Forms of Evolutionary Salons

Many different types of salons could be held.  What are they?  What are their diverse gifts and limitations?  Do some of them fit together into larger patterns?  How do they relate to each other -- or how might we use them in synergistic ways that serve our purposes well?  Below are suggestions that reflect some of the range of possibilities we discussed.

Any of these can be local, regional, national, global, etc. We can develop do-it-yourself templates for people to self-organize any of these - more easily the local ones.

Using the net/phone/video - any of these could be entirely offline, entirely online, or a hybrid. The online component could be synchronous (live in-the-moment), asynchronous (such as this website), or both.

A.  Strategic Conversations - leverage
   1.  Sector Salons - well-networked people in a field gather to explore the evolutionary implications for that field (e.g., business, philanthropy, education, journalism, religion, computer/net, and/or other technology, etc.)
   2.  Evolutionary Thinktank Salons - experts gathering to produce intellectual products on a specific topic (e.g., social software, disaster response, collective intelligence, etc.) - as done by ISSS: in the months prior to the event they have an organizing committee open to participation from attendees, thematic threads, personal and online work pursuing shared inquries and preparing intellectual content, a well articulated schedule that follows multiple threads, opportunity to focus in a thread or go from thread to thread.
   3.  Convening the Convenors Salons (e.g., evolutionary retreat centers, umbrella organizations, etc.)
   4.  Storyfield Salons - Open Space gatherings of futurists, social thinkers, and experts in sustainability, collective intelligence, evolutionary dynamics, etc., along with society's storytellers -- novelists, movie people, journalists, historians, etc.

B.  Emergent Evolutionary Salons
   1.  Open Emergent Evolutionary Salons:  wide-range diversity of participants in open space and world cafe gathering around broad themes for community-building, grounding in evolutionary framework, and generating creative/wildcard emergent dynamics. This approach may include some experiments in deepening together (e.g., through ritual)(see C, below).
   2.  Focused Emergent Evolutionary Salons:  Intentional multi-sector diversity gathering in sector and cross-sector conversations similar to Barbara Marx Hubbard's Syncon conferences.

C. Deepening Evolutionary Salons
   1.  Experiential workshops that deepen and develop people psychologically and spiritually; personally, interpersonally, and/or collectively; and strengthen their connection to the past, the present, and/or the future and to the whole, the center, the middle.  Some give people experience in tried-and-true approaches, but many work on the growing edge, exploring new possibilities as experiments.
   2.  Community of Process Practice Salons:  People interested in learning and deepening their practice of one or more processes or group practices gather to do that.  For example, we could have periodic open space gatherings exploring the art of hosting, to develop a community of practice to open and hold space for our salons, perhaps modeled on Spirited Work.

D.  Public Evolutionary Salons
   1.  Evolutionary Open Forums - big events which anyone can attend and learn about and talk about evolutionary issues
   2.  Ongoing Evolutionary Cafes - Marc Tognotti's idea of an ongoing public conversation (probably world cafe) held out in the open for example in Washington DC
   3.  Evolutionary Living Room Salons - weekly, biweekly or monthly discussion groups in the tradition of the Utne Salons or Conversation Cafes

I'm not really getting the wholeness of this way of dividing things up. Many of these categories seem to overlap
, or cut across all of the others. Perhaps other elements can be pulled out to apply across the remaining ones, as i did with the use of online tech. --John Abbe