There’s a lot of people who are stepping forward saying the important words: “this is what I know, this is who I am, this is why I want to be part of the solution.” We meet one another every day, seeking to find our place at a common table of work. Any table.

From our conversations with public and private agencies that manage volunteers we can reliably report that since last fall a radical, widespread increase in volunteerism has occurred. Many volunteer organizations are overwhelmed with the uptick in their numbers of calls and participation.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 science fiction novel Cat’s Cradle created a language that included the term “karass” to define a group of people who, often unknowingly, do what Vonnegut termed “God’s work in the world.” We’re now able to communicate virtually, creating the potential for karasses across the globe. Everyone has become a potential collaborator. So how do we connect with our karass?

Parker Palmer, an education theorist, describes the need for “a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” Every day, meetings, conferences and summits attempt to create such a space. Increasingly, gatherings are cross-disciplinary, as more of us believe that integration of disparate perspectives is needed to unravel complex issues.

On May 15, the Oregon Arts Commission – and emcee Bart Eberwein – and a large cadre of people from many walks of life – opened the door at the Oregon Arts Summit 2009, a large group gathering of 320 Oregonians, titled “The Art of Collaboration.” Subtitled “where the arts meet… your business, your community,” the Summit placed the word “meet” at the center of its activities. To connect with our karass, we have to sit down at tables with people we don’t know, open conversations that lead us to discover what we share in common. Much of the day’s content was devoted to how to start these conversations.

(For those who did not attend the Oregon Arts Summit, you will find a number of posts on our website on our website about the Summit that describe the day, the speakers and what various attendees learned. We have also compiled a variety of links to other blogs, responses and articles about the event. We would love to have your feedback about your experiences with collaboration or the Summit.)

While much of the Oregon Arts Summit was an extraordinary success, a significant number of participants suggested in their evaluations that they wanted more help to “meet new people” during the Summit’s busy day. We hypothesize that these Summit attendees may be thinking, “My karass was in the room and they didn’t find me (and I didn’t find them).”

The conscious intentions of the Oregon Arts Summit were “to have us meet”, “to help us learn” and “to inspire us to future collaboration.” So as we seek to learn from the Summit, and feed that learning forward, there are questions to answer.

Here’s some questions we want to explore:

• The Summit design was grounded in concepts from Parker Palmer, an educator best known for his book The Courage to Teach. Palmer’s ideas include the notion that humans learn best by posing their own questions, and that a community of co-learners at work on the same topic will expand the scope and quality of what the group learns together. The Summit’s question was “What is one thing you know about collaboration and how did you learn it?” What kinds of questions stimulate people to connect outside their existing circles and “find one another”?
• Presenters were asked to be co-learners. Each told their individual learning and personal stories. Each was paired with a collaborator from a different industry for small “studio dialogue” with attendees. Collaborators were chosen for their demonstrated on-your-feet curiosity and for their cross-sector “renaissance perspectives.” Each collaborator asked their presenter to expand their perspective – unscripted and unrehearsed. While the speakers knew this would be the format, each agreed to risk thinking and learning “n front of the audience.” We want to know the following: What encourages experts to interact with one another – and with the rest of us who have something to add to the dialogue – in a community of learners?
• The Summit sought to establish a common culture: plain, honest, open, and transparent. The agenda and Eberwein’s service as emcee established informal “rituals” to provide attendees with a sense of personal control and safety. A question: When we enter a new place we’ve never been before, what empowers us to explore, what provides the sense of safety so that even the most conservative of us choose to engage fully and passionately?
• Experimentation and pursuit of individual curiosity were actively encouraged: Go where you want to go, learn what you want to learn, trust that you’ll be in the right place at the right time were communicated as Summit values. A question: How can the learnings and values of a one-time event influence us when we return to our desks?
• All sessions were videotaped for later web access, so attendees were offered the “safety net” that following their curiosity in the moment was not an irrevocable choice. A question: With blogging and tweeting from conferences increasingly popular, what’s the common language and information that should be posted by organizers to provide representative content from the variety of perspectives?
• Content of more focused interest was delivered in 8-minute off-the-cuff briefings during the Summit’s 15-minute “move-breaks.” Some attendees chose these move-breaks as times to text-message or tweet, others decompressed with coffee and snacks. The move-breaks, the extended 75-minute lunch, the pre-Summit presentation, the post-Summit social hour, all were provided to stimulate informal networking. A question: How do we find/meet our karass in such random situations?

Margaret Wheatley, in the groundbreaking book Leadership and the New Science, said, “Consider how different it is… when the wave of information spreads out broadly. Instead of collapsing into just a few interpretations, many moments of meeting… will occur. At each of these intersections between an observer and the data, an interpretation will appear…Instead of losing so many of the potentialities contained within the data wave, the multiplicity of interactions can elicit many of those potentials, giving a genuine richness..”

The 2009 Oregon Arts Summit aspired to create such a space. May we all learn something from the effort!