Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.

	May 20, 2007

Sunday Open Thread - May 20, 2007 What I'm thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Vignettes: My writing is a reflection of what I'm doing and what I'm becoming, and as a result much of the future subject matter of this blog will be the results of my Let-Self-Change activities. Two of the skills I want to learn are paying attention and better story-telling. The best way to deepen one's skills is through practice. My practice, paying attention and telling stories, often takes the form of vignettes, very short stories where I recount something quite simple but extraordinary that I've noticed by paying attention, focusing on and memorizing the details, and then deepening those memories by retelling these internalized accounts. Like good short films or poems, these vignette stories need to have a point: there has to be something important (usually not obvious, often ambiguous) about them. My holiday Monday post tomorrow will be my latest vignette. Improv: Another skill I want to learn is improvisation, the ability to adapt, to converse, to do things spontaneously and effectively without planning. That has a lot to do with listening and paying attention, and even more to do with practice. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this yet (any ideas?) but when I do, I'll be documenting it. Good Working Models of Social Networking: We are capable of replicating success by analogy if we have a good story to work from. But when it comes to good working models of wikis and blogs in organizations, I've found very few good success stories, and some of the ones I've investigated are suspect. Is social networking unable to make its case in big companies, or are the managers of big companies just not listening? Blog-Hosted Conversations: I've now got the tools, thanks to readers' advice, especially Lavonne and Johnnie Moore: Pamela for recording the Skype conversation, Audacity for editing, and the Internet Archive for hosting the big .mp3 files. Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. What are the skills you've been trying to develop, the changes you've been trying to bring about in yourself, the important conversations you've had recently? New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber. You can buy prints of his work here. 4:31:36 PM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2007 Dave Pollard. Last update: 02/06/2007; 7:27:39 PM.