Today I had a nice meeting with JonL about the aesthetics of group dynamics and how social software provides methods of sustaining and growing relationships that one makes in real life during our busy interconnected lives. I talked about how the watercolor game is a good icebreaker for a retreat because it gives people non-verbal ways of getting to know each other as they simultaneously learn about a new medium, assuming that the participants are all business people, not artists. Jon talked about how much he has learned from his life experiences and how he wants to put more of his personal knowledge into his blog rather than focus on the social and political commentaries of other thinkers. Jon has a lot to teach and I love to meet and work with him on social software projects. Jon said, "Social software is thinking in relationships. In contrast and complementary, tech makes the thinking and the relationships explicit." Then we talked about how to teach about distributed systems of problem solving and knowledge sharing in some form as a Polycot product, such as a retreat or seminar.
I also did some painting by the pool. When I got inside I was missing one sheet of 12 little paintings that I'd just completed. After looking around and around I went back to the pool and there they were floating face down in the water next to the filter intake. I was surprised how much of the pigment stuck to the paper. The images were all still visible although rather reduced in color intensity. Ironic that one of the soggy pictures was a painting of the gray pool float foating on the pool.
