The Art of Hosting the book on AoH

Honoring all the beautiful intentions and (unsuccessful) efforts that went already in realizing the idea of an AoH book, I copy here what I learned about them from Monica's email:

We (a number of us in the AoH network) had an attempt in co-writing a chapter about AoH in Peggy Holmans new version of the Change Handbook - that was really like not moving in flow - it was a tedious process and Peggy ended up writing much of the chapter herself.

As Tatiana mentioned - there was another attempt to do it in a co-creative way last spring / summer - but no real flow .

Other initiatives and attempts have been made as well.

She continued:

So I am holding a question - Since the AoH is a much a very co-created process - and a lot of people are contributing and adding to the field - does that mean that the book needs to be co.written as well? - if not? - who is going to do it? - and how is everyones contribution being honored. - Because no-one owns this - and I feel - no-one can copy-right it. So for me - I am interested in exploring - how this could happen in a good flow.

I’m wondering what went wrong, what did you miss, in earlier efforts. That could be an interesting learning conversation, I guess, particularly from the perspective of the principles of “hosting” a book collaboration, which are not so different from the principles of the AoH of any conversation that matter.

For a second thought, I realized, what I’ve just written is not true. Hosting conversations is different from facilitating the design and unfolding of a complex, multi-author production process, for which presencing seem to be a more appropriate social technology. I hope it’s OK that I seem contradicting to myself but this and the previous paragraphs could be relatively easily reconciled by, first AoH-ing the formation of the book-convening team, followed by the presencing of the future book that wants to come into being through our collaboration.

maybe if we can start harvesting the AoH´s - we start to gather stories and raw material for a future book - who knows.

That “maybe” is the very reason why I shared this idea at such a seemingly inappropriate time, in the midst of preparations for a training. Birthing a book with multiple, not co-located authors, and harvesting collective intelligence in geographically distributed community of practice, would require that we full-heartedly embrace our web-based collaboration technologies not as an extension of our preferred social technologies and our individual and collective capacities.

What would that mean practically? Let’s take the example of "What else can the Journal be also used for?"