Deborah,

I appreciate how you capture what I thought were the richest aspects of the dialogue last Tuesday. I could listen to Fred Dow all over again, talking about Harry.

The design of the concentric circles was to allow for a sense of connectedness and to humanize all parties involved. I appreciated the diversity in the voices in the room, as well as the risk taking many of the initial "sharers" modelled. I am most grateful for Paul Grogan's leadership in this as I think we are moving in the right direction.

In my humble experience, most complex issues, once aired out among people of like minded spirit, turn out less complex than previously thought. As two heads do think better than one, imagine the power of many. When we make it so that we are reminded of the fact that each of us walks in this struggle in the company of many as passionate and as focused, all things are possible.

Since I love Boston so much, I want to see that my city becomes the place that reflects what I hope for the entire world. As I've lived in the midst of armament, of war, or persecution, I want to do the best I can to ensure that the 21st century welcomes its children without this kind of pestilence. So that each child knows clean water, clean air, safe playgrounds and most importantly, loving and connected relationships with each teacher (peer or adult) that crosses his or her way.

Sayra Pinto

Deborah, I share your passion for this technology and electronic collaboration.

I've been a fan of electronic meeting facilitation and on-line collaboration for many years. I cannot tell you how often I attend meetings and forums and wish that available technology and thinking is available to connect all of the attendees and speakers with each other and with information and tools they could use to go beyond talking to actually acting as a group to do whatever it is they were talking about.

I have a blog at http://tutormentor.blogspot.com and last week I posted messages about a couple of events I attended in Chicago that I felt would have been much more beneficial if there had been an electronic connection between participants and speakers and if there had been a vision to keep everyone in the room connected with each other and the issue via some sort of online elearning and collaboration forum.

As you and others post examples of such electronic collaboration, I add these as links in the Learning and Management Tools section of http://www.tutormentorconnection.org. That way people who visit this site will not only learn more about knowledge management, decision support, innovation, etc., but they'll also see how we want to incorporate these concepts in the Tutor/Mentor Connection.

"Build it and they will come" is the only way innovators can demonstrate the value of such tools and process. This means that early stage innovators in the non profit sector must find volunteers, partners and investors by using the Internet to cast a wider net for support. I've been doing that.

During May 2005 there will be two Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking eConferences. One will be from May 6-11 at www.alado.net/econference and the second will be hosted May 23 by IUPUI. The url is http://econference.uc.iupui.edu/

We link these conferences to a face to face conference we're holding in Chicago on May 12 and 13, and to web sites that contain in-depth information that shows why volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed, where they are needed, what varieties of programs exist and could be duplicated, and ways business, professionals, faith groups, hospitals and universities could be strategic in supporting such programs as part of a pipeline to careers strategy.

These econferences introduce everyone who participates to new ways to learn and collaborate. We're not organizing them in a traditional way, with a tops down organizational structure. We're enlisting partners, such as the Digital Workforce Education Society at City Colleges of Chicago, the Webheads, IUPUI and others, who already have econferencing capacity, to host the tutor/mentor topic during a strategic time frame. By November we hope to have hosts in Australia and the UK as well as in Chicago, Indiana and possibly other US cities.

By posting my message in multiple forums where others are gathering to learn and share with each other, my goal is to increase participation in tutor/mentor collaboration, and to recruit volunteers who already know more about this than I ever will, but who don't have a cause that they can use to demonstrate the potential of their collaboration tools.

By posting my vision on T/MC web sites, anyone in the world can visit my site and learn what I'm thinking. A blog does this. A web site can do it even better.

Because poverty is in all parts of the world, we know there are groups of people putting in many hours to innovate solutions. If we can connect these groups with each other, we have more ideas to innovate with and more potential partners to help put good ideas in play.

I believe that technology can be a platform that anyone can use to be a leader, if that platform is free, or at low cost, such as this blog space.
By creating distributed ownership we create an army of leaders, who each in their own way will evangelize civic engagement and community service, and provide a path to an internet community where people are innovating ways to make this a better world for everyone.

Dan Bassill
Tutor/Mentor Connection

I'm delighted to read Sayra Pinto and Dan Bassill's comments here. I hope that other folks will post their thoughts about online tools for civic engagement as well.

As I mention in a subsequent blog article, there's a possibility that TechFoundation will become an active supporter of a project of this sort in Boston and Massachusetts. I'm totally thrilled about this. Eventually, I would also love to see the Civic Source calendar that is being spearheaded by MassINC and the Commonwealth Civic Roundtable linked with the online civic engagement tools that are now under consideration.