The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.
    
Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
the seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test.
    
When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.
    
Suddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door.
She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side.
Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair
My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.
    
With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains
In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains.
They say there is a window from one heart to another
How can there be a window where no wall remains?

"Asking favors is fundamentally different than offering them. People gain by being bridges. Thus, to be able to tell you about a job gives me whuffie in our relationship. Feeling pressured to connect you to an open job makes me uncomfortable. In all of the networks described above, the bridge got to control the information flow. In Milgram's "Small Worlds," if you didn't know that i knew the target person, you may not have tried to pass it on to me. If you don't know that i am dating someone who has something that you want, you won't try to pressure me into giving you access to it. Thus, i can choose when to reveal my connections in a situation where i can come across as being helpful, rather than being put in a position to feel cornered. Revealing the network shifts the power."

Denham Grey: Documentation & knowledge. A oft repeated question / assertion in KM is the link between explicit documentation and knowledge. The point I'm trying to make, is documentation alone does not = knowledge. To retain knowledge against attrition you have to have a community that can appreciate the context, understand the issues, talk the language, adopt the assumptions, share the tricks, interpret and adapt the explicit stuff to changing external circumstances."

Matt Mower: "I have formed the view that it is intrinsic to knowledge that it be actionable. By this I do not mean that it necessarily provokes action, but that it enables it. From this viewpoint the question is documentation knowledge? doesn't matter very much. Any particular document may, or may not, be knowledge; to different people, and at different times. Everything depends upon the context."

"It is easier to have freedom of thought in a concentration camp than in America today."

"So said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for literature and is the author of a number of books that are insightful, both on the nature of the Russian political system and of the human psyche when placed in situations of extreme hardship. In 1974 he fled Russian persecution for the land of the free and the home of the brave. To his astonishment he discovered a land where freedom of thought was no greater than in Russia. There was a difference only in the nature of the restrictions on his freedom of thought not on the extent. Of course the natural response is to say "like it or leave it", that is, if he thinks it is so crook then leave (which is actually what he did, returning to his native Russia after the fall of communism.) Our friends, however, are not the ones that tell us what we want to hear, but those who tell us what we need to hear.

He made this statement many years ago. It is interesting to consider whether it is more or less appropriate today. Are we more or less able to question the behaviour of our country's respective leaders without being labelled UnAmerican/UnAustralian."

Well, for starters, George Bush and John Kerry are both graduates of Yale University – that long-heralded bastion of the Eastern establishment. In addition, each of these men were members of Skull & Bones, the most exclusive secret society/fraternity in America, and prime breeding ground for the CIA and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

But wait; there’s more. John Kerry’s wife, Teresa, was formerly married to Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz. Guess what college he attended. Answer: Yale. And guess what notorious fraternity he pledged to. Skull & Bones! Now ask yourself: what are the odds that both presidential candidates went to the same school, belonged to the same secret society, and that one of their wives was married to TWO different Skull & Bonesmen? It’s infinitesimal … off the charts.

Every moment of one's existence one is
growing into more or retreating into less.

- Norman Mailer

• Name
• Context
• Problem
• Forces
• Solution
• Resulting Context

Curiosita: An Insatiably Curious Approach to Life and an Unrelenting Quest for Continuous Learning.

Dimostrazione: A Commitment to Test Knowledge through Experience, Persistence, and a Willingness to Learn from Mistakes.

Sensazion: The Continual Refinement of the Senses, Especially Sight, as the Means to Enliven Experience.

Sfumato: A Willingness to Embrace Ambiguity, Paradox, and Uncertainty.

Arte/Scienza: The Development of the Balance between Science and Art, Logic and Imagination. Whole Brain Thinking.

Corporalita: The Cultivation of Grace, Ambidexterity, Fitness, and Poise.

Connessione: A Recognition of and Appreciation for the Interconnectedness of all Things and Phenomena. Systems Thinking.

The project aims to facilitate the ability to envisage viable configurations of functions based on structures more complex than those reinforced by hierarchical organization charts. It responds to the need for potential collaborators to design "conceptual keystones" essential to the coherence and viability of unforeseen coalition possibilities in difficult situations of governance.

The project focuses initially on the creation or modification of computer software for which an appropriate database is then developed in collaboration with a number of bodies. These tools are then used to provide a "catalytic context" from which new patterns of group and institutional action could emerge. The principal output would not therefore be any form of "report" but rather a piece of software (possibly a prototype). It is the dissemination of this software, ultimately through commercial channels, which would enable many people to explore the tool as a "collaboration enhancing" device. In this sense the real output of the project is new forms of collaboration.

Its claim to originality would lie in its ability to open up (and mid-wife) new and alternative patterns of collaboration -- especially across discipline, faction and cultural boundaries. In creating this device, the purpose of inter-institutional collaboration would be to enrich its scope (as represented by the database) and explore opportunities it opened up (specifically in relation to institutional arrangements for sustainable development).

As with the construction of any building, there is a basic need for "scaffolding" to hold the conceptual and organizational elements in place, especially during the early phases of "imaginative, interdisciplinary" interconnection. It may be argued that it is the lack of this scaffolding feature which prevents many potentially useful initiatives from "getting off the ground" -- and staying up. And the more complex the psych-social structure, and the more communication space it spans, the greater the need for more complex scaffolding.

...all abstract knowledge is only a faded reality: this is because to understand the world knowledge is not enough, you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality...