really amazing session in the moon pond. Another one's happening early Pacific time, that's my time zone, this upcoming day. But we had one earlier today as well. And there's this little space where we did some breathing exercises and we just kind of recalibrated ourselves for the rest of the weekend. And another session is happening for that. Just look at Jackson Rhee's session in the program. Really fun, we had like 20 people, it was amazing. Go to the right, co-working spaces. This is where we're going to be talking about a lot now where as the team's form, reach out to at complexity team, complexityweekendgmail.com and say you want a co-working space. In the team registration form, we ask if you want one. If you do, you will have a space to embody your team to live here. And you can work there. We'll go into the details of these co-working spaces, but that's where we want to kind of be starting now and through the rest of the weekend. But still at the cafe, still live session rooms, we use the whole space. And then the space we're going to be talking about in the next live stream is the studio space. And that's when we're starting to prepare for the teams that did decide to form and do decide to present. Maybe we can record videos together. Teams can record their own videos and we can share that on the live stream as kind of a default mode of sharing. And then people are still welcome to join the live stream and do live presentations or whatnot. So Dan, what do you think about all these post-its? To me, there's two categories of post-its. There's things that you can either talk to the gather committee about. So Shirley, Sean, Steven, Alexandra and Barb for this cohort. And you can get involved with the organization of the gather and the updating of gather. Or in a future cohort, you can play a more active role. And then there's feature requests like for the gather people. And so we pass requests and feature ideas up to them. So, and also just fun, great ideas like a cocktail bar where you can mix disciplines. I like my collaboration, shake it, not stirred, et cetera. Let's keep moving forward. So we can- Hold on, there's a question I wanna address. So how do we access team studios? And I just wanna point out, when you're in the cafe, you go to the right into the team coworking. There's immediately a door right under that where you go left again and you'll get into the studio. And when you're in the studio, there's actually a little door to the kind of middle left of the room that actually teleports you back to the middle of the cafe. Just a shortcut, so you don't have to walk all the way around. It's a one-way little teleporter. Great, okay, let's go to seven. So again, this is just a quick overview because in the next half hour, we're gonna be talking about values and then we're also going to be talking about the team registration form. So again, how do we go from the big picture, the big ideas like complexity and the big values to a common space with a process towards an outcome in deep time? Well, on Friday, that was, for some, it was Friday, but again, this is just sort of vague because the days are different. On Friday, we had an awesome welcome live stream and quite a powerful keynote presentation and 90 minute panel with Dave Snowden. So well, well recommended to rewatch that one. A lot happened during it and it was very provocative. And so hopefully it gets us all thinking whatever our backgrounds are. And then we jumped right into gather and we started the fun. From that first onboarding to gather until the team closing ceremony on Sunday, we're in the middle of it. We're in the team formation phase and that's really what this presentation and this discussion is gonna be about, which is talking about team formation, who, what, why, where, when. We heard a lot of insights from Blue and from Alexandra earlier and now let's make it operational. Let's figure out how we're really going to do it with formal documents and with forms. What would you say just about the overview here? I think this is just kind of to keep in mind and it's in the program as well. If you look on the left side of the program, it kind of has a storm, form, norm, perform. If you wanna actually talk about that for a second, Dan, that's kind of the flow of the weekend and it maps onto this community team formation, team longevity narrative. Sure, so there's many frameworks for team process and one of Tuckman, I believe, but developed by others, it's separating this team process into forming, which is coming together, storming, which is like brainstorming, norming, meaning setting local norms. Like, are we gonna be raising our hand to speak? Are we going to have this kind of a meeting schedule? Those are the norms. Logistical and behavioral norms. And then performing is whatever that means for your team. Maybe performing means, okay, now let's get back to work and start editing this wiki. Or maybe that means we're gonna be performing on a live stream. And we take a complex systems approach to those form, storm, norm, perform, thinking about them as sort of nested within each other and more like a spiral and something where we're always in all of those stages and that's what gives teams a lot of agility and flexibility. And Dave has a great cup collection, great comment. Oh, he does. I was like trying to see if it spelled out a word or like had some symbol or something with it, how it was laid out is funny. Cool. So if anyone has any questions about the overview, they can drop that in the live chat or anywhere else in a post-it note. Rules of engagement, let's get there. So let's go to eight. Five avenues to participation. So you're standing there at the crossroads and there's five things that you can do to participate and