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Much has progressed towards holding an “unconference” in Missoula. An Unconference is a self-organizing event where the participants create the agenda in a transparent fashion. The format encourages dynamic content and participation in a way that a closed agenda event can not. The great people at Missoula’s own ModWest have been early supporters of having a BarCamp here. ModWest is an internet and web hosting, one of the top 10 web hosting companies in the world. Right here in our small city of Missoula! The people there started a Web 2.0 social networking site that has been featured at the Wall Street Journal. It’s a way for people to set up fun polls. There is a poll on that site for the theme of the BarCamp. The number one choice fits well with the idea that it be a convergence of art, technology, and community.

On the technical side, I attend the JavaOne conference every year since the year after it started. This month I also went to a new offering, an unconference barcamp like event called JavaOne Camp. This was my very first unconference, and it was facilitated by the wonderful Kaliya Hamlin, also known as the Identity Woman.

Kaliya was kind enough to invite me to attend the Internet Identity Workshop. Since JavaOne Camp had few attendees, I was not able to experience the full beauty of an unconference using the Open Space method until I went to the IIW. It was awesome! All these techies gathered in a circle and then lined up to describe the topics they would discuss and put them on a big sheet that set the agenda for the day. And then people met and talked and wandered between events. This amazing unconference happened with some preparation, but much less than a traditional conference, and the interactions were so much richer than is usually feasible at a more traditional conference where the agenda is hard wired before the event begins.

At the event, Kaliya introduced me to the wonderful Lisa Heft who is an Open Space facilitator and trainer of Open Space facilitators. I was amazed to learn that Open Space has been used in corporate board rooms, technical conferences, intentional and co-housing meetings, between Israeli’s and Palestinians, with United Nations groups, and more.

Having returned from the San Francisco Bay Area and both the JavaOne conference and the Internet Identity Workshop, I was able to do some Drums for Peace last Saturday. The leaders of the excellent peace and justice center in Missoula, the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, Betsy Mulligan-Dague and Ethel MacDonald both were enthusiastic about holding an unconference in our town. We have the wonderful Missoula Art Museum in our town that Ethel mentioned might be a good space. We’ll see, I joined the MAM last Saturday and they have some very nice community spaces in the museum.

Turning back to the technical field, which is really more my home, there is the Missoula Web Discussion Group which meets once a month. Several members of this group are interested in getting the unconference going. We’ll see where this train goes, but it has been a great ride so far!

Martin Seligman was the president of the American Psychology Association. He’s written a few best sellers, one of which sits next to me as I write this entry. “Authentic Happiness” is the title. The book blew my mind a few times when it addressed a few psychological misconceptions which alone are worth the price of the book. It surprised me to learn that at least according to statistics and surveys, most people are happier than most people think, even people in dire and difficult circumstances. Also, people usually return to their general level of happiness. Tragedies to do strike, but even after great difficulties, people usually return to their happiness setting or pattern of happiness.

The biggest “aha” for me was finding out that the modern and largely American concept of the value of venting emotions is based on a flawed model. The idea is that people hold emotions like liquids in a plastic bag. If the emotion doesn’t get bled out one place, it will come out another. But psychological studies invalidate this. The expressing of emotions actually tends to increase them. So if you express a lot of anger, you just get angrier. If you express a lot of happiness, you get happier. Suppressing anger can be healthy. This is a gross simplification of the results of the study, I recommend looking up the book for a greater understanding of the science behind it. I’m sure there are times when it is healthy to communicate anger, but the clear message I got from the book and which is confirmed by personal experience – it is healthy to hold back angry feelings because they tend to fade. It reminds me of the bible passage, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

Yet with all these benefits and messages, what most inspired me to blog about the book was the scientific implication of the God concept. Seligman relates his own journey through the field very nicely in the first chapter, about how Psychology had been focussed on problems, broken people, on mental illness. Seligman found his mission in life when he faced the facinating topic of learned helplessness and discovered that it challenged the psychological models in use. His breakthrough was realizing that they didn’t have a model of happiness and psychological health.

At the core of psychological health he believes are several virtues that are common to all the main world religions:

• Wisdom and knowledge
• Courage
• Love and humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Spirituality and transcendence

Seligman doesn’t philosophize much about God in his book, it’s not a theological treatise. But he does write a little in his final chapter. His ideas aren’t developed, it’s an interesting chapter because of the personal way he relates his thoughts through story, and it’s interesting because it raises questions about God, meaning, and purpose. Having spent time with scientists and engineers most of my life since college, I well know that the God concept itself is very suspect in that arena. Seligman seems intrigued by the idea that it could be valuable again in science.

We can go to the moon, we can split atoms, all based on a greater grasp of the material laws. But how meaningful really is any of that, if life has no meaning to us individually and as a culture. Isn’t it interesting that the core values that make life meaningful are virtues common to the world religions, the very heart of where mankind has encountered a Creator, the Buddha, Enlightenment, or whatever one calls the core origins of our universe?