For a few years now, I’ve been on a learning quest related to Systemic Modelling, a.k.a. SysMod.  It’s an approach to working in groups or teams: more sparking of the group’s combined intelligence, fewer conflicts or misunderstandings.  I wrote about it here a while back.

In this post, what I wanted to reflect on is not so much what I’ve been learning, but more the process of learning, for a field like that with many interweaving ingredient-skills.

Getting interested

I always like things about how people communicate, how groups collaborate, inclusion, exclusion, learning and difference.

The initial pull for me to get into SysMod in particular, back in 2022, was seeing a video of Caitlin explaining some stuff which I already partly knew.  She was talking about how something we experience as “a problem” can also be seen simply as one element in a system, sometimes with strengths yet to be identified.

I was like: aha yes!

It crystallised something I’d been thinking about, and pingled my “interesting things here” sensors.  “Someone here I can learn from”.

Based on that intuition (plus already having read Caitlin’s book a few years before), I signed up for one of her Inside Story courses – following a project where there had been tricky conflict within an organisation.

What I learnt and observed kept on being interesting to me, and I decided I wanted to learn this territory myself.  In a sense, that decision was the first transition stage of the journey.

Gathering skills

So then it was like:  okay, I’m officially learning SysMod now.  Here’s a list of skills, I gather the skills.

I embarked upon a phase of gathering and practising.

I knew from past experience of learning other things that my brain was gonna need some real data to play with.  I went to a lot of Peer Practice sessions, and if someone said “I’ve got a topic, who’d like to facilitate”, I’d pipe up “I will if no-one else wants to”.

It was intrinsically rewarding to learn in this way, because we talked about real things, and I could sense the conversations being useful to people.

Over a similar timespan, I also did some more courses.  Every now and again, one of the trainers would explain something specific that made something fall into place.  And then I’d have a new thing to practise.

After I got to Foundation level, I was still really in this same mode of gathering skills:  it was just that now, they were more advanced or more varied skills.  For example, at Professional level, one of the things you have to do is co-facilitate with someone else – so I started practising that, along with some people who were ahead of me, or about the same level.  (Thanks to Pascal, Valerie, Matt & Ratha!)

The being of not yet knowing

As I was learning “new stuff”, I would also be drawing parallels or making connections with “old stuff”.  For example, “evidence versus inference” was familiar to me from years ago, and so was “noticing the vibe of making someone wrong” (which overlaps with SysMod use of the Drama Triangle).  There were lots of times when I would think: oh, I recognise this element, yeah.

But in this stage, it was overall from a position of “not assuming that I know how to do this“.

I think that’s a good attitude to have at a certain stage.  You don’t want to be coming in like “I already know this, I already know that, I already know this”, or you’d never be able to learn anything new!  You’d be like the would-be Zen student whose teacup is already full:

He poured and he poured and the tea rose to the rim and began to spill over the table and finally onto the robes of the wealthy man. Finally the visitor shouted, “Enough. You are spilling the tea all over. Can’t you see the cup is full?”

The master stopped pouring and smiled at his guest. “You are like this tea cup, so full that nothing more can be added. Come back to me when the cup is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind.”

I don’t think what I did was “emptying” my mind exactly, but I think there is a kind of “bracketing off earlier skills”, which can be helpful when you’re trying out new stuff.

Like if you’ve done ballet for years, and now you’re starting tap dance, you want to be able to set aside how your legs and feet “know” how to go into ballet positions.  A tap shuffle is different from anything in ballet, and the pull of ballet habits would get in your way.

Transitioning, consolidating

That kind of open, provisional “being of not yet knowing” can be a great place to come from when you’re learning something new.

And, it’s not necessarily the best place to ultimately be standing as a facilitator!  At what point do you start transitioning back towards “the being of being on top of it“?  haha.

When you’re in charge of a thing that’s happening, you have to have integrated the new skills enough, so that you’re using your own senses to sense what’s happening.  You can’t be running as the proxy for somebody else’s ideas of what to do.

You might have a blueprint in your back pocket, but the blueprint always needs adjusting for the circumstances.  You have to do your own experiment.

