Tonight in San Francisco: From Participation to Power, with Harald Katzmair
On November 19th, pioneer social change strategist Harald Katzmair, Ph.D will lead us in an exploration of the media environment and cultural moment in which we live, and point the way from mere participation to power.
Harald’s talk will begin with an exploration of the dark side of Web 2.0. How it can overload us with messages, shrink attention spans, erode focus, and thus disrupt our ability to find common ground and take common action. Through Web 2.0 we may be, as in the title of cultural critic Neil Postman’s influential book, amusing ourselves to death.
We must recognize that individual participation does not necessarily equate to power. Power is the ability to act. And collective action is what enables citizens to be powerful politically. Being hyperconnected can overload us and cripple our ability to act as individuals and groups at a time when we need to be really good at taking common action in order to avoid a climate disaster.
In Harald’s view, what’s needed to survive are new tools that can help us do just that. We have to go beyond mere individual participation to collective action. And realize that it’s not the size of your network that counts, but how it’s patterned to achieve a clear goal.
Harald will share cutting edge tools he’s developed to help groups set agendas, act collectively, and mobilize networks for change. What sets Harald’s approach apart is that it’s based on social network analysis and complexity theory, which are especially useful for modeling complex systems, harnessing collective intelligence, and identifying actions that have maximum impact with minimal blow back.
Harald is CEO and Founder of FAS.research, a pioneer in applying social network analysis and complexity theory to solving complex problems in multi-stakeholder environments. His passion is helping people come together to solve “wicked” problems. One of his current projects is helping tribal leaders in Jordan develop a water sharing system. If Jordan does not succeed in this, they’ll run out of water in 20 years.
It should be an eye opening night. We hope you’ll join us.
This event is cohosted by Shareable Magazine and the Abundance League.
MEETING:
When: Thursday, November 19th, 2009, 6:30-9:30pm
Where: Citizen Space , 425 Second St., #100, San Francisco
AGENDA:
6:30 – 7:00 Arrive – mingle, nosh
7:00 – 7:30 Member announcements lightening round: share your passions, needs & gifts quickly
7:30 – 8:00 Break – nosh, make connections based on announcements
8:00 – 9:15 Presentation and discussion
9:15 – 9:30 Clean up, take the discussion to the 21st Amendment
BRING
-Willingness to help others and receive help
-Healthy stuff for the potluck
-Yourself, friends
Harald is a great inspiration to me and many others. He's helped us a lot at Shareable. And he's the go to guy in Central Europe when it comes to analyzing networks and designing stakeholder strategies.
I also think he's helping to lead an important shift in human evolution. Sounds overly grand, but let me explain. We're entering a stage where intangible collective structures like language, culture, and networks can be made tangible, can be visualized (because of the Internet and innovative research methods like social network analysis). These collective structures powerfully shape us as individuals and as a society, but most of the time we're unaware of there impact on us. What Harald and others are doing is creating tools and processes that help us see these collective structures so that we're better able to shape that which shapes us.
Social change is not just the aggregate of changes individuals make added up. To change ourselves and society, we also need to change the collective structures which shape us. This is not an individual act. It requires that people come together to act collectively. We should not forget this when we hear things like "if only everybody used CFLs." This shift in thinking is part of what Harald will talk about tonight.
As an example, here's a semantic network analysis map Harald and I collaborated on to help us understand how sharing and the commons are connected to other terms on the website delicious.com:
http://bit.ly/460kEG