The impossible has become reality...



Leon Regelson online Videochatting via Skype!

It's ALIVE, the blog is ALIVE!

Loretta is not yet associated with ABC. This announcement is provided as a service to the community.

On 06/06/09 5:34 AM, Loretta Donovan wrote in LinkedIn:
--------------------
Imagine you are trying to engage hundreds of people in a conversation about the generative power of Appreciative Inquiry. Some of them had computers, others used PDAs, and many had cell phones. You wanted them to socially and emotionally connect with each other - in real time. Their comments should be archived for viewing later. You wanted their ideas to flow to the world. And there should be no cost for the technology.

What would could you use for this purpose? Twitter! On Monday, June 8 from 8:30 to 9:30 pm EDT join in the first Appreciative Inquiry Tweetchat. Here is how to participate:

> Create your Twitter account at www.twitter.com
> Go to http://tweetchat.com/room/apprecinqchat and log in

Questions and topics of interest should be submitted by 5pm EDT on Monday to me at worksmartsgroup@gmail.com.

Saving Sounds (SaSo) Project

Association Building Community, in order to track and assist the development of the Process Arts, connects with Conference Recording Service to create audio and video recordings and make them available for study by the public, members of ABC, and to related practitioners working in the field.

CRS has been recording culture change work for over thirty years and, thanks to founder/owner Richard Page, has made it possible for Brandon WilliamsCraig to connect with and learn from dedicated authors and facilitators from all over the world.

A room in my co-op just became available. Do you know people looking for a home in Eugene, Oregon (or anywhere - i moved here to live in this house!) who you imagine we would enjoy living with, and who would enjoy living with us? If you like, pass the word along to them...

Life,
John Abbe

= = =

Walnut St. Co-op - Room Open

We live in a big, beautiful, old house on the east side of Eugene,
with 9 bedrooms, 2 living rooms, 2 kitchens, 4.5 bathrooms. There is
a sunny shared office, garage workshop space, and more. We also have
an ever-expanding vegetable garden in the front yard and established
apple and pear trees in the back yard. We share dinners Mon-Fri, with
each person cooking one night a week in teams of two.

We share a vision of progressive social change founded in holistic
rather than adversarial politics. We enjoy each other's company,
while allowing each person lots of space for independent projects and
outside friendships. We serve as a networking node for a variety of
people and organizations in Eugene and elsewhere. Interests of
current residents include writing, dialogue & group process,
car-sharing, snow camping, wikis, meditation, and more.

We are especially interested in finding long-term folks (at least a
year), but occasionally host people who are shorter-term. We want
responsible housemates with good communication skills. We are a
diverse group, queer-friendly, with a current age range from 24 to
62. Rent is $335/month plus utilities, and $130/month for food
(almost all organic).

Getting to know us usually starts with coming over for dinner. Please
call us at 510-387-5228 (cell - preferred) or 484-1156 (local) for
more info, or email walnut@ic.org. We also have a website at
<http://walnutstreetco-op.org/>.

Riane Eisler

April 21, 2007 San Jose, CA		The Montessori Foundation & The International Montessori Council's 3rd Annual West Coast Conference on Partnership and Montessori Education Keynote		Contact http://www.montessori.org (800)-632-4121 E-mail
April 22, 2007 Chicago, IL		Coop America Green Festival Plenary Speech (12-1 pm) followed by Booksigning (1-1:30)		Festival Website
April 22, 2007 Chicago, IL		Crossroads Center Speech and Booksigning 3:30pm		Contact: Laura Strkel and Al Gustafsen, (312) 831-9350, www.crossroads-center.org
April 23, 2007 Chicago, IL		In These Times Speech and Booksigning		Contact: Erin Polgreen (773) 772-0100, http://www.inthesetimes.com/
April 24, 2007 Chicago, IL		Transitions Bookplace Speech and Booksigning		Website
May 4-5 2007, San Francisco, CA		New World Forum: Imaging and Shaping a New World		For more information: Wisdom University
May 8, 2007 San Francisco, CA		International Museum of Women What’s a Woman’s Worth? Special Event and Booksigning		Phone:(415)543-4669 www.imow.org
May 10, 2007 Berkeley, CA		Black Oak Books Speech and Booksigning		Website

CREATING A CARING ECONOMY

FRIDAY MAY 11, 2007 - 7- 9:30 PM

Fellowship hall- 1924 Cedar at Bonita

Berkeley, CA 94709

Wheelchair Accessible

(By Public transit,on Shattuck take #43 on Shattuck to Cedar,
On Cedar walk downhill towards Bonita,on the left you will see the large building.)

