Architects Get Talking at Oregon Conference

The following article appeared in the June newsletter of the Conversation Cafe, an important dialogue initiative I’m involved with. If you were there, and even if you weren’t, I’d love to hear what you thought about this dialogue process

Case Study: Architects Get Talking at Oregon Design Conference

By Leif Utne

The classic Conversation Cafe — a small group gathered weekly at the neighborhood coffee shop or in a host’s living room — is just one way to use this powerful dialogue method. The CC process is a useful tool to get just about any group of people in any community or organization to go deep quickly. We frequently hear reports from hosts who use it in schools, conferences, churches, and workplaces. But I, personally, had never had such an opportunity until recently.

Car-Free Blogs

Dang! There are a crapload of car-free blogs out there. Hanging out with my friend Kurt the other day, who is six weeks into chronicling his just-begin year sans automobile,  got me wondering just how many car-free blogs there might be. A quick Google search on “car-free blogs” turned up 181,000 hits, including a few particularly interesting ones:

Car-Free USA blog is the first hit on the list. Self-described as “A blog promoting the joys of car free life in the USA.” The blogger behind it is Brian Smith, a communications guy at the Oakland-based environmental group EarthJustice, who I met last year at a meetup for

WorldChanging.com’s team of Bay-Area contributors.

There’s Carfree Family, by Paul Cooley, a 41 year-old father in Santa Fe.

There are a slew of blogs about World Car-Free Day, including some of its local iterations.

There’s even a link to an index of all blogs on WordPress.com that contain the tag car-free. (This post will no doubt turn up there once I hit Publish.)

One of the best is the Year of Living Car-lessly, an experiment undertaken by Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank. After his teenage son totaled the family car, they decided to simply not replace it.

And in a bit of cruel irony, the sponsored link that turned up above that Google search was an ad for MotorAddicts.com.

I can see clearly now…

A historic first! I’ve never worn glasses in my life. My eyesight is still quite good. But as time and years of working with words on screens and pages would have it, my eyes don’t focus quite as well as they once did, and I sometimes have to strain a little too much for comfort to see clearly. (Hey mom, how about a lesson in some of those Bates Method exercises you used to teach?) That, and Antigua is known for having excellent eye doctors who’ll sell you designer glasses for about a third of what you’d pay in the US. These frames are from Spain and ran me about $130, lenses and all.

So I decided it was time.

I’m still not used to wearing them. (I’m not wearing them right now, frgzmpl.) They definitely work, making everything a little clearer. But it feels a bit like snorkeling.

Well, what do you think? Do they suit me?

/Leif

Vid: Motorcycle Classics and Team MOMBA

I edited this little vid for Motorcycle Classics magazine.

By train somewhere in Sweden

I'm posting this straight to the web via the wireless connection on a
high-speed X2000 train en route from Stockholm to Växjö, in southern
Sweden.

World War 2.5: The Game

Nearly three and a half years ago, during the runup to the invasion of Iraq, we posted a link from the Utne Web Watch to a clever flash game called “Gulf War 2 (aka World War 2.5).” Billing itself as “the mother of all Flash games,” the site spins a nightmare scenario in which cartoon versions of Cheney, Rummy, Condi, and Powell rush us to war, only to find that our actions turn Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists and ignite a wider regional war.

In light of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East today, with Israel bombing the bejeezus out of Lebanon, the designer of Gulf War 2 may turn out to have been alarmingly accurate in his predictions.

P2008: Tagging the Race for President

Potential presidential contenders Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Russ Feingold have all been slapped recently with the tag “p2008.” And no, we don’t mean graffiti artists spraypainting their campaign buses.

“Tagging” refers to the growing practice on websites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and thousands of blogs of letting users attach their own descriptive keywords to images, videos, links, books, blog posts, and articles. Tagging harnesses the wisdom of the crowd to classify and organize information. The practice has even given rise to tagging campaigns, where groups encourage web users to tag certain kinds of content with specific keywords.

For example, the folks at E-Democracy.org, a clearinghouse of online political information, are urging bloggers, linkers, and other netizens to apply the tag “p2008″ to anything related to the presidential race — campaign sites, political blogs, news sites, etc. — thereby making such content much easier to find with search engines.

My first moblog

Testing the phone-in posting feature.

Podcast: First Flight

Hoping for a soft landing.