 All right, so this is an inside Jerry's brain call on Wednesday, July 10th, 2019 We are going to talk about online places for dialogue and group work and small group work and things like that I Will I will apologize ahead of time because as anybody is saying something that I know I have some relevant resources in my brain To share this being inside Jerry's brain. I will take over and do a little screen sharing as you're talking So my apologies ahead of time. I'm trying to add something relevant to the conversation and see how that helps our group process Actually, that's a so inside Jerry's brain is a bit of a group process experiment in that way but Lawrence and I met because he His platform sutra was hosting a conversation that happened on Monday, which I couldn't attend because on Monday My mom got a brand new shiny hip installed So I was busy waiting for for her surgery to be complete But it was a conversation with Rosa Subizarreta on some really interesting things and Lawrence if you want to take any of these pads in I'd love to see how we can you know We have convened people with lots of expertise and lots of different Different areas and see how we can be helpful in unpacking this this set of issues Okay, sorry you handing it over to me at this point for a moment. Yes If you want to go back and forth exactly exactly on whatever you say Okay, so Let's see where to start I will give kind of the broad background on sutra and we'll kind of evolve and see see where it goes because I'm kind of speaking to a Wide audience without a clear Specific say use case in mind. I'm just gonna kind of speak about everything broadly and hopefully we'll land in a place that is interesting to people So sutra has been You know percolating for the last five years or so and and really started with an inquiry into how to facilitate Meaningful connection online I I've been kind of very interested in in this area about how do you create genuine sense of human Connection between people in an online context. I've been doing startups and online tech stuff since 2004 so that's a domain that I've been very familiar with You know people throw around boards like community and and I Kind of Was called to and I caught myself. I think someone actually called me on it I was like what exactly do you mean when you say community and that was about 2012 or 13? I was like, hmm, what do I mean when I say community? So as I started to unpack that rabbit hole around and around authentic human connection and and what I mean by that is You know, it's not what happens in a Facebook forum for the most part I don't want to say never but you know, what I mean is that when two human beings interact and They're left with a few a sense of you know, actually knowing the other person kind of caring about the other person Ideally feeling supported and having a genuine kind of sense of relationship with the other person There's obviously lots of degrees about that but as as I've continued to explore that area the What really emerged was a theme of communication and how do you improve the quality of communication? between people how do you expand the level of awareness in a given communication so Specifically same as I'm speaking here or as any of you are listening, you know bringing awareness to you know Just my body sensations. I'm a little bit nervous talking to people in an online environment and Possibly sharing that if we were gonna do say a more kind of structured theory you style process we might Hold a moment of stillness and and bring awareness to any subtle sensations or thoughts or images That or feelings that might be coming up for us and sharing that I find all of those things to be practiced skill sets and things to learn that you can either Learn that specifically or you can you know have a dialogue and just learn as you go in the context of that so it's been and and it also to me feels that that is an ingredient a major ingredient in Really better decision-making in in generating better sources of knowledge better insight, you know into I you know to kind of take it to the extreme of potential is to just really Creating a better outcome for humanity You know if people can listen more deeply and use their awareness in more expanded ways I believe that that would improve a lot of situations and and so you could say that's kind of the The the ultimate end goal here. So to kind of bring it back to a very grounded level as as this exploration into community work and connecting people has Evolved and emerged. We really started to get into small groups so the small group paradigm was was really crystallized for me after taking the u-lab course in 2014 and That was one of the first experiences where I'd interacted with a bunch of strangers online over a period of time and I came out with a very real sense of connection to these people and And I was like, wow, this is this is, you know, this is real. I like I feel connected to these people It's more real than any other online experience. I've had in that sense And the idea that the way that people form Meaningful relationships is through small groups and and that if you know if you're going to explore something like an awareness building dialogue Then that works best in a small group, you know, it's it's hard to You know because this quality of this this way of dialog and really revolves around Listening to each person and feeling heard by each person and each person speaking And and kind of excavating what is in each person's awareness That is difficult to do when you're in a group of a hundred people or a thousand people I did, you know, sort of somewhere. There's a sweet spot between five to ten and So we've been with that in mind. We've been exploring How do you work with scalable small group interaction? How do you? Optimize that how do you deal with all the challenges around? Engagement and you know, you bring a group of strangers together and you know into a small group and You know, how do you kind of run that in the ideal way? How do you? Create a tool that can possibly work in different contexts where small groups might be relevant It could be community decision-making. It could be a learning experience. It could be a collaborative experience So I'm just kind of painting different contexts here that we're thinking about You know, for example, you know when I Love the idea of co-creation. I think that's a big kind of motivating thing for me and and as over the years I've participated in various co-creative Experiences and processes. I have observed many common challenges Many co-creative efforts I tend to fizzle out because there's a lack of directionality There's a certain amount of chaos and ambiguity and and it's the nature of the the process is that you're when you're you know Co-creating you're delving into Especially in the theory you sense you're delving into the unknown and when you're working with the unknown One of the biggest challenges and discomforts is that you are well, you're working with the unknown You don't necessarily know where you're going and that's a really big challenge I've been part of many different groups where people are constantly trying to figure out where they're Going or you know, how to somehow actualize their potential and So and so I think there are certain inherent Aspects of a co-creative experience that revolve around Harvesting and and and curating what has already been spoken and and said To to work with that so when you have an online discussion It you know, what was said three days ago might be gone It's you know way back in the past and so it's how do you capture that? How do you somehow retroactively organize that? How do you make the most of? everything the group has Interactive around So there's there's a number of aspects there One is just the quality of awareness and reflection in the current dialogue and two is what's being done with what has been said and Three is possibly, you know, how is the group then? Circling backs if you think of a co-creative process as a type of iteration And and you're so you're iterating and kind of reviewing what's come up Reviewing what you've said and then iterating into the next action So if you don't do that that you're kind of just perpetually stuck in the unknown and that's bound to fizzle out So all of that is kind of my very abstract and broad way of loosely introducing you to the kind of the themes that we're thinking about with with the software And I will say that, you know, we started out building a community kind of broad community platform and You know, we came up I think where we found a focal point that was Most grounded and and receptive was around learning experiences, you know, when when there's a clear Benefit for a clear reason for a person to be participating. They want