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PurposeConversation

There is an on-going, likely perpetual conversation about who we are, what we are doing, why we are doing it, what our story is, etc.,.

These thoughts are essential to many other questions, including, “How do we present ourselves to the world?” (the PrConversation?,) “How do we pay and for what?” (the PaymentsConversation?,) “How do we govern ourselves?” (the GovernanceConversation?,) and many others (“How do we grow?”, “How do we interact with emerging projects?”)

keywords: purpose, vision, values, intention, characteristics

Meeting 2007-10-24

in attendence:

Lion started by saying, “I think we need some sense of our vision, because there are all these decisions and questions and situations, the answers to which I think need to be based in some collectively shared sense of who we are, what we’re about, and where we’re going, so that people don’t end up being disappointed.”

MykO? spoke to our need for an overarching vision. He said that things could spiral out of control, if we don’t have some sort of vision that we understand and agree with.

To figure out what that vision is, someone asked, “What brought you here?

Some of the things people said include:

BrianRice? said:

We agreed that we want room for purposes – things like the six-hour startup, a games night, an OpenSpaceTechnology? day, etc.,.

In a statement of vision, we might want to say: “We are not identifying with any particular purpose.”

BrianRice? noted that SeattleMindCamp? has the same problem: People look at advertisements, and say: “That’s great… …for somebody else.” …When the person in question is exactly the sort we’d like to attract.

Community minded people, environmentalists, biologists, …

Some people are super-comfortable in places like mind-camp – “auto-networkers,” – people who network with others like a machine.

Part of the big goal of SeattleMindCamp? was to get people who are stuck in their islands a way to get out.


There was a period where we moved around between rooms, and where Kristi & ElizabethGrigg? & DavidLindes? & Laura came in.


David was sharing TedTalks? with us. “What are TED talks?” “I dunno what that is.” People explained it.

Lion recounted the conversation to this point, to the people who just came in.

Laura said, “It sounds like what you’re looking for is a thread to connect your activities.

David appealed to Lion: “It sounds like an all ages version of the school.” He then said, “I’d like to hear more about this school, from you.” Later in the meeting, Lion explained about TheClearwaterSchool? and the Sudbury Schools, and so on. But not just yet.

David noted that he wanted to learn things he’d never hear about. He liked the diversity of topics, art, philosophy– that this is not “geek central.”

He’d like to teach photography to a photography clique, and be a student in other cliques. The point is not “to geek.”

Somewhere in the gathering, it may as well have been here, we talked about “geek” and how it means so many different things to so many different people. Some people see it perjorative, some people see it honorary. Some people see it being broad, some people see it being narrow.

MykO? suggested that we might get further by looking to characteristics. For example, we like to teach or mentor or learn.

LionKimbro said, “Perhaps we should distribute all this. Perhaps we should all write up reports about what we’d like Saturday House to be like, what values, what visions we have, and then share them later.” BrianRice? said, “If we’re going to break out, have some directed questions.

We went back to “The Sudbury School for Adults.” Someone said, we are making ourselves better adults, better leaders, better teachers and learners, … “But we shouldn’t use the word better.” We are learning. We do not believe learning has ended. Kristi brought up labels, boxes, definitions; Then someone spoke about tag-lines, phrases, and words. Kristi said, “For me, it’s about Community being Creative.” She agreed with BrianRice? – if we go home & brainstorm on our own, we should have a few specific questions.

Laura brought up (I can’t read my notes here– did I write “climate arena?” Doesn’t seem right.LionKimbro). “We can’t just stop doing stuff, and change.” (Honestly, I don’t remember what we were talking about here.)

Somewhere around here, we talked about education and Clearwater, and the difficulty in describing it to people. Kristi noted that we define ourselves by our children.

“Free Learning environment.” We’d been talking about Clearwater and Sudbury, and we were asking ourselves, “How closely are we connected to Sudbury? Is this related? Should we talk about it?”

DavidLindes? had the idea to talk mission statement: a statement that, when there is a question, it can be justified ultimately by the mission statement. LionKimbro recited the CommunityWiki:MissionStatement:

This is a jam-session. We do not know where we are going. This is open. It has no mission. The topic is rather broad, so let us grow in whatever direction we want, and split later. There is space on this stage for at least a few dozen people, and it looks like there’s plenty of room right now. If you enjoy the music and like who you see, come join on in!

MykO? suggested a refridgerator magnet wiki-like mission statement.

We talked about how this influences ourselves and our outward appearance.

ElizabethGrigg? hadn’t talked in a while, and Lion asked her to talk. She told us she was thinking of Daisy, who spoke at Hugo House. His performance career was launched by “21 dog years.” She said he would say things like: “I have to come up with the marketing thing for this brochure,” and that he couldn’t do it until he had a title in mind.

So is it uncreative to box yourself in? Elizabeth argued that there is heroism to it. “The title is key. I can’t get excited about it until the title is clear in my mind.”

