what’s love got to do with it
At 7:30AM this morning, Linda Crafts, our Chief Sustainability Officer, and I were reviewing the organizational chart of Dreamfish. We are recruiting now and writing job descriptions. We talked about the backend operational choices we make in the organizational design to create an enlivening organization that produces services for professionals who care about sustainability.
In our first year, the proliferation of creative internal activities we do, combined with our strategic blurring of all boundaries, has set up an interesting dynamic for an outsider looking at Dreamfish from different angles. When an individual first encounters Dreamfish, it would be easy for different people to have radically different experiences and thus interpretations. To explain, I’ll tell you a story about a guy….
The story is about The Accordian Guy . If you saw Joey deVilla pop into play at Julie and Amanda’s improvised wedding in Toronto , you may have thought he is an artist making art. Then, Joey was spotted at an open source software development conference, and then you think he is about technology. Until you see him standing on the conference stage, leading the audience of web developers in a song , whose lyrics were about software development. In fact, you could conclude that his accordian playing is a core process that delivers his mission and inspires innovation in software development.
Singing with scientists is a legendary practice in Dreamfish. In fact, art influences every fiber of what Dreamfish is, but it is not to be confused with what we do. We have applied art strategically to influence the shape of Dreamfish’s organizational design and culture. Anne Chao, our Creative Director, is creating interactive visual arts installations in the office, in which employees place art objects that represent the values they want to bring forth in their work at Dreamfish. We are creating a new position of Director of Organizational Health, who will be facilitating experiential learning dojos and somatic leadership coaching for our team. For strategic planning this year, we used choreography, somatics and visual art as technology for an Appreciative Inquiry that involved our community of staff, partners, advisors and clients.
All of these creative backend practices influences the front end practices to fulfill our mission–to produce social networking services and engage in collaboration with clients. In the coming months, we will be launching our platform service –a service for people to create social networks and use social networking tools that support social, environmental and economic sustainability. Dreamfish will still be facilitating networking on the ground, no worries, friends — helping groups to launch social networking with participatory face-to-face events. So, dancing with a big Taiko drum , we might be inviting you to sing along, some time soon.
Caroline Bernadi co-founded Maatiam, which gives individuals and businesses an easy way to help nonprofits to raise funds through everyday online shopping. Caroline just announced a terrific opportunity today…