Early days: four things I’m thinking about: holding environment, curiosity, care and communication.
Continue reading “Building groups that don’t burn you out”Individualist vs selfish
I was having lunch with someone and got into an argument about the reason for putting up solar panels. It was weird to be faced with a different worldview when I felt my view was the obvious answer. It was even weirder to acknowledge that their reason was also perfectly valid, but I still felt triggered. So this got me thinking. This person is not a bad person, I just don’t think he ever even saw the need for care, giving it or receiving it. So what is that worldview, and why is it so different to mine? I wanted to call him selfish, but that wasn’t it. It was more … individualist.
Continue reading “Individualist vs selfish”Holding structures and scapegoating theory … or something. A wobbly.
While working on the AquaCurious proposal, I had a wobbly. This happens, I pour myself into my work completely and so it gets tangled up with all the emotions and undercurrents and things. So I just poured it into Claude. I don’t know if any of its responses are factually true, but the feelings were BIG and the conversation helped.
Don’t you think this whole application is just naive? Too much of a pipe dream?
Continue reading “Holding structures and scapegoating theory … or something. A wobbly.”AquaCurious
I applied to the MSCA again. Calculated success rate is about 7.4%, heh. But, the process, as always, was so incredibly insightful and I am already applying the principles in my work and thinking. So, win.
TL;DR: AquaCurious: Cultivating Curiosity-Driven, Gameful Coalition Culture for Sustained Civic-Led Water Partnerships
I ask how six structural elements – process, place, people, power, purpose, and care – let civic actors build and sustain coalition-based water governance. Curiosity as the design mechanism is mobilised through gameful approaches, applied through the vehicle of designing a pocket park in Tampere.
Continue reading “AquaCurious”Why Does Patriarchy Persist?
notes from the book by Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider
I wasn’t mad about the style of the book, it lacked coherence to me, and then I found the more recent book “In a Human Voice” which I loved (notes here and here) and so I never recorded my notes on this book. Here it is, and reading the notes again proved very helpful! (thanks Stela)
Continue reading “Why Does Patriarchy Persist?”Care-giving, care-taking, and the feminist metaverse
In the past week, friends have had intertwining conversations that I want to try weave together here. The overarching theme is the power of information to make care, visible. To make the connections and relationships between everything visible. If this in turn has the power to change anything, well, that is another thing and where the post unravels towards the end.
Continue reading “Care-giving, care-taking, and the feminist metaverse”MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence
The sentence, drumroll, is:
Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.
(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)
Continue reading “MetaPlay: Biosphere reserves, glass cliffs and the project in a sentence”What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite
The previous post – version 5.1 was a mess and I found it really hard to work through all that stuff. Part of my frustration is the feeling that I am doing this to get academic research funds, but I don’t really care about this aspect of the academic rigour, and that doesn’t do wonders for the motivation. That changed this week. I’m really starting to see the value in it, for designing an actual game, for example, and I’m having fun! My brain hurts, but hey.
I’m currently looking at building something like a participation curiosity scale or something like that, inspired by Kahan’s article. I’m a bit embarrassed to say I’ve been quoting Tim Harford left and right since 2017, but only actually read the article that he quotes this week, spurred on by Ricardo’s mention of causal approaches and me having a panic about how one measures ‘replacing judgement with curiosity’.
Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not.
Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not.
Continue reading “What we play is life, version v5.2 – methodology development, causing yet another total rewrite”
What we play is life. Project v5.1 – focus on measuring behaviour change, or: focus on the “play”, and less on the “what”.
After thinking through the fifth iteration and asking for help about being stuck in the weeds, Ricardo reminded me that what we’re trying to do is influence behaviour, more than contributing to understanding it (because I was also inspired by Chan’s article about a cohesive theory of value). I was really stuck with my methodology, and he suggested I look into causal approaches. Things that measure actual behaviour, not just what people say they would do, or like, or believe in.
Continue reading “What we play is life. Project v5.1 – focus on measuring behaviour change, or: focus on the “play”, and less on the “what”.”Community engagement using cats as metaphor
This came from a Friday evening casual chat in the OMI group discord, where we were wondering about how to retain members amidst different personalities, while attracting, and more importantly, retaining new members. We spoke about herding cats, and that you don’t herd cats, you throw some tuna where you want them to go – the tuna being the shared vision that people want to be part of.
But this wasn’t the full story, and fuelled by my most recent project iteration (blog forthcoming but this note pad has rough thoughts) and a bit of beer, I thought, it’s not just about tuna. So I shared my cat situation along with how I think this translates to community management. Writing it up sober, I still think it works well. Also adding cat-specific details for posterity.
Continue reading “Community engagement using cats as metaphor”