 group so I could actually make a difference and that's why I sit here so that's my spiel. Thanks Stacy. So I got here a little bit early and Stacy was here and we started talking about recapturing the Fourth Estate and basically building new models for journalism and so forth which is on Stacy's mind and this is the build OGM call for Tuesday July 13th 2021 and so this kind of a mix of how do we stop drawing money out of the bottom of the pyramid to fund all these kinds of things and how do we get funding opportunities from higher up the food chain I don't know how to say it you know the the pyramid the food chain the whatever and then how do we revive journalism I guess because we need sort of live people who are doing this. Want to say more? Yeah because the slight difference that I want to look at is what about if instead of looking to how do we get funding for this we look at how do we get to a place that we're not looking for funding from above so that's why when I talked about like gathering those people that are starting their platforms and having them buy into wanting to do this because what we would be offering first of all would be community so that would be a reason to at least want to have them stick their own foot in the water and provide us with content what OGM could be doing is helping to organize that contact and that's going to create a structure where people are going to meet each other once you got to that level you have all these writers all these videographers all these people that are trying to teach you how to get your project started and that's what we can teach the community so that we're teaching people how to actually use their ideas but OGM is the core that creates that expertise and then that's something that the larger players they have to pay to come in So charge the larger players for access to medium because I think making a living is really important to all the people you're talking about including myself and long ago I said like if we built a Trident submarine three feet shorter we could fund journalism in this country for a really long time you know the the the amounts of money we spend on stuff on stuff I hope we never need is crazy yeah Pete's mentioning something that Vincent has put in front of us in a couple conversations in the chat in the zoom chat here which we might want to switch over to the to the matter most but but the idea of curation that can be rewarded through token through tokens in the economy there's a couple different models and then and then there have been dozens upon dozens of efforts to rethink the economics of journalism the mechanics of journalism the the platforms of journalism all those kinds of things I'm not sure any of them have actually succeeded yet I'd be interested in anybody's opinion on the call about what has worked and what hasn't perhaps they see the last thing I'm saying I see this is more than just journalism that's one arm of it and I'm only sharing one part of the project but it's also entertainment and like I'm thinking like if we took the energy that goes into video games and we redirected that energy into this like we talked about the creating the news almost like a scavenger hunt of finding events that's the game part of it that that would draw certain people into it what I'm really talking about is creating a whole network but the the reason that somebody would want to join and add their content is because that makes them an investor that's their price of it they're like investing in this thing that we're going to try to create that covers more than just journalism it covers all kinds of media creation and the community is built in I'm done now I think I said everything and I've had conversations with Phil so he might be able to fill in where some of my ideas I didn't put out yeah let me let me just try and find my notes here and also but I'm sorry Pete has his hand up as well yeah Dr. Kaminsky I think it's a great idea Stacy I think for what it's worth as I work within OGM and Keekalab and the general plex that we're in that's basically the you know the question the question I'm working on why don't we make so for me one component of that is that we have little sovereigns very small organizations that are focused on for me it's software development or information management or things like that right but that's where you see CSE is a place that people come to to communicate and collaborate massive wiki is a place where people not only kind of it's not only that the peer production is kind of owned or something like that it's like massive wiki is actually the idea that that that it's not collectively on it's it's uh or it's not uh you don't push information towards the middle you push information around all over the place all over people right and the information exists in communities a lot of massive wiki is the idea that that information happens in community with other people and ideally small groups of people in lots of overlapping and decentralized ways so the the it's it's for me it's the same you know that there's a continuum between software development information management uh entertainment uh news all of that stuff for me is the same and i think you're totally right that we want to decentralize it and figure out how how we replace big these big massive structures with the same kind of energy and passion and um in investment from ourselves uh into you know into the world um with uh so we don't want to do that in big centralized columns we want to do that in very broad distributed distributed ways um i'll put my hand down a second um and also one of the goals here has been to create a shared asset uh informational asset indra's net you know to use an old analogy that is useful for education for journalism for science for everybody so that when students grow up and and make it better they're making better data sets and information and relationships and arguments that are used by journalists that put out there and when journalists write an important piece about something those elements of their piece are actually in this shared space uh so that someone could go you know if there's a brilliant article that somebody wrote that's changing policy ideas about it then that then the argument parts of it in the middle and the evidence that supports the argument are available for others to pick up and use and improve on um and so at some point a politician might be drawing on exactly the same pieces of the web of indra's net that we've got between us and showing it in a debate and saying you know this thing over here yes and here's what it looks like as policy instrumentation and then somebody else scientists could be measuring the effects of that policy in the same webs of information that we're using so for for me i'm like i've often wondered why we aren't all trying to improve the soil so there's a piece i want to write called data is the new is the new soil because a couple years ago there were a bunch of articles data is the new oil and their intention was we're just going to capture everybody's data and sell it off and look how valuable it is and you know basically dumpster diving on everybody's is such a such a great idea we just want to i think it's going to be the basis of the new economy and i'm like uh how about data is the new soil and thinking about soil fertility um as a way of building this up then there's this separate issue of how do you charge for it who gets who gets to pay for it and who can make a living from doing the the tilling of that of that virtual soil which is a big issue but really really complicated in the middle here go ahead Phil yeah just sorry just reviewing my notes from speaking with facing i had a couple really great conversations um and the initial conversation kind of centered around that we're trying to make this major shift from our current system but none of us but basically where we're trying to build a new system but our products of the existing system so how to create kind of a space that brings in she used the word muggles she said you guys had talked about her muggles of how we bring in muggles as part of this process people that aren't part of this systems thinking group um she also um made reference to um gills uh re i forget what the proper term is but re basically restructuring capitalism um and looking at kind of land as cyber space labor as creatives capital as attention and figuring out how we kind of introduce this new economy um but the overlying goal was to create a learning library garden and kind of change the education process which jerry i think is something you're very interested in well and just kind of trying to re teach people um the other part of it was working on different kind of little groups like if it's deciding there's 10 projects we want to work on our 10 people we want to focus on and figuring out what kind of working groups we need to create short videos or create a tv show or a channel or a network around these topics and ideas and kind of bringing in the academics to creatives and and creating this new kind of collaborative um future yeah that's i say correct everything i'm missing thank you yeah judy and doug welcome to the call we we started off heading into recapturing the fourth estate rethinking journalism and the the economics of journalism the intentions you know all of those kinds of things that's where we've been dwelling for the first few minutes of the call um yeah and judy i assume you're breakfasting i am cool um so let's uh step back for just a second and i just want i just want to sort of check in in some sense uh because all of us i i think the conversation we were just having shows that like at least for me uh we're just thinking really hard about all the issues around this and how to how to pull them together how to make them better we're the points of leverage uh what can we affect what experiments can we run and so forth and and stacey um we're not very separated from a bunch of journalism institutions and projects i mean uh you know craig newmark funds a whole bunch of a bunch of journalism he's a major funder now for the columbia journalism school and a bunch of others um craig newmark is on the list of people for me to try the pitch to fund ogm projects in some sense and so if you know if we could frame in a piece of the conversation i was hoping have today is about how do we see projects like what's a project what's our list of projects and how do we see those and how do how do we take them from glimmer of a spark of an idea in somebody's head to listing someplace to okay ours objectives and key results that we can kind of measure over time and offer up as a way of tracking our our efforts on all this so that's that's sort of a thought but um actually i mean by way by way of checking in for a second i just want to say i i was in fresno for a memorial service over the weekend it was hotter than hades and fresno luckily air conditioning appears to be a popular device uh there but i'm walking to the little airplane that took me back to portland on sunday was the peak of the heat all matched the peak of the heat on the weekend it was 112 on the tarmac and it was just i felt like i was standing in an air fryer again sort of we had that we had the the heat dome in portland a while ago but strangely in the middle of my trip i had three really long really great calls that have a lot to do with ogm the first one was with nova spivak uh who is an entrepreneur and like there's an arc project that um in the when when um when ilan musk sent the tesla car up into space heading out into space at the launch of their falcon heavy or whatever it was that masterful picture of like a dummy sitting at the wheel saying with uh with the little dashboard saying something like don't panic or thanks so long and thanks for all the fish i forgot what the quote was but but that that masterful picture of like this is how you do space travel in the trunk of that of that tesla was a copy of the arc which is uh one of nova's many projects and the arc is meant to be the new version of what is this what is the cd rom that contains samples of civilization like how do we explain ourselves to a different culture and so uh so that's one of his projects and i had called him to sort of pick his brain a bit about how to pitch ogm what to do and he had a bunch of interesting uh uh topics one of which was uh maybe we should put a copy of