there's more as well. But here's five big ways you can participate. What are they, Sean? Yeah, so again, like we were saying earlier, there's no right or wrong way to do complex weekend. Some people, they don't want to interact synchronously so much, maybe they'll do an hour every day or none. Interacting on Keybase number one is totally valid if that's all you want to do, right? There's so much content there. There's all these references. You can just spend all your time reading and messaging people, working on teams as a fully asynchronous anonymous even contributor, right? That's totally viable. You can do any combination of these. Number two, right? Watching and re-watching all these facilitator intro videos. All of our amazing facilitators, they spent time to kind of communicate their perspective, what they're excited to share during the weekend. It's great to honor that by watching their videos, even if there's a lot of them and some of them are longer than others, even if you put it on 1.5 times speed just to kind of flow through it and have all their words kind of enter your mind, it's nice to honor their contribution there. Number three, hanging out and working and gather. This is really when we want to show up for each other. You don't have to do it all the time. You need to sleep, you need to eat. It's fun to be in there though, but when you do arrive, try to participate fully and try to have your video on if you're comfortable doing that or if you're ready, that makes sense at the time. When you're not talking, just be a good kind of participant. But that can be all you want to do. Maybe you don't want to engage with Keybase at all. That's totally viable. Number four, attend live facilitated sessions. You can attend all the sessions. You can attend none of the sessions. They're there to help facilitate interaction, to teach. There's lots of reasons to go to these sessions and it's up to you to make the decision as to what you want to get from it and if it's one of the modes you want to engage with over the weekend. And then number five, finding a team. There's the I Need A Team Keybase channel and that is there as a backdrop, especially as we get closer to the end of today and into the early tomorrow. That's gonna become more active because our goal as organizers and facilitators is to make sure every participant who wants to be on a team finds a team where they are a valued member of the team. So that's the space we're gonna be using for that, that Keybase channel. So message there if you wanna put out what you're interested in or asking if different teams exist. Facilitators or organizers will respond to facilitate those interactions. And then the Explore channels like we were talking about earlier in the first hour of this live stream, they're a great bed for new team seeds to form or just even if the team ends up being kind of a community that spawns subteams. There's so many different things that come out of these Explore channels that just subscribing, hitting the gear next to the Keybase team name, Explore all channels, see all these opt-in channels, join the ones you're interested in. That's a great mode to get engaged with those who are likely to join teams or maybe just want to read all the great content or engage. And remember that our Keybase and our Gather space are gonna be cohort specific forever. So in two weeks, you finally get around to reading Explore Quantum and you message somebody. They will hopefully check their Keybase and be there to respond. Or you could just post in general, hey, I'm gonna be co-working in this space for the next couple of hours. Feel free if you wanna have some flashbacks, or if you wanna have a throwback. So it's like our tools are what connect us and that's how we participate. And keep that in mind with the team co-working spaces which we'll talk about in a second. You're gonna get that assigned to your team if you choose, if you want that. And that will always exist in that space. So if you wanna have team meetings, maybe have them in that Gather space as this kind of public co-working, global, always online space because that allows for you and your teammates to be collidable with others in the community. And you never know if you're working and another team decides to have their meeting in the space two weeks from now, two months from now. And that interaction leads to something helpful for everyone. Nice. So on slide nine, which we'll just introduce and go through, you can go into the single source of truth, which you all will have probably bookmarked at this point. And you can feel free to just add any information. We posted just your key base username and your first name. So the same information on your Gather avatar. And then feel free to opt in. If you wanna share what is complexity to you, what are you looking for and what might you like to be contacted about? So this is kind of like our cohort message board. And that will also be persistent. But that's just to show it and we can continue on. Thanks. Let's have a little bit of a reminder of our purpose and align at the highest level as we start to descend from purpose through values to guidelines to a form that we're gonna fill out because a team, it's one headache to align on what time to meet. Oh, what time is that for you? Okay, but that's logistics. The hardest thing to align on and the thing that will increasingly be seen as critical for team collaboration is alignment on purpose. Because imagine if there's people whose purposes are not aligned, either one or both of them are literally working counter-productively with respect to their purpose. So aligning at a high level with purpose and then dropping down through norms of participation down to the specific forms that will be filled