Author: Tenneson Woolf

I received an email from my friend Tom Atlee this morning. As he often does, he included several valuable and helpful resources. This time, focused on economics.

I watched this TED Talk featuring Silver Donald Cameron. He is speaking about Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness. Tome describes it as the best TED Talk he has ever seen.

There is much in this for me. It has me thinking of another friend and colleague, Linda Wheatley, who offers a lot of her attention to GNH. And the story itself is inspiring. Much on what is possible from premises not so absorbed in growth.

Enjoy.

• What is the new conversation in social justice and equity that you are longing to have? http://berkana.org/nyc Friends of mine doing this.
• @acuginotti @mariajbakari @chriscorrigan Hi Augusto. Not sure how you are creating this, but fun to see. I love your offerings!
• yfrog.com/meshpdj Today’s harvest of tomatoes and a few beans from my garden.
• RT @berkanainst: Check out our latest newsletter! From Scarcity to Abundance: Reexamining Our Relationship to Money bit.ly/pxvtvF
• yfrog.com/mnf4imj Summer blackberry breakfast in Seattle.

More on clear principles that my friend Helen Titchen Beeth shared recently on the Art of Hosting list-serve.

My experiences is that when these kind of principles are created together in a well-held social process, they transition from just words to activated energetic centers. A difference that comes to mind is that “just words” (though usually very lovely maxims) need a lot of push behind them to keep them alive. A kind of rote memorization to perpetuate more of their life. Whereas, “activated energetic centers” have a sustaining life of there own. A kind of imprinting and embodiment in the gut. I suppose in older terms, the activated energy is a deep level of buy-in.

In a very different context, here are the principles developed by the Elise core team that hosted Interinstitutional Workshops for translators to raise awareness of a communication tool for translators, in the context of translating EU legislation into 23 languages – a mammoth task that involves the European Commission, the EU Council and the European Parliament, and more thousands of translators than I care to contemplate…

“Our principles speak of the way we wish to work together.

•Our relationship is based on trust
•We sense, then we act, then we sense, then we act… When we don’t know what to do, we stop and sense until the next step becomes clear (OK, we might have a little panic, first… )
•Awareness is important: we pay attention to each other and to the process
•We trust each other to act when needed
•We pay attention to what is in the centre
•We have fun together, doing challenging, meaningful work
•Our mandate is to succeed, and we do whatever it takes
•We have a clear goal that makes sense to us
•We interact: we work together, we take each other’s advice, we are peers
•We are flexible and we support each other to become ever more flexible”

An interesting email from my friend Toke Moeller in Denmark. From this premise, I wonder if this number is changing with increased connection through social networks. I wonder if the size of the neocortex is growing / evolving because of this multi-layered level of connection, once sci-fi, that has now become a norm.

Dunbar’s Number

Dunbar’s number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.[2] Dunbar’s number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint oneself if they met again.[3]