to learn something It's much easier to kind of put them into the group construct. It's much easier to take them through a process Versus just a broad Conversational community and and so our software works in both contexts We've found it easier in in the context of like a specific learning experience I I very much Welcome your feedback as as I show you the software around kind of different applications and and uses and you know I'm hoping that part of what will come out of this call will be some interesting ideas around How that can go Um, so at this point, maybe I'll I'll pause I'll hand it over to you, Jerry And then whenever we can ask some questions or whatever and then the next step might be A type of screen. That sounds great. Um, and uh, you're seeing the chat I see the chat. I haven't not been reading it Exactly because it's really hard to actually speak coherence And follow the chat so totally get that but but you'll see some questions in there and in fact some answers So judy asked community as a noun or as a verb michael then posted A link to a post from eight 1985 titled community as a verb. That's awesome Um, and so you'll see a couple things going back and forth there Um, and I think I'd love to do a quick swing through Who we've got here and just just get a little temperature reading for how do you feel about online discussions? Have you ever experienced a fantastic one something like that? Um, and you know, what what about the what sort of attributes make for a really good online conversation? And I'll add before I just open the floor and one very tiny thing that was part of I don't remember where it was It might have been uh on the well it might have been on eyes or something like that But really really early on when when we were all doing terminal sessions that had all scrolled into a buffer One of these forums had a little banner that came across your screen That just said take a minute and send to yourself before entering this particular thread or discussion And it didn't pause your keyboard. You could immediately start pounding at the keys But just the banner acted as a little baby threshold And made conversation inside just that little bit more mindful So so I think sometimes the affordances are insanely subtle And sometimes even the limitations of the medium like, you know 300 bod haze modem and the scrolling log and just you know, ascii Actually, we're pretty fruitful in that way. So Uh, whoever would like to jump in please do Yeah, actually, I just want to say and hi hi Lawrence. Hi mark one of the theory you sessions This aspect of Injecting some little hints or encouragements for both personal and group process awareness Is to me that that's a really key area these days, especially in How do you get groups together online? And especially in the context where we're dealing with Issues that are anthropogenic in origin where you cannot Completely objectify the question you have to include interest subjectivity essentially And so to me this is absolutely crucial area Absolutely agree and and I made a tiny comment in the in the chat about this is what facebook gets asked backwards So facebook business model is all about selling us to advertisers and you know Provoking us to become addicted to sharing too much of our information which they can then sell to advertisers If they had actually built a platform with the intention of maybe helping civilization be civil and become civilization again They would have built a very different platform They would have built different things but Maybe we'd be addicted to helping each other right now and in really fruitful ways and maybe I mean the whole formula behind the curtain To be very different and would lead to a different set of designs And I hope we explore what the designs could and ought to be and and and I say that partly With no hope that facebook is going to change that dramatically Partly also knowing that when you have to go to a different place for a special conversation It's not as useful as when the place you're always in Is really good for a special conversation So if facebook could make a leap like that more people it would affect many more people Than than a separate platform that does this I think this is just my hunch So i'm trying to figure out what what does that look like? How does that play out? anybody else Judy jean michael good experiences, uh, you're muted judy sorry Uh, it seems to me that we're looking at multiple levels of awareness and dimensions in this Because to have the sort of mindful conversations and co-creation That is being described by lorenz You actually need a population of reasonably self-aware people who are Self-aware for themselves and able to manage their emotions and reactions in context in a reasonable range and also um Open awareness to other people which is another dimension of you know for elevated listening And I think that that the the software can enable that I think I've had some actually very productive conversations with your group here jerry, which is why I keep hanging in after over a decade of knowing you Because of the quality of the conversations that occur and the thoughtfulness that occurs and the Growth of ideas within them. They're not specifically tasked, but because of this introduction to zoom through you and the group I've been using it with some working group rather effectively And I think people are finding that It's a good way to do co-creation when we can't be geographically co-located Love that and I'm I've always been a hesitant about videoconferencing and um I was hoping google hangouts with video was you know really Powerful because they can do many many many they can do multiple hundred concurrent video users They know that technology But they never quite got the ux right so getting in getting out knowing where to go how to join was terrible And along comes zoom and it's kind of eaten that space and now gone public and all that And one of the few things I really like about zoom is that we can do the occupy hand signals During a call and we can do a little bit of gesturing inside of our little cages here Which is sort of fun like I think it I think it it adds a bunch of flavor and makes up for the fact that Right now i'm looking at where I think the lens is on my bezel But right now i'm looking at michael and you can tell the difference from far away Like we're really good at knowing where somebody else is looking And looking directly into someone eyes is much more connective like it really you you sense it You know differently so the parallax is even a problem here. So all these things are all mixed together Yeah, I will say I i'm really waiting for the day that you can have a camera embedded in the middle of the screen So so one of the many startups I saw back in the day had invented a technology So imagine your flat panel display was a series of fiber optics strands with notches cut in them and that what you were seeing was being beamed in one side and bouncing off the notches But that the other notches the other way were absorbing light and where the whole screen was a camera And they had only developed this as far as blurry black and white So with software they were trying to resolve the image and who knows what was where it was going to go So I got briefed. I invited them to our conference and they then vanished from view Which I think either means they just died because the thing never worked or they got classified And like hidden from from our view permanently But it was I was like, oh my god, that's so genius because the parallax issue completely melts away My whole screen becomes and I could maybe even say, you know Make the focal point be where the person I'm talking to his eyes are so that you can so there's nuance in it But they went away We used to have some really good Learning discussions on linkedin before they screwed up the environment six or seven years ago um discussion threads that ran on actually for thousands of posts because it worked in such a way that That once you were following a thread The next post ended up in your mailbox And you could answer it right from your mailbox as opposed to have to go someplace to respond to it The difficulty was that after a period of time With people coming in and leaving you got to a point where You ended up covering the same things that you had already talked about a dozen times before And people got tired of repeating So they just tuned out Which is one of the the harvest capability of sutra was something that I really liked So to be able to to go ahead and Those things that go by that that the group collectively comes to Essentially close your on you can harvest And say here's where we are and when a new person shows up you can say here's where we are We already talked about these things