Category: people

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One of the things I always do after an event is go through the people I met and see if I can connect to them, e.g. on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. This time around, part of that is adding people to my RSS reader, because they blog. This is an additional pleasure, not just because it extends my network of bloggers that I read, but also because doing so was a key part of my conversations at Crafting {:} a Life in the past days. So I am subscribing to people with which I already have had extended time talking. This immediately puts them at a shorter social distance than normally when exploring new blogs (and they requested me to describe better the importance to me of that, and what/why/how I do that).

Rosie le Faive as a direct consequence of the conversations at Peter’s unconference started a blog press pound. Her first posting is a very good start (definitely not the ‘hello world, is this thing on?’ variety) and I hope to read much more (here’s a bunch of reminders to self that I keep handy when falsely thinking I need to write ‘properly’ before I can press pound to publish). It’s a WordPress blog and it launched with IndieWeb support for Webmention, which is very good. There’s a whole bunch of IndieWeb peeps hanging out on IRC/Slack, Rosie.

Clark McCleod’s Kelake blog in contrast has been around since 2001/2. This too is a WP blog, so I hope to see Clark add Webmention and other IndieWeb features.

Steven Garrity’s blog Acts of Volition goes back to 2000. I’ve been aware of him for a long time, ever since he figured in Peter’s surprise at how well known PEI turned out to be when he first visited Reboot in Copenhagen. Now I’ve met him in person and added him to my reader.

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20190608_084935Walking to the market

I’ve just woken up after a great Day 2 of Peter’s Crafting {:} a Life unconference. Nominally the day was more about doing, where the first day was more about meeting and talking. We started with a walk from Peter Catherine and Oliver’s home to the Charlottetown Farmers Market. There I enjoyed a second breakfast of tasty crab cake, a lovely salmon bagel and good espresso. It was a beautiful sunny morning and we chatted both during the walk and outside the Farmers Market.

20190608_093459Peter, Oliver and Ethan holding court

One of the participants has access to a bus so he drove us back to the ‘campus’ where we all gathered again to build the program for the day together. A fantastic line-up of things ranging from ‘blood memories’ , the history of Peter’s home and surrounding houses (including daguerrotypes), drinking your first ever cup of coffee (and the life changing story behind it), to drawing fantasy maps.
I suggested doing a session on blogging, building on Day 1’s conversations about what happened to blogging, and the future of blogging. It ended up on the schedule for the afternoon.

20190608_110318Olle starting the fantasy cartography session

The rest of the morning I spent with a small group of people at the harbour location of Receiver Coffee, where two of us had their first ever cup of coffee (“I never deliberately put a bitter thing in my mouth with the intention to enjoy it”). Around the coffee we had a fascinating conversation of the seismic consequences of leaving a prescriptive strict organised religious community. The methods, tactics and tools I use in working with groups a lot, in order to create a space for collective change to happen, to build connections and community, essentially can be and are being used to introduce and maintain power differences, isolate groups etc. It’s as if a tool you see as fit for beautiful craftsmanship is deployed to stab someone.

20190608_113054 Garden conversationa first coffee, and back yard conversation

After lunch I sat down with a handful of people in Peter’s back yard for a session on IndieWeb tools and how they can breathe life back into blogging by taking control over your own content and the tools to connect you to others. For lack of laptops and because of bright sunlight, we talked more than we did things. And because of a bit of confusion around the schedule a larger group joined us an hour later under the assumption that was the correct starting time. But those ‘glitches’ worked out fine, as whoever is here are the right people, and whatever we talk about is the right topic. At first we talked about the IndieWeb tools and underlying standards and intentions, and examples of how that works out in practice (or doesn’t). From there we looped through an enormous variety of topics, from filling moments with listening to podcasts, to lifehacks, to getting transcripts of YouTube videos to parenting, reading to elderly people to improve quality of life, to instagram posers, grooming and language, and much much more. The free flow of the conversation with people drifting in and out, went on for some 4 hours effortlessly. People were taking notes but not disengaging on their phones. For me this session was worth the entire trip on its own, I was in flow. There’s much I still need to tease out for myself, to go back into the conversation and pick on a few strands to explore further, but right now it’s enough for me to admire the shape of the ephemeral construct we put together in that back yard. I came out sun burned not having noticed it in the conversational flow.

