On October 9-10, some of us met in Austin, Texas to discuss how to move Compression from being a book to more of a movement. How can real work organizations actually start on this?
The group chewed for a while on a vision for itself, working through our different takes on it. The most succinct version of a vision came out as:
“Assure survival and well being using self-learning systems.”
This was followed by proposing a mission much like Doc’s Operational Objectives in the book. All agreed that a picture of what a world actually functioning in Compression might look like is still too much of a cloud vision, and better is needed if it is to become a more popular concept.
All present volunteered to do some project to advance this cause. As these materialize, the newsletter will report progress. Several wanted to begin local Compression study groups. Doc volunteered to send out a brief set of slides for a presentation to get such groups interested. Those will be out this week.
Compression is obviously very important to our future, but how to channel energy around it remains problematic. Some of the discussion was on leading by asking questions, and stimulating others to ask them so that they understand a lot of assumptions that they may be making without being conscious of them. It became obvious that our biggest struggle with ourselves was broadening thinking somewhat as described in Compression and Fractionation.
Finally the group decided to continue having teleconferences and to have another group meeting with more people able to attend sometime in January.