My work on learning by doing has morphed into my role with EFN in fascilitating Currency and Software Guild formation. Ongoing work, gathering and such will be scattered about this and other sites.

What is below is a bit dated but still holds. Now there are a bunch of us working on EFN together, real progress in making the vision reality.

Please review and offer feedback on my Showcase proposal, Learning by Doing Labs.

By my resume, I am an MIT trained technologist with over twenty years in software development and IT operations. In that career, I have worked on system internals, porting kernels, writing spoolers and device drivers, and in operations I can assemble and configure just about any system from scratch as well as designing the people processes that make software development and deployment flow smoothly while meeting business requirements and schedules.

I know I want to put more purpose in my career, and the first, small steps are begining to happen on that path. I'm still blogging directly in HTML with vi (very infrequent now), and have been hacking some content management code (SubWiki and PurpleWiki), but in the long run this hacking is a means to an end. I have known for over ten years that I wanted to shift to a new focus on the trinity of Leadership, Education and Design, but I have not known how I would do this. The beginnings of a path are starting to emerge from numerous diverse threads, ideas and initiatives.

The Leadership I refer to is the leadership of service, and it is well modelled by the emergent meritocracies of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. I am also learning about some non-technical processes with similar structure, Open Space and the Humanist Movement are examples. Political appointment and priviledge have no place here as the leader serves at the pleasure of the community rather than capital or authority. Should there be a failure of leadership, one of two things can happen, the project can launguish and possibly die or recover if a new leader picks the flag up from the battlefield to ralley the troups with refreshed energy, or alternatively an upstart may challenge with a new initiative by creating a "fork" where the code base diverges along separate lines. Sometimes this is the unfolding of separate visions, and a healthy development, but the forking process is not without cost, so more typically the community expresses itself before this happens and forces a change from the bottom.

There is no doubt that this kind of leadership takes skill and experience, but more often that not these leaders are forged in the process of taking on the tasks of leadership and learning quickly from peers, mentors and rapid feedback from the community made possible by networks and tools. Here we arrive at the second leaf of the trinity, Education, but not the familiar process of K-12 and then possibly university degrees. Instead I view learning as a continuous, never ending process of gaining experience, skills and wisdom by taking on more and more difficult and comprehensive tasks under appropriate guidance. The pace of advancement limited only by the choices, talents and commitment of the aspirant. See my Learning by Doing Labs proposal for the current incarnation of this idea, and the most complete and ready to roll out.

For me, Design is the glue that holds all of this together. To be sure, you can focus Education and Leadership on other domains, but it is Design that turns the wheel of progress. Again we found the domain on emergent processes, in this case best represented by the organic PatternLanguage? conception of Christopher Alexander in the domain of building design or Architecture. In April, I participated with Tom Munnecke in a ChiliPLoP workshop on patterns of uplift, and at the same event there were several other Pattern Language workshops for different domains. Alexander's conception is being extended and mutated to fit all of these domains, and I would claim that what unifies all of them is Design.

Sorry, the links below are broken until I rehost my site.

Home Page: http://www.geraldgleason.com

Blog: http://www.geraldgleason.com/pro jects/blogs/gerry/blogcur.html

mailto:gerry@geraldgleason.c om