Endless Knots

October '07 book club: The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

"Elegant and electrifying." Those would be my blurb adjectives based on the first 68 pages of The Septembers of Shiraz. What I noticed in the blurbs on the book's cover is the repeated use of "beautiful." This book is beautifully written without being overdone. Much attention to the small details of a room, the little crack in the wall that disrupts the mood for a whole page.

I didn't mean to mention page 68. It's literally where my bookmark is but now that I have...check out The Page 69 Test, popular with my Zoetrope writer friends, wherein the 69th page of a book is evaluated for how well it represents the whole book. Guess what? Generally, it does.

Carolyn Goodman: "one of the most decent people..."

Bob Herbert's NY Times column of Sept 25, 2007, mentions Carolyn Goodman (I need to make a category for her - meanwhile, posts here or here or here or here):

Dr. Carolyn Goodman, a woman I was privileged to call a friend, died last month at the age of 91. She was the mother of Andrew Goodman, one of the three young civil rights activists shot to death by rabid racists near Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964.

Dr. Goodman, one of the most decent people I have ever known, carried the ache of that loss with her every day of her life.

Carolyn's memorial service is Sunday, October 7, 2007, at 4:00 PM at New York Society for Ethical Culture, 64th Street and Central Park West, New York, NY.

If you're attending, please send an email to melbrady at optonline dot net

 

Wish you were here

To my dear readers:

I know. Blogs are not supposed to be letters (not that anyone can say clearly what they are supposed to be) but...

Tonight, this. A still evening on the Smile of the Great Spirit. She hoisted a shiny white moon and smoothed the lake so there is not even a ripple, not so much as a tiny wave lapping at the beach. Most who camped here for the summer have pulled up stakes and so few lights along the shore, fewer boats on the water. It is 70 degrees at 9:30 PM, no wind, no no-see'ums. A perfect night.

Thank you for reading my blog. I wish you all could witness this rare autumn night in New England too.

Your faithful scribe,

J. Lipnack, girl reporter

Virtual team training at ICIC

Spent last Thursday at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City here in Boston. ICIC is the brainchild of Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who wrote the books on competition and who wrote the prescription for releasing the "wealth of the inner city," one of his phrases: See  "The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,"  Harvard Business Review.

ICIC's mission from its website:

To promote economic prosperity in America’s inner cities through private sector engagement that leads to jobs, income and wealth creation for local residents. ICIC brings together business and civic leaders to drive innovation and action, transform thinking and accelerate inner city business growth and investment. 

Thus, ICIC works across boundaries--with clients, experts, donors, competitors, kids--and to assist, we provided our Virtual Team Training--evaluation, exercises and examples, with a virtual-team model and a little vision for the future.

ICIC, welcome to the world of virtual teams.

Reading with Roland

In the mysterious world of book reviewing, the highest honor is not like that of a restaurant, where three stars bring home the gold. With books, authors covet "a starred review." Not two, not three, simply "a" star. Roland Merullo (various posts here, search on Writing) has one for his new book, Breakfast with Buddha. No surprise to this reader.

From Library Journal: 

...Especially well written, Merullo's second visionary novel (after Golfing with God) captures the spiritual struggle for true belief and inner peace with wit, clarity, and subtle reality. Warmly recommended for popular fiction collections.

Photo by Amanda S. Merullo

So...those of us in Eastern Massachusetts are in luck. Roland will read from and sign Breakfast with Buddha at 7 PM at these bookstores along the coast. Join me in Cambridge:

October 3: Toad Hall, Rockport
October 4, Andover Bookshop, Andover
October 23: Porter Square Books, Cambridge
October 24: Baker's Books, South Dartmouth
November 7: Duxbury Library, Duxbury.

And, writers, you'll enjoy the interview by Matthew Quick in Quay Journal, which includes Roland's writing resume. He doesn't believe in rules for writing, including the supposedly unbreakable one: write every day. Roland's writing bio is on the jump page (from Quay).

Disclosure as per below: Roland is my fiction writing teacher.

 

Predicting ethnic violence

Can we predict where ethnic and/or cultural violence will next break out? Our friend, Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complexity scientist and founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), is co-author of Global Pattern Formation and Ethic/Cultural Violence in the Sept 14, 2007, issue of Science, the pub of AAAS. The abstract of the article by Yaneer, May Lim, and Richard Metzler reads:

Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yygoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

And you can listen to Yaneer's Science podcast about the article here. Congrats to Yaneer!

NECSI is hosting the week-long International Conference on Complex Systems (Oct 28-Nov 2). We're among the keynoters for the special day on networks.

 

Collaboration experts, help me, please

Remember FreePint, the newsletter that beams out of the UK to 100K information workers (that would be all of us, yes?), where I wrote a little piece on my favorite blogs and websites? Another request arrived from them. They're celebrating their 10th anniversary (congrats in advance) and, for that, editor Monique Cuvelier has asked for "the most significant developments over the last 10 years" in collaboration. In 500 words. What would you cite?

This week's edition has a good round-up on social networking sites by Shally Steckerl.

Yom Kippur online

It had to happen. For those who live in their own temples--or do not or cannot go to services--yet want to hear Kol Nidre, the signature Day of Atonement prayer, click here and download - versions from Toronto to Baghdad, Ashkenazi and Sephardic.

You can also sit in on live services at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, California. Reminds me of my youth, quiet laughter of warm greetings as the congregation gathers, and I can see my father standing in the back of our synagogue, reading the newspaper as services drag on, see him standing on the steps, smoking a Camel with his friends. (But my rabbi never had to tell anyone to turn off their cell phones, as this one does.)

And if, for you, Yom Kippur is merely one of those impossible words to pronounce, its meaning, in a nutshell, is a day spent renouncing oaths made purely for selfish purposes, remembering the larger good, and committing to upholding oaths made on its and, of course, God's behalf. May we all pay it forward for the year to come in honesty and with love.

Meet Jeffrey Walker

I've blogged before about the special gifts that come uninvited to speakers. People, strangers, all perfect in their own ways, say outrageously nice things, tell you their stories, say they know you from some chapter in your life where their characters may not have been as well-portrayed to you.

So it was that when Jeffrey Walker introduced himself at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this past June, said he knew us from when we consulted to Index Systems, a long-gone but then high-end consultancy based in Cambridge, Mass, I, reading his nametag, exuberantly replied, "We have to talk!"

Jeffrey is President of Atlassian Software, the Australian company that makes Confluence, a sleek wiki product that simplifies collaboration. We were introduced to Confluence through a client using our virtual team methodology; within days, that company's clever engineers had adapted our People-Purpose-Links-Time model to their wiki.

As things worked out, it took a few months before we scheduled our call but, during that time, Jeffrey sent an insightful note about his views of the conference with a good list of +/- (I was on the Advisory Board), invited me to be "LinkedIn" to him, and observed that I hadn't joined Facebook (corrected as of 48 hours ago). This morning I received his acknowledgment as his "friend" on Facebook (if you haven't joined, this could sound ridiculously hokey but there is something very compelling here, still to be understood by moi)...and so I checked out his "wall." There I noticed a number of notes where people were wishing him a speedy recovery and such...which caused me to click through to his blog where I discovered that Jeffrey has been blogging about his cancer, an arcane form, his recent surgery following what appeared to be a recurrence (fortunately benign), and the tremendous energy he has brought to recovery, i.e. just post-op, he asked the nurses where the hospital gym was, they looked at him as if he were mad, and long-short, he ended up with a treadmill in his hospital room.

Jeffrey is also a painter and a jazz musician. He lists Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as his fave all-time album, which gives us common cause right there, and, business interests aside, I am very happy to have made his acquaintance. You will be too.

PS: His blog, radiowalker, is must-reading for those interested in Web 2.0.

Jeff Stamps at MTLC Tech Trends Forum today

NetAge's own Jeff Stamps, our Chief Scientist and inventor of our technology, was the lead-off speaker at the Mass Technology Leadership Council's Tech Trends Forum that took place today in Waltham, Mass. The focus of the session was "Making the Workplace Thrive with Collaboration." Jeff put the emphasis on the people side of collaboration, often overlooked in favor of a focus on pure technology. Slides from his presentation are here.

"Enterprise and team collaboration requires new principles, behaviors, and tools," Jeff said, illustrating how organizations can capture and embed their knowledge by consistent use of online spaces."

According to one of the organizers of the event, Jeff was quite a hit:

Jeff -- great job at the Mass Tech Leadership Council's Tech Trends Forum on the Enterprise Web and Collaboration.  Your presentation was excellent and your handling of a variety of questions in the dialogue with participants just reeked (this is a compliment :-) )with experience, knowledge and insight regarding the subjects and issues discussed.     Many thanks