and came to an agreement If you have a question about them you can raise it but we're not going to go through the whole discussion again about all these things okay, so which which Takes me to another little comment I put on the chat here, which I just wrote the word amnesia just as a reminder to me Without explaining in the chat, but One of the things I've learned I haven't shared my brain here here in the call yet But one of the things I've learned from 21 years of using the brain Is that every tool we have is a flow tool We have very few tools for curating a stock of information There's wikis and to me there's the brain because all the other tools you're always creating a new mind map They don't let you make one big mind map and I have I have one mind map I've been tending for 21 years Which has everything I care about remembering for those 21 years all of you who are on this call are in the brain and Your context is in the brain likely where we met or if we attended an event together or things you care about Companies you've started essays you've written posts your you know your your twitter account They're probably all in there. I can do that and show you but It would be lovely for me from and this to me this knowledge is rare I don't think a lot of people have had the experience I've gotten to have because of this brain thing So I wish I could come into a conversation and have a standing snapshot Of that conversation that says Here's a sort of a heat map of where we are here are the topics we've covered So if you wanted to go catch up on this particular argument that fascinates you go here And we've curated or pulled out the threads that matter etc etc But but I wrote in the chat just now that I'm always daunted when I enter an online discussion that has long threads Because I'm not going to remember where it was by the time I remember to reply to something It's a long past I get the the mute the length of a good sustained conversation online has always been an obstacle to me um And so so I tend to bail on places where I feel like I can't quite catch up in order to Participate appropriate. I don't know if other people feel differently that way yeah I think that's one of the key challenges is how to go from flows to stocks because as Jerry just said we've got tons of flow oriented tools and and even other kind of processes like You know world cafe There's a harvesting phase which is usually the least satisfactory phase Of the whole process because no one feels it really happened. Well the challenges Well, how do you help automate that if it's even possible? And I'd be curious curious Lawrence as to what facilities in sutra and how you work with that Yeah, I will I will demonstrate that when when we do the screen share Awesome. Uh, Judith had mentioned the word delphi iterative process and just wondering. What is that exactly? That's a typo. It's delphi It's kind of where you create concept statements or other things and you circulate and people iteratively add to it It's ancient technology But something that would be useful for some of the things we've been discussing and I'm wondering How to modernize it in light of these things that are occurring I've got it on the screen right now. So Um, it dates back to rand corporation In fact, I remember the first 300 bod more than I was using was to try and correct to a delphi Network in the east coast So it was long distance as well as 300 bod It's an old system incidentally in terms of old systems Let me intrude just this briefly. Can we clear the screen share here video? All yours Can you see my? Yes, thank you. You've got two screens on him. I'll put it this way I'll let's go ahead of that Can you see my camera? Which is It's um, it's How many things try touching it? There it is Suspended on a ruler by a piece of great. Oh hilarious. So you have mounted your camera midscreen on purpose Yes. Yes, and I can move it from side to side. Yeah if I have to choose somebody else that I'm talking to I Sort of go somewhere else, but it's a big Yeah But it sort of gives me that that ability to relax and stay present in this space I like that. That's sweet and you're compensating for the parallax problem right there. Yeah. No, I tried also the periscope, you know Drop down reflector. That was nice, but the field of view was difficult I tried double reflecting glass, which is a lot like that Right, but couldn't get that to work. So I ended up with a piece of string and a ruler So I think it's I think it's Errol Morris who does interview documentaries and he invented That this thing he called the monster interviewer or something like that. I've got it in my brain I can look it up But it was basically like a teleprompter that newscasters use with a one-way mirror So that as he was interviewing somebody they were looking directly into the middle of him Yeah, and it looked like a face-to-face conversation, but then he could capture, you know a high-def Beautiful video interview Just tools technologies and they come with string always With tin cans, otherwise the string doesn't work. That's it very important So so Lawrence, do you want to do you want to take us into a A bit of a screen share and just think through talk talk a lot about your your design process? Yes, so let's uh, let's see where we're at here all right here And apropos the Delphi technique I think When the institute for the future was founded they were founded on Delphi And did that for maybe 10 years and then lost, you know, totally switched their process and dropped it But they were a Delphi shop early on Is there now a co-creation are there multiple co-creation alternatives to that that are more simultaneous because One of the drawbacks of the time was it was iterative, you know and kind of By modal in that sense you got a then you got a prime then you got b plus a prime, etc and I think that's what we're talking about today But I have no knowledge of what the facilitation systems are that are useful now And I that is too deep a question for my knowledge of the space But I'd love to know too Go ahead Lawrence So Yeah, I'll give a kind of a brief top-level overview and then I'll highlight a couple of uh Different use cases and and then we can use that as a as a starting ground for the conversation. So As I mentioned, you know, one of the Observations that came out to me about, you know Online experiences where people feel connected is the importance of the small group construct I mean, I'd say this is an example of it, right? We're on a call. There's six of us You know, there's a lot more space there for each person to speak and to have You know, a very human-like experience And that's that's always been A very important factor in In this work a lot of a lot of sutra has been Highly emergent in the sense of where it is today is definitely not necessarily What I was thinking about four or five years ago, but kind of by leaning into this thread of Connection communication community and and always endeavoring to kind of get more practical and really observing real-world interactions So, you know, we I wrote the first line of code in 2015 and we deployed in a co-working space And you know three four months later in mid in summer of 2015 and you know crickets. Nobody was using it But through a process of iteration in At this point many different communities and courses and and whatnot, you know, each one very much a learning experience We've kind of evolved the product. And so this is this is what you're seeing now. So one of the One of the key features of sutra is is this concept of a circle everything in sutra revolves around a circle and Circles can contain circles. It's almost like a Multicellular organism, you know, once you understand one cell you can create All sorts of things with it and that's that's kind of the design inspiration for sutra in some sense It makes things a little more abstract and possibly confusing because there's many ways to do something But once you understand what a circle is and the way that you can kind of Stack them and and work with them. It gives you tremendous flexibility around I'm navigating group experiences and and also I think one of the things that's always emerging for me is this is the relationship between You know real human interaction and chaos, you know real human interaction. I think is is naturally chaotic But there's an inherent creativity there and if you try to over structure it you lose that creativity And so I think a big part of it is is really working with That inherent chaos with this kind of almost like a spiral mindset about like the one thing that I think works really well with Chaos is iteration and just kind of coming back to the same point and you know rechecking and rechecking and so Um, so just kind of top level, you know, Jerry