South Bruce Peninsular - Ortegrity: Rethinking Municipal Methods - Comments

Can Communities be Wise?

garym — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:29:10 -0400

Some further thoughts related to future positives and the extra bang for the municipal buck ...

Interestingly, a community of people (whether a group, a company, a town or a nation) is better equipped to be wise than an individual. This is true despite the fact most of the communities we live in or with are clearly foolish, small-minded, unconscious and/or destructive. Truly wise communities (some of which operate on millennia-old traditions) are seldom seen or publicized by our civilization, preoccupied as it is with bustling off to its own demise.

As individuals, we are inherently more limited than a community. Although we can consult books and friends and critics, in the end we are limited to our own single perspective. We are, alas, only one person, looking at the world from one place, one history, one pattern of knowing.

A community, on the other hand, can see things through many eyes, many histories, many ways of knowing. The question is whether it dismisses or creatively utilizes and integrates that diversity.
[ Can Communities be Wise? ]

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

One small detail

garym — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:36:00 -0400

Ok, the fine print, yes, the catch, the thing that I forgot to mention, just one small little detail so small I thought it maybe not worth the mention but nonetheless include now for the sake of whole-picture completeness: The ortegrity members can not get paid until after they deliver.

Minor thing, really, but probably needed to be said. In nature this means the anthill starves if it endlessly deliberates, in the film industry it means the principals get eviction notices if the show doesn't go on or overruns the grant, and in commercial enterprise it generally means that efficient project success is in everyone's best interest.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

Ortegrity: Rethinking Municipal Methods

garym — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:25:54 -0400

Hold on to your hats. Reading this essay on re-evolutionary industrial organizational theory and practice on Future Positive, the thought, mind-blowing crazy as it is, occurred to me that our present stalemate council is perhaps the perfect incubator for setting the Dr Wilkins plan into action at the municipal level. We're nearly doing it anyway, only in a destructive spirit; formally adopting the Ortegrity method simply saves us the stigma of not doing it the old, broken way: