Category: The Site

For those involved in making the Practice of Peace audio book, here are some technical tips for recording your voice on your computer.
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Somebody asked on the Open Space mailing list if Harrison Owens book The Practice of Peace would appear as an audio book. Harrison replied that there were no current plans, so I suggested creating an audio book together.

I was inspired by Cory Doctorows latest books (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe) as well as Lawrence Lessigs new book Free Culture, which have been released under the Creative Commons’ least restrictive license. This license allows people to do pretty much whatever they want with the original works, as long as it’s non-commercial. This allowed some people to self-organize and create audio versions of the books, by each volunteering to read a chapter. This is what we’re going to do with the Practice of Peace also, and I volunteered to coordinate.

Here’s a list of chapters:
Chapter I Peace and the Practice of Peace
Chapter II A Piecemeal Approach to Peace
Chapter III Scope of Work for the Peacemaker
Chapter IV Muddling Through
Chapter V The Pathology of Control and the Power of Griefwork
Chapter VI The Practice of Peace
Chapter VII Many Roads to Peace
Chapter VIII Preparation for Peacemaking

If you’d like to read a chapter, please add a comment to this post saying what chapter you’d like to read. If somebody’s already taken your favourite chapter you might consider another one. If all the chapters are taken add a comment anyway – maybe will work something out.

Harrisons publisher, Human Systems Dynamics Institute, will send each person a copy of the book, and we can then record a chapter and put them together somehow.

There’s been a huge interest in participating, which is a wonderful reflection on the generosity of the OS community. So what do we do if we have more volunteers than chapters (which I’m almost sure that we have). Any suggestions?

Did you know that there are now 65 book reviews on this site? Basically I’ve reviewed every business-related book I’ve read since I started this blog about a year ago with a few novels and various non-fiction thrown in for good measure. I only write reviews of the books I really like, so they’re all good, but if you held a gun to my head, and forced me to pick some favourites, I’d probably choose these (today at least, tomorrow it might be five different ones):

Paul Watzlawick: Change
When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless?

Robert Wright: Non zero
One of the most interesting book I’ve ever read. Examines cooperation (non zero sum games) as the main driver of both the evolution of life and of human culture.Read it!!!

Dee Hock: Birth of the Chaordic Age
The story of Dee Hock and how he came to be the CEO of VISA, the worlds first chaordic organization.

Margaret Wheatley: A simpler way
This book is without a doubt the most beautiful and unconventional business-related book I’ve ever read. It describes a simpler way to live and work.

Harpo Marx: Harpo speaks
The life and times of Harpo Marx. Fascinating and extremely funny.

I’ve expanded my cyber-empire, and moved my blog to positivesharing.com. Mostly because I have lots of international readers, and to them (in the words of a memorable comment from last year), my last name Kjerulf looks like unpronouncable line noise.

If you have any links to kjerulf.com please shift them this way (gotta pump up the Google rank on the new site).

The experiment is over. This weel Chris Corrigan and I swapped blogs, mostly just for the hell of it. Chris wrote very eloquently about his learnings here, forever changing the way I think of blogs by introducing the pants metaphor, and I summed up my experience here.

All in all an interesting experience, and I’m glad we did it. What do you think about it?

As an experiment, Chris Corrigan and I are swapping blogs for a week. I’ll be posting to his blog (Parking Lot), and he’ll be writing here.

I’ve been having online conversations with Chris for a while, and I ran into him at the Practice of Peace conference outside Seattle in november. He works as a facilitator, change agent and problem solver and is a frontrunner in the use and development of Open Space Technology.

To me, this blog swap is an experiment in writing to a different space. To go to new (virtual) surroundings and see what that brings. To play with the format, and see if it’s fun. To improvise around a set of topics that may or may not arise from the new place. To simply try something out of the ordinary. Let’s see what happens.

Welcome Chris, take it away.

I’ve started a list of people I’d really like to have a conversation with. An interesting parallel to the 100 things thing?

These were the ten most read posts in September:
* Autumn Poem
* Selling fish in Seattle – and having fun
* Book review: Man’s search for meaning
* Possibly the best music video ever
* Book review: The fifth discipline
* Psychological test
* Book review: Cryptonomicon
* Book review: Getting to yes
* Book review: Small world
* Book review: Nuts!