you told me to give you some thinking around our design process Um, this is a lot of what what we try to design is Um, is a a tool that uh, isn't locked into any particular use case And that's almost been to a detriment because you know, I think if we'd set out to create like a system That was specifically for creating learning experiences. Um, it might have made things simpler I think what what my intuitive observation here is that when a community is interacting It is a learning experience and when you're when you're generating a co-creating you are learning and so there's a And when you're working with the unknown, you're you are learning So the the learning process Both from the side of the the human side the skill sets that a person needs to learn as Judy said earlier about kind of like You know the level from which a person is operating That is a learning process and then whatever the collaborative Purpose or goal might be If you're kind of working in this unknown kind of way that is a learning process So there's an inherent learning process or if you're a community that is uh, let's say Uh trying to do anything together. That's novel or new that in itself is also a learning process though figuring out how for people People figuring out how to be together and collaborate harmoniously Is a learning process? so so that kind of idea that We have a learning platform that isn't locked into what you might traditionally think of as a learning platform Um, but is very flexible And looks like a kind of collaborative platform or or conversational platform is is is one of the you know, I think when you Tune into the subtleties of what we're trying to do here. Uh, that's that's one of the underlying threads So, uh, with that kind of top level introduction, I'll explain a little bit about what's going on here in the screen Um, so this is a women's meditation course Um, and the top level here is a circle that contains Four sub circles and you have 27 members that have been broken up into four sub circles And if I go inside one of these What you'll find is what looks very much like a basic discussion thread something you might see on something like slack um, and that's kind of the the lowest common Feature here is basic Uh chat like interaction you come here if you want to post the message you click on the blue button you write something Hello world and you post it and there it goes asynchronous chat Uh, nothing particularly novel there. So I'm gonna I'm going to show you the basics first And and then we'll get into some of the more Um unique features of sutra. Uh, so the second thing that it's a basic in most Learning experiences is that you want to have uh content To to share and so here in the resources You have modular content that can include video text You know anything that you would normally want to Put into a learning experience that can be published as modules with subsections Another point of note here is that this can be set to be Lockdown so that only the creator can modify it or it can be a collaborative resource So, you know, one of the threads that we really think about in terms of co-creative experiences And co-creative learning is co-constructive knowledge You know, you have a learning experience and almost every learning platform is a one-way communication and the content That's the you know the the learning the textbook content. It's it's fixed. It's a one-way communication and and so How do you enable that content to To be co-constructed? I'm going to show you some very specific features around that That kind of give sutra almost a wiki-like aspect to it so Quick check in here. Is everything so clear so far Good over here. Great. All right. Any questions anybody? You're doing a great job. Good. All right, cool. So We have a conversation. We have the content. I'm going to start getting into some of the Kind of differentiating features now one of the aspects is if you take the classroom metaphor where you have You know, you're in a physical classroom. You have the textbook and you have the guided conversation And one of our reflections is that When you bring a group of people together if they have some sort of structure or guidance that it it can Help a lot to guide that conversation into deeper places So if you if you look here and you see the the posts of the green bars that i'm passing These are part of um a script a sequence script. This is an eight-week course Where part of the content is in the modules and part of it has been scripted in in a feature that we call structures So this is a structure here where you see this post went out on monday february 19th This one went out on tuesday february 20th And it's a way to create a scaffolding for An inquiry or a learning experience so you could imagine like say Like say if i put this in a completely different context Let's say you wanted to approach some sort of community Governance question and a traditional approach might be well, let's take all thousand people in our community and put them in a discussion form and do it that way But in sutra what you could do is you could take those thousand people you could break them into 100 groups of 10 people And then you could drop a structure with a set of questions Into each of those 10 people and and have groups of 10 people basically go through A dynamic interactive conversational experience And and then kind of call what's coming out of that and and so How would you call what's coming out of that? Well, that's that's what i'm about to show you next Which is that when you have a very long discussion like this people share very long posts And sometimes in those very long posts there are nuggets of really valuable wisdom that often get completely lost or forgotten so our kind of Exploration into that and this is very much like us trying to figure out how to address this is that you can note something and when you note something You can do two things first is that you can just call What you want and second is that you can retroactively and collaboratively Label it so here i've created a label called meditation assuming that this person is describing something really interesting about meditation I'm saving this note That tag has been created now you'll notice that of course This original text did not get motivated and modified, but what did get modified is if i go to the notes here This piece of text is this was noted in the past so here it is and that's the snippet that that i noted meditation so I'm going to go back to to the discussion and just note a couple more things here so that i can show you Where this ability is going so let's find A few more comments here. Let's assume that this too is a very Very interesting reflection on meditation. I'm going to save that and we'll We'll we'll harvest we'll harvest one more comment here and the idea here is that you know you can go into a discussion and you as the kind of person running it or or You know ideally everybody as people participating in this process Can collaboratively and retroactively that's the key feature here You know as you're in a discussion You know, you're not going to be thinking about labeling your comments and and I don't think that's a reasonable expectation But retroactively as you're reading something and particularly if you're reading someone else's content and you're like, oh This is really interesting. Like you know, I I I'm into this like I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and and save that I find myself wanting to do that all the time wanting to somehow categorize other people's Contributions, so um, so that's really the the the gist of the effort here. So I'm I've I've now labeled three comments When I click on the label, I can just zoom in on that part of the conversation with those Comments if I go to notes, I get a slightly different view on that And in that I can see The edited notes and and here is also again some of this is we're really figuring this out But the aim is the goal is that you have a group of people and and here's something there's a seed of insight and together we can go and and you know We rework we work this to make it more powerful or relevant uh, or you know Insightful something that as a as a community there's both the aspect of the individual contribution and then there's the collaborative refinement of of that contribution So so we've got the notes and now what and and the next step is that we can now um, we can now take these notes and um Very easily capture them into a resource so I can take that I can create a new topic We'll call the topic meditation. We'll say, uh, you know personal insights. Here is the content that everyone contributed um Everyone is who contributed is mentioned here. Here's the discussion that came from when I save this page. Everyone