In an article in today's Palladium-Item about changes to Richmond's zoning code that were passed last night, City Councilman Parker is said to have stated that, "he didn't think the council should support something that might put someone out of business."

Parker's words are a manifestation of some of the more regressive and misdirected thinking that too often dominates in Richmond and Wayne County's governmental leadership, but that is rarely verbalized so succinctly.  The statement was a reference to claims by Porter Advertising and their supplier, Productivity Fabricators, that the new sign ordinances included in the zoning code (which place some restrictions on billboard advertising) would put those companies out of business.

Why is this regressive and misdirected, and why is it good that the zoning changes were approved anyway?

First, let's take the claim that the Richmond City Council might be putting someone out of business.  It's certainly true that this government body has the ability to enact policies that could make it very difficult for one kind of business or another to do business in Richmond (and when it comes to humans rights organizations, look out!).  But that's a lot different than implying that the Council is responsible for maintaining the financial health of a particular for-profit operation in town throughout all kinds of changes in culture, policy and governance.

When a City brings its community's regulations up to modern best practices, be it in areas of safety, food service, transportation, health care or signage, it's a given that business models of the past will need to adapt.  Big tobacco, tanning salons and the fast food industry know this very well.  It would be quite unfortunate if the folks at Porter Advertising hadn't thought to learn how trends in community zoning and signage policies were eventually going to impact their business, and then prepared themselves to make changes accordingly.  But again, that's their job to do if they want to succeed in the wonderful world of capitalism, not City Council's responsibility as a government entity.

Secondly, even IF we accepted that City Council was indeed in danger of "putting someone out of business," I'm still not sure that's in itself a reason not to pass one piece of legislation or another.  This is the fear-based line of thought that keeps communities like Richmond stuck in the past: we'll only allow things to change if they will create jobs (any jobs, no matter how low the jobs pay or how temporary they are), and we'll fight against any change that might force someone to do something differently, or that might endanger jobs.

A basic function of lawmakers in a representative system of government is to encourage change that represents the diverse and changing interests of the community and discourage change that conflicts with the interests of the community.  If someone came to the City Council and requested legislation that would allow them to dump toxic waste in the middle of downtown, I would hope Council members would be okay with putting that someone out of business. I'm sure that in this town, if a proposed zoning change was going to encourage the flourishing of adult entertainment venues, the Council would fall all over themselves to put those operations out of business.

These may be extreme examples, but consider that it might just be a good thing for our community to have tighter restrictions on the size and placement of large commercial advertising signs throughout our landscape.  Is anyone else tired of only being known to strangers by the RV billboards that introduce us to travelers on I-70?

Maybe a Richmond skyline with fewer and/or smaller billboards is a Richmond that residents and tourists will enjoy more.  Maybe Porter Advertising and their colleagues in the industry can innovate, adapt, change, figure out what the global best practices are in tastefully sized and placed marketing tools that make an impact.  Maybe they'll do MORE business with these changes - who knows?

I wonder what opportunities for community improvement might have been passed up over the years because a single, influential business played the "we might lose income if you do that" card?

Old minds think, "how can I stop bad things from happening?"  New minds think, "how can I help create the best possible version of the community I want to live in?"

In this case, I think City Council rightly considered the broader interests of the community to pass these zoning code changes - they may not be perfect, but as with this and other matters, we won't know until we try something a little different.

1) The Pal-Item reports on a meeting happening today about technology in schools:

The Richmond Community Schools Board of School Trustees has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday to learn more about the school corporation's technology needs...Technology coordinator Rob Tidrow has reported to the board that the school corporation is operating with outdated technology, and in some cases, technology that is obsolete...School officials have asked the board to consider paying for the upgrades with dollars available in a rainy day fund or the school corporation's savings account.

I support our schools having current technology so that students can be engaged with and knowledgeable about how to get the most out of these tools. In the past that may have inevitably meant running the latest version of Microsoft Windows on the latest desktops from Dell (although there are plenty who would have said there were alternatives then too).

But in an age where many technology tools and services are online, and aren't tied to a particular operating system or hardware vendor, it shouldn't be a foregone conclusion that a school has to spend large amounts of money on proprietary software licenses and cutting edge hardware, when low-cost or free software and older but perfectly usable hardware can do the same job. In a time where school budgets are being cut, it's worth looking at other options before reinvesting in more hardware and software that may also become obsolete as quickly as what they are replacing.

I pointed Mark to this issue, and in response he wrote up one particular technical approach that RCS could take. There are others, too.

