A Book?

Harrison Owen hhowen at comcast.net
Thu Jan 27 05:31:40 PST 2005


Lucus et al --

I think we are making a relatively simple task much more complicated than it
need be. Working much too hard, so to speak. My thought when I suggested
this to Doug was simply that since he had asked the question, "What does it
mean to live in Open Space?" he might think about assembling all those
replies in the order of appearance on OSLIST -- and editing out other themes
that popped up (delightfully) along the way. There is no need to write any
material (of course he could if he wanted.) Nor is there any need to decide
which among the multiple replies are "suitable." They all are! -- After all
somebody cared enough to post them!! Once done the whole great opus should
find a happy home on www.openspaceworld.org (Michael Herman -- Where are
you?)

Now that I think about it, Peggy Holman might feel called upon to do the
same thing for all of the postings that showed up following her question
from Juanita Brown of World Café fame. Peggy we're calling :-)!! After all,
Peggy and Doug posted their passion on this great Electronic Bulletin Board,
and we all know what happens when you do that in Open Space. Remember? You
are simultaneously accepting the responsibility to make a report! Although
in this case you don't have to write a word.

This really isn't new of course -- Michael Herman and Chris Corrigan did
basically the same thing with the "Non-User's Guide." Anybody can read it,
and print it out if they care to. And a lot of people have. Traveling around
the world I have seen any number of well-thumbed copies. As a matter of fact
I would bet that more copies of the Non-User's Guide have been printed,
distributed and read than any number of similar sorts of books coming out of
"real" publishing houses -- my own books included.

And when we come to the whole question of Public Domain -- there is no
question. OSLIST is, and always has been, completely in The Public Domain,
even as Open Space Technology is totally free and available to anybody who
cares to use it. But, as I have been at pains to say ever since, the free
gift of Open Space carries with it the responsibility (cost) of freely
sharing what we have all been learning. OSLIST is a great repository of all
that shared learning -- freely given and free for the use of anybody who
cares.

Harrison

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Drive
Potomac, Maryland   20845
Phone 301-365-2093

Open Space Training www.openspaceworld.com
Open Space Institute www.openspaceworld.org
Personal website http://mywebpages.comcast.net/hhowen/index.htm
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives Visit:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html



-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Lucas
Gonzalez
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 5:56 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: How do you live in open space?

A book might be written cooperatively using, just as an example,
mediawiki + primarilypublicdomain + some software used to make things
easier.

1) Mediawiki is the software behind http://www.wikipedia.org and can be
used for the purpose of creating such a "book".  If participants here
would care to cooperatively create an index, then fill it in with
messages taken from the list or with original/new contributions ...  it
might be done.  Then of course, people might also use their two feet to
go somewhere else.  One unpredictable issue is How many people would
participate?  A small self-organised team might go for a small project,
and scale up if more people e-congregate.

There are other things different from Mediawiki.  The OST community has
long had wikis - that could be used to try the book idea out.

2) Primarily Public Domain http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org means
"public domain except noted".  We can't assume past postings in this
list are like that, so Editors would have to ask permission to each
contributor whose contributions to the list are used in the "book".
Maybe there could be a "policy change" from now on, and state that
postings to this list are "public domain except noted".  All my
postings here are like that, so no need to ask me!

3) There's a computer program (for those who like such details, it's a
Perl script) that makes it easy to download all the messages in a
yahoogroup.  I would think a similar thing could be done with OSLIST,
if and only if someone is interested in having all the messages in
their local computers to fish some threads and compose some chapters.

Any other issues worth considering for such a task?  We may all walk
around the idea, touching it with a very long stick, and pretending
we're not really interested.  But comments might help those with enough
passion about the idea to, maybe, try it out.  (No, not me.)

In fact, I'd think we're much more interested in "helping write
reality", so to speak.

Lucas



______________________________________________
Renovamos el Correo Yahoo!: ¡250 MB GRATIS!
Nuevos servicios, más seguridad
http://correo.yahoo.es

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist



More information about the OSList mailing list