the brain on the next version of the arc that came that showed up for him after our call he sent me this note saying uh jerry why don't why don't we put a copy of the brain in the arc and i'm just realizing that i have an open loop with him to explain why it's 500 megabytes big so if we can bookmark that i need to get back to him like what's with the size of it anyway um so the nova conversation went in lots of different directions including some more esoteric ones without that i that i won't come back to right now then i talked to sebastian hasinger who is an old old friend and we had no intention of talking about ogm but he is with ibm right now working on stuff that is incredibly ogm me and we realized oh okay this is totally resonant we had a great and fruitful conversation uh that took us in lots of different directions i'll i'll re consult my notes here but uh he's going to set up a meeting between me and his boss and see if we can't kind of uh find some some forms of overlap in what we're doing and what they're doing uh which was really great and then sunday morning i had a conversation with pat scanel who i know because we're both on a mailing list that gordon cook started years ago uh who who was kind of a really nice geek reporter for the telecom sector and we just went away deep and he's he he offered up a metaphor or in that conversation we came into a metaphor that uh that worked really well that i offered up in a call yesterday the call that that jordan ran uh which stuck which was a cool thing and basically that um and i've been searching really hard for metaphors for ogm in the sense of you know are we like a barn raising are we like uh you know and leaf cutter ants uh are we like uh a glass uh specialist the glass the stained glass craftsmen who who welds together the various pieces of the colored art which make up the rose window and and uh on sunday i was like well it's kind of like we're all in a quilting being we're making a patchwork quilt because the pieces individually are beautiful but they're woven together in a way that makes the whole artwork really beautiful the the making of that work is called a quilting bee it's a communal effort the fabric and the texture of the quilt really works and also quilting and weaving are are really ancient arts but they're not durable arts because fabric rots and so they don't get as much fame as ziggurats and other monuments mostly to like male rulers who are trying to make themselves uh immortal anyway but this notion that that um we were kind of trying to help help create sort of a quilt that could nurture like all of us is interesting and uh form an interesting kind of uh background but but but then pat and i talked about a bunch of other things that were very ogm so so those three conversations have been like spinning in my head i need to go back and consult my notes and report on them better but i just want to bring bring them into our conversations here because they're really helpful in helping me see like what our possibilities are and where to go um so let me just stop that was a little longer check than i thought but anybody else want to jump in first of all i'm sorry i missed the call jerry i had a couple things come up here that precluded attending so i hope it might have been recorded um i should i check with jordan on that probably this is yesterday's call i was definitely recorded they even recorded all the breakouts so i'm pretty sure they'll have a good uh you'll be catch up okay perfect sorry that i couldn't constructively contribute all right we missed you um i think an important dimension of this that i keep coming back to is the process side of it the sort of human interaction side and how we make available to various groups and individuals ways to come together and tools not just the tools but the social dynamic processes that will help them be effective working together and that is can be enabled and fostered by the right technology support to that type of interaction breakout rooms are an example of how zoom has adapted to that need for smaller group discussions but i also think that there's a deeper level of the process of building communities and communication processes and shared objectives and shared planning that allows groups or teams of individuals to move toward a goal together and that involves as we talked about before metrics and measures that are not so much stakes in the ground although they are but better ways of telling if you're making progress or if you need to change direction or if you need to modify what it is that you're trying to do and so i think that's a sort of social science piece that i still think we need to spend some time framing and thinking about how we might have groups of individuals who are good at that sort of thing helping frame that and available to groups so that the groups become more effective and that applies to both in-person groups as well as virtual groups absolutely and and judy one of the projects that i envisioned framing up and describing eventually as a set of ogrs and project plans perp and pete i'm really interested in the blending of your project plans idea with okay ours like what's the bridge there and then how do we see all of that in several different dashboards like at different levels of granularity but one of the projects that i'm eager to frame up and see if anybody's interested in is how do we instrument the beautiful bodies of pattern languages like liberating structures pure gaji wise democracy pattern language and there's others how do we instrument those so that they're easily at hand for anybody who wants to level up their game can we front end them with some kind of a chatbot or individuals with judgment who are available for quick questions for what process should like my group is stuck we're trying to do this kind of thing with this many people what process you do suggest or something like that and it's like oh try world cafe what's world cafe boop here's world cafe oh i'd love to run that boop step one step two you know gather these materials go through this step you know i'm not sure i i'm not sure i'm smart enough to run this thing we're experienced enough can i hire somebody who could run it for me boop here's a here's a marketplace of people who have the skill to run you through this process so i'm i'm i think that's like probably three different kinds of projects mixed together but i think they illustrate um a way that ogm can actually participate and aim at things that are missing build out some of them in a skinniest you know toothpicks and and and take kind of form uh just frame them up and then put them in the world in a way to see like okay what does that create and then if that doesn't resonate with what you were just saying and i'm heading off in a different direction say so because i'm i'm thinking that that's kind of a manifestation of also what you're saying no i i agree with all of that jerry but while i think of it because stacy kind of triggered it with some of the comments about um papers and positions of people and so forth i wonder if we could tuck in the background somewhere um framing the equivalent of the lock and demostinies debates from ender's game where wise people pose as individuals who debated major topics in the public as a way to represent how the topics twinkle together which is the biggest issue i see us facing in this country right now is that we're so polarized the groups never talked to each other and there's really no forum where the topics are discussed together appropriately but in ender's game the two siblings um i guess it was peter and valentine who took on pseudonyms of demostinies and lock um wrote a whole series of presumably basically internet-based debates that framed the polarization of key issues and allowed the healthy debate of those viewpoints with respect so that the viewers and otherwise people might pull out of that the central wisdom that could be balancing and i see that so lacking right now it's like you either watch you know fox news or you read the new york times and none of the people except weirdos like me do both because i want to see different perspectives are the same question and there used to be a publication which is probably still out there called mother earth news that pulled in writers from opposing viewpoints to put together tableaus of viewpoint and i just think our group might be while somewhat liberal probably in general thinking would be the right group to try to pull that framing together and actually knit more rich conversation potential for many people um and you've also just described a different set of scenarios that i would love to to to set up with an ogm and again now i'm thinking project wise you know what what what does testing what you just described look like uh in its simplest form that's a a great thing well if if you're doing it like journalism or like news it's viewership i mean how many people actually listen to the debate if it's a verbal debate or how many people how many clicks do you get to this inter twinkling of opposing viewpoints page by page yeah we we also have in our community a bunch of black belts in debate so canonical debate lab uh jamie joys a bunch of others have been thinking and working on this piece of it a lot so one one place where we're heavy i think is in people like really interested in the presentation of arguments and public debate and whether it's on forums or in some other visual form or something like that i think we we've got a lot of talent there which we haven't picked up and done anything with we haven't offered them a place to to you know mix their ideas in or even or even a show and tell in that sense go ahead go ahead fel um i love the idea julia also a huge fan of ender's games i love the reference um one thing i'm kind of curious about is just to boil it down are we talking about changing the way arguments are stated digitally are we talking about changing the way people interact with information like if you had to boil down like if this was a project if you had to boil it down to the very simplest thing that the project was focused on is it how we present information is it how we discuss information um i think it's both i think in the simplest terms it would be interesting to attempt to hold the equivalent of presidential debates which arguably were not entirely successful in their current form but identify key knowledge experts with differing viewpoints and invite them to present in a video live and be recorded with sort of they state their case handle it just like a debate they state their case then they respond to the questions of the opposition um i mean it would take some people more scholarly in this practice than i am but i think for a lot of people who are confused or who have a genuine interest to understand why half the country thinks x when they think y it would be useful to find mechanisms for that to occur right now the only thing you can really do is look for opposing opinions in newspapers or occasionally in magazines like the Atlantic or something like that because they'll attempt to get some balanced viewpoint um just in the interest of good journalism and i'm thinking that with the literacy levels in this country written word is not the way to reach the majority of the people and in other cultures it's even less the way and so it's sort of like we need to go back to the days of the radio or the tv in the early days when people could take in the information without needing to read it because the literacy level in the country is like fifth or sixth grade and these topics are more complex than fifth or sixth grade words doesn't mean you use the big words but you need to frame it in a bigger way i'm not saying this real clearly because it's a pretty early formation idea no no that's that's usually helpful um yeah in my mind i think the video idea is fantastic and then maybe we could do a quick hitter like here's the key points key takeaways for that kind of simplified the text to have some kind of text takeaway but i i agree that the video thing is the way to go i think space use project is resonates with that as well that she's looking to create video content because it's kind of the most digestible um and i apologize i missed a little piece in the middle but uh judy you just reloaded a piece of the conversation yesterday with pat in my into my head which i really liked um and it