Robert Paterson's Weblog

Reboot8 - Transactions or Relationships? A return to being human!

Well it's over. Many told me that I had to experience reboot and they were right. Thank you Thomas. I can only imagine how you feel today.

Two days packed with great speakers and great conversation. A great design with both a traditional conference and an unconference combined.

I am pooped. But also elated. I am elated because so many of the speakers and those I talked to in the anteroom and the garden could see a common pattern. Natural human relationships, based on honor and reputation, mediated in the context of community will replace transactional relationships mediated by institutions.

Whilst some speakers still spoke about how to make a better commerce website, many such as Doc Searls, Euan Semple, J P Rangaswami and Lee Bryant were clear. Community and personal reputation will increasingly be amplified by social software and will creates "Places" in which commerce will take place, just as markets themselves were once social spaces. Participation is not a feature of this emerging paradigm but its centrality. Community will be the container into which things will happen directly between people. Social relationships and hence trust will be the critical factors.

Doc showed us a series of pictures that reminded us what a real market was like.

Markets were always social and depended on relationships and personal trust.

Even early financial markets such as Lloyds were in coffee houses like this. The motto of the City is "My word is my bond".

Thee dark clouds are of course that we are so captured by the metaphor of our birth. We were raised in a machine/institutional world. Some of us cannot make the shift.

I saw a clear split of metaphor here in Copenhagen. Some still see the web as part of a linear value chain that supports a centralized system.

Others see it as a place where time and space collapse enabling people of like minds to connect instantly in a completely dispersed system. Some still live in the world of Newton, where the search is for a better way of manipulating people to use a tool where the gaol is to have more stuff as a proxy for fulfillment. More now see this as a world of Einstein where only relationships are constant and where the goal is a Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness = fulfillment as a person.

Of course this new world is not new at all. It is a return to how humans, as intensely social primates, have always lived and worked until we experimented with a "One to Many" information architecture.

The theme of the conference was "renaissance". Some, like Euan, who have come from a large institution, reminded us that with the Renaissance also comes the Inquisition. Doc was very clear that the rebirth of a more human world would not be easy as the owners of the machine world, have great power and will not hesitate to use it to protect their turf.

But I am very hopeful. I am hopeful because where we see the new implemented in organizations such as eBay or Southwest, we see the new give the old a drubbing.

At the end of the conference, Thomas went around the room and asked us to speak out what we would do now. My reply, "Talk less do more".

I hope this year to work on a couple of ideas that will offer this power to some key areas. What about a local food network on my home of PEI where small producers can connect to each other and to those who want to both eat better and support animals and the land? What about extending Public radio globally where say immigrant communities in the US could have their own programming that both invests in their own social capital but also links them across the US and back to home? What about connecting parents to each other and to resource centres all across Canada? These are some of the ideas that I would like to move on. All are rooted in major areas of tension - the future of farming, food, duet disease and the environment. The future of our multicultural societies and the future of our children.

Technorati Tags: Agriculture, Change, Children, Community, Copenhagen, Culture, Doc Searls, Euan Semple, J P Rangaswami, Lee Bryant, PEI, Public Radio, reboot8, Relationships

Tip to Tip - Dieter's Pics

Here is the link to Dieter's pics on Flikr

Technorati Tags: Biking, Dieter, PEI, Tip to Tip

In Copenhagen for Reboot8

I made it after 23 hours of travel. I will be attending Reboot8 for the next 2 days.

I too with Peter Rukavina am finding Copenhagen and the Danes very special. When Peter talks about the bikes being everywhere he is not exaggerating. None are locked up. I went by the station last night on my way to have dinner at the Tivoli and saw thousands of bikes, all unlocked, waiting for their owners to return. Imagine what the social capital is here to allow for that. In most countries, the station is a centre of petty crime. Here it is a meeting point packed with cafe's that you would like to spend time in. I found that the Tivoli truly charming. Imagine Wonderland and the Champs Elysee combined and packed into a garden?

My hotel, Cabinn City is cheap and very clean. My room is a bit like a bedroom on a train sleeper.

I plan to take a ton of pics and to see some friends - not the least Peter whom I have to go half way around the world to see.

Technorati Tags: Biking, Copenhagen, Pter Rukavina, reboot8, Social Capital

Slow Road Home - Fred First - Doorway to a better Life

Do you believe in magic? I do.

I have just finished Fred's elegiac book "Slow Road Home". I don't recall being moved so much by a book - ever!

"All who wander are not lost" - J R Tolkien (p 204)

Why? Let me tell you. When I was a boy I read the Odyssey and saw it as an adventure. I read, Moby Dick and thought it was an adventure. But when I read them again in middle life, I saw them as my life. When I read Slow Road Home, I saw it as my life and then as a real adventure. An adventure that I knew well. Fred has become, as Dickens did, the hero in a mythic tale of his own life and so showed me, my own. The adventure and the mythic tale are all about seeking home and finding its magical and restorative power.