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Pre-dinner waiting time was filled with terrific oysters. It had been a long time since I had them, and the last time was of the ‘here’s a bit of salty watery snot’ variety. These were fresh, we’re on an island after all, delicate of taste and very meaty. A local chef then served a nice bbq burger meal, after singing an Irish dedication song to us. More music followed.

20190608_184013pre-dinner rush to finish the first draft

Elmine had been working on writing a story during the day, which she plotted together with Rob Paterson, and she read out the first finished draft in front of not just the 50 people who participated in the unconference, but also their partners, families and others who had joined us for dinner. It must be daunting to stand up and read aloud something you created just now, and of which the ink isn’t even dry yet. Leaving half the audience brushing away a tear, it was great. I also felt it completed the circle of our own participation. Elmine led us through the first exercise on Day 1 where we told each other stories, and now she rounded it off with reading us all a story inspired by the family who brought us together in and around their home. When Peter thanked Elmine and they embraced, that was the moment I felt myself release the space I opened up on Day 1 when I helped the group set the schedule. Where the soap bubble we blew collapsed again, no longer able to hold the surface tension. I felt a wave of emotions wash through me, which I recognise from our own events as well. The realisation of the beauty of the collective experience you created, the connections made, the vulnerability allowed, the fun had, the playfulness. We wound down from that rush chatting over drinks in the moon lit back yard.

Thank you Peter for bringing us all to PEI for a few days of, as you wrote earlier, the simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while. Crafting a life is in part about crafting shared experiences. This most definitely was one.

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Today was day 1 of the Crafting {:} a Life unconference that our friend Peter is organising on Prince Edward Island. It was a fun and wonderful day.
It was a novel experience, doing an unconference party like this as a participant. Elmine and I have always been on the other side, the persons convening a group of our friends and connections in our home for the event. Then you know all of those there, although most participants won’t know each other. Today it was like the latter for me, half a dozen familiars, and 40 or more people you never met. Peter said when he picked us up at the airport “you are the only two people in the world who know in what position I am right now.” The flip side of that is I’ve learned what all of you who participated in our events knew all along, how it is to participate.

20190607_084854Before the start, the circle of chairs waiting for us

Both Elmine and I did take some role in today’s events. In the run-up we chatted with Peter to provide feedback and share some of our previous experiences. And today, we helped set the scene. After Peter’s welcoming words and intro, some songs by Michael, and a welcome from Oliver, Elmine took the group through an introductory exercise. It was a version of the ‘anecdote circle lite‘ we did ourselves last summer. Groups of 5 or 6 would talk about “something you crafted or created that you’re most proud of, gave you most pleasure or was the most fun to do.” It is a good way to get to know some of the other participants while doing away with the usual ‘I’m John, and I’m the X at Y company”, of which nothing ever gets remembered when 40 people do that one after another. Now I’ve learned about veterinarian training on PEI, who created the most recent official PEI atlas (and whose name because of that will be remembered centuries from now because those official atlases are kept and cared about), and the pleasure you feel making something with your hands when your regular work is coding. While one was telling their story the others would write down what stood out for them. All those notes served as a source of reference and inspiration for the rest of the day.

Crafting {;} a Life Crafting {;} a Life

Next Peter and I guided the group through building the program. I opened the space and invited people to propose topics or sessions, and when enough others showed interest it would go on the schedule. After the first sessions and lunch, and later in the afternoon we returned to the schedule so people could add things, and use their earlier experiences in the day to suggest new additions to the schedule. With the instruction to be curious, follow your energy and your feet to where you feel engaged, and have fun the participants were off.

20190607_173005the schedule as it emerged during the day

I attended sessions on constructive approaches to local climate adaptation efforts, the role of arts in social movements, a conversation on what happened to blogging, burn-out avoidance strategies, the future we see / want to see for blogging, and how to start and not to start a creative hub and maker space. I would have loved to also join a session on ‘phone nerding’ and the ‘death café’ but you can only be in one spot at any given time. I feel that the fact that this is all taking place on an island with a tight-knit community, gives a special flavor to the event. The sea is a natural boundary to the community and who counts as part of it, and there’s a strong sense of all being into it together. That also showed yesterday evening when Elmine and I found ourselves discussing the impact of AirBnb and other pressures on the local housing market, with some people at a bar, one of whom turned out to be the city counsellor responsible for that subject.

20190607_161502envisioning the future of blogging in Peter and Catherine’s back yard

We ended with pizza and some drinks. Tomorrow we will return for day 2, which will be focused on doing, where today was more about meeting and talking. Some ideas for what to do already emerged during this day. I will likely do something around the indieweb with the others interested in having a personal site away from the silos. But first sleep, and breakfast on the Charlottetown Farmers Market tomorrow.

