ORGANIZING WITH THE FREE SCHOOL!

I’ll be leading a series of discussions with the Common Action Free School on organization. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

On May 23rd: “Ants and Organization“
On May 24th: “Organization and Consensus“

Both talks will be held at 6pm in the basement of the Coffeehouse in uptown Normal and are completely free and open to the public.

Below are some resources and reference materials. I’ll be using these examples to make some conceptual points about organizations, and with some guides for suggestion how we might build our own.

Deborah Gordon’s TED talk on ants is probably the most important to watch of the bunch. It is about 15 minutes long. If you are as excited by her talk as I was, you may want to watch her hour long Google Talk. The other significant video is this RSA animate short, at 10 minutes, titled The Power of Networks. This gives an introduction to complexity, network theory, and the importance of organization for the digital paradigm.

The rest of these videos and links are short and quick, most less than a minute long. Easy to watch, and full of inspiring ideas! If you were at my last teach in at the Uptown Normal Circle, you might remember some of these videos. Others are new and exciting!

To understand is to perceive patterns
Ant mill
The Wisdom of Mold
Pong collective intelligence experiment
India traffic
Traffic jam propagation
Traffic and speed laws
Subway maps converge
Open Space technologies
I’ll be adding to this list of resources and links as I prepare the presentations. Any questions, comments, or suggestions as I prepare are totally welcome!

You can read more about the Common Action Free School here:

http://www.commonactionfreeschool.org/