Humanize the Earth!

co-op gathering 3rd week in April in Little Village

Email I sent to Hub Housing Cooperative members, Mark Fick and Dorian Breuer tonight (crossposted at the Marshall Square blog):

Sarah and Mark Fick spoke at one point about two things:
1. http://chicagocoop.info that Sarah and I are starting (it’s slow-going) and that all will be welcome to contribute to.
2. A one-day gathering of co-op folks in the spring sometime, as a replacement for the Chicago Mutual Housing Network annual meeting that is no longer.
3. Possibly using 1 as a collaborative space to plan 2 and using 2 as a way to get more folks involved in creating 1.

So, tonight I was at the Illinois Green Party fundraiser with Howard and spoke at length with Dorian from the Pilson/Southwest Side Greens about co-ops. He’s been kicking the idea around with some friends about starting a co-op. I said we (Hub in general, and me specifically) have lot to share about our experiences and we’d love to help others.

He’s a do-er, not a talker, so we immediately decided to do a one-evening event the 3rd week in April, hopefully in Unit M1 at the Hub (is that possible, Dan and Laila?). If this isn’t okay, maybe we can use Cafe Catedral. If it is okay, which night of the week would work. We’re just to pick a date and tell Dorian.

And Mark, is that day-long gathering still in the works? How might these two events work together? Share a flyer? Be billed as a “series”? Have the Little Village event be but one topic for the day-long event, but be a different day? I don’t know. I’m just brainstorming here.

We didn’t talk about length or agenda or anything like that. Nothing is set in stone except for our desire to make something happen for information purposes in this part of the city.

Please let me know how you (each of you) see this and what you might like to do to make it happen. Thanks!

wrythings

My friend Michael Maranda has taken the blog plunge. He’s all about media, community, networks, the digital divide, politics, open space and much more. Read him at wrythings. He’s also writing elsewhere about OneWebDay in September. I’ve agreed to help with it in Chicago, though I don’t really know what it means yet.

edit: For some reason this post gets far more spam comments (sometimes 10 per day) than any other (you don’t see them because comments by unknown people are held for moderation).  I’m turning off comments on this post only.  We’ll see which post is the next target!

too small

I agree with Doug: Your goal is too small.

new project collaborations.us

I just started collaborating with Norbert on a new site about collaborations, called Collaborations.US. We’re not sure yet where it will lead, but there’s a link from there to a new blog we just put up as well.

similar conferences on top of each other

In my last post, I talked about the birth of Planetwork in Chicago. What I didn’t talk about there was what Planetwork is. From their website:

• Convenes a unique forum exploring the most critical issues affecting civil society in the context of the strategic use of the Web and information technologies.
• Attracts a multidisciplinary community of highly skilled social change agents to envision, implement and share solutions to the most pressing interrelated crises on the planet.
• Incubates projects that demonstrate the role information technologies play in accelerating implementation of pragmatic solutions to local and global issues.
• Disseminates ideas, examples and case studies of digital solutions designed to bring about ecological sustainability and social justice worldwide.
• Galvanizes a new community; providing a rare opportunity to experience a renewed sense of hope, inspiration and empowerment.

So what if we took that, and wrote an invitation that included these points as Planetwork, and the omidyar.net member’s conference stuff we’ve already written and proposes, why not have these two event right on top of one another. Same location, same circle, same agenda wall, everything.

So it’s not co-located and it’s not co-branded, but it is literally two conferences at the same time and same place. And both invitations on the same page. Crazy? Hmm.

Chicago Planetwork

I’ve been reading Kaliya Hamlin’s blog for a while now and met her face to face in Portland at RecentChangesCamp. She suggested that we start a Planetwork chapter in Chicago. Planetwork hosts some conferences, but more importantly, monthly gatherings. Some of us had a lunch last week to talk about this and brainstormed co-branding the omidyar.net members conference we’re hosting in Chicago on July 14-16 with Planetwork. It was just a fun idea to play with, more than a concrete plan. Someone who’s been to both sent me a message afterwards contrasting the Omidyar Network and Planetwork. Besides both ending in “work”, I sent this response:

We believe every individual
has the power to make a difference.

We exist for one single purpose:
So that more and more people discover their own
power to make good things happen.

We are actively building a network of participants,
because we know we can’t do this alone.

We invite you to learn more about us
and some of the people we’re working with.

And your experience of both the o/net conference and o/net itself it totally different from mine. Yes, I totally agree wtih you that there is a ton of “just talk” on the network, but Christina and Life in Africa, Lars and Peace Tiles, Mark and all of his various initiatives with the food chain, Evonne with Ammoration, there are tons and tons of real-world collaborations happening as a result of o/net, or greatly strengthened becasue of o/net and even more so beacuse of face to face gatherings. The Chiacgo conf was one of these. About 20 people got together in San Diego last fall from the food chain. There were at least 20 o/net people at RecentChangesCamp that Brandon and I initiated and helped organized in Portland, OR.
why am I interested in planetwork? because I’ve been reading Kaliya’s blog for a long time and swapping emails (met her at o/net, incidently) and finally met her at RecentChangesCamp. she suggested Micheal Herman and I get hooked up with you (didn’t tell us your name at the time) so start in Chicago, can’t remember what the context was, but it seemed another network that was very similar to what we’re (the big we of people I’m connected with in some way) already doing that would benefit by being further connected.

anyway - forget about the conference for a bit - that was really just a crazy brainstorm and not at all the focus of our lunch conversation last week - the focus was on getting the chicago planetwork website up so that we’d have the tools necessary to have chicago planetwork gatherings - the group of us that drove the chicago o/net conference into being are the sorts that are interested in getting the most done with the least amount of work - hence the way we organize chicago lunches - anyone issues an invitation at any time - if there are 2 or more other people that respond positively, then it happens - we can do the same thing for chicago planetwork, with a higher number of responses, perhaps, though even that might not be necesary

anyway, however we organize gatherings, havnig the web presence will be a way to get further connected with people that find planetwork a good way to connect - that’s my interest

Does this interest you?

test of my online status indicator

If this works, I’ll figure out how to put it in the sidebar somewhere. It’s an online presence indicator, which will tell you when I’m online and available for a chat through jabber (gmail does this automatically, without you needing any software, or there are tons of other jabber clients). This is like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ or other chat programs, but jabber is an open standard, so there’s interoperatibility, like we have with email and telephones. Imagine if you could only email people with your same provider? Or phone company? That’s mostly what we have right now with instand messaging. Hopefully this is changing with google getting into the chat business and doing in openly. Anyway, when I’m online, you should see a yellow lightbulb.

Okay, that works. Now I’m trying to figure out how to make that lightbulb clickable so you can send me a message.