Your own way

Many many times as we’d been learning, Caitlin would say things like “some of this is just how I do it – you’ll have to figure out your own way”.

That made sense to me in principle.  In any field, there are going to be a mix of essential bits and variable bits.

But in the early days of gathering skills, I felt like I wasn’t yet really at that stage.  It was like “learn the rules before you break them”, or “Chesterton’s Fence“.  First I had to reach some level of understanding of what the essentials were.

One development which turned out to be immensely valuable was when a couple of my fellow learners got permission from their then-current clients for a small supervision group to review their training-session recordings.  (Thanks to Blake and Emily and their clients for this piece of generosity!)

That meant I had the chance to witness two more people “doing it their way“, along with snippets of how the sessions were received.  Emily and Blake would be doing some things the same as Caitlin and some things different, which makes it much easier to see what is and isn’t essential.  It expanded for me the possible territory of “how this can work”

(The funny thing is, we’re trained that if you’re giving examples in the introduction to a topic, you should give at least three examples, otherwise people don’t have enough sense of the territory.  And here was an example of three examples :-) )

Blake, Emily and Caitlin all have different styles.  Watching any of them, I’d have moments of “I couldn’t do that”.

And then, somewhere around the time of those supervision-review sessions, that’s when the “finding your own way” part became tangible and vivid to me.  Well yeah, I can’t do it like them, because they’re them and I’m me!

The flow of playing to your strengths

Then there was a specific thing that Caitlin said to some of us one day:  “If you’re gonna use this stuff out in the world, you have to use it in a way that costs your system nothing.”

Something about that statement felt very illuminating to me – like a “different way round” to look at some of the things I’d been mulling over.  Things fell into place.  It was a bit like that thing in chemistry where you get a supersaturated solution and then tapping on the jar can initiate the crystallisation process.

What I heard in “costs your system nothing” is it’s about finding the way which plays to your strengths.  What can you do, which for some people would be alien or difficult, but for you comes natural?

For example, it’s in my natural flow to “be analytical” and to invent practical solutions.  My brain likes solving for “how are things put together now, what are the constraints, what else might be possible”.

However, I don’t identify as a quick thinker.  If you want me to answer “on the spot” about a load of new data, then you might be out of luck, because my best answers usually come after I slept on it, or a week later… or a month later, when the topic floats back into my head during a walk one day :-)  When it looks like I thought of something “on the spot”, it’s probably because we’re on territory that isn’t new to me.

And it’s easy for me to connect with feeling compassion for people, and seeing everyone’s different perspectives (also useful for scaffolding other people’s learning) – whereas sometimes I might not know where or how to draw a boundary line in the moment, especially if the conversation is moving fast.

So then I started wondering: okay, of the whole territory of Systemic Modelling, where is it most useful to be analytical like that, or “see it from all sides”-ish like that?  Which parts of this territory are right up my street, and where do I just need to be “good enough that it doesn’t mess up the rest of it”?

And, thinking ahead for the future:  what else do I know, that isn’t taught as part of SysMod, but can weave with it and multiply with it?

Metaphor landscape

In retrospect, I can see that my spatial metaphor in the gathering stage was of a kind of “working towards“.  There was this destination up ahead, which, when I’d gathered enough skills, I would reach.  Each gathering of a skill was also a step towards that destination.

This transition that I’m thinking about now was a kind of other-way-round.  Instead of trying to get to somewhere else, now I wanted to be grounded in my own knowing, and gradually bringing the new stuff in to integrate it.

I got the image of a pile of gatherings over to my right, and me, bit by bit, reaching for them and bringing them towards me.  As I bring the new skills towards me, I’m making sure that they’re congruent with me and how I work.  I’m making sure that they’re like properly installed.

There might be a few elements that I never actually bring in:  I leave them on a shelf in case I do want them later, but right now I don’t have a use for them.

That process of integration and “how do I do this” is still ongoing.  I actually wrote the seeds of this post back at the end of 2025, and in a sense, the transition has been going along that whole time.

I still am gradually acquiring new ingredient-skills as well.  That might not ever stop.  The transition I’m thinking of isn’t like “got all possible skills, don’t need any more”:  it’s about the relationship between me and the skills, or about my ability to wield them based on my own intuitions.