She said that experimentation is one of our values, like the refridgerator magnetics. A safe playground for experimenting. “If you experiment, it’s okay. You can even take a stand for something, even though it may not be your position.” Instead of experimenting on the world, or a given process, we are experimenting on ourselves. Testing ourselves. Normally, in business, it has to all be tried & true, “This makes money.” But we are experimental.

Lion recapped: As values, we have listed so far:

Lion said, “When we were originally having conversations about the SaturdayHouse?, one of our priorities was being part of the Internet.” David asked, “What do you mean by that,” and Lion described a difference between CommunityOnline and OnlineCommunity. “Community Online” is composed of communities that exist primarily in the material world, and then happen to have some online parts. Online Communities are communities that were born on the Internet, and the Internet is their primary mode of communication. Communities Online tend to not interact with the world at large– they use email on private email lists, they use private social networking tools. Online communities tend to be Open Communities, communities online tend to look at the online world and foreign visitors with suspicion.

Lion (who is the author here) explained that we wanted to try to be a place that is simultaneously material and virtual. So there were original experiments with recording everything, and we envision(ed) making a priority of having computers set up for easy access to the blog, to the wiki, to a video camera set up for putting videos on YouTube?, and installing projectors and making it easy to browse the web socially. (And so on.)

DavidLindes? proposed that a better phrase would be: “connected with the world.

ElizabethGrigg? asked, “Would this mean we would be on stage?”, and asked about safety.

We talked values some more: Learning, sharing creativity. “Friends everywhere” came up, and somehow that led to a discussion on “humanity as a friends resource.”

LionKimbro said, “This is all getting rather boring; I want to tell you a vision.

I said: “I’d like to see 50,000 people at Saturday House. I’d like Saturday House to take up several blocks. I think that I am not alone, in being tired of getting home, and having to collaborate with interesting people only through the Internet. I made Saturday House so I could meet face to face, and talk with them, and work with them on stuff, and to sing, and to dance, and to have a grand ball. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I want the side of the Westlake Center to be a gigantic discussions board. “If you want to talk about X, go to such-and-such building, at such-and-such time, and we’re having that conversation.” If you want to build something or learn something, there are plenty of people who want to do that right with you, and they’re all active and present, and their priority is to do that with you. A whirlwind of creativity. All the tools necessary are there and available, and there’s someone eager to help you learn to do it, and get you in on helping with their project. I see no reason to close in.”

Kristi said that she was more introverted than extroverted. “I like that there are no expectations” – that she can sleep, and that nobody will care.

DavidLindes? related about his experience on the photo community that be participates on. Who comes? The expectation is that you be “polite & interesting.” Polite comes first on their list.

(Okay, I don’t understand my notes here– something about “Utada?” It reads: “Salon, parlor, … talk, … grouw, … some wnat x, y, z, … doing w/ our photography. I don’t know what it’s about, though.) – LionKimbro

Someone (ElizabethGrigg?) asked, “Is there any attention to the concept of investement?” By investment, she meant:

…such as, …

…something that the group invests in, or sets aside space for, …

We generally agreed (it seemed to me) that the group wants to have, allow, encourage such things, though we seemed unsure of how to go about it. Something about being small in a large collective.

At this point, someone brought up the book, “TheTippingPoint.” Not sure how it came about, but it was talked about. It’s “sort of a marketing book,” but it’s also about epidemics, social interactions, and so on. Part of it was about the rules of groups- that appear in religious, company, – any sort of large social setting. That is the rule of 150 people, also known as “Dunbar’s Number.”

Gortex Corp. was brought up as an example – at Gortex, they set buildings up to hold 150 people, and then you’re off to another division. It has to do with “who can know how many people, by one degree of separation,” or something to do with human memory. Regardless, there seems to be a number at which people feel anonymous, and unconnected from others.

Lion brought up the EcosystemOfNetworks model that he & his friends talk about on CommunityWiki?.

Someone brought up that at Mindcamp, he often wants to go to two sessions that are active at the same time. There are some questions about, “Can we serialize these things, so that I can go to all of them?” If choices are all lined up, and nothing is in parallel, then, …

Someone speculated that we may want to have a similar “rule of 150,” for the SaturdayHouse?. Perhaps when it gets to a certain size, it federates. Perhaps each “house” is 150 people. The houses are federated, and aligned by relatively loose PointsOfUnity. Perhaps we would use the same technique to connect federated Saturday Houses? Or, instead, have a Ting of Saturday Houses?

Someone raised, “We’d need to get way bigger.” This is thinking beyond our britches. Someone brought up that we simply don’t have space for that many people. “But if we find we are limited by space, we can take that as a sign that we need to move to a larger space.” We don’t struggle with space immediately.

If we get a lot of people, we can start doing sign ups, or have multiple locations, that we can split off into. Lion recounted that in the initial Saturday House discussions, we talked about just this scenario, and that we would send some of our membership to the new place. Lion had volunteered to help in just that.

…to continue transcribing from L-10, beneath the line…