2) Jason Truitt writes in his blog at the Pal-Item:

Expensive new technology requirements for 911 offices have brought six area counties together in a search for solutions. Fayette, Franklin, Randolph, Rush, Union and Wayne counties all use the same [911 emergency] system now, but it will be obsolete next year and no longer supported by Microsoft.

There may not be any off-the-shelf open source offerings that will meet this need, but for crying out loud, don't just sign up for the next Microsoft contract only to find yourselves back in the same position a few years from now. While they're teaming up, I hope they explore what other communities are doing to get more value out of their emergency systems, whether it's creating systems themselves that use more open standards, finding new uses for old equipment, or even challenging the expensive requirements that might not be serving community interests as much as they are guaranteeing income for influential vendors.

These two particular cases may be decided as they always tend to be. I hope that in general, local decision-makers will realize that there are other ways to go that save money and make better use of existing resources.

But one only has to look at the long list of community building organizations and entities in Richmond - and the overlap, duplication, and even competition that some of them represent for each other - to wonder if maybe this isn't an area where we're actually holding ourselves back instead of moving ourselves forward.

Consider, in no particular order:

• City of Richmond (including the Mayor's office, City Council, various commissions and committees)
• Wayne County Government (commissioners, council, and related entities)
• Richmond-Wayne County Chamber of Commerce
• Main Street Richmond Wayne County
• Richmond/Wayne County Convention and Tourism Bureau
• The Economic Development Corporation
• The Richmond Depot District
• Richmond Art Works
• Wayne County Vision
• Neighborhood Services Clearinghouse
• Institute for Creative Leadership
• Preserve Richmond
• Wayne County Foundation
• WayNet.org
• United Way of Whitewater Valley

All of these organizations, while having some significantly different areas of focus and programming, are essentially working on the same core issue: how to make Richmond and Wayne County a better place to live, work and play.

They approach that question differently, for sure. Some are funded by taxpayer dollars while others seek membership fees and grants. Some have brick and mortar operations with paid staff while others are made up of a few key people who meet when and where they can. But all of them are trying to build up our community.

I wonder, then, if Richmond and Wayne County is benefiting from the work of these organizations as much as it could or should. If you add up all of the budgets and person-hours and fundraising galas and community events and networking gatherings and the like, are we really seeing the results that we should if those same resources were being put to work by a smaller number of organizations, or even one organization? Or is there some fragmentation, or even severe limitation, that comes from having so many proverbial cooks in the proverbial kitchen?

And the above list is just the organizations working on community building at a fairly broad level - if you start to look at organizations working on specific issues like environmental awareness and sustainability, education, youth programs, housing, or providing social services to those in need, you can make whole separate lists with all new kinds of overlap and duplication of efforts, all right here in one little city that doesn't even have an Indian restaurant!

Sometimes the overlap is just logistical or administrative: everyone having their own calendar of events, for example, that the average citizen doesn't have a hope of knowing to check when they want to find out what's happening in town. Sometimes the duplication or perception of duplication is more substantial: every year about this time, small businesses start getting bombarded with letters asking for charitable gifts or membership renewals for the coming year, and they have to decide how best to support their community, hoping their dollars go as far as possible. In turn, the soliciting organizations have to spend their time and resources reiterating the value they bring to the area, just to make sure they aren't lost in the noise.

This doesn't seem like the most effective way to operate.

Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that the work of any one of these organizations isn't needed or valuable, or that their mission and approach aren't sound. In fact, I support many of them with my time and dollars, and have been fortunate to call many of their leaders and advisers friends over the years. Some of them do collaborate and enjoy strong partnerships, and many of them can point to significant and lasting successes they've had here. Diversity of approach and funding, sometimes with a little duplication, can be essential.

But I also can't help but indulge in some thought exercises:

What if some of these organizations were better at communicating openly and honestly with each other not only about shared values and goals, but about their concerns, egos and territorial sensitivities?

What if some of these organizations could truly collaborate, share resources, or even merge programs?

What if we didn't take the impact and relevance of some of these organizations for granted, grilling some on why they're still a good value, and praising others more for the under-appreciated work they do?

What if we decided that our community needed a new approach?

We are complex enough beings that we can simultaneously understand how our community is hurting in a lot of ways, and also how good we have it and much possibility there is for the future.

Old minds think: "How do we stop these bad things from happening?"

New minds think: "How do we make things the way we want them to be?"