Sponsored by the Social Justice Committee
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists
Donation $10- $30

"Secrets of Facilitation" Free Virtual Workshop Coming Up April 16 & 17

Originally Posted: 12 Apr 2007 10:52 PM CDT

Next Monday April 16th and Tuesday April 17th, Evolve Faciliation and Coaching is sponsoring a virtual workshop where Michael Wilkinson will explore the 'Secrets of Facilitation' with facilitators from around the globe. This workshop is part of the Evolve's 'Leading Lights' program, a series of virtual workshops and interviews with international facilitation leaders and authors. All you need to participate is a phone! This is a great opportunity to interact, question and share thoughts with Michael and with facilitation colleagues from around the world. The Southern Hemisphere workshop will be convened Tuesday, April 17th, 10am - 11am Sydney (12pm Auckland, 8am Perth, 9:30am Adelaide, 8am Singapore and Kuala Lumpur); The Northern Hemisphere workshop will be convened Monday, April 16th, 8pm US Eastern Time/ New York, 5pm Pacific Time/Los Angeles). For more information or to register, visit www.evolves.com.au/events.htm .

Nexustentialism

next, ... us
for change

This email goes to roughly six thousand folks (and growing) who have shown an interest over the years in the Process Arts, building community on purpose, and guardianship of peace.

The Nexus For Change conference has just reached a finish at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Iris McGinnis
,
John Abbe , and
Brandon WilliamsCraig (among over three hundred others) participated in this proto-community of Process Arts practitioners from the relatively unknown to the (in?)famous worldwide. This collaborative missive reflects Iris' and Brandon's experiences and becoming aware of the expanded possibilities for the future emerging from this kind of gathering..

A certain "Alice down the rabbit Nexus" feeling pervaded our time in Ohio. We lost three hours across time zones, went to bed late and rose early to be a part of the teams dealing with Logistics, Photography, and IT. By turns, Nexus was frightening, exciting, exhausting, invigorating, disappointing, and wonderfully exceeded both our expectations. Details of our individual feelings, responses, etc. may be found (sooner and later) on our individual blogs (please click on our names above).

Nexusians provided several suppliants with financial help in order to work toward diversity, as well as giving gifts of friendship and collaborative inspiration. We received round trip airfare and a place to stay so that we might participate, and paid for reduced registration costs and related expenses from matching money raised within the ABC community. We feel profoundly grateful, in particular, for LeonRegelson and Marilyn Madsen within ABC, Bill Adams of Maxcomm, Peggy Holman and Steve Cady, Joe Matthews, Cheryl Honey (Nexus Share and Care) of Community Weaving and the Family Support Network, and the M.O.D. students from BGSU who created the morning-after Ancient Wisdom Circle.

The event itself was a fundamental gathering, for the first time on this scale, of whole systems changers, researchers and authors, organizational development professionals, community builders/weavers, academics, human systems innovators, playback theater and graphic artists, and a multitude of other corporate managers, consultants, and facilitators - all apparently desiring open circles to struggle fruitfully with change-work and make a positive difference in the world. Hopefully this kind of gathering will continue and deepen, find its way around the nation to a different area each year, and reach beyond its currently limited scope to consciously support the face-to-face building of communities of understanding in specific locales - beyond the intense days of cross-pollination.

The opening invocation for the Nexus was a "Samoan Circle" in which each of five chairs was labeled with a role: Jean Bartunek (professor of Organization Studies at Boston College and former president of the Academy of Management) began in the Scholar chair, Henri Lipmanowicz (retired CEO of Merck subcontinental, and co-founder of the Plexus Institute) began in the Leader chair, and Carolyn Lukensmeyer (creator" of AmericaSpeak's 21^st Century Town Meeting) began in the Practitioner chair. Peggy Holman offered the following words to explain the Activist's chair: " Brandon WilliamsCraig is of the new breed of activists, who, rather than advocating for or against something, are process activists – bringing people with diverse perspectives together so that wise answers emerge." Most gratifying of all was the briefly empty " Wild card" chair for the rarely heard voices the future/the artist/the natural world/the unknown/the child, etc. The opening was both hopeful and problematic and, in so being, a fine place to start as a metaphor for the whole endeavor.

