musings of an itinerant lover

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with a number of colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center for an all-day meeting related to understanding a coherent approach to global water sustainability. One of the themes that seemed to run throughout the day was that we have put our efforts (in this particular case for water sustainability efforts) into fragmented silos that often remain isolated. This, of course, reflects a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge whereby we have put knowledge in these silos and have gone to great lengths to keep them separate. One university professor in the group referred to his own division where he spoke of 3 different chairs of different areas of water management that never interacted with each other. For any of us that have spent any length of time in academic institutions this comes as no surprise.

If we believe that reality is an integrated whole, then a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge will never approximate an accurate understanding of the underlying structure of reality. No wonder then that our social systems (i.e. governance, economies, etc.), built upon our perception of the structure of reality, often don’t seem in line with the rest of the biosphere.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had the incredible opportunity of late via SecondMuse to collaborate with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, World Bank and NASA in an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief and developing solutions to these critical issues. These codejams are a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a “give camp” to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

The thrill for me is not just that this is an incredible partnership between the disaster risk community and the software engineering community, but that it involves three of the world’s largest corporations who are generally known to compete aggressively with each other. In this endeavor, however, they are not only co-sponsoring this event, but actually co-organizing it. The organizing team is composed of champions in these organizations who are looking beyond strict allegiance to the corporations they represent and instead choosing a wider allegiance. The challenges, of course, are clear in that this collaboration is happening in an environment that expects and often encourages competition between the organizations but then again…what noble effort has not met with challenge at its inception.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve made a commitment with some of my closest friends to blog once every couple of days for the next month in our ongoing crusade of sorts to consistently blog. It started with once a day for a week, then turned into this with a biweekly check-in. Though I have a nutty month coming up I think the purpose is that its not that hard to write a couple of paragraphs at night and share what you’re thinking, what you’ve learning, what you’re musing on. So here it is to bloodpact blogging!

One of the themes that’s come up frequently recently is the practice that Baha’is refer to as consultation. Its the community’s mechanism of collectively seeking truth and finding consensus. In consultation you don’t own your contributions per se, but rather once you share your perspective on the matter of hand that perspective belongs to the consulting group. We try to maintain both a frank as well as a loving atmosphere and the goal is at all times to put truth before our current thinking. As such it is my understanding that you act upon the consultation just as much as the consultation acts upon you. You might be informed as deeply by the consultation as you are informing it, and often may find yourself in the position of changing your opinion on a matter a number of times during the course of the consultation.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to wikipedia “conceptual frameworks are a type of intermediate theory that have the potential to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks act like maps that give coherence to inquiry.” I view it as an explicitly stated understanding of what you know to be true. So we go through life making tons of assumptions: people are bad, people are good, that’s just the way it is, business is business, don’t mix business and friends, businesses are supposed to make money, organizations are supposed care for the well-being of their members, reality is integrated, etc. Of course some of our assumptions are accurate and others are not. The purpose of writing a conceptual framework is to hang these assumptions in front of you so that you can examine them critically and hopefully, over time, you will be able to discard some of the erroneous assumptions and more deeply develop some of the more accurate ones.

In my first undergraduate economics course, a rather self-assured professor of mine stood in front of the classroom and confidently declared that humans are “selfish, greedy, have unlimited wants and the world has limited needs and thus the field of economics.” What he really meant to say was that “we have a conceptual framework that has evolved throughout the history of civilization and this framework has underlying assumptions about human nature, the purpose of governance, the distribution of wealth and other things. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate and sometimes they’re a bit inaccurate and what the field of economics is based on today is the assumption that human nature is exclusively selfish, greedy and has unlimited wants”….that’s what he really meant to say I think…it just came out wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently asked by a mentor of mine what motivates me as an entrepreneur. He said that in many industries people talk and talk and talk and you just want to grab them by the collar and say “Enough already!!! DO something!!!” But that with business people, and in specific entrepreneurs, the dilemma is actually quite the opposite. That we are almost plagued by the need to act immediately and that you almost want to tell us “WAIT!!! We don’t know enough yet…just stop and think for a second!”

I’ve been thinking about his question and in particular about being almost “plagued” by the need to act immediately on things. I’ve also been thinking about how I think about things to get a little bit freaky meta on you.

Read the rest of this entry »