A/UK 4th anniversary: co-creating a global deep listening space with dialogues.one
One of the interesting thing about the last few years for A/UK has been the experience of anticipating mainstream futures from the margins.
Forms of ingenuity and opportunism arise when conventional resources are tight (if non-existent) in pursuit of your vision (cosmo-localism, anyone?). And powerful digital tools are there to help you connect, convene and curate as you need to.
The future may be here, and may not be evenly distributed, as William Gibson famously said. But we would suggest one of the places the future gathers is in the activities of solutions-driven activist communities.
A great example would be the use of video-conferencing networks and software to pull complex groups together. For A/UK, this certainly predates the Covid era. In our work with XR and CtrlShift, the Zoom meeting became a necessary tool for deliberation and encounter throughout 2019 and early 2020.
The ability to download discussions (and even automate transcripts) made it possible to increase the value of meetings. This isn’t just producing strategic resources for movements, full of ideas expressed in dialogue, but also the possibility of media content for public usage.
So when the bug drove us indoors in early 2020, we and our peers were already active in a virtual way. Our “The Elephant Meets…” series began as a video archive preparing for a big real-life meeting in December 2020 - but those contributing to it (system-thinkers with ambitious plans for the future) became a target-list for live discussions in the first ten months of the pandemic.
The best of these became a kind of symposium, maybe even a congregation, in quarantine - combining insight from the speakers with contributions from any citizen or public agent who wanted to participate. Many others were putting on these fora, of course - Civic Square’s online conference in April 2020 was regarded as a real triumph - but we just want to note how easily the idea that “10 years of development in one year” came to agile, self-sustaining communities like these (and ours).
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We’re dwelling on next steps for our video and audio services on A/UK. But as we go, and as part of the surge of activity, we’ve embedded above one of our global-level encounters with other practitioners and audiences. By invitation from Alistair Langer and team, A/UK’s Indra Adnan is hosting on Dialogues.one, a network which does dialogue—
differently in nature from what we often call dialogue - a mechanical and unproductive debate between people seeking to defend their views. Dialogue is not a discussion. Instead of imposing our opinion on others, we invite here others to add new dimensions to what we are thinking about, potentializing the collective.
They have a useful guidebook to their methodology here. The participants above are:
Duda Pedrieda (Rio De Janiero) - generates infrastructure for autonomous art and culture - interested in how scenes can have their own businesses, make beer, etc
Irene Lopez de Vallejo (and more) (Bilbao) building a Disco (Distributed Organisation), building better orgs with tech and common sense
Soushiant Zanganepour (Vancouver) impact investor, social enterprener. Inventor of Swae which creates ideas meritotocratics in orgs and cities, helped by AI. “The main goal is to replace politicians and middle management… I am deeply allergic to abusive power”.
Alina (Berlin). “Ex corporate monkey and now yoga teacher”, part of Burning Man community, an Agile coach