Collaborathons of the future

Thoughts emerging from this weekend on:

Warm Data Lab

An interesting method for guiding participatory sense-making and insight-building from a human-first, perspective. The setting of the space and the guidance towards listening-first and embracing inter-connectedness, afforded a deep discussion of the topics and the emergence of shared insights.

I felt merit to this method. Very important in how it’s introduced and explained. @euge facilitated an excellent warm up journey here through his presentation.

The safe space and authenticity that emerged allowed me more than ever to suspend any prejudgement, biases, stereotypes and just listen and absorb insights. It was extremely effective at soliciting a wide range of experiences.

I’m interested to explore ways to make the discussion outcomes more effective and actionable.

I’m overall optimistic about this type of collaboration. I especially observe how even when fostering these types of emergent co-creative, collaborative sessions, good facilitation is crucial to guiding the ‘co-facilitation’.

There is more to build upon here. How can we turn these insights into actions? Should that have been part of the design of the collaborathon or should that be a natural emergent outcome?


What is contribution in a changing world.
…from the perspective of: Family, Economy, Spirituality, Ecology, Culture, etc)

…It’s really how we choose to define, and re-define them. It’s a reflection of our values and how we choose to manifest them, through our participatory co-design of our joint experiences daily.


Some notes on…

  • Culture & Ecology
    I’m so curious here as to how we can continue to respect cultural traditions, but be empowered to update and modify some parts of rituals, practices and identities to closer align with our beliefs. To bring back old rituals that give us empathy for the earth, closeness to our community. To share and borrow from other cultures that might do parts of this better, respecting their origins but embracing our shared future.

    A friend @M_PF once told me about a ritual involving the planting of a tree for a birth, and then when that person is married, the tree is cut down and used to furnish their home. Whether for practical purposes, or just as a earth-bonding experience, this practice seems beautiful to me.

    Imagine growing old with your tree sibling, experiencing it change shape and weather storms as you do.

    More like this!


We are our context, our context is our first contribution.


Where does it go from here?

I recently heard @ela prompt us to consider and re-imagine what types of organisations we want to see in the future, this weekend I had that thought expanded to what types of collaborative environments do we want to see in the future. This weekend was an interesting experiment towards that.

Meeting people’s authentic selves in these spaces was invaluable. Starting from spaces to be and enquire rather than forcing specific objectives, does feel nourishing and a good starting step. Though it feels like one step of many.

I’m curious to explore and collaborate on the design of light-touch (not heavy handed, humanity debasing) technology can help us organise in this manner. e.g. @hugi introduced me to the ‘Dreams’ and ‘Reality’ Edgeryders organisational tools.

I’m also super curious about this notion of win-win games, the best examples of these for me so far are games that prompt and invite vulnerability and get us knowing each other and our selves by talking about interesting aspects of the human experience that we don’t always talk about, stepping outside of our usual conversational loops (e.g. School of Life question cards, Authentic Relating sentence stems)

Someone mentioned about how existing competitive games like ping-pong can be changed so that instead of trying to bat the ball past the other person you can bat the ball to the other person and with a simple twist make the game a co-operative rather than a competition. Can we make these simple twists to the bigger games we place in our lives?

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