Note: OGM Forum is no longer active. This is a static snapshot as of February 2022. You can browse the site to see posts, but the functional features of the site will not work. You can search or download a zip archive of the files from the site at github/OpenGlobalMind/forum.openglobalmind.com.
@michaeldobbie
I’m black, thanks for asking about the diversity here Michael. It’s extremely important that we include more voices within our discussions.
If you’re interested, I’d love an opportunity to chat with you about how we could possibly move forward by taking real action towards transformational evolution for most people.
I finally got around to read the draft after preparing/converting such long-form manually. Overall, it reads quite decent for the general direction towards which OGM appears to be framed/designed/intended behind the public/surface scenes. As a plan or outline, instead of pondering too long on some vision concept or draft or whitepapering, the storythreading as one initial offer/product/service could be conducted on some groups or for an events, so that might lead to practical experience, allow to adjust/fine-tune, maybe recommendations/testimonials, ways to advertise/promote/present and then expand. Before it remains all in the abstract and designing the perfect logo or landing page, but the real value/benefit needs to be delivered to real customers who are willing and happy to pay for it. Not much of a danger here, many participants are practicioners and professionals, but are there opportunities to try this in a sandbox, early dry-swimming training?
Another interesting difference which becomes more apparent with descriptions like this (which is a good thing, getting to clarity quickly rather than realising misalignment way too late once investments/loss grew), is that OGM/facilitation as a commercial business might have certain competitive wants/needs/obligations and therefore needs to design for all these questions like artificially restricting/controlling data access, confidentiality, managing from where to get money and what to spend it on, ownership of the produced results, splitting profits, expectations on certain quality/reliability of service levels as payment/operations might depend on it, and similar. On the other hand, as @abigailbrody very suitably pointed out, there’s the open commons/community projects on massive scale, like Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, libre-free software development, OA/OER (the less confused, non-fake ones), and these are created and maintained/stewarded with little money or money just as a secondary instrument, open/inclusive/preserving policies, as they’re not competing with other proprietary, artificially restrictive, closed, exploiting enterprises, but are universally agreed as a necessary and superior offer in comparison to earlier products like the Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta.
Sure enough, there are still plenty of commercial information services, as I don’t think we could reasonably, usefully get a Bloomberg Terminal or Gartner reports or similar kinds of things. So now, one question might be whether or not or to what degree the OGM name/brand/initiative is supposed/expected/intended/designed to become a financial success with reputation among + access to big industry players and/or also helping small participants in some markets or supporting friendly/good organizations in/with what they do, enable stable employment, become an institution that can influence slow companies in urgent need towards more favorable actions and decision making, or, again, on the other hand, expand and apply techno-ethical libre-free future information society principles to other domains like sense-making or online collaboration or systems analysis + urgent, complex problem solving, even in cases where it would operate at a loss or no income at all in the many important areas where economically no money is available at all or generally simply not spent/invested.
There’s also the option to design for a hybrid, either very deliberately separating into two branches who then via carefully installed protocols/interfaces can enjoy the fun of interacting with each other (also for resolving such conflicts of interest and remaining able to do things in both and all worlds), or OGM operates as one integrated entity but then has to somehow determine how it’s going to handle the different perceptions/expectations by people, which can easily be a source of constant confusion and subsequent frustration.
Please apologize the exaggeration, of course these two main perspectives don’t need to be mutually exclusive. There’s good money to be earned for actual work, which can be highly specific, custom facilitation which isn’t useful beyond the boundaries of the single, specific case, or compensation for the investments/efforts related to physical scarcity like time, location, materials, etc. In digital and for information however, these are inherently and naturally not scarce at all, they always only keep duplicating, and there’s no reason to ever have a shortage of an immaterial good. Trying to artificially limit and restrict such in order to then be able to sell access to it, that’s suspicious at best, and in many cases very destructive and unethical. Rules of the physical world don’t necessarily carry over to the immaterial information world, nor vice versa. Business models intended for one of them exclusively or covering parts of both should better take that into account.
No matter how that’s going to be decided, one direction at the exclusion of the other, or a hybrid, or a mix, it’s much better to gain some clarity about this in advance and not go on for a long time with a lot of confusion and frustration, to in the end when it’s much too late part ways in bitter disagreement and at a huge loss/waste of earlier investments/effort. For that reason, I think this draft is an excellent contribution to outline the general concepts and invoke further discussion, as already arrived in the replies to this thread and elsewhere.
@michaeldobbie I’m wondering if there’s some actual differences of opinion, or if there’s wide general agreement, just some differences in terminology. For better understanding, a few questions:
If there’s something called the OGM platform, in what capacity, to what extend, is this Discourse considered to be a/this OGM platform? Other or beyond serving for general OGM-related discussions?
Wouldn’t it be very important and useful to have any or all bunches of engineers and system thinkers talk to each other, in contrast to only talking amongst themselves?
I would object that we’re in a “technological chaos”, technology by definition and purpose can hardly ever be chaotic, to the contrary. At the same time, we’re in quite an artificial, unnecessary technical mess, which is caused by bad and malicious products, which is not a result of the technology or technicalities, but financial interests. Furthermore, there are much larger and more serious messes, when it comes to ecology, lifestyle, politics, and these are also not much aided by us remaining stuck with bad technical products. Yes, no?
Also, if we all just hang for barbeque and have a good time, isn’t there a huge risk that things get worse by themselves automatically, if left unattended?
What do you think keeps women to join and engage?
Are you saying that the virtual world isn’t real? You’re not suggesting that it doesn’t exist, or are you? Is it that the representation isn’t identical to the real thing it represents, and you’re in favor of the real things, at the expense of their representations?
Are you aware that Google Search is really not that much about the minimalistic search term input form, but what makes it work is massive crawling of all the Web pages and the page rank algorithm and huge data centers?