gets notified um, and then I go to resources and Here's that that resource that I just created. So it's it's right here. Everyone has attributed um, so in in in a way it the goal here is to create a bridge between uh, uh, kind of an unstructured uh, chaotic conversation and and then, uh, a flow trajectory for gradually Organizing that harvesting it culling it and into notes and then and then possibly Refining that into finished resource content that can be shared with You know either a post course highlight or with a community You know with the broader community or with other communities You know or or in the example of I gave you with the community decision making you've taken 100 people and broken them. I'm sorry thousand people broken them up into a hundred groups of 10 people it would be impossible for any one human being to keep on top of all of those but You could ostensibly Have people in each of those conversations creating notes and then Kind of at a top level see those notes and harvest them into reflections and resources and that's Um, so that's part of the intention here. So I've gone through a lot. Maybe it's a good time to do a quick check in Uh, any questions or reflections so far? Yeah, Lawrence when when you do that harvesting and you create the resource Next week people add four more things that they think are relevant to meditation How do you update the resource? Well, let's do it right now. So we'll go and say, uh, you know this This one right here. Someone's added another reflection We'll label it meditation. We'll save the note. We'll go to resources I'm sorry. No, we'll go to notes And so here's that comment I'm going to check it off. I'm going to add it to resources I'm going to go to the meditation resource. I'm going to select the personal insights page And here it is it's at the bottom here. So I'm just going to Uh, you know, there's a number of ways I can do this, but I'm just going to put it up here And uh, yeah, she's already mentioned there. So I'm just going to delete that and Okay, so it so it ends up loading it on the on the bottom of the page So you don't impact all of the additional notes It just kind of puts it in there so you can then edit it the way you wanted to You've uh, you've done some nice work on this since I used it last Thanks, man. Yeah, it's So are the notes you're adding are those visible only to you or to everybody? They're visible to everybody. So this is a collaborative Kind of situation and and you can filter it to you know, just notes from you You can filter it by note count or most recent And here also, uh, the idea is if you have a whole bunch of people in the group So this is a note that I didn't note If I if I See I can see that someone else noted this and I can in a sense kind of vote for it or whatever So here I've all it is is I'm basically noting it myself. So it's There's a way to also kind of have a type of popularity view on this So here is a note that two people have noted and if I scroll here and do by note count That should pop to the top Can you add labels to other people's notes? And more than when yeah, so here I'm I'm going to add a label We'll call this We'll call this reflection And we'll give it a different color Free label save note and there you go other comments questions and um Lawrence, I just typed into the chat that like we're in a we're in a Sandbox clone of a conversation, right? We're not screwing up. Somebody's active. No, this is a sandbox clone. Yeah But but what's funny is As you started just messing with it in demo mode to like add stuff I had a little constricting feeling in my in my chest I knew that you were doing this in a workspace, you know, just separate But I wasn't really positive and it's like, ah And which is good like like, you know, you might want to use that when you're discussing this with people and say And maybe I said in the in the comment maybe explain this before you go in But you might actually delay the explanation and say hey What I just did did it cause anybody any agita? This is just a play space But but that emotion you felt is important to the thing you're trying to achieve here right general area The the only thing that bothered me at all and this was lovely stuff. Uh, Lawrence very nice indeed Was all this breaking people up? Ah every time you brought people up like I tweet a little bit Hmm Into something as a word maybe maybe organizing people into small groups instead of breaking them into small groups Something like that. Say the word, please. That's a good. That's a good. Uh, that's a good word choices Breaking is not quite the connotation. We're trying to you could just say convening small groups or you know Something like that which is a positive word into the small group format and then back to plenary or whatever you want to do But yeah, I totally agree that breaking or Uh fragmenting or any of those kinds of words probably don't help you Foster would be a good word. Yeah Sorry, what did you say judo? Foster foster fostering small group discussion. Yeah One of one of my problems in the demo is that I would not know To create the labels and the notes and the resources that you just did that that these are not obvious gestures Yeah, and you've invented this from from sort of from whole clock I mean, this is a new kind of conception of it and I'm curious because There are several other formats for doing similar things to this One of which is you know Comments on google docs where you can leave a note or a comment or whatever and those are pretty well known by now So so that actually sort of works another one is the shadow internet things like hypothesis where you have a plugin that then creates You know, you can overlay any page any page on the web that will allow it And basically mark up the page and have and have a running commentary in the margin and hypothesis is totally open source Um, so that would might be an interesting code base to start from but you're doing something different here You have you have an instance of conversations in here with your own set of tools and affordances And I guess back to what I started with I don't know that I could easily intuitively Have done what you just did Yeah, and I think that's a big thing that we're trying to we I would say that unintentionally A type of a workflow for working with community discussion and knowledge has emerged here with with sutra and You know as as this As has emerged as a type of workflow my reflection has been like wow. This seems like it has some like really interesting potential But of course, it's a workflow that absolutely no one is familiar with And that you know, we are exploring how to introduce how to make intuitive for people And so that that's kind of a You know, whether or not this is an optimal workflow or how to really Optimally introduce it to people as something that we're we're very much trying to figure out So and it strikes me that partly what you've built and i'm oversimplifying here in what I just typed But that you have a series of primitives the circle is a primitive a tag or a label is a primitive And I think you've got both and they're both sort of roughly the same thing. They're just with different names We don't have tags anymore. We got rid of those. Oh, you got rid of those. Okay, so then there's only labels And then you have templates which you haven't demoed yet But you can but you can attach templates in interesting ways to different objects to other primitives So you can have a a response to a query be a template Etc. Etc with picklists, but but it seems like maybe one way to explain this is hey There's only x and i'm just i just enumerated three here. There may be six I don't know, but there's this many primitives and we're remixing them in creative ways That's that's like that what the tinker toy set looks like Then go into the the constructs of a discussion right, right Yeah, and I'll just briefly demo what I think you're talking about there with the templates, uh, which is uh, so the the You know in in the context of a discussion um one of our aspirations is to Deepen the quality of of awareness in a communication that happens between a group of people and and what that means is is You know really expanding the scope of what a person is considering While in they're in an interaction that might be bringing awareness to body sensations to images coming up for me thoughts feelings You know situational environmental things You know bringing awareness to how something is is maybe What's something that someone shared is bringing up for me? I I personally consider this to be one of the most important and Most important to develop human skills in in the world, uh as as far as just Harmonious society so a big part of Our exploration is you know, how do you kind of