Response by Carlos Mota

1) What are the things you liked or valued most?
   
 - the opportunity to connect with kindred spirits doing great work. This was
 valuable personally as well as professionally. I made a lot of great new
 connections, and deepened existing connections, several of which are already
 spawning new collaborations. This kind of opportunity is invaluable, and may
 in fact be the most productive element of a gathering of this kind. Kudos to
 all of you for creating an environment that honored the value of butterfly
 conversations.   
   
 - the open-space marketplace. This allowed for those with shared questions or
 visions to find and learn from one another, and to do some real work to
 advance both practical and theoretical areas.   
 
- I enjoyed sitting together in the large circle, but didn't find that much of
the actual content that came out of those large circles seemed particularly
cutting-edge or relevant to the work at hand. The attempt to sense into the
middle seemed to generally veer toward personal sharing or abstraction. That
said, the large group did seem useful as an opportunity for people to briefly
report on their experiences in the smaller sessions, so that the whole could become aware of what was happening in its parts. I'm not sure how I'd do it differently. I might be inclined to try some longer periods of just sitting quietly in the large circle, possibly having some musical interludes, singing or chanting, etc., but not trying to make magic happen in such a large, diverse circle.
 
2) What advice do you have for those organizing the next salon?
   
- I might try to allow some pre-organization around topics of interest, so that
people who want to have, say, three one-hour sessions over three days on a
given topic can sort of find themselves beforehand and do a bit of
pre-thinking and collaborating on a rough agenda.
 
- If we want to keep the Great Story of Evolution as a unifying framework, we
might want to actually require some pre-reading on the subject as a sort of
filter to make sure that everyone is on the same page, and then be a bit more
explicit in how we tie that to the work at the salon.  
   
- I wouldn't be against a keynote speech or two to help focus the discussion
and unify the field.
 
- see my comments on large circle work above
 
3) How do you imagine your gifts contributing to the future of
this movement (of which Evolutionary Salons are but a part)?
   
- articles and books on the subject
   
- giving talks and workshops on evolutionary spirituality and collective intelligence   

- developing broadcast and web-based media programming to spotlight the ideas and work of the great innovators in the field
   
Thanks for everything you did to make it happen. In my eyes, it was a huge success!
   
Craig