Home, is not your house. Home is the place that chooses you. Home is a place where you go to find your true self. Home is the place where you as a steward will leave your legacy to the next generation. Home is the place you choose to die in. Home is where you may choose to leave your ashes. Home is not a house.

He describes the "call" "When we are young, we live where we are born. For some of us, the place of our birth is a perfect fit and we never leave it. For others, like me, something is missing there and we look for home in places we have never been but long to find." There is something about the power of longing that I know too. "Something has drawn us here over the years, brought us back. A longing we cannot name has caused these hills to hold a nutrient we cannot live comfortably without".

For me it was the Atlantic property of my Grandparents. The smells of pine and seaweed, the morning mists, the gentle summers and the long winters. For Fred and Ann, it is the mountains of Virginia, the summer heat, the spiders webs, the brooks and the winter stove.

In our busy lives, most of us lost our sense of place and how it could work its magic upon us. Fred says "Whether we know it or deny it, place molds into each of us its latitude, its elevation, its geometry and chemistry. But it is possible to live so fast that we become oblivious to our relationship with the land that requires a daily attention to the particulars every season."

There is a sad scene in John Boorman's excellent film Excalibur, when Merlin, wistfully says that the age of magic is dying and so must he. But I wonder - is the age of magic returning? Can Fred help us find it?

Where does he work his magic? He works it in the "Daily particulars of every season". What do I mean by this? Have a look at some of his photos - here. Fred' s eye sees the details of these daily particulars and sheds new light on what we pass by every day without seeing.

This is how Fred sees the details we pass by.
Or this - an Ice Curtain

The book is called a Blue Ridge Book of Days. Like medieval Book of Hours, it is a series of contemplative vignettes about daily life. Fred looks with an eye that most of us have forgotten we own. He sees life in all the mundane actions of existence for him, for Ann and all other living and non living parts of his landscape. We meet spiders, deer, snakes, birds. We hear the insects, smell the bloom, hear the crunch of ice, the buzz of the chain saw. We share his coffee, smell the flannel. We sense the waters rushing below and the life beneath the soil. We meet his family and we meet his people. For me, above all, we also meet Buster.

For what is a man or a place without a dog? How can we know a place well without a dog to guide us? Buster and then Tsuga are deep undercurrents of energy throughout the book. The account of Buster's death had me cry out "Oh No!" as by his deft touch, Fred set up the scene and I knew what would unfold.

What a deft touch. Fred writes prose that reads like poetry. He also has the gift of on one page providing an aha, on another a ha ha and then another a tear. The book is a series of of scenes that layer upon each other to build a whole. It is like a series of snacks that become a meal - leaving the reader complete and sad that it is over. I want to hear Fred read it. I can hear his voice on every page.

This is not a self indulgent book. This is a mythic tale that can grip the heart of any person who seeks to find themselves and hence home itself: that place where the person melds into the world and readies us for that time when we all go back to that larger home.

In this busy world, we have forgotten how place can inform us and make us whole. We have forgotten how the mundane, gathering wood for the winter, working in a vegetable patch, walking the river bank serves the sacred. We have forgotten the meaning of being true to a place.

Fred ends with this sentiment. " A man can be fond of women, but he will settle down in a relationship and build a love affair of meaning with one woman. And so it is, ultimately - if we are fortunate - with finding our place....For the first time in my life, I feel a monogamous fidelity to one fixed and particular place that is as deep and permanent a commitment as the vows that I have taken to this one woman, my wife."

And so our hero, Odysseus, after a lifetime of adventure is called home to his woman, Penelope and to his home - as all men are so called.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fred First, Magic, Place, Slow Road Home

Recalled to Life - Part 1 - The Magic Garden

The Magic Garden

People ask me all the time "What part of England do you come from?" My answer confounds them. I reply that I come from the Montreal part of England. However, in many ways my life does begin in England. Here then, is how Rob became a Brit. Here is how I became an adventurer. Here is how I learned to love being free. Here is why I am, at heart, a sad person - for the price of all my adventure and freedom was love.

In this picture you see me with my sister Diana and our maternal great grandmother, Charlotte. It is 1954. We are in my granny's garden in St Andrews New Brunswick.

We are with her because our mother had left that summer with our father to set up house in England. The plan was that Diana, aged 2, and I aged 4 would follow in the late fall with our nanny on board ship.

Great Gran, aged 70, thought this a remarkably irresponsible idea. She felt that Nanny was a buffoon and we were so young. So she, aged 70, was going to accompany us and ensure that we did not fall overboard or whatever. So that fall, Great Gran, Nanny and Diana and I set off from Montreal on the Empress of Australia for Liverpool and for an adventure that was to shape our lives.

Here is the Empress of Australia at dock in Montreal. This was an interregnum for CP ships. The Old Empress of Britain had been sunk in the war and the new one was not going to come online until 1956. The Empress of Australia had been an old French Liner, the De Grasse, that had been sunk in Bordeaux and raised for CP.

