Morning all, Another lovely day in Princeton and here I am at the crossroads of a new, albeit familiar, adventure. One that begins with this blog in some ways. Let me start as I'm prone to do at the start ... Back in the early 1990's I expressed a desire to "get" community and social connection to my mentor Roye Fraser. For anyone who's not familiar with that story I apprenticed with Roye for seven years learning how to facilitate profound transformational change based on his life's work he called the Generative Imprint Model. Along the way I also picked up a bit about NLP and hypnosis and some other funky personal transformation and communication strategies ... but let's save that for another time, eh? Anyway Roye was in Israel during the late 1950's into the early 1980's. During that time, while serving in the Israeli army Roye spent a lot of time on kibbutzim. He had a great sense of community and social forms, which he shared generously with me. He also made some recommendations for me to follow up. For all intents and purposes that was the beginning of a twenty-plus year search that I've ramped up to the highest priority over the last seven years or so. Now I've come to what I believe to be an understanding of what community and social connection is all about ... the hows, whys and wherefores ... and that's what I'm doing here. Instead of starting as a lone voice in the wilderness, I've decided to bring my voice to a community that already has begun moving in a direction I both can and do find myself largely aligned with already (BTW this is a critical component as far as I'm concerned, finding yourself okay with being largely aligned in terms of values - without having to agree with everything 100%). So the beginning of the new era will included a presence within this community space afforded me here on zaadz ... let the party begin!!! Best regards, Joseph Riggio, Social Ontologist Princeton, NJ and On-Line All Around the World

Morning All, One thing I have found out for sure about both blogs and relationships is that they require daily nurturing to remain healthy ... hey maybe they're the same thing! So here I am again stopping by to write a bit more ... The essence of my interest is community. To use the physicists concept of a "deep question" it would make some sense to ask, "Does community exist?" This is really an ontological question rather than an epistemological one ... in other words a question of classification vs. one of knowledge. Of course I also acknowledge that it would be easier to simply accept that community exists and get on with it, yet I wonder if that's the case. For instance my intuition is to simply accept that community "is." This would mean to mean that sustainable extended relationships based on some mutually beneficial ties and possibly interests exist. That's one way that I think of community. At one point in time this would of and could of been true. In some places it still is true. Yet in the most upwardly mobile sectors of society it's least true. People move around and the true sense of community fostered by a continued presence falters in these sectors. Neighborhoods still exist of course, and in some places their character is still defined by the folks who live there and who have lived there continuously over time. Yet I sense this is becomming less and less the case in many places around the world. One example that comes to mind is from a recent trip to Beijing, where they are literally "designing" new communities for successful, upwardly mobile, young, white-collar professionals. In these newly chic neighborhoods the traditional Chinese sense of community, where people were embedded in relation to others local to themselves has all but disintegrated. Even where a decade ago I would have found a solid and stable community, now I find rapid change and flux. This is not a critism of these changes, simply an observation at this point. Yet I find a counter-example here in the emergence of on-line communities ... first the bulletin boards of services like CompuServe and Prodigy in the old days of computing `'~> ... then the forums on services like Yahoo and Google Groups, and more recently the emergence of specifically stated on-line communities like zaadz and others. In fact it would probably be proper to say that my typing here today is evidence of a desire to connect. To be more specific to establish a means to share ideas and experiences with others, to be in communication and to participate in a community ... if only in a virtual way. I think the essence of blogging comes from the drive to communicate, connect and build community. So maybe after all we are a species prone to keeping in existence ... I'll be keeping my eyes open ... Best regards, Joseph Riggio, Social Ontologist Princeton, NJ

Hello again ... here's one for the weekend: One of my intellectual mentors has been Dr. Clare Graves. His model has shaped my thinking, specifically his concept of the evolution of social consciousness. A protege of Dr. Graves, Dudley Lynch of Brain Technologies, Inc. in Plano, Texas, has also helped shaped my thinking in the arena of social influence. I expect around these parts Dr. Graves model is relatively familiar. It's the same model that was made more popular by the authors of "Spiral Dynamics," Don Beck and Chris Cowan and more recently by Ken Wilbur and Andrew Cohen. While Dr. Graves was developing these models in the late 1950's through the 1980's, only now are his ideas becoming more widely known and recognized. Simply, Dr. Graves says that we are living largely in a world populated by folks who have developed through the first four levels of values on a social evolutionary scale he described in great depth ... (1) Survival, (2) Tribal, (3) Independence and Autonomy and (4) Social Order and Organization. Those of us who are living in the most industrialized countries in the world are embarking on what Dr. Graves describes as the next three developmental levels of his social evolutionary scale ... (5) Entrepreneurial and Opportunistic, (6) Pluralistic and Inclusive and (7) Systemic. Beyond this Dr. Graves suggests a possible eighth level on his scale, (8) Global ... and there are those who believe we have evidence of the emergence of a group that holds this value set as their most basic default pattern. Yet regardless of where a person defaults their values both drive and guide them, while also remaining open to modification and developing futher along the social evolutionary scale. One of the things that most intrigues me are how people and groups transform ... letting go of old patterns and adopting new ones. It seems to me that this requires a willingness to question everything ... even those things you "know to be true." When a person can set themselves free to see what they have not seen before, they remain open to the path of personal transformation and become the harbingers for social transformation as well. I'm curious ... do you find it off-putting or exciting that the good Dr. Graves has given us a way to examine where we stand in our values in regard to others ... e.g.: "looking out for number one" or "looking out for the system that contains us all." Until we meet again ... Best regards, Joseph Riggio, Social Ontologist Princeton, NJ