Are you experiencing a shortage of online conversation communities/groups/opportunities? For me it’s the reverse, I likely could fill every day of every week with many calls and conversations, if I tried, and it’s all the same, not much constructive or useful or interesting, after listening to a lot over many years.
Apologies if some of these sound blunt, I’m more curious instead 
thanks for hanging a bit at the bbq, i decided on watermelon bcause of the weather so will be replying in bits and pieces here, for now just to say that to me Discourse by default is our current platform. I mean, what other space exists that better represents us all at this moment? google groups has died out, zoom calls are once a week curated events for those into that kind of jam (not my preferred way of showing up or doing dialogue)…so what else do we have? all i’m saying is that we look at where we are right now, see who is engaged and poke around, ask around, ask what ppl want, what else we can add…just as you are doing…so kudos to you for staying with it my friend!
Hey, thanks for replying, much appreciated! I think this Discourse and some of the other sites/services that are currently used are quite decent for us to find each other, learn about each other, discuss topics of interest, hang out together, and see if or where it leads to. So it may, for now, be de-facto our first version or starting point towards a/the OGM platform (whatever that means, whoever knows what/where/how it is, how it looks&feels like, what it’ll do or not do, etc.), and in that respect the contribution of the draft as well as your inquiry too to address more of the social side are excellent opportunities to form the kind of thinking that may eventually get us there, to a great new place with barbeque and not just abstract speculation and digging ourselves out of the technical chaos.
Just a quick personal note, as I deliberately, have to, because of the Builder role, look more at the technical things, it’s great to have you on board to also cover and help with some of other aspects, and I think they’re not mutually exclusive opposed nor is there a need to contrast them, and we all can easily have a great time to do interesting things with both of them in parallel. I mean, it likely would be hard to find somebody who doesn’t want any social bonding, connections and hanging out with friends, or somebody who is serious in suggesting that we should shut down all the electrical stuff and mechanical instruments and meet some place in the woods (and while the latter might be fun too, it likely is somewhat impractical when it comes to things like the notion of global minds, etc.).
we probably need all the tools we can get our hands on, at least to try them out, and to continue to improve on previous tools, while also staying alert and aware of the limitations of these tools and not get misguided about how slick, cool they initially seem, definitely not to allow them to take over or replace the spirit and intention of what we’re hoping to communicate…humans have a long history with technology and with technology also using us, the fear of AI is nothing new but it’s a legitimate concern, language itself as a technology has fooled us into believing we actually communicate with one another…
I can’t speak to all women, but as a woman with two small (grand) children as my responsibility with both day to day parenting and online school, there is no way I have time to do my work, take care of kids, and then spend a lot of time listening, organizing, responding to anything else. OGM in theory is really wonderful. In practice, my experience is that there a lot of men with a lot more free time/bandwidth available than perhaps many women. Men who have interesting ideas and like to present them. Just can’t be my world these days. I just try and keep up peripherally.
It could be an interesting data point to look at. And maybe one reason women are underrepresented in these sorts of configurations.
Love it! And, by ‘love’ I’ll leave you wondering which of ‘The four loves’ I mean:
Storge – empathy bond.
Philia – friend bond.
Eros – romantic love.
Agape – unconditional “God” love.
Thank you very much for sharing! Would you say or find it useful/conceivable that if there’s some way to better organize the piles and piles of material so you could more easily find and navigate the interesting pieces or maintain a high-level overview, that this would improve quality, connection, relation for your situation? In terms of, let’s say, you have certain topics, people, events you’re interested in to be able to cherry-pick and choose from little snippets where to dive in more deeply and what to skip? Like, you know, similar to book recommendations by your friendly reader community/circle because they know what you might be interested in Just asking in particular from an OGMic perspective, besides other gender dynamics.
I am a great fan and long term user of hypothesis
https://hypothes.is/users/gyuri 2700 of these are public
We are developing
https://trailmarks.co/
and a lot more.
The landing page is about a value proposition for the individual learner.
Eventually consistent emergent people centered collaboration is our current goal.
https://twitter.com/TrailMarks
https://twitter.com/TrailHub1
Looks like the forum does not play well with hypothesis
Nancy
Thanks so much for sharing and for opening up the dialogue to the broader systemic issues and the institutionalized inequities between the genders. This as well as other factors should be deeply contemplated if we are going to not only welcome, but make the potential of OGM accessible to everyone. Not an easy topic and not any easy set of answers.
Matt
@skreutzer, thank you for a very thought provoking question. It made me dig deeper to think about motivation - why would one participate, before thinking about the affordances for participation. I’m not sure affordances themselves draw me in, but I do notice they attract some folks. So thinking about those differences may be useful at some point.
Here are some quick thoughts about my motivation that come to mind.
Finally, I have spent enough time in male dominated groups that I’m kind of feeling done with that too. (This may simply be my cornona/smoke/school grandkids at home/too much work fatigue speaking!) And my sense that (and this is probably my own sexism speaking so I’ll own it) the focus on affordances, particularly technical solutions, has to be more deeply embedded in relational and system conversations and women seem to be more often good at that. Again, gross generalization and probably too much rambling. Just trying to put my finger on my own thinking and feeling I guess!
As we articulate our tacit awareness and understanding as we seek to be understood to gain better comprehension, to solve previoulsy unsolvable problems in the digital we are effectively Externalize Our Collective Intellect. I see the possibility there to do it in a way so that we end up with a Map that is the territory that we an explore and in dwell within and after all our explorations we come back to where we started and see it for the first time, for what it is what can we do about it.
not mutually exclusive i think;
this document expanded, augmented into collaborative mode, ‘simply’ goes into depth and detail as to achieving such a place.
ultimate goal is to elevate global consciousness …
?
