Humanize the Earth!

expanding networks

January 19, 2006 at 9:16 pm | In humanize, open space |

There’s a pretty new blog at Open Space World.org where I’m contributing. It’s not a place for original content, but to link to happenings of any kind anywhere in the world concerning open space technology. Michael Herman has been running the OSW.org site for 5 or 6 years, with quite a few years of a try at getting the practitioner community to tend a wiki and this blog is the most recent incarnation. There’s a behind the scenes blog where the initial crew of editors is working on expectations, givens, guidelines, orientation materials, vision, etc.

Michael posted there from hugh macleod via euan simple about blogs as being “disruptive.” Hugh was talking about a wineary that doubled it’s sales in one year after Hugh mailed a bottle of wine to 100 bloggers nearby, no strings attached. Hugh explains that it’s not the bloggers themselves running out to buy more wine, not even their friends and families. It has to do with changing the wineary’s relationships with it’s customers.

So anyway, Michael was wondering if this OSW.org blog is being disruptive. Here’s my latest post in answer:

Okay, I get it. We’re doing that.

What I mean is, we’re disrupting the os practioner community. Michael talked in the other thread about finding people doing ost that aren’t already part of the oslist. He also talked about people writing their own content and getting credit for it when it’s linked from osw, or eventually just has an openspacetech tag on it.

I think this is more and less and different from that. Why are os practioners starting blogs? Some have been doing it for a while, but why start now? Well, the oslist is essentially inward looking. Our blogs, all of them, are outward looking. I may not have any readers except close friends, but those close friends might only be about biking and know nothing about ost. Well, now they do. And maybe they read one of Ashley’s posts because I link to her and on we go.

So this osw blog is disrupting because it’s demonstrating the idea that we can be outward looking, growing networks and connections that are multi-disciplinary, and still have a community.

This idea is important enough to me that I’m going to put it on my own blog, not just buried here in the comments! :-)

I post it here because the most people are blogging, communicating, writing in any way, and the more the readers are also writers and the more we link to others writing about what we care about, the more we weave together larger and more powerful networks.