came about in a kind of a strange way in that he said oh do you know john brockman and i'm like well yeah i was kind of near a near miss on his digerati book but he called me the pilgrim because i was thinking you know i was kind of going and reporting on different people in the tech business way back when and then i remember that i sat next to mitch ratcliffe at a conference long ago and we were going to actually do a pilgrimage we were going to each make a list of the people that we thought were like changing the world and go go visit them and interview them in different ways and that that we just didn't do that we shelved it but then pat and i started talking about ogm one of the things that might make ogm really interesting and lively is to create kind of a pilgrimage path for it where we go interview some of the thinkers that we're talking about and in so doing start to ogm the interviews meaning um meaning uh max marmar took the transcript of one of our early calls and mapped it into mirror boards so that you can see the pattern of the conversation um kiko lab has done a whole bunch of post processing of things and trying to call and even just a simple video edit pete has been using uh the script basically to deconstruct and reconstruct uh videos and so forth which is also dangerous because it uses uh lyre bird to fake people's voices if it has a good voice sample so you can in fact have people saying things that they didn't say which is like a deep fake but but but we wouldn't have to just do one form of transform on the interviews we could in fact i i would naturally be sitting there curating them into my brain or whatever future brain platform is and we could invite other people to do other kinds of riffs on the info so that there's this sort of gallery view of the emerging discussion and if the people we go interview are not the usual suspect white men then we actually increase the diversity of our thinking of how it goes and then another thought i had was and for each thinker we're not just trying to replicate everything that's in all of their books which is interesting but rather um hey this sounds a lot like this other you know this sounds like this other sort of philosophy or philosopher can we blend those ideas together like like i think i think an interesting thing we can do in the world is kind of chew at the boundaries between uh ways of seeing the world and possible solutions to the world to see if they if they're actually the same or actually different and and also contrast those views so that we can say hey this is really opposite to this other sort of body of work what's up with that how do you see it where do you go and then as we learn from each of our visits we're basically refining the artifact the Indra's net that sits between us that lets us move forward go ahead Stacy i think in addition to everything you're saying another thing that would be good is to go in as not just on a pilgrimage but as explorers finding people that are already working in their communities that don't have a book that haven't published a book but have actually organized their communities and are doing things because a lot of people don't know how to get started so these people are special in that you know they didn't have the rich uncle or they didn't have you know the iv league education now they put out a book they are the ones i think we need to start shifting a focus towards and that's where we're going to find diversity um really quickly g we could borrow the nano rimo national novel writing month is just a contest where people write a novel in the month of november i think every year we could put up a contest like that for people who've got a book inside them and figure out how to how to get those books out sorry duty go ahead well i was just going to mention there was a novel that our book club read called news of the world and the main character is a fellow on horseback who travels from town to town and reads the newspaper in the local pub to the people in town because the people in the more primitive world of the us at that time are not readers and so he's bringing news to the town by presenting it to them orally this predates of course in old west days television radio and a bunch of other things but it harks back to that in the role that this could play in presenting information so you could have newscasters presenting a panel of newscasters presenting different types of content rather than the people who have had poles apart on the positions that are there i think it invites a lot of creative thinking about different formats that might then lead to contemplation and reshaping of views and that just reminds me of another piece of the conversation with pat which is the interviews with each of the people visited on the pilgrimage would themselves make a media channel they'd you know they would easily be a twitch tv or whatever that could just be a you know slightly edited would would look like a podcast or whatever else and that would be one artifact right but then but then adding other artifacts in parallel to it and enriching the whole experience and making that easy to access would be a very visible way for us to experiment with sort of adding ogm to the world and building this out i also think there's a sort of a psychology question of this that i'm not the right person to answer either but how is it that we actually invite people to hear views that are opposing to their own because we're so affinity based in our approach to society and that i think you know perhaps you can do it by having keynotes that are icons in the disparate points of view each of whom will bring their followers but their followers are coming to hear view b not to be influenced by view a and so the dynamic of actual reforming of ideology is a pretty complicated social cycle dimensional that i love to see us tackle because i don't see it getting tackled anywhere i'm film yeah i i had a different point but after hearing judy say that i i do think even if you bring in two sides of the conversation as judy said a lot of times if the conversation on the chat kind of devolves into tit for tat kind of uh conversation of kind of i don't know i just usually it devolves into i don't know healthy dialogue basically it's not people aren't engaging with the conversation they're fighting about their point or fighting for their point so if we could sorry i was just going to say the phrase that suddenly popped in my head was common ground yeah and if we could find a platform that allows creation of common ground or at least identification of common ground that would be powerful yeah and and maybe if we have a at the beginning 10 minutes is kind of a uh masterclass and how to engage or how to to talk about different topics or engage with opposing views i think something around those lines could be helpful but my original question though was how we kind of stand this up and how we give this going um and i guess the one strategy would be to decide the decide the topics we want to focus on uh and search out uh experts that way or look at our own networks what experts we know and see kind of where we have warm introductions that people we could probably talk to and then break those out into different topics or different areas um but i i would i'm not a pico but i would say like a simple air table where people can say experts they know with their expert there's something topic area and we can go from there and kind of start doing a bit of outreach thanks phil i'm pete i want to say something uh well i mean this gently um uh uh ogm thanks a lot um thinking is really good but um but there's something that is to be said for the folks that say i have a project do you want to help join you want to join my project how can i make my project better i'm building this thing i have a blog i have a wiki can you join this discussion with me to work on my project um uh i i think uh i i like it when people are are doing their projects i also i can report out by the way the the call yesterday was interesting jerry and i were both on it um one of the things that struck me i was in the making making communities more efficient or something like that it was kind of the tools thing um we're really far along ogm and and the plex around us ogm and flotilla and kiko lab um uh are far along the idea of how how do we decentralize and how do we federate um and i think that's the the key of how we decompose these big superstructures so it was interesting hearing a bunch of smart people talk about i was in a breakout on that and um having having them talk about you know how this is going to work having you know 10 000 100 000 million people working on making the world a better place uh and um they still talk about there should be an organization that does and instead of um you know there's there's a bunch of organizations in a flotilla that are working together so i feel really good about where we are so i want to go back to your gentle nudge uh p because uh because i think so the spirit in which i'm presenting the ideas with pat yesterday that turned into this a pilgrimage that turned into sort of swarming ideas and weaving them was that this could be a major project that shapes ogm and ogm's path into the future and out of it would spill some of the some of the effects some of the tools some of the some of the other projects that we want to build along the way and it could be that it's a dead end and i'm sort of testing the waters with you all to see if it sounds exciting and it seems to fit what stacey was saying uh at the start of our call i think it sort of uh fits in there pretty pretty in pretty interesting ways as well um and if it weren't exciting to other people who then wanted to come join the project and sub projects of doing this then it would be a no a no-op it would just not be interesting but but but that was entirely a spirit in which i was saying it and i realized that we've been through lots and lots of talking and lots and lots of hey what if we did this and at this point we aren't doing enough of anything um but does that match and i mean are you trying to are you trying to gently say hey nice try with another idea but why don't we just do a simple thing or are you like could you be less gentle and more and more direct with your advice but um but take for instance this call um the conversations on this call where will they end up um i think they'll end up in a recording i and i think a few people will watch the recording and i think they'll fizzle out from there um is is that you know i so i've one of the things i've been reflecting on for a few weeks and this is part of a longer um quest you know over the past six or nine months how do we how do we know what we know how do we remember um how do we uh have conversations that then turn into actions um one of my observations kind of it's a simple one but obviously it feels deep and profound to me is that um each of us as we work together each of us or or there's there's a significant amount of overhead to kind of coordinating with other people um uh it's um and it's a pain it's a pain in the in the rear when you know uh when somebody says hey can we take notes about this could we make a project plan for that you know and it feels like we've we've been trained in our society that these these wonderful organizations magically make things happen for us right and other people do the work and we get used to that so it's easy to it's easy to say well i have this great idea and you know somebody should do this um but the kind of the upshot if if we actually need if we want traction on the ground uh it's a lot more like hey can we slow this conversation down can we take some notes can we make some plans you know get to the end of a meeting say okay who's going to do what when start doing things like I have a project you know uh so one of the random little projects that popped up last week was Wendy McLean doing mapping um she's uh she's had the the concept the idea of visual mapping supercharging you know everything information space projects and everything and she finally kind of last week got to the point where with a couple conversations she's like um I guess I have to do it um and so she she pulled together a map uh in a software tool of the plex around her um and uh said here's an artifact and and it sucked in a lot of ways she didn't send it to the right people it wasn't well