Iris met many wonderful people at the various formal and informal conversation 'cafes', attended numerous workshops, and hopes to write about them later on her blog. Brandon convened two Open Space sessions entitled, respectively:
- Process Arts: culture-making, Healing Friction, and guardianship of peace
- Grief Before Beginnings: essential depths without which changes are unsustainable
and was happy to be interviewed about the Process Arts by Michael Gaciri.

We wish we had understood, ahead of time, the full scope of the collaborative and emergent Nexus design process, so we might have sent a clear invitation, so you might have watched the invocation process, since it was streamed internationally and is now archived (Nexus Home > Conference Central . Media streams) via the web. All would have benefited from your feedback and encouragement and we would like to invite you to review the Nexus material on the web, to consider attending next year, contact us with council, suggestions, issues to raise, etc. Please send any thoughts, desires, inspirations and let's continue our conversations into making the next event sparkle even more brightly than the first.

With Nexus behind and before us, the nationwide walkabout to grieve what is past and build the Guardians of Peace begins soon. Iris may also wander, grieve Aidan, and (if financially manageable) go to conferences to continue connecting with other process artists. The better part of a decade has passed in building our small ABCommunity slowly and our core desire now is to grow in size and depth, share the fruits of our modest learning, and be changed by new people. We'd like to send more regular reports and invitations.

Your creative and financial contributions (see below) will help take this work further into the world and empower more folks participating in this culture shift toward peace (conflict done well). If this interests you and you have the ability please contribute what you can to make it possible to take our work out in the world. While attending conferences can be very rewarding it is also financially and physically exhausting. Although this one was largely covered by gifts of various sizes, the overall cost to others to get us there was about $1,500. In the near future we'd like to offer community building circles, classes for adults and children, and raise funds for even more folks to participate in training and intense gatherings like Nexus For Change. Let us know if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested in getting together on a regular basis to learn and practice Process Arts. We would love to expand our face-to-face community. Also let us know where you are outside the Bay Area so we can connect when we are in your area, with you and with others with a will to practice and learn from each other. We are profoundly grateful for our time out in larger circles this year and look forward with particular energy toward being together during the Next Us For Change. Particular thanks to Peggy Holman and Steve Cady - to Peggy for revealing herself in the Ancient Wisdom Circle created with students on the morning after as being a "nexustentialist," and to both for their warm welcome and desire to collaborate - making local ripples swell into waves of global change.

We hope to work more with you on the questions this work inspires and the responses and learning we all carry. For us, the core framing question emerged in Peggy's words from the Day-After Circle and we deeply desire to share its unfolding with you and the wisdom you represent. The core question underlying this entire field seems to be: " In Service to Whom?"


Warmly,

Brandon and Iris
from Association Building Community a.k.a. Beamish Process Arts

A list of links mentioned above:

1. The largest cache of beautiful photos including people, graphics, charts, etc. http://www.flickr.com/groups/nexusforchange/pool/
   
2. for Session notes mentioned above go to http://www.nexusforchange.org and select "Conference Central" and then "Session Notes Library"
3. for Video go to http://www.nexusforchange.org and select "Conference Central" and then "Media Streams"
4. Iris' blog is http://mythinginaction.blogspot.com/
5. John Abbe's blog http://ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?ObBlog
   
6. Brandon's blog is behind http://bdwc.net. Search the word "Nexus" or click on "Recent Blog"
7. Process Arts interview http://www.nexusforchange.org/index.php3?object_id=GME_Vault&function=download&item=8c1b83db43b595d09ce2082f333a59cf
8. Walkabout (the Little Fire Burns) http://abcglobal.net/LFF.html
9. Guardians of Peace project http://abcglobal.net/GPx.html
10. Please donate via http://www.justgive.org/giving/donate.jsp?charityId=6530
    

FYI list admin information:
If you would like to unsubscribe, or would prefer to change the way you receive communications from us, please visit http://lists.beamish.org/mailman/listinfo/beamish and enter your subscription address (the one through which you received our most recent message) at the bottom of the page. If that is too hairy, please email me directly at brandon@abcglobal.net and I'll take care of it. If we have inconvenienced you or evoked creepy feelings about tech gone wild we can relate and do heartily apologize.

As always, all feedback is very welcome – the chewier the better.

The organization name will read "Beamish Process Arts" - which was the founding name of Association Building Community.