introduce this quality of awareness in communication to people How do you and more than just introducing it? How do you make it very easy and accessible in the context of an online communication tool? And particularly in the context of a type of co-creative collaborative tool That communities might use because you know one of my personal theories is that you know If you want to have co-creative community in the utopian sense Then the a key ingredient is communication and and listening and holding space that without that It doesn't matter how good your system or aspiration is if those basic attributes are not in place Or there isn't a willingness to learn them The community effort or collaborative effort will be challenged. So um, so thinking about how to weave that into Um a learning or co-creative process is a big part of what we try to do and one of our attempts at that In in a very kind of crude and prototype form right now is this feature called reflect which allows me to structure The the way a person responds to an input. So here What thoughts and feelings come up for you? What associations come up for you? What images and sensations come up for you? This is all customizable So you can you can create a type of micro survey as the organizer To have this be whatever you want or to have it just be a basic input box for general Responses, it's very much an area of exploration here. So if I type thoughts and feelings, you know happy tree Flying and I post that That comes here. It's it's in line in the conversation This is also something that that can be noted. I can label it as you know Uh, why not just use the one here reflection? Uh, save and um, so again really looking at how you can have a conversation and then kind of Have this second order of data, right? So there's what's being said and expoken and then there's the kind of Subconscious response to it. Uh, and how do you capture that and bring that in parallel to the discussion? It's somehow work with that. Um, I think we're very much at the early stages of of this of making it both a rich experience So that maybe as I'm As I'm responding here I it can be tied into like an image search engine where images and things come up as suggestions And then after you capture that really maximizing the value of that so you have 10 people that have done this and they've had a deep kind of You know reflective conversation and all that data is there. What can you do with it? How can you somehow? Take that into a more generative Potential where you know somehow in bringing that together and making it visible and highlighting it for people it might be seed for New awareness or or insights. So that's where where we're trying to go with with almost all of this You know this this labeling feature. I kind of label it as a Categorize it as a kind of a non-linear conversational Features so you can you can kind of you can take things that have been said in the past and Bring them into the future and retroactively organize them And then the reflections are similar and in you can kind of take the conversation That's happening on one level and then and then bring awareness to Different levels of that conversation and somehow capture that and and all of it I think if I had to describe a broad a broad trajectory here is this idea that you you have a Variety of approaches to deepening the conversation And then the intent is really to kind of harvest and call that and and bring it full circle into A resource so you you kind of have an implicit co-creative process happening here where the the kind of lowest Hanging fruit is say a finished piece of resource content That that might come out of your discussion and might be The seed for Say for example, I want to label this and say okay. This is a great thing to consider for You know next steps always a big thing with any sort of co-creative discussion So I've created that label save note and so now collaboratively we can go in we can zoom in on The next steps we can add some reflections on that and then If we wanted to we could create a new circle and and shift that conversation there Um, but again kind of working with the chaos instead of trying to structure it out, you know really Trying to kind of extract the optimal creative potential in In what I find is naturally in these kinds of conversations Thoughts questions anybody go ahead Judy. Well the question I had was one about The process of formation of the group and the progress of the group along the trajectory Of self-awareness and disclosure and trust and all of those things that become part of co-creation How do you manage that or do you manage that or do you trust the group to manage it? um It's sort of self-enabling I guess The best way I can summarize what you're saying because it'll go where the group goes I don't know if that's a sensible question, but no it's it's a it's a really good question. Um So part of these kinds of things is process and part of it is this technology On on the and part of it is content And and so on on the process side Our goal is to create Features that really support this quality of interaction There are elements of creating a safe space that are You know heavily dependent on the person organizing it heavily dependent on particular Messages and content that's shared early in the creation of that space the trust building, right? It's not like software Isn't going to create that sense of human trust But we as uh, you know as an as a as an effort can create resources for people to do that whether it's best practices for forming a group whether it's Kind of suggestions around how to structure a group and things like that and that's something that You know with the experiences running on sutra right now we tend to be have sutras open for anyone to go ahead and play with and create experiences we we We tend to be heavily involved with some of those experiences where we kind of very actively work with people creating them to um To kind of weigh in on on exactly the things you're talking about like how do you create that trust? How do you create that? sense of safe space It's it's very you know I I will say that that small group process is a very tricky territory For a number of reasons going from trust to engagement Uh, you know to figuring out how to scale that to the the the additional labor that might be involved um, a lot of those those are questions that we are very much trying to understand how to create some sort of optimization around how to make that simpler and and I think our goal is to really create a type of toolkit that will You know radically improve That and and really help people create again. I think one of my biggest observations from the co-creative world is that People like to use these terms without necessarily understanding Uh, the the that the human skill sets that need to be Learned, you know that it's not just a process thing. It's very much a a skill set thing and and so um Kind of helping people create those experiences helping people learn how to do it helping people participants Learn whatever they need In line with the process. I think that's really the the most Uh, kind of key thing that we're trying to go through like uh, crystallize here is that um, you know, when you think about things like meditation or mindfulness, uh, and you think about Doing that on say you're meditating and and but the goal of it is to bring that into your interaction into the context of what you're doing and and so Uh, you know, how do you bring awareness into the context this kind of awareness based interaction? effortlessly Into the context of whatever kind of collaborative of learn or learning process you might be doing um, and that's that's where we're really trying to go here is is to create a general tool that can given a very broad set of different contexts can Make it easier for people to interact this way But it's a very unknown territory. So, you know, we're always trying to figure out what we're doing really exciting Anybody else? Um, can you release the screen for a little bit? Yeah, thanks Just want to show a couple things um Are you familiar with uh game shifting? I'm not so, um, whoops arthur brock And a bunch of other people did this emerging leader labs and as part of that they Kind of invented a process called game shifting Uh, which is interesting because arthur ran a meeting for me once Using game shifting which is more of a real-time thing, but but A couple other people who've experienced game shifting and I have a common thought which is it would be great to have kind of a scaffolding app That you could plug different kinds of group process into Right, so one of the things i'm sitting here wondering because we we mentioned world cafe along the path is could you More deeply emulate the world cafe process