What’s of interest? Principles for Open Impact – Open Thinkering
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For the past few months, Tris Lumley has been convening Opening Up community calls. I’ve been to a few and given some advice about various things. It’s led to a previous post on this blog: Ethical Licensing for Impact Organisations.
Earlier this week, Tris posted the following on LinkedIn:
My first response was that “everybody owns all the ideas — good or bad.” I made a note to myself to come back to this, and the blog post you are reading comprises my further thoughts.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
Sure we talk about openness all the time around here, it’s in the name of our organization. This post by @dajbelshaw refines much of his open thinking and work for open organizations with this list, that one could hardly argue with.
Do these ring tru for you? Does this capture the ethos of openness? It’s not just resources nor is it solely about licenses.
Openness is an attitude
Ideas belong to everybody
Community is based on trust
Collaboration over competition
Open licensing is how we roll
I was struck by the first one, Openness is an attitude, that has a special place for me- it’s even the featured image in Doug’s post, Yet Another illustration recognizable in style as the work of @VisualThinkery
My associative trails thinking zings back (yikes this is long ago) to 2009 when I was recording short videos for a thing I called Amazing Stories of Openness (presented first at Open Ed 2009 in Vancouver).
One of these was recorded on a tiny Canon digital camera in poor lighting of a hotel patio at night of the brilliant facilitator Nancy White. In the short video “Create Separately or Together?” Nancy talks about an experience with organizations and knowledge management, but at the very end of this 1:20 video she says this very same assertion, “Openness is an Attitude”.
This is not about any claim to owning this idea, just that it has been, for me, the primary understanding and way to be, by operating with an attitude of openness.
This just seemed like a beautiful bookend spanning 16 years.
Hey! I am trying my best to get some folks engaged here, help me out, it gets lonely.
Hey @cogdog, thanks for your reflections on this post! The first thing I should say is that the “Open is an attitude” quote comes from friend and long-term collaborator @LauraHilliger.
Openness is a difficult thing to define, as many veteran educators and technologists like you will attest. I’m re-reading the excellent Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the moment, and the way that Phaedrus goes insane trying to get to the nub of what is meant by “Quality” reminds me of endless discussions about what we mean by “Open.”
Anyway, the purpose of the post isn’t to try and provide a definitive answer, but rather stimulate further discussion - as you’re providing here!
A final note: @Downes rightly points out that the aim should be cooperation rather than collaboration. Something with which, as a member of a worker-owned co-op, I fully agree
Good stuff reading ZatAoMM! Pirsig packed so much in, and that part of his rant on quality even went into ideas of un-grading. I read it on my own road trip through the northwest US— there’s a part in his book about a diner in a small town in Idaho and I had just passed through that time earlier in the day.
Sometimes it’s a little better to travel then to arrive.
Found in my blog notes a reference to a brilliant CBC story of someone who interviewed Pirsig in his 8os
Alright, alright, we’ll all reread ZatAoMM! Sadly, one of my bffs stole my copy along with an entire box of books when I made my transatlantic move. It’s a joke between us, I steal them back one at a time, but I probably won’t be in the US any time soon, so I’ll have to get a new copy. I was probably 17 the last time I read it, so I honestly can’t remember all the things packed in there. I just know it was a great book…