out is how we're gonna get that multi-scale alignment so that the work is going to be fun and productive and inclusive. Our collective purpose at complexity weekend is a work in progress. And so it's always open to people's thoughts as we iterate cycle to cycle, but I'll just read them and Sean, you can give a thought. We learn complexity science by doing. We serve through deep time. We include to innovate. Diversity is key. Participation is core to transdisciplinary practices. Yeah, I think even before maybe digging into these, I'm just gonna put that call out. If anyone has other ideas, you are a member of this community and these values and these purpose, values, guidelines, they ultimately come from the community and you have a bottoms up effect and you have kind of a top-down effect. And we did the top-down when we started the weekend where we communicated the purpose, values, guidelines at that moment to everyone to broadcast that to our agents in the systems that they can interact with that in mind. Now's our chance to do the bottoms up. So if you see any of these and you have ideas, you think they are better modified in a certain way, leave a post it now and we'll talk about that and that will continue to evolve the state moving forward. Also, it's bottom up and top-down. It's kind of a topic that comes up in complexity a lot and people might be used to hearing that in the context of an organizational chart. Like top-down means that somebody's superior or their supervisor, their boss is giving instructions down and bottom up would be like sort of the feedback if it exists at all with just the regular worker or participant giving information up. And here we're all participants, we're all lateral. We're all on the same level as participants. And our top-down is coming from our community purpose and values. And so this isn't like a mandate or a dictate. This is our co-evolving purpose. And that's how we align. We're not aligning based upon somebody who controls the paycheck and controls your time. And it's something that's a lot different in terms of how it organizes. So anyone is free to continue adding. We push the meme of complexity to new audiences. Fun idea. And of course we're curious about that. It's definitely something that a lot of people are interested in. We can wait just a few more seconds to see. To the side, to the side, to the side please says KDC. Side, side, side, side. I've heard that before. Maybe while we're waiting for some post-its, I'll go into the existing purpose, right? So learning complexity by doing, like we talked about this in the first live stream, there's so much to learn about complexity at an abstract level and intellectual level. Sometimes it just takes seeing how complexity is embodied in a specific system in front of you for some of these concepts to really click. And then once they click, you can pour them over to other systems or back to the abstract or general. Dan, do you wanna take the second one or post-its? Yep. Well, one post-it says open the space to share controversial ideas. Great. We wanna respect each other and our differences in opinion. We serve through deep time is about thinking about the long-time scale, understanding that us as organizers and as a community are gonna be here in the long-time, two cohorts per year with a weekend, and then also the other 10 months are gonna be heartbeat so you can check back in. That's our commitment as a community, but also we encourage teams to think about deep time. Homelessness is a big issue. So are we going to just instantly think that we're gonna fix it today and then we aren't gonna have any non-linear effects if we don't consider them? No, we wanna think about serving our system of interest through deep time and supporting flow is kind of similar. Like imagine if the river only thought about the first mile. You'd get a blockade, you'd get a flood somewhere. Deep time is the whole river of time and thinking about the total flow. Nice. I wanna add one thing to the deep time one and that's actually as a team, how are your solutions that you put out into the world or whatever outcomes, how are they gonna live in deep time? Are they going to have any unintended consequences or anything in the immediate or short term or the long term that you need to keep in mind as complexity thinkers while we're implementing and putting it in place? So that's another aspect to deep time to keep in mind. Cool. And bringing complexity thinking and being to everyday life, supplanting old school, institutional approaches over time, awesome. So I'm sure more will come in but we'll go to our core values which are also totally open, add more. We have a document where we talk about this and we edit it collaboratively but our core values again, I'll just, maybe I'll read the first three and then you can give a thought. So complexity weekend is itself a complex system. Education is active, we learn complexity by doing. Teamwork makes the dream work. Participation means accessibility and inclusion for all. Respect is key and step up and be brave. And so anyone, please feel free to add a post it. What's one that stands out to you today, Sean? The one I keep combining is I just need to combine the bullets but participant means accessibility, inclusion for all and respect is key. I always combine those when we talk about it because all of these properties are kind of the necessary environment for extreme diversity to appear. So you have to be inclusive when you're forming these teams across time zones, across disciplines, across everything, all these different dimensions. You have to invite that diversity into your team or it won't appear. Accessibility, use language that is universal as much as you can. Try not to use too much jargon. Try