using sutra And one of the things that happens in world cafe is people shift from table to table And when they shift from table, there's one person who stays behind as their app or tour And they explain what was what the discussion was so far from the notes that have been hand scribbled on, you know, the round coffee table Um, what's the equivalent of the round coffee table in sutra? And you could probably build it as a resource artifact, but you might rename it. I mean could you flavor sutra to be a world cafe platform? And instantiate it and say, okay Now we've agreed to do the next three hours as world cafe virtually Let's go do it here and then the next day we're going to do is open space So in open space what we need is I think we should talk about this and then we have a schedule of rooms and times And we have a way to flip between the rooms. There would be different affordances for that, right? So so here I have group process tools and techniques in my brain. I've been collecting a bunch here and Is this sort of conversation tools? Group dynamics has a lot more. Oh, there we go power tools for collaboration. Sorry. Let me go back So world cafe and a bunch of other things are are kind of hiding here, but and also the Liberating structures people know a lot about all of this obviously But here's a bunch of power tools for collaboration each of which sort of does a thing a narrow thing So kind of I'm saying can you Following maybe the tinker toys approach Can you take the the raw materials you've created and reshape them and instantiate them as different kinds of group process That people can invoke and now to take us back to game shifting What arthur and who did game shifting do is they will track a Meeting in real time and use different parts of just a whiteboard. So it doesn't have to be software, obviously But to say okay, we've agreed that this next next segment is going to be speaker and audience And then we're going to shift into popcorn and then we're going to shift into q&a and then we're going to have a baton pass kind of format and Each of those is a way of fostering some kind of group discussion with some sort of purpose Uh, and then he's tracking a bunch of other things But if we start to break our agreement that this is audience with no questions until the end of the speech And then there's questions. He will he would suddenly sort of move the little pointer from audience to Popcorn without necessarily interrupting the conversation just so that the group was aware that they had just kind of broken their agreement And entered a different kind of conversation So there's lots of ways this all interacts. It gets messy and confusing pretty quickly But i'm just wondering Is this is this avenue something that's interesting to you how might that work because i'm in i'm in a conversation That is not a project yet, but is like this wishful thinking Wouldn't it be great to have a game shifting framework into which you plugged things like sutra But also things like sutra that understood group process techniques quite deeply and could lead newbies through a particular group process Uh, yeah, I love that idea. Um, if I if I can share my screen with you again, I can I can show you Uh, how you know one one approach to something like that in uh in sutra So, um, I will just so as I mentioned earlier circles can contain circles in this particular circle I have Turned off sub circles. So i'm just going to briefly go into circle settings here And go into the sidebar sections and show the sidebar section circles Great. So here we are and if I go here we can see that there's Uh, no circles. So uh ostensibly I could have uh, let's say that you know what i'm going to go back to the top level here Where we can see these conversations the top. Yeah, so here are all these discussions and let's say we're doing some sort of world cafe type format um what you So just to very roughly kind of outlying what you said Jerry as as how it would work in sutra um When you go to the membership section here, you have an ability to Automatically place members. So basically after each Conversational round you could go here and say, you know, take all the active members And split them equally into one or more into circles with no more than five people Randomly Basically or you could do it by you know run a survey or whatever, but you could basically Um regroup people automatically. So they've got their old discussions. They've had them. Those are preserved Uh, and then each time there's a new iteration of discussions So you would regroup them here you place them and then you would add Possibly a structure into those discussions. So then you would take Uh, a structure. Let's just go ahead and create one here. So this is uh, um, you know, we'll call this Um, you know world cafe inquiry and we'll add the first question, which is, you know, what Current issue do you think is most important? And we'll add another one that says, um, How my others view this issue And and so let's say the goal here is to do an asynchronous um, uh, type of round robin discussion Over time where the conversation in each group only progresses when Uh, 75 of people respond to each post And uh, each question is Uh, we'll say it's three posts. Uh, so how might others view this issue and uh, who Are the stake holders and when we add one more that just says, um, what you know, what Are possible next steps? So here we're gonna make we're making all of these dynamic And Yeah, so there we go. So we've created the world cafe inquiry with four questions I'm gonna go ahead and uh and save that Uh, and I'm gonna go ahead and uh, Let's go back to Let's go back to the circles here and I'll just demonstrate this in real time. So we're gonna create a circle here uh, we'll call this um One of the table discussions And uh, we don't need to announce this to anybody. So create that Um, and we'll go back to that structure that I was just that we're gonna go ahead and add that to Well one of the table discussions and we'll fire it off as the system will send it now And here we are. I'm in here. I'm the only person in here. So What current issue do you think is most important? Learning how to listen And hold space and so I've created that post I'm the only person here. So the next question has come through. How might others view this issue? You get the idea. So basically we could do a round of these We could reshuffle people do another round People could be instructed to note things as you know Folding space ideas Uh Create that label save that note. So here we've created that note and that label and if we go into the top level discussion here And we go to notes We should see it right there So you have just had say 50 conversations That are basically people being reshuffled five times You know, basically like cohorts of 10 conversations at a time We shuffle five times you had 50 conversations around a singular threat of inquiry with a set of questions People are labeling and noting things in those questions and then you get a top level view of the highlights Whatever, you know, kind of came out you can then call into a resource and potentially share that with with the broader public You know, I think I think I think what I like about what you said Jerry is is that you know, kind of thinking about different group processes or different methods of inquiry that could be Kind of woven into the the capabilities here so that someone could You know relatively quickly just bang that together with with their particular With their particular community or body of people. Yep. Thank you. That was that was uh, super interesting anybody else thoughts comments questions Wishes I'll take all the wishes. Yeah wishes are good. I've I've been a fan since the first time I saw it Thanks, jane I want it Even though I gable runs a hard time I believe you produced a pretty good video seems good at that um Yeah, I think uh, so I'll You know, I'll weigh in with my with my question, which is that um You know, we're we're really trying to uh Figure out how to talk about this how to Approach communities that might use it. Um, you know, our aspiration is to uh is to turn this into an open source project um, so there's there's a lot of areas where we're trying to um Kind of lean into uh And you know, particularly around obviously I've had an hour and a half to kind of explain it to you and show you to you You know, how to make that uh more clear or how to talk to people About it in a way that they're like, wow, this sounds really interesting I I get a you know, there are a lot of communities out there that I you know, there's no shortage of Discussion products from discourse to to mighty to slack um I do feel that there is a kind of a unique approach to discussion here that Would be valuable and