Living Locally

Expanding Local Relationships with Social Technology

2008-03-29T07:12:00.004-04:00

If you want to expand your local relationships even more, here are some of the places you’ll find people living locally.

Socializr -
This is the one site we recommend you get started with. Click on the link and see HoCoLocal Lady Mary Kate Murray as a prime example of how to use this social site.

HocoBlogs-
This is the local site where you will find many of Howard Counties bloggers. If you like your news hyper local and with personality, check out this site out.

13ers on the ...
Keen on generational distinctions, GenXer's can find each other here.

Facebook
This one you either get or don't. It's a must for social technology minds...and you'll find lots of Columbia people with active profiles, that's folks over the ages of 30 we talkin' about. This link will show you how to get started.

FriendFeed
A favorite aggregator site for all your personal online activity. Check out HoCoLocal Lady Ilana Bittner's page to get a sense of how this works. If you have a facebook profile, consider adding this feed to your profile.

Twitter
This is a micro blog site, which means you can only post 140 characters. It's a real time update of what's going on in your world where others can follow you. It's fun, it's easy, it's a great way to start. Click on the link and follow HoCoLocal Lady and American City Girl JessieX to learn how about Twitter.

Time banking
We are passionate about possibility for making a real difference locally by participating in Time Banking. Click here for Jessie's personal contribution to its success and the best place for you to learn about it and sign up to take part.

OM Community Art Night

Flickr

If you do nothing else, may we suggest that at a minimum create a Socializr account ... including a picture of yourself.

Make a Living Locally

2008-03-23T22:38:00.002-04:00

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A Personal Thinking Buddy

2008-01-29T02:52:00.000-05:00

Living Locally is not obvious. Thinking Buddy is a term Jessie and I use to describe the relationship we have with each other, and the kind of relationship we can have with others.

Thinking Buddies expand the capacity of an individual. It synthisizes partnering, coaching, mentoring, witnessing and truth telling into a dynamic that lets two act as one and that one is you.

To live locally, we believe there are five critical areas of attention:

Get Connected
Open Up Your Mind
Be Ready to and for Change
Have a Personal Strategy
Start Now

Initial Thoughts on a Functional Vision

2008-01-29T02:50:00.000-05:00

My visions of a TO BE county social systems starts by imagining the county as a single living organism where each individual resident represents one cell within the body of this organism. Today, these cells are primarily independent and work on their own behalf, even though some spend much of their energy inside of grouping of cells identified as businesses or other organizations.

Metaphorically the TO BE condition of these single cells (residents) is similar to the period in time when single and multicellular entities become “frogs.” Using this metaphor, we can outline the major organs of our county “frog-like” organism establishing the core functions:

§ The Brain—Office of Integration

§ The Heart—An Education System

§ Circulatory System—Infrastructure that moves resources, data, information, people as they travel throughout the entire social system

§ Respiratory System—Input and Output monitoring of all resources and associated waste

As we set to connect everything to everything else, the core function of our social system is the education system. In Howard County we can design around the current HCC campus and educational offerings. Of course, our education system requires major regeneration and thinking. Yet, the idea of “You Can Get There From Here” is a perfect beginning to literally and subtle tying everything in the county together.

The redesign will be based on the idea of Integral Education: body, mind and spirit in self, culture and nature. There are new models emerging that will help guide us through this process, with the intent to create an environment where peer cohorts, wisdom counsels, and leading authorities interact to exchange, debate and explore ideas, innovate solutions or learn basic life skills to help us all thrive. The premise is that everyone is a leader and as a leader we take responsibility for our world. For most of us, that means ourselves. Those whose world can include leading others, their job is to expand the worlds of others, without losing theirself.

Like a heart, our education hub beats the pulse of all those who pass through it, feeding all the vital organs in the system which in turn touch every other aspect of “the body.” Secondary schools, business, government, libraries, media centers will be in constant communication and exchange so that our education system meets the needs of our people. This is place all people touch and pass through on a regular basis. As members of this social system we live a principle of transferring knowledge to each other, demanding that special attention be given to providing and receiving education services continually on an individual level. This is not to say that transferring knowledge is done only in classroom settings. The redesign of education will support the spectrum of learning styles and learning environments across a broad range of subject matters, commensurate with the diversity of minds we have living around us.

Our ‘Heart Hub’ is built including an imperative for convenient access to the homes, restaurants, shopping and entertainment facilities. An extremely high level of functional, aesthetic and meaningful design will prevail, inspiring our body, mind and soul. This heart serves everything and when combined with the brain distributes intelligence across the entire system; utilizing an innate human capability to self-organize.

First Organizing Step: Office of Integration

2008-01-29T02:45:00.000-05:00

In our fragmented and silo structured communities, integrating the diverse interests, capabilities, needs and power bases is the first step toward designing a social system that includes the core value needs of it constituents. These social structures do not exist yet, so building one will feel much like walking across a bridge as it gets built.

The first job will be to train and staff the Office of Integration (IO) with the “right” people. These people will demonstrate a high degree of experienced based learning; quick processing of feedback; competence at recalibrating their state of being and associated actions; an ability to take independent initiative and work in a highly collaborative environment. They are systems thinkers whom enthusiastically take responsibility for (at least) the following 7 functions:

Map out resources and capability (hereafter referred to as: everything) with the county- creating an AS IS image of county living
Understand how everything organizes itself
Establish Trust and Respect within (CAPI) Coalescing of the Authority, Power, and Influence as it exists within the county today

Sponsor data and information across all domains sharing summits on relevant to a single topic

Support the creation of Vision of what the county can become – creating a TO BE image of county living
Establish a Vital Signs Monitor to: diagnose the health our social system, prescribe interventions, identify the next initiatives and design support structures
Connect everything to everything else
Administer a list of projects to move from AS IS to TO BE

Broken down by tasks
Delegated to the appropriate everything

Core Value Needs in a Human Social System

2008-01-29T02:32:00.000-05:00

A social system has a core. From that core, human values: what is important to me, arise. To design a social system That Works, for the diversity of human beings that live in the 21^st century we first understand the nature of human values. There is not just one level, in fact, what is important to us changes as the conditions we live in change. As our world becomes more complex humans have developed new codes that define what we value. When crisis hits, we often step back to less complex core values, get to the basics of life.

These core value needs are presented in order of magnitude. To begin to grasp the complexity below the simplicity it’s helpful to see each succeeding statement as a larger envelope wrapping (like Russian Dolls) around the previous statements resulting in a principle of transcend and include rather than transcend and ignore or reject.

Not everyone has all of these value needs, yet within any American social system for the early 21^st century, all of these value needs will be demanded by at least some of the citizens.

Super-ordinate principle: Rights and Responsibility are two sides of the same coin.

Basic survival resources: shelter, food, clothing, heat and health.

Fellowship: protection from harm, reciprocity, stories/communication, neighbors/friends.

Individuality: freedom of expression, empowerment (to fill powerful) in living our own dreams/lives, to have an identity, to stand out, to create boundaries.

Transcendent Purpose and Meaning: live by a code of values and ethics, to align with something larger than self, family, organization or nation, to pursue truth, to enforce a rule of law, to serve.

Achievement: access to opportunity, work toward goals, to get ahead, to take calculated risks and receive the rewards, a space change or improve, uncover facts.

Caring and Sharing: global inclusion all people, listening to each other, connecting to our common humanness, experiencing our emotional bonds together, pluralism and equality.

Adaptive: living by natural flows and patterns, developing and using competence, radical self-responsibility and choice, flexible, resilient, engineering systems for living.

In Howard County, different segments of the population, and various geographic densities have challenges in all of these areas, thus we have to address them simultaneously. To do that, we will begin with the outer most system of values, Adaptive. From here, we can ‘recover, regenerate and renew’ the underlying foundation of value needs.

It’s from this Adaptive value system that an Office of Integration might emerge.

Note: This listing of value needs comes directly from highly researched and documented accountings of “core” intelligences that form in humans to deal with successfully more complex living conditions.

A Declaration

2008-01-29T02:15:00.000-05:00

For sometime now, Jessie and I continually discuss the going-on’s of Howard County/Columbia from a perspective of curiosity, frustration, eagerness, and dare I claim - wisdom. Inside of our conversations, I personally, have been exploring the questions of:

What is it to live here?
What is the value I have to contribute, and
Why would I want to do anything different than I am already doing?

I don’t have complete answers to these questions, but they serve as a place to stand, an outcropping from which to view life in Howard County. I have lived in this county since 1990, a long time in my experience. I have been one of those county residents that moves to Howard County because of a home, the location to a major airport, and stayed because of the school system. It’s only been with the last couple of years I have even been interested in these questions. I became interested primarily because the man I married moved here to be with me, and he found this place dreadful; very difficult to meet people, plug in or even just have fun. He challenged me to create a community two years ago, and I have been pursuing that challenge ever since.

Today, I am ready to take the knowledge, the thinking, the observations and present an opening statement about how I, Cherie Beck, can be involved in this community.

There are four major areas of focus in my opening statement. Each one represents an aspect of involvement in alignment with my competency. Generically, these are big picture elements which I see as fundamental to shaping a future for Living Locally a regional social system; an integrated, functional, intelligent, learning system that proactively supports all residents that participate in it to thrive. Participation is, in a democratic nation, a choice.

Core value needs in a human social system (in America)
First organizing step: Office of Integration
Initial Thoughts on a Functional Vision
Personal ‘Thinking Buddy’

Develop Resilence

2008-01-29T02:14:00.003-05:00

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Transferring Knowledge

2008-01-29T02:14:00.001-05:00

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Choosing Civility

2008-01-29T02:13:00.003-05:00

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Making a Living Locally

2008-01-29T02:13:00.001-05:00

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What is Living Locally?

2008-01-29T01:50:00.000-05:00

Living Locally is expanding our activity in the region where live way beyond owning a house from which we commute to our place of work, and from a home that enables our children to attend a good school.

Living Locally transcends the service mentality of donating money and time to local issues. It includes, but is certainly not limited to political action or holding a public office. Living Locally ultimately will mean different things to different people, yet there will be an underpinning of experience that informs your Living Locally Lifestyle.

We have 5 principles that underpin the idea of Living Locally:

Expanding Local Relationships with Social Technology
Making a Living Locally
Choosing Civility
Transferring Knowledge
Developing Resilience