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My friend Peter has been blogging for exactly 20 years yesterday. His blog is a real commonplace book, and way more than my blog, an eclectic mixture of personal things, professional interests, and the rhythm of life of his hometown. When you keep that up for long enough, decades even, it stops being a random collection and becomes a body of work, an œuvre. Œuvre really is the right word, according to Peter he’s written 2.67 million words. Novels on average have eighty thousand words, so Peter’s blog is over 33 novels long. Most novelists aren’t that prolific.

I’m a regular reader of Peter’s blog exactly because of the quirky mix of observations, travelogues, personal things, snippets of code, and reflection. To me the way he weaves all those things into one, is what we also tried to achieve with our Smart Stuff that Matters unconference (in which Peter participated): bringing global (technology) developments back to the size of your own home life, your own city life, and letting your life inform how you want to shape and use the tools available to you. So that, in the words of Heinz Wittenbrink (another participant last summer), when you discuss themes important to you, you actually are discussing the details of your own life:

To list the themes [….of the sessions I attended…] fails to express what was special about the unconference: that you meet people or meet them again, for whom these themes are personal themes, so that they are actually talking about their lives when they talk about them. At an unconference like this one does not try to create results that can be broadcast in abstracted formulations, but through learning about different practices and discussing them, extend your own living practice and view it from new perspectives. These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live, and the relationships you create or change at such an event like this.

Heinz’ last sentence in that quote “These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live.” is true and important as well.

Of the 20 years Peter kept up his blog, I’ve known him for 14 years almost to the day, ever since we met in a Copenhagen hotel lobby mid June 2005. Our first meeting was aptly technology mediated. As Heinz wrote, our blogging practices cannot be separated from the relationships in which we live. Traces of our connections are visible through the years, building on each others thinking, meeting up in various places, visiting each others homes. Not just our specific connection but the shared connections to so many others.
Blogging isn’t just a reflection of our lives, but is an active part in weaving the connections that make up our lives.

Next week Peter organises an unconference, called Crafting {:} a Life. Modelled after Elmine’s and my unconference birthday parties, Peter is celebrating not just the 20 year milestone of his blog and his company. He’s celebrating in the same way he blogs, the completeness of our lives, both the sweet and the bitter. It’s in that contrast where beauty lives to me, and how we can appreciate the value of the connections we weave. Elmine and I will go visit Peter and his family, with 50 or so others, on Prince Edward Island in Canada in a few days.

Peter recently said about our and other participants coming to Canada from Europe
“It is humbling to consider that each of these old friends is coming across the ocean to join us for the simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while.”
We felt the same every time we did an edition of our unconferences. Elmine wrote last summer, looking back on her birthday unconference Smart Stuff That Matters:

How do you put into words how much it means to you that friends travel [literally] across the world to attend your birthday party? … How can I describe how much it means to me to be able to connect all those people Ton and I collected in our lives, bring them together in the same space and for all of them to hit it off? That they all openly exchanged life stories, inspired each other, geeked out together, built robots together?

The simple act of spending time together talking about life for a while. is a rather rich and powerful thing to do, Peter, which packs the full complexity of being human. We look forward to seeing you, Catherine and Oliver next week, as well as 50 or so others that came to form your ‘global village’ while you were engaged in blogging a life.

Good conversation with Robert and Lilia (company, Lilia’s blog) today over lunch in Enschede. Explored shared challenges concerning doing business, also as a couple, seeing the household as an economically active unit, finding your way back into a field, or extending into new fields and more. It was good to catch up, and take the time to do so. Definitely need to continue that soon for several directions the conversation took us in today. Also Enschede hasn’t changed much since we left, and the problems with trains being delayed and cancelled proved part of the reason we moved still stands :).

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Wilma Haan has been named the new general director of the Open State Foundation. As, the equally new, chairman of the board of the Open State Foundation, I think her joining OSF is a great new step for the organisation. Backed by strong experience in both journalism and digital, she has shown herself a great energy source that will strengthen the team. The fit with Tom, who stepped in as interim director when Arjan left last summer, and the rest of the team is also very good. Tom has done great work as interim director in the past months, and will be the new deputy director. Together they will bring the Open State Foundation further, I am convinced, and I look forward to working with them both. I hope to learn lots from them, as my role on the board is a recent one as well.