Or to use another metaphor for the whole thing:  To learn, I’ve been playing a card game using specifically a new subset of cards, so as to get familiar with those cards.  But then in the long run, I don’t want to be only playing with a “half deck”.  Now I have to shuffle all the cards together: old and new.  Now I have to figure out the strategies that you can play with the full deck.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2026. All rights reserved.

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I was just thinking again recently about a particular section from my zine Creativity is for everyone.  I thought I would share it so as to be able to link to it here.

Intuition

An important thing in creativity and in life is your relationship with your own intuition.

Intuitive knowing isn’t the same kind of knowing as knowing a fact.  Intuitions can be misleading – e.g. if they were based on insufficient information.

But if you don’t pay any attention to those internal pushes and what-ifs, then you’re missing out on a valuable source of wisdom.

It can be a challenge to learn to trust your intuition – and it can be a challenge to learn when to question it.

Both are important.  Both are skills which mainstream culture doesn’t support very well.

If you get time with a good counsellor or therapist, or a friend who’s a good listener, part of what they’ll do is help you tune in to your own intuitions about things, and come up with safe ways to test their truth.

In day to day life, most of us get more encouragement to override intuition than to listen to it.

Intuition and risk

Trusting intuition is partly a matter of owning the risk of it.  It’s an act of faith to trust your own sense of a situation even when others disagree or you don’t have conclusive evidence.

Of course there are also risks in following other people’s ideas and overriding the voice of your intuition.

For one thing, you might have been right!  By taking the
generally-recommended path, you might miss out, in some practical
sense.

But that risk applies either way:  it’s possible you’d miss out on something by taking your path, too.

What you’re also risking by overriding intuition is a loss of valuable experience.  I mean like this:

Suppose you thought in the first place that the recommended path was the wrong direction, and then it is.  In that case, you’ve missed out on doing your own experiment.  In a sense, you’ve done someone else’s experiment instead.

If you follow your own intuition and then it all goes wrong, at least you’ll have some new data.  You’ll be fine-tuning your intuition for the next adventure.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2026. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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Jump straight to the instructions

What it is:  Zoom has this option whereby you can keep re-using the same link, whenever you need to repeat a similar kind of meeting – without making the meeting be the same time every day or every week.

For example, you can make a recurring meeting called something like “Jennifer and Jane confer”, and then any time you decide to meet, the two of you already know what the link will be.

Or if you’re organising a course, you can make a link named after the course, and include the link in the joining instructions.  Then, even if it turns out you change a date or add a bonus session, participants can still join the newly-scheduled session via that original email.

(I don’t tend to use this option for events open to people I don’t know.  For those, I would rather have a new link every time, so that people can’t jump back in on a later date without me expecting them.)

Step by step

1. Log in to your account via https://zoom.us/signin.  The “No Fixed Time” option is an “odd one out” in the interface, because it makes you log in via the main Zoom web page.  (All the scheduling options from the “Zoom Workplace” dashboard make you put in a date and time, which isn’t what we want.)
2. Click on “Meetings“.
3. Click the blue button “Schedule a Meeting“.
4. Give the meeting its name.  (Once the meeting happens, people will see this title as they arrive, confirming they’re at the right event.)
5. Ignore the date and time stuff, go down the page a bit, and there’s a tick-box for “Recurring meeting“.
6. When you tick that box, a drop-down appears, and that’s where you can select “No Fixed Time“.  As soon as you select that, it “realises” that you don’t need the date options, and they disappear.
7. If you don’t want anyone to be able to get into the Zoom room before you, then tick “Waiting Room“.  But if these are people you know, more likely you’ll want to let them join on their own, so that any early birds can have a chat before you get there.  In that case, ensure that “Waiting Room” isn’t ticked.
8. Click “Save” to actually create it.
9. After you create the link, you should be able to copy it.  Then you can share it with anyone who needs it.
10. Once you’ve created the link, it should stay accessible via the Zoom Workplace app, under the heading “Recurring“, recognisable by the title you gave it in step 4.  So, even though you had to go onto the web site to make the link in the first place, you shouldn’t need to go back on there when you want to use the same link again.

