Humanize the Earth!

AboutUs.org

A few days ago, I wrote: finally, a use for spam! where I talked about wanting to work and live in a do-ocracy. Today I started reading Naked Conversations, about business blogging, and it occured to me that I haven’t written about my work at AboutUs.  AboutUs is a small company based in Portland, OR, that’s attempting to do it’s work as a do-ocracy, and teach the world that the world wide web is a two-way medium, and even more than that, is a place for collaboration.

Until today, when I had an idea about a way for AboutUs to get better, I’d make a wiki page about it, or talk about it in the company IRC channel, or I’d attempt to make the change myself.  It occurs to me that company employees (I’m a part-time contractor) could be communicating with each other and the public by blog as well.

AboutUs already does a fantastic job and communicating openly with it’s users, fans and critics (see ConcernsPage, for example), and yet the potential is there for much more.

Some things I’d like to see AboutUs doing:

• Publish a feed of some sort about technical changes to the site.  I’m pretty sure page names are no case-insensitive as of last week, but haven’t seen an official (or unofficial) announcement.  Maybe this could be a blog or wikipage with an RSS feed?
• For projects (see OurWork for a list of projects) that can stand to move slower, even just a little bit slower, put less staff resources into them on a weekly basis.  This slower pace, along with a clear list of tasks that staff thinks need to be accomplished on the project, allows visitors to the site to get involved and help.
• Encourage employees to blog, even just once a week or less, about what’s currently exciting them at work, or anything they like.
• I’ll write more when I think of more.

I really love the work that we’re doing and am excited to be working in this kind of an open organization, with such a great culture, and I am excited to see that culture evolve and get even better.

Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club planting day report

Back in May, I wrote about another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area. Yesterday was that day, but not on Whipple. Due to some miscommunication, I thought we had the place all lined up, but we didn’t. We ended up playing at 2948 W. 24th St instead. We had 5 adults (Cathy from my C3 class, Joanne, John, Ben and myself from the HUB) and 4 children (ages 8-10) participate. We had to do a lot more work to get into the soil this time than last time, as it was so compacted. But work we did, and we got 2 hostas, 5 coral bells, 4 bleeding hearts and 8 day lillies into the ground, as well as a flat each of prarie grass and echanaicha. Joanne also did a great job building a fence out of sticks and zipties!

New Leadership

For the last couple of years I’ve been thinking about and working on “new” ways of organizing that are sometimes hard to describe. It’s sometimes more clearly what they’re not. They’re not hierarchical, for example. In any event, Jean has a fantastic post about Leadership in Participatory Culture that gets at some important points about this “new”:

Leaders within this context display, I think, the following characteristics. And I would, of course, prefer to think of them as nurturers. But to bridge from one paradigm to the new thrivable participatory one, we will use the past terminology. Leaders, then, in participatory culture, noticeably portray the following:

• trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
• draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
• demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
• act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
• show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
• listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
• instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
• defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
• hold each participant to their greatness
• open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
• willing and ready for new opportunities
• able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty