Monday

Rick Heller on "Compassionate Comments" and bringing nonviolent communication online

Please join us for the May session of the Ethos Roundtable!

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Featured guest: Rick Heller, creator of Compassionate Comments

Here's a little bit of background about the session from Rick:

Rick Heller is the editor of the online magazine The New Humanism, a publication of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University. He is the creator of the Seeing the Roses project, which provides online videos teaching mindfulness with the aim of encouraging consumers to make more environment-friendly choices.

His writing has appeared in Free Inquiry, UUWorld, and Buddhadharma magazines, as well as the Lowell Sun and Boston Globe. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. He holds degrees from Boston University, Harvard and MIT.

Rick is also a Web developer, currently working in Ruby on Rails. He created Compassionate Comments using Javascript inserted into a standard Wordpress template, to demonstrate the 4-step nonviolent communication process and how it potentially could be adapted for web comments. The steps, developed by Marshall Rosenberg, are:

1. Make nonjudgmental observations.

2. Note one’s feelings.

3. Identify the personal needs that give rise to those feelings.

4. Optionally, make a request.

For more information, please see Rick's recent article on the Public Conversation Project's blog.

After the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, charming venue, and free food at the 501 Tech Club, which is generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food, it's both courteous and prudent to let her know how much to order.

See you on May 17th!