named you know I and I'm not I'm not saying any of those things to be mean I'm saying them actually be kind of generative she did it she did something she ran it up the flagpole and and you know because we're because we need more of that a bunch of people said yay that's awesome um and nobody said uh you know Wendy this isn't finished or I wish you had done it better this way or you know so um seeing that was uh a balm to my heart you know somebody just doing something and saying here's a thing and not being embarrassed about saying you know it's not a perfect thing it's a thing and I want I want to do it more and I want more help and you know what's wrong with it and let's go let's do it so more of that I'm feeling dogged I don't know in what order no I've spoken a lot don't go ahead okay um I find myself thinking that we keep talking about trying to help other groups have a conversation why don't we do that with ourselves uh point two is talking about projects uh always makes me feel like when a project is being defined part of the definition is it leaves out a lot of reality often it leaves out the reality that's important to what the project is actually about so uh how do I have a conversation that focuses on an issue on on the real issues that are on our minds where we don't quite know what that is yet especially in this group where we tend to think we're fairly homogeneous but I think we're very heterogeneous if we start looking at what we think is going on in the world a lot of very variance is going to open up here and we're not handling that yet and yet we're talking about helping other groups handle it I'm mixed on that how does anybody else feel I feel like well go ahead uh Phil and Pete I think responding to that okay yeah I kind of agree with um in the sense that we haven't deliberately filtered to certain viewpoints but the character of our interactions provides a subtle filter and we end up with people in the room who think a lot of the same things we think and not always applying critical thinking someone will perhaps take an individual you know challenge a bit or something but I think I think that comment by Doug is important I also think Pete's comment of welcoming the people who actually are ready to do something is critical because one of the things that we're very capable of is thinking about a lot of things but reducing into action that results in change or output um is not collective usually it's very individual Pete and Phil and me um thanks Doug um I I agree conversations are important um and I also agree that it's easy for people to say I'm doing something without uh without really understanding what they're doing or who they're including or who you know what what the the aims and the goals are I think uh so we have a place where we where we have conversations there are a lot of us in conversation right now that's it's centered around matter most um it doesn't that doesn't have to be the only place and there are other conversations that go on in in other dimensions um some of the conversations um I guess we've we've gotten to the point where we have clusters of people small small groups of people uh who have viewpoints and projects uh so trove for instance or massive wiki for instance um where they're building something and they're building it with an opinion and a viewpoint um so we have we have uh first degree discussions where uh you know we talk about massive wiki or something like that and and actually to be to be fair and honest uh a lot of the discussions some of them happen in artifact space um uh where other people can see them and and still a lot of discussions happened uh happen you know between people in zoom rooms or or even worse in private conversations or something like that um so a lot of what is happening with massive wiki you can't see unless uh you happen to be on a call with me and Bill Anderson or me and Wendy Elford um but still uh even even with that we have we have patterns of coming back Vincent will post things about trove here's what's going on with trove or or I will post things here's what's going on with massive wiki um so we have these first degree conversations and those happen you know to some extent already and I guess the the manumost channels act as a primordial soup to use um a metaphor I use sometimes um the the manumost conversations end up being a place where we can kind of see each other and get the idea of what you know people know what Bill is interested in and what Wendy's Wendy Elford's interested in or what I'm interested in and then you can have a a more pointed conversation I have a conversation later today with Mark Carranza we've been playing scheduling dance for a few days but he and I know kind of what we think and that a more focused conversation privately not not because not because we want to keep it private because it's more manageable to have a close private conversation um we're going to do that later today and and something will cool will come out of it so there is within ogm and and the the communities around ogm we do have this reasonably rich way to converse um we also have second degree conversations where clusters of those uh so this is uh flotilla clusters of those people um trove and massive wiki and factor and kiko lab come together in a forum space that is in between those groups um and those are super generative I think because people come to those with a viewpoint an opinion and and uh the thing that we kind of evolved in flotilla was a keen interest in interoperability how can we do our own thing but also meet in the middle and cross cross pollinate cross fertilize what we're doing um so uh that's been super generative and I want to see more of that all over the place um so that's that's kind of the communication and don't you know conversation stuff it's it's actually happening now um it could be richer it definitely could be more artifacti um video youtube recordings are are are certainly artifacts but they're not very accessible um so uh so I guess I try to encourage people to I it's hard it's hard to make artifacts that are useful for other people and useful for yourself but um if you have a mix of meeting notes and recordings then at least you've got a bit of a hack on it uh taking a video recording and turning into a transcript and turning it into highlights or something like that that's a lot of work and it doesn't get done much because it's a lot of work um by the way it just says it just popped in my head ogm could do well just by funding some of that you know um digesting videos into small chunks um so then projects project plans uh the I carry a flag for um I've got a manifesto the the name I have for it is everything is a project um the ogm name is actually something more generic even it's um project template or something like that uh the there is a way and I do it wherever I go to say uh okay let's not just have some wild idea that we're chasing after without much thought or coordination let's actually write this up as a project plan and for me a project plan includes a conversation amongst the people who are doing it what are we trying to do what are we trying to accomplish how will we know that that we've been successful when we accomplish it and what are you know what are we how how are we accomplishing it what are our practices in um kicking track of what we need to do what we've done um whether we've done it the way we like it or not so it's when I say project I don't mean um I I guess none of us have been using the project template very well even me um but I'm also willing to share my project template or a list of other people with their project template um it's it's not hard to to be effective um in setting up goals sharing the goals discussing the goals long enough that you share them with the whole project team um setting up roles where people know what they're doing in a project and then we're moving forward you know on the on those goals uh we've had some pressure from Lyonsburg to to do better at that and so OGM especially Judy and me and Jerry went through that pretty deep um we're we're focusing right now uh you know the OCR thing uh that that Judy brought in I think and and a few of us have picked up on um is a way to sharpen our ability to continue continue to do project stuff I guess so it's it's interesting I thought I was coming into this part of my response saying um oh we do you know we're good we know how to do projects um we know how to do projects and we're doing a sucky job at it I can own that um none of our projects are have good published project plans um and goals and and uh visibility out to other projects and things like that so I will take it as an action item to do better for my projects to do that I'm filled in me yeah um thank you for all that I I echo all that sentiment uh generally um one thing I've seen and I know I haven't met an OGM as long as most people but I do see that we have great conversations and we have conversations and we have conversations and and I think we've all seen that but it just it's just kind of these different conversations one thing I'm trying to do um or we're trying to do is figure out what people do want to work on break out those working groups create those documents those project plans and then I think we can easily see where people are willing to work and maybe people that are talking about projects but won't work on them and then we can figure out what what OGM can support and fund out of those areas of interest I think we do want to take advantage of the people not take advantage but support the people in our group that have that are experts in a space we want to bring people together that are doing things actually doing things and people who want to do things um so creating spaces for that and creating spaces for work because most of our spaces right now are for a conversation and just conversation but how do we create those spaces where people are working and moving forward on different um different topics our different projects sorry um but yeah I think even with the conversation today I was I was trying to say like let's create this air table and we can start that's progress that's at least a functional takeaway rather than say like it will be good to to do this and then next week we're saying oh it'll be good to do this and kind of continue down that path um so I'd very much like to figure out how OGM says right you have an idea this is this these are the next steps like we've we agreed that this is a good idea here's here's how it progresses um but yeah basically just echoing kind of Pete sentiment thanks um a couple things uh yesterday Pete and I were part of a two hour session that Jordan ran for a guy named Yannick Silver who convenes a group called the one degree network which is well-intentioned people trying to get things done in the world and Jordan is trying really hard with the community siege efforts oh and Yannick's network is how I met Jordan in the first place uh halfway through lockdown um and and Jordan was trying really hard and I this this impression was doubled down yesterday just from the process to get all the little flotillas of of of entities to sort of commit to doing things and being on project plans and all of that um he asked me to participate with an eye toward hey um I could host this for OGM as well uh so I was participating yesterday partly with the idea you know do we want uh do we want OGM to be doing this uh etc and um and I was ambivalent and I'd like to debrief with Pete kind of in in this group around that and I just want to hold that for a second and then the second thing is back to what Doug put in the room a moment ago which is I just want to ask Doug what would you like to see us do like what would make you really happy what what what thing could OGMers do that would make you quevel like oh we heard you and we're on it and we're actually doing that can you describe it well it's it's so uh messy in a way uh what I would like messy we apparently love messy so far go ahead well what I would like is a conversation about what the hell's going on in the world and where are we with it so for example I think we're at the point where it's clear we are not going to stop temperature rise below three degrees uh given that what are we going to spend our time doing what's worthwhile and what's our group understanding of that uh is is that even a reasonable question I'm