I remember none of the voyage. But our arrival in Liverpool is engraved in my mind. Our mother was there. We had not seen her for months. She met us at the docks and gave me, of all things for a 4 year old, a book. It was a pop-up book and this one inspiring moment started a passion that I have all my life for reading. By the time I was 8 she was sending me book parcels to school. I had read Moby Dick, Tale of Two Cities, Beowulf and even War and Peace before I was 9. I discovered the world of the mind and of the imagination.

As we journeyed to our new home, 14a Airlie Gardens, I was also struck by how different London was from home.

Everything was small - the cars, the trains, the houses. It looked, in the fall of 1954, as if the war had ended the day before. There was bomb damage everywhere. The house next to ours was a bomb site. People wore pre-war clothes. Rationing was just ending. Many children had never seen any fruit other than an apple. There were very few cars and very little petrol. No one had central heating. Instead people still had grates to burn coal. Coal that was delivered by men who looked like Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady. They wore funny leather hats with a long back so that they could carry coal in sacks off the horse drawn wagons and tip the coal over their heads into the coal holes in the pavement. When you walk the streets of London - look for the round iron coal covers - underneath were once coal cellars. We had smogs and all the buildings were black. Milk was delivered by horse drawn wagons. Taxis were all pre war. It was a London hardly changed from Edwardian times.

14a Airlie Gardens. This was a truly Magic Garden. This was the special place that formed much of my life.

Here Diana and I are with Nanny Cosgrove in the garden. Behind us is our 2 story, 5 bedroom flat. It cost 210 pounds a year to rent. Note we are with Nanny and not with our mother. We had lunch with our mother once a week on Thursdays - Nanny's day off. More on Nannies in a later chapter.

Here is the garden now. It seems even more magical than in 1954.

Here is the pond at the centre of the garden today

Here are the buildings that surround the garden as seen today

14a is off to the right of the picture up the lane. Airlie Gardens surrounds one of the most lovely gardens in London. The garden is completely enclosed and hence is very safe. Diana and I and all the children from the buildings ran wild here. We lived like the children in Swallows and Amazons.

This was the formative safe container that did so much to shape my world view. Here I learned to love nature and adventure.

Of course, the garden was only a garden to the adults. For us children, it was a portal to anyplace we wanted it to be. It was our Narnia. In it, we re-enacted the wild west, oceans where pirates were common and more than any thing we re-enacted the war. Not all the residents appreciated the noise that 10 kids could make when replaying the Battle of Britain and roaring around the garden with arms akimbo being Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109's making machine gun noises. But one resident did. Better still he had a huge collection of Toy Soldiers and Guns. Better still he was a movie star!

Here he is - Peter Cushing - the lord of the Hammer Horror films. For my younger readers, he was the commander of the Death Star in the first Star Wars film. On the left, you will see what looks like two boys with guns facing the camera. The shorter boy is in fact my sister Diana. The taller boy is me. The year is 1958.

He was a lovely man. It is so ironic that he played parts like Dr Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes who were very distant men. In person, he was very warm and I suspect that he had never been able to have children of his own. He had a special place for them in his heart. He loved to play.

This was our gang. We spent all our days with each other. The boy almost crouching away from PC was called Ronald. He had a huge collection of Airfix models - more on them later.

The sweet little girl on the right is Fiona. She caught my sister's hand in a gate. In revenge, we persuaded her brother, Andrew, the sweet little boy on the left, that we had this brand new lemonade from Africa. We got him to take a deep draught. Of course, it was not lemonade. Nor was it from Africa. I leave to you to wonder what it may have been. Needless to say, I got into a of of trouble.

This garden is where I lost my Canadian accent for ever. After all, a child has to fit in and this was a cultural pressure cooker. There was no TV. Every waking moment was spent in the garden with this gang. My greatest crime, and the event that introduced me to the most mysterious person in our family, was committed with them. As I have said, rationing was just ending. No one had had any kind of luxury for 15 years. An admirer of my mother, she looked like Grace Kelly, had given her a box of Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars. They had this wonderful box all full of color.

Mum had put them away for the day when she and my father really had to make an impression. I had found this treasure. What really appealed to me and the gang however was the box. We tried to smoke a few, most of us were 7 or younger, and became suitably ill. So we broke up the rest of the cigars and I traded the box with Ronald for an Airfix model.

The big night came. My father's boss had come for dinner. The fatted calf was killed. And then - the big moment. Dad asked if anyone would like a real Cuban Cigar. Men began to faint in expectation. He strode in triumph to the drawer to find - nothing. I will never know how he guessed. I am also not much of a lier. Enraged he pulled me from my bed, and asked what I had done with the cigars. When I told him that we had smashed them all up, he could not contain himself and he spanked me for the first and the last time.

That was my first memory, aged 6 of meeting him, my father Jim - the mystery figure in our life in the nursery.

Next - English Food and Sweets in the 1950's

Technorati Tags: Airlie Gardens, Autobiography, Diana (Paterson) Fischer, Family, Peter Cushing, Rob Paterson