DREAMS After Dark
For years – perhaps decades – I’ve been advocating for dialogue as a transformational practice. More recently this has taken form as DREAMS
DREAMS began as a conscious counterpoint to STEAM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. I’ve come to think of STEAM as instrumental (how we do things), and DREAMS as existential (why we do them). We need both – but very little space is given to DREAMS.
D.R.E.A.M.S. is the underlying philosophy of the Newham Mosaic initiative, of the NAIC project and of the proposed DREAMS after Dark Zoom dialogues.
The proposal is that Dreams after Dark is free flowing, free form, late night dialogue between people who want to talk late into the night about anything from ‘Do you Believe in God?’ to ‘Is it Worth Voting?’ and through ‘What Do you Want, What Do You Really Really Want?’
The dialogues take place on Fridays, on Zoom, from 10.00 PM and may last up to 12.30 AM. If no one turns up the host will wait until 10.15 PM and then close the room. No one is obliged or expected to come regularly or to stay from the whole session and participants can come and go as they wish.
The dialogues will not be recorded unless there is a pre-arranged key speaker who wants to present on a particular subject for a maximum of 10 minutes. There will be no meeting minutes and no agenda.
The first dialogue is on Friday 22nd May 2026. If you are interested I will send you the Zoom link on request.
NAIC
Alongside this, I will be restarting the NAIC (Negotiating AI as a Community) workshops. These are not courses, but spaces for collaborative problem -solving, developing community coherence and cohesion, and exploring the tools and structures (including AI) that might support this. One way of thinking about this is as the development of a “Borough Brain” – shared capacity for thinking, coordinating, and creating together.
What do I want from this? The kind of community I would want to live in.
What qualifies me to do this? Not authority, but participation. The same qualities that qualify any of us: vision, and the willingness to act on it.
I’m not offering a finished model, but opening a space and a process that we can shape together.
NAIC (pronounced ‘nike’ as in ‘spike’) will return in June. Initially as a series of online workshops exploring the use of tools for ‘Augmented Community Intelligence’ ACI – and beginning to use them practically.
If you are interested in being part of a team of digital explorers and developers building a dialogical commons for Newham start by signing up to the Newham Mosaic website via the ‘login’ link in the top menu.
NAIC sounds like Nike but has no relationship to the sports company. I do, however, like its slogan: ‘Just do it’!