Back to Work and Speaking of Open Source...

It's been a tough week, so I've lost some momentum here. One thing I've been musing on is that while Bohm has specific methods for his conception of dialogue there are other analogous ideas that share the spirit of dialogue and even some of the methods. The most obvious was the Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, who do something very similar to Bohm's methods of dialogue, but in the context of religion. Bohm would probably be happier with something that didn't have a Christian ideology behind it, but the methods and even the larger goal of solving the world's problems are there, as is the leaderless conception of group activity. Then there is Tolstoy's conception of history, which like Bohm's is about the collective expression of purely personal feelings and spirit and a certain contempt for mere technical solutions. There is a great sense in Tolstoy that all of our behaviors and motivations individually is the great subject of history. In Pierre, the central character of War and Peace, we have a person who comes to understand something deeper as he rejects a Cartesian view of the world and acts on his feelings. There is no method of dialogue yet an understanding of it.

Now we turn to Open Source, which is a technical arena for solving problems. It's much like dialogue in that it is leaderless, but it is focused on technical problems and solutions. More will be written about this later, but nearly everyone is aware of Linux, the operating system that is providing a real threat to Microsoft's dominance of that market as well as humanizing the complex UNIX technology. More to follow.