to, like you're saying, including other languages. That's actually something as an organizer level we're trying to understand how can we help translate languages eventually and have that not be such a barrier. Everything's in English right now and that is a barrier to global participation in team formation. So accessibility is a really key property there. Respect, super key property. You have to feel, if your team is gonna succeed, every member of the team has to feel respected and they have to feel like they're contributing to a shared purpose and that they have alignment around shared purpose. So those are standing out to be right now. What about you, Dan? Yep, including other languages, including styles of learning, it just accessibility and inclusion are non-negotiable. They're not supplements. They're the fundamental frequency of participation. If you can't access the gather space, you're not going to be in gather at that URL. If you're not feeling included from a psychological or from a narrative perspective, you're not gonna stick around. You're gonna close that window and do something where you are included. So we wanna cultivate a space where we include each other. So for those of you who are forming teams and you're the team former, you're the center of gravity for the team, you're the first one on the dance floor, keep these in mind, that you're the early adopter of teams, awesome. Bring other people in, highlighting accessibility and inclusion and that's how we're gonna make it all work together. Cool, yes. And re-imagine science wrote, "'Lovely sentiment on inclusion, Sean, it seems noteworthy to learn how you each learned these lessons." We could go on and talk about how and where we learned and the input from so many contributors who are here at this cohort and who are not in this cohort who helped us learn and integrate these lessons. These are, it's not us coming to you live. These are collaboratively edited documents that have been evolving for years and we always just copy over the documents and that's our starting point for the next event of that type. The next heartbeat, we're gonna copy over the feedback form and what worked and what didn't, let's update. And that's how we both build and respect previous work while also allowing new voices to be heard because that's crucial. Yeah, I wanna touch on accessibility and another dimension here. And this is actually at a community of practice level, organizer level. If you think about the organizers for this particular cohort, surely Jared, Dan, and myself, we are mostly in central and Pacific time and that's actually a limitation for our community right now and there's other organizers in our organizer circle who step up to the heartbeats and the other biannual weekend cohorts. But if anyone out there is watching this and thinks that they may wanna help co-organize, we really do need organizers across the globe. We need organizers who are in other time zones who aren't, for instance, like last night, totally asleep where there's not necessarily anyone there to pick up the phone if something's on fire or something. We need people in this community to step up not only to be facilitators throughout all the 10 heartbeats and the two weekend cohorts, but also organizers who can hold down those times and bring that organizer energy so that the space is inviting at all times. Because sometimes, honestly, it takes organizer energy sometimes to get flow to occur in the community. So we just need others to step up with that organizer energy at different time zones that can keep that flow happening worldwide basically over the weekend. Yep, and the entry point there is really co-organizing a heartbeat. It's a four-week sprint, but it's not eight hours per week. It's like one to two hours per week for four weeks leading up to that heartbeat on the last weekend of the month and then each person gets to put their own spin and finish on these core values and on how they're implemented especially. Let's get to the participation guidelines before in the last few minutes, we might wanna just cover the form more. So we encourage the adoption of a complexity thinking mindset. We encourage and emphasize that communication is key, relationships as well as teams, so one to one and one to multiple. Embrace technology but know its limits, which means use good audio and visual etiquette and just use technology how it works for you and let us know if we can help. Full participation while appreciating diverse abilities is absolutely crucial. Some of us are gonna be here asynchronously more or synchronously more. Everyone's participation is absolutely the perfect way to do it and reach out on the edges and stay involved. That's kind of related to this just rejoining the experience. Every heartbeat is interactive, every weekend is interactive. So rejoin again and again and every time it'll be new and different. Any thoughts here before we jump to the form? I think I'm ready to skip because the live stream, the one we just did previously has a lot of that but leave comments or leave post-its here or in the live stream chat, I dropped the actual document that you can go in and comment that's a more extensive actually than these slides. That feedback is always integrated. Dan, can we actually go to slide 14 just briefly before we go to the form? I just want to talk about these team co-working spaces and basically, to the right of the cafe and the gather space, some teams have already taken some co-working spaces so maybe you can just watch and see how they use it and learn. But really briefly, the design of the space is to allow whatever size team and that can be two people, three people, one person, up to 10, 15, whatever your size your team is, this should accommodate and there's some objects in here to interact with. So it's a private space and as you've seen and gather, if you've been in the space already, private spaces you can always hear and share screen or whatever to everyone inside that private space. If you're outside of that space, you don't see anything and you don't hear anyone from outside of the space. So it's just this private, synchronous, audio-visual shared screen experience. So that's there and there's two objects inside this space that I want to draw your attention to. If you've done any shared whiteboarding in the live sessions yet, you'll understand the object to the right and if you press X to interact and gather for any object, it'll open the shared whiteboard experience where you can draw together collaboratively or you can write notes together and I'd recommend taking that content and putting it somewhere more stable like a Google document or something after you're done working but it's just a nice way to have a bunch of people interacting and kind of flowing with each other while on a synchronous audio-visual experience and then the left object, this little green phone. This is actually, if you press X, it'll open up a website called JITSI which is a browser-based video conference space. It's like Zoom or any of those other technologies but you don't need to download an app or anything. You just go to the URL and boom, you're in a video chat and if you open that, you'll see the URL is jitsi.me slash xyz123 or something. That URL is actually something that facilitators if you're watching this, you can take that URL for that team's co-working space and send it to somebody external to the cohort so that people in Gather can just press X, open up that video chat together and boom, they're talking to a stakeholder. They're talking to someone who can ground their work that actually has lived experience in healthcare systems and with homelessness. Any of these things that the team is thinking about solving is a problem or making some impact on or coming up with a solution and we need to ground our solutions with real stakeholder feedback. So this is a great mechanism to make that happen and it's really up to facilitators to think of the connections in their networks that might allow these teams to thrive. So that's it about the co-working space, Dan, unless you have something else to say and let's do the form. Perfect, let's get to the form. So Sean, if you could post this bit.ly link, the team registration is open. So right now we're going to talk about this team registration process. So team registering, it's like a checkpoint. It's not the finish line and it doesn't set you up for any specific finish line but it does help you hone your team's understanding of collective purpose. And what we're going to do in these last eight minutes here after releasing that form, it's in the live chat and also you could post that in the key base is going to be exploring this team registration form and just walking through it. And what's the difference between team co-working in a studio? Good question, KDC. So co-working is just a space where you can hang out and work but then the studio is a place where you can go and record a video. There isn't too much of a difference. You could record a video or co-work anywhere but we're trying to build each time more and more norms and gather locations that help specialize. For example, maybe in the future there could be an audio engineer in the studio whereas there'd be somebody who has a lot of experience with team co-working in the co-working space. So it's just sort of like a place-based way for us to know what we're doing. Oh, we're co-working. I wanna go see what this team is working on and their co-working, see if they're accepting a new member whereas if there's a team in a studio maybe you don't wanna interrupt a live recording. So this form, which everybody is open to look at it's how teams signal to the organizers and facilitators that they're interested in participating in complexity weekend by forming diverse teams, finding a shared purpose and working to solve whatever problems they choose to address. And people can read a little bit more details about what the team-based experience includes over the weekend, but what it comes down to is working together whether totally asynchronously or totally synchronously or some fusion from literally right now until the closing ceremony and beyond. And we're gonna walk through the questions but we ask a couple of questions about what is your combined perspective and how are you going to be taking the next steps to form a shared understanding and do collaborative sense-making on the projects and the questions you're curious about. And then also we encourage teams to record a three to five minute video to share during that closing ceremony and live stream. Also, if a team wants to present live we can make that happen or if they wanna do a video and also join live we'll make that happen and my facilitated sessions are about how to record. So not everyone needs to know how to record but if that's like, whoa, sounds kind of cool. I'd like to do that. You can really step up and be a person who brings a vital skill to a team. And this is gonna help us connect you with facilitators if as well as external stakeholders if that is important for your team. And again, we just encourage teams to be really open inclusive to what kinds of participants and what kinds of backgrounds are gonna be working together on these projects. It's complexity, it's transdisciplinary. It's really helpful when there's diversity and perspective and skill set in time zone. That's how we're gonna be working together and having the most emergence in our teams. And it's pretty good to fill this out if