open to to total reframing but I'd like to be in the dynamic conversation about all those things where we don't quite know where we're going it's not defined as a project but it's our common sense of of what is uh to use the language what the fuck is going on and what do we do about it so so um the pilgrimage project I talked about earlier would involve going and visiting people who are working on exactly those kinds of questions each of whom has a set a worldview and a set of opinions and but let me cut in here we don't we can't even do this with ourselves yet why bring why go to other people the the diversity in this group is extreme actually okay um I'm not sure the diversity in this group is extreme I know nobody who's a Q and on member or a far right I'd like there's nobody in this group from the far right uh I bet there are people in this group that think that technology is the solution to climate change and people who disagree with that I totally agree on that I just don't know that that's a broad you know broad as broad a spectrum as I think many of us wish we had a presence in the group um so doing this for ourselves would be great I do this every day in my brain so I have my own opinions expressed as best I can in the brain which is this obscure little tool that is still not sort of in the world and I would love to be doing that conversation with other people in particular the other people who have shown up for OGM and we're not able to do that yet so yes I'm agreed with that but okay but but the pilgrimage is meant to provoke more of that and draw us into collaborating to to pin up those kinds of suggestions and worldviews and rub them up against each other and figure out how this all works um so we have three people in the queue let's go Pete Michael Stacey I think Michael's first okay yeah I think you're right hi I'm apologies for being late I'm just I'm struck as as we talk with a thought that maybe maybe a mental exercise but also it could be really practical is if we went around and we you know identified the groups who are doing the best work on the stuff that is important to us perhaps less nascent than some of our efforts are I mean including factor I would say you know there's probably somebody out there doing what Factor's trying to do better than Factor's doing it and we asked them what they need from us and what we could help them with they would two or one probably say money um and you know our expertise and our wisdom and our ability to help them do what they do pale beside you know fueling them and perhaps publicizing them and I I feel like if OGM as an entity you know this gets back to our discussions about his OGM a non-profit itself what what is our purpose if we had the thought exercise of let's say OGM's funded to the tune of an endowment of you know a billion dollars and we're out there identifying people who are doing the right work funding them and connecting them to each other raising up the ones who may be obscure but you know have great stuff to offer that's that's to me I mean like more more people doing the same stuff is not really what's being cried out for it's like powering the people and connecting the people who are doing things and I don't know if that's a project you know for for us each to um identify people in in the sphere we're in or just people we see that we think are doing great work and we want to connect but that's a way of being outward oriented and not you know navel gazing or or you know collectively navel gazing I'm sorry to be that's that's you know uh so many navels so little time but you know it just really strikes me that that funding is what's needed and direction recognition of direction and how do we do that brief response just to you Michael which is I'm desperately trying to shape OGM up into something that people can fund and the path of that seems to be project oriented pieces that are fundable in the middle of all the stuff we're all trying to do so defining what a project is and then putting up OKRs and what that I'm actually trying to head there so that I can go out and appeal to rich people people have way too much money and or have been trying to solve this problem in different ways so that they might help us go go fund others to do this so part of this would include a fund for saying hey we just located a piece of the puzzle we'd like to give them some money as well and we would become kind of a pass through because our filter our judgment our antennae in the field turned out to be really pretty good because our worldview or our intentions are are understandable and are good in that way so that makes sense it does I mean I would just say that you know I almost think that finding projects that are already in full swing or or you know have really proven themselves in a way that our projects can only begin to when we you know say okay you you and you in this group you know it's like yeah I mean we we we could I think it would help us be funded if we said look you didn't know about these you know 20 projects that we've found in these areas I mean let's say we've picked I mean this isn't this isn't our thing but let's say we picked the the UN 17 and the SDGs and and said here are here's one project in each of these buckets that we have identified as the one that's doing the best work and that we are going to fund if you fund us and we are going to help and shepherd and connect with other you know entities those those are our 17 projects these 17 projects that exist outside of us that are diverse that are you know battle tested by the fact that they've been in existence we're not just dreaming them they exist I think that could be really powerful um thank you um Pete and Stacy um thanks um uh it's an interesting idea Michael I I think well I think maybe you've got something there but so on the one hand Lionsburg and Jordan are hard after the problem of of getting money and distributing to the right people so um uh Jerry has a principle uh I'm going to do this as best as I can do I I've seen need I'm going to do this until I find that somebody else is doing a better job than me and then I'm going to join them and do you know give them as much power and so Jordan Jordan and Lionsburg are deep in the let's redistribute money thing and and so I you know that's why OGM is joining up with Lionsburg in in that process so I feel like that that need is covered and we've got that going as an activity um and it's much harder than any of us thought much much much harder um but it's going that project is actually going well um as as things things are and and if you have any energy or passion about doing that let's get more money to people who are doing a good job or who are capable of doing a good job join up with Lionsburg just you know I that's it's an easy easy one um uh so uh I wanted to honor Doug's you know Doug's thing um I think I have that same question you know what the F is going on um and you know just what the F is going on and all the different places right uh climate soil uh food systems uh you know blah blah blah I think that's a reasonable discussion to have I think you could have a meta project maybe I would call that of of actually going through and probably each of us can rattle off the top three or four amazingly bad things and are amazingly awesome challenges that we have that that if we can solve them the world is going to be much better um but we don't do that in a way that uh I can go to a webpage and say okay so UN got these 17 SGGs here's the 100 or 200 top problems and here are um you know here are five or 10 different ways that you can sort and rank them and and understand the scale of them how many dollars would it take to you know this one is it would only cost 10 billion dollars to do this one you know or you know uh you could have a like a shopping cart is not quite the right way to do that Amazon does a good way a good set of you know let me look at this data a couple different ways trove is even better at that um if we gave if Vincent was able to accept money to take part of trove and make it into something where you could see not only who's working on this but just what are the problems you know and Vincent is a wizard at making different ways to visualize that different ways to think about it ways to structure those sets of information so that it's easy to pull out lots of pull it out in lots of different ways that would be an awesome thing so so to honor Doug's you know anything that we could do um I think that's a good potential project um so I can I can say really clearly for me the problem that I see is actually a meta problem or a meta meta problem the problem isn't any one of those problems or the the super problem is that we have grown into over the past two three four hundred years we have grown into a coexistence a codependency with super scale um organizational social structures we we we let these big corporations and big nation states do incredibly stupid things because most of the time they kind of provide us a better life or what we think of as a better life right so so from a strategic point of view the the problem that I have chosen it's not climate change it's not food systems it's not um you know whatever it's not information management whatever it's figuring out how we reconstruct the the whole of society all you know five billion people or whatever into much smaller units who that are human scale that do rational things rather than counter-rational things that for me is the top line problem um and it's easy for me to see it now it's easy for me to go uh does this effort work against you know towards that goal or or is it not helping that goal tactically so that that goal is is big and large um and there are lots of parts of it that I can't work on but the part that I can work on in a tactical fashion is how do I decentralize knowledge how do I decentralize information how do I get more people talking to each other in groups how do I make groups of groups work right all of that that I can actually do so that's the tactical um solution set that I have for that big super problem so now to say the conversation of what the f is going on and how bad is it and all of those things um it's it's funny we're at a point where you can kind of like like close your eyes throw a dart and you've hit a problem that you ought to be working on fast as possible or your grandkids are going to be dying dying a horrible death right um so the one for me that keeps coming up is claus and food systems you know it's when you listen to claus for more than about three minutes you go okay uh claus has set a timeline 30 years you know uh right now we've got 90 of the food production and food distribution in the hands of you know nine entities super global entities that don't give a shit about about humans um and that is going to burn up the planet and cause everybody to you know or millions of people not everybody it's going to cause millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people to go into major food crisis which is going to lead to a bunch of other crises right it's pretty easy to go I'm going to drop everything else I'm not doing this because I have something that I picked but I actually don't need to do a survey either of of to say you know pick food systems or climate change is another good one or you know the the the one of the year is um uh just dealing with pandemics and then that breaks into just deal with disinformation and misinformation and the way that people humans cluster around stupid things rather than clustering around smart things you know pick one of those and you're done you've got your the rest of your life you can be working on that super productively um so back to just start doing something the there's the heuristic I have kind of is pretty simple um it's uh I am super passionate about something and I'm going to do it kind of like Jerry says I'm going to do it until I find somebody doing something better so I think that's one rule that you can have there's a thing that I'm passionate about and I'm going to cluster people around me and we're going to get it done I'm going to work on food systems or I'm going to work on uh social equity or I'm going to work on you know whatever pick it start doing it if that doesn't call out to you um look around you who is doing something and uh who are the you know who who do you feel resonant with you like what they do so um