Please make your desire clear on the Just Give form

Membership (whatever appropriate offering you would provide to support any vital organism growing these changes)

Program: Guardians Of Peace (Process Arts Community for Training)

Program: Little Fire Burning (walkabout and national outreach and teaching)

Program: Training Scholarships (to help develop process artists)

Administration (to further the survival of our community infrastructure)

If you would prefer to write a check, please write your purpose in the memo line and post it to ABCGlobal, 181 Farrelly Dr., San Leandro CA, 94577.

Toll Free (866) 236-0346
administration at abcglobal dot net

partial facilitation history for ABC members

• Mediation for three professional martial and performing artists sharing one creative space. The proceedings took the group from the verge of legal action to peaceful settlement.
• Group facilitation inside San Quentin Federal Penitentiary
• Community Building Circles and Facilitator Trainings
• a weekly public forum, Friday evenings in our downtown Oakland offices
  
• ongoing (as of 2007) community circle to build community within a martial arts dojo
• public demonstrations and learning processes
• offering public circles during the How Berkeley Can You Be festival in our open tent
• Open Space circles following presentations on the Process Arts during the Nexus For Change 2007 conference.
• ongoing rotation of facilitation during every Council (Board of Directors) Meeting and monthly, all-day Retreat.
• more...
  

Members - please add more as they apply

Potential Ways of renaming/visioning Beamish:

LR: Institute Of Process Arts (IOPA)
FYI URLs with iopa and ipa almost all taken - could use processarts (below)

BW: Association Building Community

Web addresses (URLs) to which we already have access:
beamish.org
processarts.org
savingsounds.org
thefamilyforum.org
abcglobal.net
healing friction.com, org, net
guardiansofpeace.org

Here is the link to be sure you are on the Beamish Junction list for all members to be able to connect regardless of their affiliations:
BeamishJunction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Wahooo! Hello Marilyn and Michael!
Once you open the blogger you grab whatever you'd like to edit from the screen below, copy it to the screen above and change it in whatever way you like - indicating your changes using the command to make something bold (heavy dark capital letter B upper right) or italicized (the leaning capital I right next to the B)

As far as Word functionality is concerned, Marilyn, that is harder to come by and involves installing a special collaborative software actually on our website. I'm working on that in association with the Making a Difference in the Presidential Process action that will be my dissertation research.

Editing Marilyn's post as though it were collaborative would look something like this then, changes in bold and directly comparable within the same page to her original message:
--------------------------------
Brandon here,

Marilyn and her new puppy are trying out this blog thing. Go Marilyn! I'd love to meet her and introduce Francisco! She is sitting on my hands trying to eat the keyboard. If we have to do all that cutting and pasting here two, I think we should continue looking for options.

I would like a system which works like WORD were you can edit the sentence assisning a different color to each editor and can see the history on the document.

Marilyn and Brandon
-------------------------

For now, can we get used to this for a while? It's free and very usable. Be honest, please. If you really won't use it please say so and I'll keep trying. Would you be willing to contribute less than $10/mo to a new set-up and collaborative tool?

I hear your appeal for more action and direction and I am certainly headed there. I believe Leon, Patricia, and Levi have agreed to either help out or contribute creatively. Have you read the proposal yet?

Levi,
try clicking on or just cutting and pasting this link to get to the proposal:
http://www.williamscraig.com/WilliamsCraig/Brandon/Academe/HealingFriction.htm

Now that I've opened the blogger,
what do I do?
Wait??????
Love,
Michael

Thanks so much, Leon, for joining in here. As we touched on today when we were together, a conversation about the use of this Blog is probably more appropriate to the yahoogroup, but over email it is harder to see everyone's individual work laid out before you.

My suggestion would be to copy what has gone before that you'd like to modify (by highlighting, copying, and pasting) and make a new entry with your changes. I've seen that work marvelously.

Several folks suggested they liked the first sentence best. I'm wondering what is next. Perhaps a useful experiement here might be to attempt to merge the two, or highlight what is most prefered about both?

This is an experiment with the Web Log as a collaborative tool and as well as a working together on our shared purpose.

The two sentences currently under construction are:

"Beamish builds community on purpose by practicing the Process Arts, including facilitation, leadership, collaboration, and more..."

"Beamish awakens to authentic connection and great possibility, responds by purposefully building community, and connects groups and individuals by attending the art of deepening dialogue into action."

Please reflect on them and post your own ideas, changes, etc.
Signing in happens at http://www.blogger.com
Let me know if there are any needs, especially technical, with which anyone needs my help.

Brandon