A must see and experience site is Museum 2.0. Nina Simon is the blog author and she does such an excellent job of making museums accessible for those who just don’t get out to visit these wonderful resources.

With web 2.0, these buildings and their treasures are open to visitors 24/7 and you are invited to not only soak up the exhibits with your eyes but participate through the wonders of social media.

Another participatory Art & Media site is called ArtsBabble.  Be prepared to while away a few hours. This is what the site is about:

“1. free flowing conversation, about art, for anyone.
2. a place where everyone is invited to join an open, ongoing discussion – no art degree required.

Read more…

Brent Uncategorized

I’m overwhelmed with the innovative and energizing approach taken by Peter Block. His thinking dovetails closely with my interest in community engagement with young people and adults. I am enthusiastically incorporating many features of the community restoration approach in my efforts to restore community through social media strategies and tools.

This short video illustrates some of Peter Block’s principles and what he means by using structure, language and invitation to engage people in dialogue about restoring their community. I think that his ideas have tremendous application for community building in York Region. Fragmentation, isolation and cynicism seem to be taking deeper hold in our community.

A community restoration approach can be challenging for organizations that are used to problem solving, collaboration and outcome based discussions. I especially like how Peter Block in his book Community, the Structure of Belonging talks about how community is really an ongoing conversation. I’ve included a brilliant overview of his model titled Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community – changing the nature of the conversation.

Community Engagement – Restoration of Community

Brent Uncategorized

York Region community organizations and those with a keen interest in solving long standing systemic issues are beginning a process of discussion on “engagement”. The York Region District School Board, concerned about school – community engagement, is a key public organization in the planning for a roundtable discussion event to held in February 2010. The roundtable planning group is comprised of members from a diverse collection of social benefit organizations and local planning networks.

In an environment where cynicism prevails, the challenge of tapping into new and creative actions seems daunting at best. To me, the driving questions at this point revolves around “how do we create a stronger sense of belonging, marked by authentic engagement (in its many forms), in our community”.

When we talk about community, belonging, engagement, systemic barriers, authentic dialogue, inclusive processes etc.. we are talking complexity. How do we have a meaningful and sense making discussion when we are constantly wearing our silo centred, agency representative hat? It’s a bit like seeing the fairy dancing on the head of the pin. You know that fairy is there but you just have to hold the pin in the right way to see him/her.

I think that one of the ways to see that fairy is to somehow suspend or put on the shelf for the moment our agency representation hat and just wear our community citizen hat. When we do that, we can engage with each other and talk about what community means, where does belonging fit into community and what might our community look like if we waved our magic wand and on and on. I think there would be wonderful lessons in that discussion that we can build on and potentially influence policy makers in our organizations. Even more importantly, those lessons can impact us on individual (personal) levels as community citizens, potentially creating a ripple effect in our relationships within our spheres of belonging.

This video by Mark Schenk from Anecdote expands the explanation of the Cynefin model. I like this model as a tool that can help us understand what we are getting into with our community roundtable planning discussions. I think there are some great tips in the Cynefin framework that we can incorporate in our planning for of the roundtable. I especially like the simplicity of the Cynefin framework and how it points to the importance of looking at patterns and building on patterns that show promise.

Brent Uncategorized community, cynefin, yorkregion

I liked this post by Harold Jarache, titled Cooperation: Moving From Soft Skill to Hard Skill. I thought his viewpoint could help in discussions amongst community groups, consumers and social change agents. The theme of the post is on cooperation and collaboration. Jarche makes a clear distinction between the two.

In my mind, when you choose to follow a plan that has cooperation or collaboration as the central unifying approach your intentions and approach is governed by your choice of these two concepts. I recommend (hope) that we in community round table style meetings, the planners don’t have both approaches in play at the event because that will be confusing and turn off attendees (i.e. The people who wear their resident hat will seek open dialogue, the agency representative person will seek problem solving and solutions).

I believe cooperation is the best course to follow for open forum, town hall style discussions.  If the choice is collaboration, I believe the event will end up defaulting to a agency driven agenda that has the usual need, problem solving, solution, outcomes etc as the over riding discussion and we won’t get very far in the goal of fostering community – engagement conversations.

Looking at Jarache’s matrix below, I see the open forum roundtable events as something that is attempting to tap into emergent (forming) dialogue and it resides in the complex, Networks, Emergent, Cooperation level. Choosing a cooperation approach will require us to structure the round table event with a well framed invitation, clear dialogue, positive, inviting, driven type questions, size of small groups discussion, reporting back to large group etc.

What do you think, cooperation or collaboration?

Brent Uncategorized colaboration, cooperation, cynefin, dialogue, matrix