Let's make sure our community building efforts are actually working to make things the way we want them to be.

It is our human nature to be competitive, individualistic, and materialistic. Our well-being depends on strong leaders with the will to use police and military powers to protect us from one another, and on the competitive forces of a free, unregulated market to channel our individual greed to constructive ends. The competition for survival and dominance—violent and destructive as it may be—is the driving force of evolution. It has been the key to human success since the beginning of time, assures that the most worthy rise to leadership, and ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.

As Korten notes, this story makes a world of peace and sharing one that is just a naive fantasy, forever out of reach.

Is this why we don't mind our police state so much? Why we make fun of people who don't achieve through competition or power-grabs? Why we'll go to any length to protect those "free market" forces?

Is this story true for you? How much of it do you encounter or even enact in your daily life? Are there other stories about who we are that you might want to tell instead?

• That we have to choose between a candidate from the Republican party and a candidate from the Democratic Party.
• That within a given political party, we have to choose a single candidate who is the best and only choice.
• That the party conventions are a time when the will of the people is represented and expressed in the form of a meaningful vote, and not just a time for the powerful and well-connected to party on someone else's dime.
• That we have to vote for the person who can win, instead of voting for the person that best reflects our own values.
• That we must choose the candidate with the most political experience, since the presidency is no place for on-the-job training, instead of choosing a candidate who could be the most effective once in office.
• That we have to choose between efficient, accurate, secure electronic voting machines with no paper trail and slow, unreliable, corruptible traditional voting methods that leave a written record of our choice.
• That it is possible choose a President who will represent us individually and work to address the concerns that affect us on a day-to-day basis, instead of working on those concerns ourselves within our community.

What other false choices are we asked to make? Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Quinn, who I've mentioned here a few times, is an author who has spent much of his life writing books that try to show readers a different way of looking at the world and the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. In Write Sideways, Quinn essentially tries to answer the question, "once you have seen the world from a different perspective, how do you help other people see that same new perspective in a way that's meaningful and lasting for them?"

As a man who often puts himself in the role of a teacher, Quinn also seems to be ever in pursuit of ways to explain his methods and process, perhaps in the name of passing on the practice of opening eyes and changing minds (his approach to world changing). But as he tells in Write Sideways, he seems to have some difficulty doing so effectively, at least based on the wild and strange questions he gets from his readers. This is not the first time he's told his own story in an attempt to provide some context and background to his approach; in Providence: The Story of a Fifty Year Vision Quest, he recounts his life leading up to the publication of Ishmael, his most famous and impacting work. I was worried that Write Sideways would be a recycling of that information or of other parts of his writings, but despite some re-hashing of parts of the Ishmael novels, I would say it's a self-contained and fresh take. (It's not necessary to have read his other books, but you'll get more out of it if you have.)

The book is structured as a conversation between Quinn and one of his readers, Elaine, who visits him for a few days in his home. It's essentially a slightly edited transcript of the conversation, and so it reads quickly, as though we are sitting in on the conversation, turning our heads back and forth between Quinn and his guest. I thought one of the key points in the book came early on, when Quinn admitted that while he's always avoided looking at himself as anyone special, he's come to accept that he has a unique frame of reference on the world, and that getting to that frame of reference is a kind of skill and wisdom in itself. From there, Quinn guides Elaine through challenges and exchanges that attempt to help her do the same, often with questions from readers as exercises.

Each time I have encountered Daniel Quinn, he has always inspired me. At first it was Ishmael and his other earlier books that inspired me to look at the world in a different way, and to find other people who were doing the same. Since then, when I've met him, talked to him on the phone or heard him speak to groups, it's been his process and approach so some of the world's most vexing problems that have inspired me, as someone who seeks to do some eye-opening and mind-changing in my own life and work.

I'm not sure anyone will ever be able to truly replicate what Quinn does, but as I'm sure he would say, it's not really about him, it's about finding new ways for humanity to live that are sustainable. To that end, Write Sideways is a helpful contribution from someone who's been pioneering those efforts in his own special way for quite some time.

If you missed it, you can also check out the Annual Holiday Bazaar happening next Saturday at the Clear Creek Food Cooperative, where you'll be able to buy crafts, jewelry, pottery and other homemade items from area artisans. See you there!

It's too bad, then, that we often seem to be trending toward the further diluting and replacing of a strong public life, especially for our younger community members. In Richmond, the Common Council recently decided to enact a new curfew that restricts people under the age of 18 from being out past a certain time of the evening, and threatens to fine the parents of those people progressively higher for each offense.