so the exemplar from for massive wiki for me uh is Bill Anderson um Bill likes the idea of massive wiki and stuff like that um uh Bill likes uh you know lots of things uh as it turns out he and I like working together Bill's like you know I don't have a burning need to make massive wiki the thing but it's it's toward the general direction of making the world a better place and Pete I really like working with you you know we have a lot of fun together so pick somebody you like working with so either come up with the thing that you're going to work on and start attracting people like hack or look for the people who are looking for help and go you know I I'm kind of ambivalent about you know what exactly I'm doing but I wanted whatever I'm doing I want to do it with a bunch of people I really enjoy working with and I'm going to join up with you and tell me what to do and I'll get it done so either either one of those those are good heuristics um Stacy then back then me well building off what Pete said but triggered by Doug and Judy this is um there's a really small piece that I think is really needs more focus and Pete you told the story about Wendy I don't know the situation but my question is are we looking at the dynamics how come people don't jump and say oh I know how we can make that better I think that again just looking at a small group just people we know like Doug said why aren't people stepping up to say well if you do this like there's something going on there that's and it's not just here it's in the world and we're not looking at what motivates people to jump on and be part of a project um and the other thing I wanted to say is the far right which is now Q Q party they created jobs and media companies for people to use their creative energy they created a way for people to do what they want and that's why I started meeting with Jerry saying the mission has to be take over the fourth estate all of us for the people a real you know so that's all I wanted to say thanks Stacy Doug well just respond I think we almost have a conversation here that's interesting to me okay Pete Pete's assertion that decentralization is the path opens a question for me how with decentralization can you take on the oil companies and global issues it just doesn't seem to be that it scales so my conclusion is we need radical decentralization and a new kind of integration at the same time um so let me I've got a bunch of things built up in my Q here and then I'll pass back to Pete so um so I'm really frustrated partly because I put a couple links here commenting solutions to world crises planetary crises etc Doug I've been actually curating the questions you're addressing actively every day all the time when I hit a great article I put it in the right place I have questions about like I have a big question big world questions your question about hey if we try to replace appliances that's never going to work I would love to rub that against Sol Griffith or somebody else who says nope we just have to electrify everything and don't worry about it here's how we solve that there's been a really great conversation on one of them too many lists I'm on lately about batteries and how recyclable batteries are and it turns out they're insanely recyclable like if you just get old batteries back you can it's like it's like a gold mine but you don't have to go break them out in a part you just dig through the batteries and you've got raw materials and it turns out that new battery technology needs less cobalt than the original anyway all those things are little fixes to all the different parts of the puzzle and I'm frustrated because a lot of that stuff is trapped inside people's heads like yours Doug and you've got a manuscript out which is a book form the book form seems to be the way that most people are thinking and I'm like the book is too long too big it's not nuggetized it's not it doesn't actually work in conversation well I don't have time to read through the queue of things that I have open tabs I can't make my way through in a day partly because what I do when I hit a tab when I hit something that's well done is I deconstruct it and connect it up to everything else I've seen before in my little weird weird web and in proprietary software that is not free yet out in the world and I'm like incredibly frustrated that other people aren't working similarly in whatever tool strikes their fancy I don't care and sharing out a consistent larger scale web of where the fuck are we and what matters and how are we going about solving it and so I'm really frustrated by that because I really want to be doing that day to day and so I want to say how do we get others to join in producing some pieces of those artifacts and that might mean that there's only six people on earth who like doing it but if they form a squad and go and like swarm different kinds of projects and debrief and construct it and build this intras net between us that even that is very useful and how do we turn this into a process not just a series of projects so I'm trying to figure out how OGM can like like Sherman's March to the Sea terrible analogy but leave a swath of OGM activity and leave behind a trail of people going oh we should think and do work like this and we should start using project plans and put them into the same web of projects and people can find out what we care about and where we are and then just keep going versus us sitting here and deciding and Pete I hit this when you and I were trying to make a you know using your everything as a project thing and I'm trying to find a middle ground here suddenly I saw an infinite unfolding recursive set of project plans because to do this project plan we needed another project plan which was then and I could see all of my time accounted for for the next decade and I couldn't see my way through getting all those things done so I'm trying to figure out how to be like a ninja in the field just doing the connecting and the interviewing and whatever and stimulating all of us to work toward this vision of solving all the little puzzle pieces hey somebody else is doing this better let's adopt that and bring it into the middle and now we've solved that piece of it and now we're doing that much better than we used to whether that's taking a video and turning it into really useful post-production you know materials which there's now enough AI in the world to do a beautiful job of that where why don't we do that that sounds great so that then as we connect up the Indra's net any one of the nodes can go back to the best conversations that happened around that particular node for example right and that little snippet out of 15 different calls is all connected up and you can go oh and everybody can come up to speed really quickly on it etc so that's basically like where I'm thrashing on all this it's like I see this possibility and I just want us to get to work building it and I keep getting sort of stuck on sandbars along the way so Pete then Judy you're muted I clicked the wrong button I think Judy should go first okay Judy then Pete I think that one of the great challenges that we're dealing with is I mean we're a group of intellectuals sitting around trying to figure out how we can engage larger communities of people to think about it and the vast majority of people have a narrower potential span a shorter time track and they're not interested in integrating a lot of new information so it almost gets down to sloganism or or bites because most of the people and I'll use kind of the EE Cummings most people term from his poetry because I don't mean it necessarily pejoratively it's just different and there's a cluster of these people whose views and values and behaviors are very different than mine and I think that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the big issues they're busy trying to put food on the table keep their kids clothes make sure the kids don't turn into delinquents and all sorts of other pragmatics of living and so it needs to be very relevant to their day-to-day things for them to care enough to even begin to listen or think about something you know if you go to them and say I think I have an idea that would make kindergarten better for your kid do you think her kid's teacher would like it they'll probably listen and they'll actually talk to you but if you talk education in a bigger window they tune out instantly and so somehow we need to get a lot more granular or we need to find mechanisms to engage individuals who like cracking new eggs you know and bringing ideas to different groups of people it has to be kind of grass rootsy rather than elevated and I don't know exactly how to do that I've never been political but I'm starting to think I need to be because maybe I can just be the camel's nose in the tent if I plant a seed here and somebody likes it they'll go run with it and I can plant the seed somewhere else and another group will run with it and then I can hook the two groups up so I'm kind of running personal social experiments right now trying to determine what might work and people don't read I mean that's part of the problem so even if it's in the brain a lot of people don't really read and they don't have the attention this sounds awful but they're not interested in or intrigued by following the path of divergent logic and sorting out what's closer to reality I think there's certain types of people who are but I don't find that in my neighbors necessarily I find it in the backs people that I know at the universities people who are on average more highly educated than the general public of the country and I'm not sure that it's accurate to say that those highly educated people are the ones that can really influence change because a lot of times they're pretty socially disengaged from change processes so I don't mean to sound cynical but I'm really struggling personally with how to have impact to invite the engagement that is needed to actually create any meaningful impact. Thanks Judy I love that. Pete and Michael and me. It's funny I've said something similar Judy people don't read people another another one is people don't watch videos because I don't watch I can't watch a YouTube video it's really hard for me unless it's about music theory actually people don't wiki people don't take notes people don't make project plans the thing that people do do is people socialize people chat and people like to talk about their interests and people and chat happens in different places right sometimes it's a zoom room sometimes it's phone calls sometimes it's telegram sometimes it's matter most sometimes it's a pub so the one of the lessons and and people will read voraciously or watch watch a youtube video voraciously if it's if it's something that they need in their life right so so the the thing to do is to figure out where people are are chatting and and start talking about your passions where people are chatting when you're chatting with them and that's that's the way you end up making connections so and and Stacy had some good questions my I have two observations the thing that people are attracted to is activity so if you're doing something if you're doing a thing they're going to be people who say oh can I help you do that thing whatever it is right so so the the lesson then is start doing a thing and telling people about it and you'll start attracting people who follow you and help you or you won't and you'll get the you know that's the universe feeding back to you that you're doing the wrong thing or or you you're embarrassed when you talk about it or you haven't figured out how to talk about it in a way that that's interesting to anybody I don't see those things happening very much if you're doing something when whatever you're doing you get people reacting to you and you get people saying can I help you so the it comes back to just start doing something so now I can also make the observation that when you start just start doing something when you figure out something that you should be doing it's scary as heck it's confusing it as heck something that is a little bit different that you're passionate about um and that you think is the answer um it's it doesn't by definition it doesn't fit into anybody else's bucket and so you're trained both both from human nature just you know just because we're um animals and primates and stuff like that just by human nature