I have been digging into Daniel Bassill’s work with the Tutor/Mentor Institute as a way to question, rethink, adapt and pirate his ideas about systems in organizations. I am essentially using the public spaces he has mapped graphically about his organization. My annotations are an occupation of his public space, a happy pirating for happy purposes.

For example, I used this graphic to ask questions and push our conversation forward, upward, downward, backward, and otherward. Part of the beauty of this work is its public nature, a commons for those who will have it or need it. It is the ultimate ‘potlatch’ and part of the gift culture that is pure Internet to the core.

I used the Commons that Daniel created here as a happy pyracy (pyracy with two “Y”s  is self-defined as white hat skullduggery). Every time I post I assume that it is the creation of a public commons to be shared by as common pasture by all the “flocks” and “herds”.  I took Daniel’s image above as just that, a commons to use but not abuse.

One moment I am a lamb gamboling in fresh white clover and another a serious old ewe stamping the ground in protective warning.  (I am a sheep farmer and you have to allow a certain amount of latitude here in my extending the pasture metaphor.)  I make a point that I am playing in the public commons of Daniel’s graphic as well as its margins, its metes and bounds, its interstices, its fence rows.

Here is a another commons, public and intended to be used by others, an organizational map that sums up the systemic work of Daniel’s organization, the Tutor/Mentor Institute.

I used this commons space to close read with a filter on it–facilitation.  In other words I am interested in creating a large system/organization with facilitation at its core much like what Daniel has done with putting tutor/mentoring at its core.  I pyrated his work by messing about with it in SnagIt–close reading it in SnagIt.  This kind of commons work forces one to be quite a bit more deliberate in considering.  I could have gone slower but I wanted to publish this new public space for him to get his reaction.  And I wanted my peers in #CLMOOC to see what I understand public digital space to mean.

I have moved beyond comprehending Daniel’s work to apprehending it and finally toward appreciating it.  You come, too.