Stewardship and Open Culture - and Dadamac March 8, 2011
Fortunately for me he reposted it at the TRANSITION IN ACTION SOCIAL NETWORK at http://transitioninaction.com/group/coalitionofthewilling/forum/topic/show?id=2320371%3ATopic%3A61531&xg_source=msg
so I was able to respond - and I share my response here:
Ref - "Finally, our shared resources include our collective social contexts – our groups, organizations, institutions, and networks. Open Stewardship invites and facilitates the care and development of these resources in the context of ever-expanding networks of projects and concerns."
Thank you Michael for that description - it helps to pinpoint where Dadamac fits in - in the open stewardship of networks and knowledge - but I have never had the right words to manage to explain this.
I am an unusual information bottleneck (or information resource, depending on your viewpoint). This is because I have spent ten years as a connection point between London and rural Africa, i.e. as a connection point between the bandwidth rich and the bandwidth poor. I have a large and varied network, which connects me to a wealth of information and knowledge. I recognise the value of the people in my trust network, the tremendous knowledge resource that they represent, and the potential power-for-good of including them in other networks.
For several years I have been trying to find ways to be less of a bottleneck, but with little success, as I have found it hard to explain what I was trying to do and why. In the last couple of years I have given up trying to explain - and instead I have turned to trying to demonstrate what I am trying to do, by starting to create systems online to make my contacts (and their work and knowledge) more easily visible to each other, and to "outsiders". I have been doing this through my experiments with drupal (at www.dadamac.net) and using posterous (at http://dadamac.posterous.com/ - mostly for "open letters" and links of interest - and most recently at http://dadamaclearnersgroup.posterous.com/ - where I hope to encourage more of my contacts to become "directly visible" online in dadamac rather than restricted to online groups or personal emails).
My hope is that at some point I will connect with people (who I can now describe as Open Stewardship practitioners) who have overlapping interests so we can collaborate on the effective nurturing of networks and knowledge generation, and on the appropriate pushing, pulling, parking and presenting of related information to the benefit of all concerned.