As with most laws that say "if you're under a certain age, the government requires that you do or do not ____", I think it's yet another unnecessary and misguided transfer of a community's power and responsibility to decide how it wants to live away from the community members themselves (especially parents and children) and to the government and accompanying police state. (Do we still honestly believe that the time elapsed since birth is such a precise measure of maturity, self-discipline, ethics or responsibility?) But in this case, it's one of those particularly draconian measures that says "you, human, must stay in this particular physical space from this time of day to that time of day." Do we really want that kind of imperative coming from lawmakers who don't live with us, who don't know what our private lives entail?

I know that one argument for this kind of curfew is that it helps keep order in the city, reducing the amount of policing that has to be done. The implication here is that (A) people under the age of 18 are the predominant cause of disorder, and (B) a form of order that involves restricting our public lives by threat of physical force and economic hardship is a desirable one. I would suggest that neither A nor B are generally true, and that by trying to relieve the burden of policing our streets during certain hours, we pursue outcomes that are far inferior to creating a community where the streets are a positive part of a healthy public life.

It's putting a band-aid on symptoms and avoiding the deeper conversations we could have about why we don't think we can live together well without a curfew. It's an example of a world run by old minds that think "how can I keep these bad things from happening?" instead of new minds that think "how can we best create the world we want to live in?" And it makes you start to think about what other programs are in place that artificially hold us back or keep us confined, when there are much more important things we should be spending our time and energy on.

I'm grateful for the fact that, on the whole, I really enjoy the things that I do for my "work life," and in many cases, would choose to do them even if I weren't being compensated. Sure, they might take a slightly different form than they do in my role at Summersault (and in Summersault's role as a for-profit company acting within and benefitting from the global economy), but I generally get to apply the skills and expertise that I posses to challenges, projects and organizations that I think are having some sort of positive impact on the world I live in. More importantly, I feel privileged to know that my "work life" and "personal life" are intertwined in ways that don't usually feel uncomfortable, and are often very complementary. The relationships I have with the people I work with, the missions of the organizations I'm involved with, the projects I take on, the values I try to live out, the larger goals I have for my life...all of these things are improved or furthered by the larger notion of "How I Spend My Time," and with every passing year, I see fewer distinctions between what I consider "work" and what I consider "personal".

I suppose this is a manifestation of an ideal that I have for the world at large - that we can work toward a version of humanity that does not require people to spend time doing things they would not otherwise choose to do, just so they can have access to groceries, housing and other basics (and often at the expense of other great experiences like strong community, strong families, playfulness, seeing the world around them, laughing out loud on a regular basis, etc). I hope we can instead follow a vocation, which as Frederick Buechner beautifully put it, is "where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." I think that when we have to save up all of those things we'd like to do, and the possibility for living out our deep gladness, for a planned vacation, we may not be living our lives to the fullest, responding to our true calling in the world.

There are plenty of cautionary statements to go along with this ideal. For example, I'm a privileged middle-class white male who can say these things on my quaint little blog that's hosted for free at a company I started with resources acquired and derived from the struggles of many others before me, while plenty of others fight for basic survival - food, water, shelter - every day. For there to be any chance of an equity amongst humans where balance and interdependent communities of people living out their true vocation can thrive, we must first find peace with justice, a culture that doesn't thrive on destruction, and an economy that doesn't depend on exploitation and oppression.

But no matter the hurdles to getting there, I think there's a version of humanity that does not require us to carve out a work life for ourselves that is separate from our personal life, that doesn't necessitate as many vacations from our vocations. In fact, humans lived this way for quite some time before our modern culture came along and said we needed to make enough money so we can buy an iPhone or two. In that time, we knew what it was like to live, work, and play all in the same context of a community of people who were literally making a living together, no daily commute necessary. If they heard stories of what we call "making a living" these days, even in the cases where we start our own companies that provide exceptional opportunities for a harmonious life, they'd still probably say, "Ha - suckers!"

What kinds of vacations do you take? What's your vocation? Where do they meet?

As a part of my participation in this year's Institute for Creative Leadership workshop, a group of Wayne County citizens are now creating the Wayne County Time Bank, and I'm so excited about it. If you're interested in learning more about this new tool for social change, I hope you'll come to our next information session on May 16th at 5:30 PM, at the Uptown Innovation Center. And whether or not you can attend, check out WayneCountyTimeBank.org to sign up for our mailing list; we'll let you know when the project is ready for public participation!