it goes against the grain to to say I want to do a thing that's a little bit new and a little bit different it doesn't you know your brain even doesn't want to parse it it's like yeah I don't think you're that that doesn't make sense why don't you go you know do the thing that everybody else is doing and then our culture is even worse right it trains you that there's important things and not important things and that probably if you come up with a new idea it's a not important thing so you have to fight really hard and meditate and do all kinds all kinds of crazy stuff just to be able to focus long enough and say this is really I I can feel this this is my intuition saying this is a right thing to do and by golly I'm going to start doing it and I don't know how to even express what it is that I'm doing but I'm you have to convince yourself that you're going to start that you're going to start doing it and it's super scary and it's confusing and I've learned over the course of a few decades doing new start-upy kinds of things it's when the the feeling of confusion and frustration and disappointment in yourself or thinking about crazy things and all of that that's when you know that you're you've got something important and you need to keep digging at it why do I think that's important how can I explain that to somebody else what are the you know who's the first person I can talk to and say you know I have this idea and I think it's crazy but what do you think and take their information and and you know start building a thing that that keeps making sense and keeps making sense it's really hard work and it's you know obviously arguably the most important thing that you can do is to come up with a new idea that nobody else has really thought of and stick to it and start doing it and start executing it and and starting to tell other people what you think it is and when they tell you what they think it is continue to feed that into your vision and make it bigger and stronger and bigger and stronger so it's really hard work um it's it and it doesn't feel rewarding uh for a long time it feels like you're beating your head against the wall or you're doing something stupid or poor wrong but you have to keep doing that long enough to to get over the fact that to get over the friction the startup friction of of doing a new thing and that's how you that's how you do it I think what you just said pit is really really important um and we should all kind of take a moment and pause and think about what we're doing that's congruent with that it's sort of walking the talk and then letting other people notice that you're doing something different and not pushing it on them but inviting them to make it better or whatever that that creates a movement because because I've worked a lot on what historically would have been called change management and you actually can't manage change you can invite change and you can model change there's a bunch of other words but you can't manage change because it's too inwardly driven so I think you're being very wise Pete thank you and I like Judy's instinct here to pause for a second just reflect on it we don't slow our conversations down very much very often which Pete had mentioned earlier as well and I operate under the self-delusion that I'm doing what Pete just described that that like the words that just came out of your mouth Pete felt like very very much like put the journey I'm on or what I'm trying to do and that's my my own perception about what I'm trying to do and I'm not sure that that matches up with anybody else's perception from outside so why don't we just sit for a second with uh with that with uh what Pete put on the table um Michael then me I apologize for breaking our moments of silence but I actually have to have to leave for another meeting um that did want to say in in listening to Pete what you said and and I'm thinking about you know the way activity attracts um I just want to add that um measurable results attract and and and Judy what you were saying about I have an idea that will help your kindergarten teacher teach better um I think it's really interesting to think about there's um I'm in a group that's discussing ways that we think all kindergarten teachers could teach better is less effective than what you said but even more effective is you know here's a kind kind of kindergarten teacher over here who's using this method and getting these measurable results um you know maybe maybe you should pattern you should help your teacher pattern their lessons after that um and then here are finding two teachers who are getting results in slightly different ways connecting them and seeing if one one plus one could be more than two um I mean it does circle back to my you know kind of looking outward um and and supporting people who are already getting results doing things um but you know I just was struck by by yes activity attracts and um results you know attract even more um not not to say that we shouldn't do things and we shouldn't be active but but recognition of others success in being active should be attracted to us and with that I'm afraid that's all right thanks for being here we're running over a call time as it is by a lot so um by Michael so I'll let me jump in briefly and then to Stacy um and I'll put my notes in the in this thing so I I just realized I had four really great conversations over the long weekend one of which was with the relative uh who was described to me as bipolar and has kind of stepped out of things and had some health issues and blah blah blah and it turns out that he used to teach communications at Fresno State and the rabbit holes he was chasing for his own personal satisfaction were insanely useful for OGM one of the people he he introduced me to was the thinker Walter Fisher who created this thing called the narrative paradigm that basically says that narratives or stories everything boils not the narratives and only narratives carry like public opinion change people's minds whatever else which is like a wholesale theory but but uh comes back to like our emphasis on storytelling and memes and other sorts of things like like and and again I think we have to work a little bit everywhere at once because we have to work on the big picture and what we think is broken and large-scale ideas but we also have to talk to individual humans who are doing stuff and when we find something that's high functioning replicate it make it available put it into the pattern languages that we're developing one of the one of the things is like how do we identify high functioning people entities processes and put them in places where they're easier to pick up and implement and and appropriate and adapt and appropriate by anybody else and if we can lather once repeat on that cycle at whatever scales we're doing good work I think that that's important work that that we can sort of do and then such an important piece of this is simple human connections and one of the things we do pretty well is is build community of practice and just build community so that we can see who else is in the room but there's a lot more there one of my goals is to make something that's that gives brain-like results but is one step more complicated than instagram because there's millions of people apparently perfectly capable of posting endlessly to instagram Pinterest name you know name your your dozen tools and add hashtags in a very sophisticated way which is a metadata which I love so can we can we do something that's that simple but only one step more that then takes us into weaving the collective fabric right and I don't I think that that's a really interesting challenge and and it's a it's a user interface challenge it's a whatever we can we can sort of put it out there I will say that people are reading and doing stuff like like people are surprisingly sort of anal about stuff and and like in QAnon the phrases I did the research which means they followed a rabbit hole of really long videos and listening to tedious people with completely bogus ideas building on top of false data but they actually spent a bunch of time doing the research and they are convinced from all this media that was generated sort of in in this alternate reality game called QAnon that was media was actually generated and Stacy you point out really nicely that people are being paid they're making a living feeding this alternate reality game that is taking you know democracy and society down down the tubes so so anyway and then like the number of humans watching videos and the number of hours of video being consumed all the time is unbelievably high so Pete I know that you have a dislike for like it's like Mark Antoine he wants he wants text and a command line and he'll be like happier if the whole world goes back to like in the beginning was the command line but the general world is like all over the stuff and and just eating it up like crazy I am just we had a discussion in chat about video so the videos I watch are the ones that I'm passionate I know watch video I love watching videos but I have to be passionate I have to be learning something and I also realize the videos I watch are edited so that all the time it's worthwhile rather than high quality yeah well you know an OGM call is high quality but you know it's got a lot of discussion and then some amazing points and a lot of discussion and some amazing points so I'm not going to watch that you know cool um Stacy then Judy is it a short thing Judy it is a short thing but go ahead Stacy thanks I'll be short too I won't address everything um oh having to Judy mentioned earlier these are academics here and then Pete you said you you know what you just said about getting a project going I just want to point out that all those people that were part of like the Q thing those are people that might have given up your approach and so they will just fill in the void they became active in a movement just talking to people no work involved and I'm interested in you know dealing with that go ahead Judy yeah me too very much thanks Stacy go ahead well I was just going to suggest that that one of the things that's most that I have found most effective is engaging in meaningful dialogue is saying I have the nugget of an idea but I need feedback and I need input to help shape the idea and then genuine listening to the other person's perspective if you ask for help not very many people will just say outright I'm too busy to help with anything and it's the most genuine way I have found to engage people in thinking about any dimension of what's occurring or what might need to change in what's occurring and so it works pretty well in small groups or even groups of 20 I don't know exactly how you do that in groups of hundreds or thousands but I just wanted to put that nugget out there for thinking about because it's it really if you want change in people and then and you know in yourself that you're not going to change easily without some kind of dialogue that causes you to think that gee I'm missing something here I need to really think about this because maybe I've been looking at it wrong um that's a social practice that is important as well and it might mean something in terms of how we would want to engage people in the topics that we wish them to think about um yes and and one of the things that comes up for me here is like how do we slow down the conversations in some sense I mean I've got these contradictory impulses on the one hand I don't have time to listen to hour and a half conversations from lots of different people which are being posted like with wild abandon on places like YouTube which I'm guilty of all the time and I wish there was an auto auto summarizer or a place that goes straight into the places where I want to sort of figure out what's going on on the other hand I think that I often wind up trapped in I'm trying to sort of do the brain curation while hosting while managing and some ability to put us all into bullet time where we're like and then hit pause so one thing I did with a couple of really conservative people I had text conversations with over the last over lockdown actually sort of into the election cycle and before I think was I deconstructed one of a couple of them sent me like a several paragraphs full full full of statements of stuff and so I deconstructed them and I put them in my brain I basically took