interesting to particular kinds of communities. And so one of the things I'm trying to really figure out is um You know, how to how to approach that Like which yeah, which are the communities and how do you talk to them exactly? Any thoughts anybody from my perspective, it's just difficult to get people to move I mean once they get comfortable with an environment getting them to move is It's funny online online conversations seem to be a one shot deal like whatever they're born into Is often what they die in However, stupidly Configured it is for the thing. They're trying to get done. So, you know, if they were born in a linkedin discussion group then Getting them over into You know, something else you're going to lose 60% of the participants easily Even even though the environment that they're in has become absolutely terrible, right? I used to own a 1962 sunbeam alpine So I was on an alpine's mailing list which had like Old geezers who were busy sharing these insane stories about how you fix that or do that And and it had gone quiet for a while and just somebody did a test of a list and then which cascaded the I guess now in retrospect obvious 30 messages of get me off this list copied to everybody And it was like, oh my god amateur hour But but it was a really old crusty tool that was now broken and you know, not not a functional community anymore I think one aspect of The difficulty of moving people from one system to another Is it's something that I think that's being somewhat addressed by the whole community, which is agent centricity So you usually the group belongs to the server Right that belongs to linkedin and it's identified that way And but there's a kind of a pernicant revolution that's possible around that to make both the individual into the self sovereignty and the community In terms of agent centricity Kind of independent of whatever server they're happening to use So that's that's a future direction, but I do see whole as one So isn't it possible for any person who's participating in the discussion To to create their own summary Um, yes Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. So I mean because people have Different perspectives that they bring to the discussion And and the things that I think are really insightful Jerry might not Jerry might say well, I knew that 10 years ago. I mean, that's old news All right, so different individuals as they go through it can in fact Make notes on different posts that they think are Important to remember and they have their own summary of the discussion through it Yeah, I mean, it's in a collaborative context in that everyone can see each other's work but you know, I I think the the Participation percentages on that kind of work are generally very low. So you might have, you know Uh, you have the discussion and and so you have obviously 100 percent observing it But maybe 10 or 20 percent participating and then one or two percent who are actually doing something like that So I think the potential for conflict is Is is low on on on that side, but uh, but if you yeah, it's yeah, we always used to say it was 99 and one 90 percent the ratios. Yeah, right nine percent active to some extent and one percent We're really driving whatever was was going on in terms of the discussion. Yeah, exactly Um, but if only a couple people are curating that's really still really important work for the whole community. Sorry Michael go ahead Um, I was just going to look back a little bit because Lauren showed me this Site and in fact we began a circle on it a couple weeks ago Which was pertaining to the project I'm using on matter most at the moment um, which is a brutal beast, you know, matter most is very Configurable and Deep and rich and dense and it ends up being deep rich and dense and you can't really find what you want on it And I'm convening these small groups of six Whose task is to just check in once a day roughly for a few few minutes But all of the six are agreeing to check in once a day so that we can jointly find their way around this general area with minimal time commitments but continuity and crossover and I was asked and Was it you Lawrence or was it some? Tom actually that asked How Sutra could participate in this And what I'm seeing from your demonstration today is how Instead of having my little sixies all on matter most and in the little honeycomb boxes, which is going to value the whole bloody lot of them could also be on uh, Sutra Which you take some of the nine and 90 as it were, you know get more of them into a The opportunity to discuss things Which I want to keep very clear from the opportunity to see things So i'm i'm i'm very interested in um in what i've Reseen and seen more of today. This is this is very interesting indeed I think it's um It's got the ambience. It's got the feel. It's got the touch It's got the facilities needs of flickering neon sign in the corner Well, you know what it really needs is a lot of people using it. That's that's what you mean traffic and I'd like to have a conversation with you specifically about the What would be involved in in buildings and sort of a Port or relationship between the matter most And this I was thinking of trying to do with kumo, but yeah That was totally different direction for a totally different set of reasons There is a lot of interest in federation protocols Which at least on a technical level would be So there's a topic west foundation And work on 20 rounds ideal room who are very much involved with that and by the way ideal room Which you you probably maybe familiar with also has A sense of this challenge of how do you go from flows and how do you harvest those into stocks that make sense basically And is that product actively developed? Let me last I looked at it It looked like it wasn't really being developed. Uh, he's he's working very hard on it And he's also working with jack park of topic west on federation And actually just more players involved with that. I'm hearing legos and so on but yeah in terms of matter most and Sutra that that'd be one one of the parameters to to consider is you know federation protocols But by the way, I guess another general comment I have is that There's really two media where there's words whether spoken or written and That's one aspect and there's a little bit of visual where like you see photographs of people in these little rows and That's so that's that's what we have and it's it's very it's limited But you know in terms of various processes for example like deep democracy or social presence in theater There's a lot done with people's physical relationships with each other and what the body says as well and So obviously that that's a challenge in terms of online and I have seen some success with that in terms of Virtual communities like second life where you do have a body to work with and that has its own affordances which actually go beyond even the so-called real physical body But I think that's just kind of a more general comment on some directions where this kind of stuff can be can go Never mind family constellation work Uh-huh, which is even much more subtle Well, I don't know about much more, but it's it's it's a different dimension or direction altogether But it would be really interesting to find out whether you could do things like this in a non-local way Yeah, uh, I mean in the past Uh As part of one alia in sort of the exercise We did world cafe in second life Simultaneously we're doing it in so-called real life In a way that was kind of easy because he very literally just Redo the whole thing, but there were these extra aspects as well Things have to be pretty easy they have to Be intuitive like like, you know Things have to be very simple beyond the point of the easy thing to design like like simplicity is hard It looks really great when it's done but Having something that manifests in a way that where what you want to do what you might do is visible What you want to do is easy to get done Is really really hard Any closing thoughts for pretty much at the end of our of our time together Yeah, laurence. Thank you. This is this is uh really um, it's lovely to go deeper into the tool I love the the collection of humans. We have here just everybody's got a lot of experience in the topic in a very different way With some use cases that matter and all that kind of stuff. So very cool Thank you guys. I appreciate the the presence and the feedback You can feel free to email me laurence at sutra.co and um, yeah, I have any any further ideas or or thoughts you might have Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, laurence. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for organizing it I'll go spend some more time with it Awesome. Thanks everybody. Thank you. All right. Take care guys. Bye. Bye