Reason for being

Information technology (“IT”) is changing our world: the impervious walls separating our “silo-like” governance structures are coming down -- at all levels: local, state, national and international. Communication and authority are increasingly being shared horizontally, transcending these boundaries – and increasingly collaborative.  The work of our Center is focused on understanding and contributing to this evolutionary change and addressing the practice, form and function of such collaboration -- how this change can be facilitated and furthered, while retaining the positive underlying diverse principles and values.

The roots of this evolving collaborative practice lies with our Board: lawyers, planner, educator – e.g., in crafting and implementing, the very concept of Habitat Conservation Plans (at San Bruno Mountain, south of San Francisco), North Key Largo Florida, and later, the conservation of the workshop/ residence/ grove of Sam Maloof, the foremost mid-century woodworker/craftsman, in the face of the proposed 210 Freeway, in Southern California.  Now, sharing what we have learned and assisting others to utilize and further explore collaboration in “creating” our increasingly complex future. 

Underlying our collaborative approach is “dialogue” -- used to “scope” concerns, issues and opportunities, often as “models” and “pilots”.  e.g., as a first, early “pilot”, beginning in 2014, CCG collaborated with the Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources in the University of California, Irvine, School of Law on a dialogue regarding the “Future of Habitat Conservation Planning” -- later joining with the Environmental Law Institute, in convening a series of dialogues nation-wide on this topic (including a dialogue session hosted by the President’s Council on Environmental Quality in Washington, D.C.).  Further sessions are now being convened on focused elements (e.g., funding and financing and multiple agency collaboration).   

As a follow-on to the Wildlife Habitat Conservation dialogue, we are exploring, other multiple agency/interest dialogue sessions focused, e.g., on climate change and other concerns related to the environment: population growth and increasing shortages of various resources – energy, water, food, etc.

We are also exploring in a very preliminary manner (with the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Maloof Foundation) a significantly different, deeper, set of dialogues focusing on the relationship of “Art, Crafts and Information Technology”.  These dialogues would bring together experts and practitioners, to explore, e.g., various IT processes and their effects on our “thinking” and communicating (with art and craft as exemplars of deeper forms of communication and thought) -- broadening our understanding of the relationship among rational and other ways of thinking and communicating.  The products of these dialogues may include: reports, articles, books – and, of course, better collaboration.  In turn, they underpin assistance provided to others in creating and implementing collaboration to address more specific and focused concerns, issues and opportunities.