took each sentence and made a thought and then connected them to the arguments and then I went back to these people and said hey I took you seriously like what you wrote I just I just put it in like like this this tool I have would you like to sort of talk about it in a deeper fashion and both of them bailed and said no thanks don't not interested or don't have time or whatever like they went away but my my gesture was both I'm really interested in what you're saying and I want to I want to understand it and if we peel it apart and complexify a little bit we might understand each other better etc it was it was an attempt to open that door and when those attempts failed but I think that that's an important thing to try to do and so in modeling you know all all perspectives into the conversation anyway and then Pete I really wanted to debrief a little bit maybe separately from now because we're almost on two hours here about yesterday's call because one of the things I thought was like I don't know how we're supposed to solve this in two in two hours and get people committed onto projects and all that like you know one of the things on the table was we should all just harmonize our worldview first and I'm like yeah that's not going to happen right I'm like yeah that that that's just not going to happen how do we get a good enough agreement on like roughly where we're headed to then work on stuff I like I could get there but man the idea that we're going to harmonize a worldview first that isn't so fast or that isn't so high level and whitewash as to be meaningless for the project like we're going to bet we're going to make life better for all of humanity that is awesome me too I really don't know what that means in terms of how you think it's going to be implemented or how I do right and that didn't that didn't turn up any interesting information for me about about how to move forward so so I'm interested in and Jordan has offered to do that for us and I'm very mixed because on the one hand we totally need something that'll catalyze us into people raising their hand and saying I have a project who'd like to play here right which is what you're asking for Pete but I'd love to see as well and we don't we're still building the mirror where we can see what a project is and who's got projects and all that go ahead Judy I was just going to say depending on when you have that call and if it would be of use to you as well as me I'd be interested to participate because I feel really badly that I wasn't able to be on the call yesterday to just see what was happening so listening to a debrief and thinking about it be good cool thanks Judy we'll do that um I have a feeling we should probably wrap our call at this point any we're pretty far over the normal time already we are and Pete and I had scheduled a different conversation for this hour which we didn't publicize at all so we're going to postpone it but it was about the question he raised during the the MOU process which was hey what a fact basically answering frequently asked questions about what does it mean to be affiliated with OGM like what are my responsibilities what are my duties what what liabilities am I exposed to all those kinds of questions and this is stuff that we need to actually address so Pete and I will rebook that call and broadcast it better okay and so the decentralization thing which Pete just put in the chat is really interesting and I think means different things to different people like decentralization is one of those rich words like democracy that and trust that that like hey I'm not exactly sure what it means and I'm wondering how to how to harness that exploration right um how do we how do we understand better what we mean by decentralization what the options are who's doing a great job of it all of that um and I think there's many different ways to skin that cat I don't know why anybody invented that analogy about that that idiom and are there many ways to skin a cat I mean like not not being a tanner you can start in any not being a tanner I don't know is that the thought you will really want to leave us with no no no I'd like something more something closer to puppies and kittens oh wait there's the cat again um any last thoughts um Doug just maybe this is the last thought I would love to find a way to liberate your thoughts from the book format and and and I at one of there's like millions of students out there young humans trying to learn and trying to become literate in media and do whatever else there's also a whole bunch of people with really interesting ideas out there some of which are way out there and kakamemi but all of which could use deconstruction reassembly manifestation in other forms of of media visualization storytelling mean making I don't know what but is there a way to to to swarm this need and to invent in the process the thing that absolutes the book and the movie and the documentary and the long form video I don't know and still it doesn't kill off the book in the long form video but enriches them somehow go ahead Pete it's a really good question I think that the answer is similar with your brain Jerry by the way so you curate a lot into the brain but it's kind of a one-way journey right so the the answer is that books and brains this this goes back to the people don't read thing people learn people learn and do by conversations so when and and actually taking a book or or the brain and turning it into even better or even smaller or even more diverse kinds of media doesn't solve the problem or it only solves the problem for the people who did the conversion of that basically and then maybe a little bit for other people you know if they they could see a snippet of Doug's book on Twitter and go wow that resonates with me maybe that would lead them to read you know three more tweets and maybe that would read them make get them to read a page or a paragraph or or a chapter or something like that but in the main we who are authors and curators think that the answer to things is better authorship and better curation right the answer is more conversations um so what you really need is somebody taking a book and saying um and maybe even just this chapter of this book is really important to me um the rest of it is interesting but i don't really care about it this chapter is really interesting to me i want to talk about it with somebody that's when you get you know can you help me digest this book can you can i teach the material from this book to you in conversation right it's all about conversations the way that that people work the way that muggles the way that muggles work with information is by conversation and activity and those of us who are authors and editors and publishers and knowledge managers forget that because we think oh i'm i'm you know i love this thing that i've condensed into a thousand pages or condensed into a hundred thousand nodes nobody cares you know at the people who or the the people muggles care when it is conversation and action about stuff that is relevant to their lives and so i agree with everything you just said and i'm hoping that i'm hoping to create artifacts that enrich those many conversations and that you should you should hope to make conversations that need lots of little artifacts i'm not sure that's a different thing i think it is actually because it's it's an invitation to improve something by participation so so around the world trying to recover reefs people sink old ships and that old ship becomes armature for a new reef and like critters come and glom up to it and fish swim through the portholes and hey new reef i'm seeing this intro's net that we're building that creates a capability but not the activity right it's the fish who come and live there exactly is is the deal right totally great um stacey then dug and then we're out of the call one more thing and i promise i won't bring this up again but i just want for a minute for you to think about um phenomena of like american idol where millions of people around the world want this chance to shine and you take something like that and you invite young people to come and do what you said about doug's book to come and break apart doug's book and create their own videos competing with each other because they want to be the best to create that version and that's the way to energize people and that's what i am trying to put out there and keep the problem is i don't want to do this project alone i want to throw out the idea and i want to be a part of it that's it that's all and then i want to go deal with the muggles so that's so i think when i'm talking about stuff i'm talking about what you just described as well like you're what you just said you are exactly into what i think i would like to help us stand up so that everybody is swarming all these different ideas creating artifacts by the bazillions tagging them up and linking them up a little bit a few people are like cleaner fish going through this whole thing saying oh this connects over here and here's a puzzle part and you all should talk you know because a lot of this is social it's not it's not uh intellectual and so forth anyway i i love it love that um dog you have the last word for this call well uh there are two groups i'm actively involved with where we do have a conversation one is economists that are stuck on thinking that the market and technology will solve our problems and the other is a group on reinventing government who think that if you get the government process right the problems are solved without ever having to specify what the problems are they're trying to work on so for me i'm pushed by both of those to want to have a meta conversation about what more deeply is going on and can we shift our strategy now notice in both of those the book plays almost no part at all except for me personally which is a fun place for it to be uh and with both of those groups i'm able to move them towards a conversation that was broader than they expected but it's not yet at the level of uh what i think we can say about the darker forces going on in society anyway i thought you had the last word Doug but apparently Judy does well just a notion that we've said many times that people become engaged because of a sense of belonging and i think that's the problem with knowledge and books and other content is you're not connecting to another person you don't feel like you belong and so what Doug is talking about i think it's it's very different to have a conversation with a person than to sit alone and read a book and i think that that's the factor that we're dealing with in the reaching of many people and so i don't know how to fix it but i think that relational piece is a really critical piece and it's more about the relationship than than the content at the beginning than the relationship shapes the shared content but there are some books that are all about membership so if i say my favorite book is atlas shrugged there's a club if i say my favorite book is the bible there's a club and i can you know silence bring what have you there's like a bunch of milestone books that represent a community in a way of thinking and are sort of iconic where almost having read the book is is membership process like ritual to sort of be in the club although i would probably say many people who love these works have never actually read the full book but but the books represent the community in some sense so so there's a there's the books are artifacts that that that you know carl popper and his thinking there's like a lot of these kinds of things and i think dug hits these all the time in his conversations because he's talking to communities whose works are represented by a canonic series of different books that are world that include worldviews and how we how we solve these problems and one of the world's problems right now is that we're busy laboring under this you know rugged individualist neoconservative globalized consumer capitalist worldview that is supported by a whole bunch of intellectual works pete you want to describe what you just put in the chat and then we'll be done no another time okay um thank you all for a really generative conversation uh alas yet another conversation but i think we put in front of ourselves a lot of things we'd like to get done that will take us out of the space of mere conversation so with that have a great day everybody aloha