possible, synchronously even if it's night for one person and day for another person or maybe draft your answers, post it in a channel or a chat thread together so that you can kind of come to consensus on it. Any overview thoughts before we just walk through the questions in the last five minutes, Sean? I am, we're doing it live. I'm adding one more question. And under, are there particular facilitators that you'd like us to introduce you to? I'm putting, are there any stakeholders or first customers you'd like us to introduce you to? Reload, reload, reload. Okay, here we go. So first we ask for just a single email for somebody who we can just email to when we're looking through our team registration forms. We ask for a team name. This is just up to you. People do all kinds of funny names. I remember last year, we had a team about insects and microbes and health and it was called sick bugs and the meme was half of the challenge. We ask for the current people who are on your team knowing that they could join or leave. It's a snapshot of your team but we wanna just know who is there with a name and a key base username. And that helps us with our goals of making sure that everybody who wants to be on a team is included on a team. And then we ask for any other email addresses for people who just wanna stay in the loop. It's totally co-equal to this top email. We just wanna make sure that we're contacting the people who wanna be contacted and no one else. We don't wanna spam you, we never will. We wanna contact the people who wanna be getting updates from complexity weekends. And if at any point you're just like, hey, remove me. I'm not trying to get these emails. Okay, or can we add somebody else to the emails? That's also fine. Okay, how about take these next two? Does your team want its name posted? What about that, Sean? Sorry, you're talking about the co-working space? Yeah. Yeah, so as you saw in the overview of the gather space, there's probably 15 to 18 maybe co-working spaces. We might have to expand, we'll see. But if your team is interested in having a dedicated spot in gather forever, basically, because this space is always gonna be around for our cohort, just let us know in this form or by messaging us and we will make the necessary edits in gather so that that space is yours. Nice. What's a general question or issue your team's gonna be addressing? This can be more than a topic area, like a little bit more than fluid flow, but general enough that it's likely to stay relevant, like flood protection in Southeast Asia or something like that. So you don't need to go all the way to the specifics, but maybe a little bit more than just a topic or how can we dot, dot, dot or what might be a new way to XYZ? This is always a fun question to consider and to really iterate and develop on just a snapshot. It's also edible, but how does complexity inform your team's approach? Remember, we're here at complexity weekend and we all were brought together by our shared purpose and our shared interest in learning complexity by doing. So how does complexity come into play? There's no single definition of complexity so this can be anything. You can say, we're gonna be thinking about all the stakeholders or we're gonna be thinking about nonlinear effects of what we do or we're gonna be thinking about phase change in social systems. Those are big complexity topics that can really make the difference when you're thinking about how to make a successful project. Any thoughts on that? I think the top level thought I'll give is when you're filling out this form, try to get as many people in the team seat or that want to become a team at that moment together in a synchronous experience together and use this form as a means to just get on the same page upfront. Provide five key words or phrases that describe the stakeholders and factor by their problem. That's just something to get everyone on the same page about what system are you actually impacting. These questions are more of an opportunity for discussion and initial thoughts that will evolve over time. So we have only one minute left so we're just gonna look through the other questions and then feel free to jump back into gather where we're both gonna be there to keep talking to you about this but we ask whether you're accepting new members joining over the weekend, looking for a few keywords and phrases that describe the problem and tools as well as the stakeholders who are impacted. These are optional by the way, describing the ecosystem that your problem is embedded in and a little bit about your attitude and orientation. Here's a question about the live stream that we're gonna have for the closing ceremony and whether your team would like to record a video, appear on a live stream or might need any help recording a video. We ask about facilitators. Are there any facilitators you're working with or are there any you'd like to work with? That can be after the weekend. They're all real people. They're all there to keep working with you. Are there any stakeholders or first customers that we could be introducing you to? How do your teammates learn? We also ask if any individuals on your team would like to use the online license of Wolfram Mathematica, which we have access to because they're a supporter. So if you wanna use a really nice and very generous donation from Wolfram, we can make that happen. And our last question is just any feedback for us at that point. And you can say anything you want here and we'll surely get back to you on that. Those are all the questions and that takes us to the end of the live stream. So we'd encourage you to just jump back in to gather whether you're watching this live or in replay and the weekend goes on. We'll see you in a few hours.