Here’s a short YouTube video with someone talking through it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLv4M9EMCas
(The person on the video changes the password, but I generally don’t do that.  In my context, most people will just click the link, so it doesn’t matter if the password isn’t memorable.)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2026. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

Long time no blog.  I’ve been busy!

I wanted to mark a third-anniversary.  It was in October three years ago, 2022, that covid got to me, after a couple of years where I’d successfully evaded it.

This is to reflect on the illness, the slow journey of mostly-recovering, and the nature of that time.

Weirdness begins

The initial couple of days weren’t too bad for me:  mostly a gigantic tiredness, and some headaches.

Then a few days in, weird stuff started happening.  My heartbeat was suddenly all over the place, skipping beats, fast and slow.  Scary!

As I started to gently potter about doing things again, I noticed there seemed to be a kind of time limit on how long I could be out of bed.  After a bit, I would feel increasingly bad, and then lying down again brought relief.

The “bad feeling” wasn’t nausea (although I did sometimes have nausea too) – it was something else.  I never did put words to a really good description of it, other than “bad”.  But it sort of reminded me of nausea in the way that it would subtly build up over time.

Discoveries and realisations

One day, maybe a week or so in, I noticed that my heart was also beating strangely fast when I was upright – like 120bpm just standing still, when a normal level for me would be more like 80.  And it clicked:  this is some version of PoTS, Postural Tachycardia Syndrome.  That explained the big difference between how I felt standing up and how I felt lying down.

Explanation:  You know how, when you stand up, your blood vessels have to readjust their pressure, so that you have enough blood coming to your head and you don’t faint?  Well, if that process starts going wonky, your body will cleverly try to compensate for the low pressure by making your heart go really fast.  It’s a way of slightly increasing the supply when the blood vessels can’t quite do their job.

In other words, the fast heartbeat isn’t the actual problem:  it’s an incomplete compensation for the problem.  Or, from the point of view of diagnosis, it’s a telling symptom.

Postural refers to the standing-up, Tachycardia means fast heartbeat.  “Standy-uppy Fast-heart Syndrome” haha :-)

(For a lot of people, it takes them or their doctors ages to figure out that this is what’s ailing them.  It’s not super well known.  But I’d heard of it already, just from knowing disabled people and reading disability-politics stuff.  I think I had even heard already about people getting PoTS for the first time along with covid – which I know now is pretty common.)

A more general term for problems with standing up is “Orthostatic Intolerance”.  And a term for the underlying problem is “Dysautonomia”, i.e. automatic processes not working properly.

Technically it wasn’t PoTS until I’d had it three months – or, depending on which framework you go by, six months.  So, in the interest of accuracy, at first I would sometimes refer to it as “a PoTS-alikey thing” :-)

Having identified the pattern, I looked into whether it was likely to wear off, or whether I’d be stuck with it.  I found a research paper on PoTS which said that 5 years in, 50% of people have recovered:  not super-encouraging odds.

I remember thinking about how my music computer setup was now nicely optimised including a standing desk, and wondering whether I’d eventually be able to use that setup again, or whether I’d have to reorganise that area of the room, or indeed only do music from bed.  I remember wondering if I’d still be able to manage public transport, maybe with a portable stool for waiting at the bus stop, or if travelling around independently was now going to be beyond me.

A theory

Pretty soon – as I wrote about at the time – I developed a hopeful theory.  There’s some evidence that at least some versions of PoTS are caused by autoimmunity problems.  It might be that your own immune system mistakenly attacks some of the signalling molecules which are meant to transmit the “standing up now, readjust” messages to your blood vessels, so that the messages don’t get through.  Or something like that, anyway.

In favour of this theory being applicable to me was also having my first ever (and still only) episode of hives, the day I first went outdoors after becoming ill.  My skin suddenly looked and felt as though I’d been stung by an insect, but there was no insect!  And hives is also an “immune overreaction” thing.

So then my theory was that, maybe after about three months, when the viral remnants had been cleared, my immune system would calm down, the signalling would start working again, and the PoTS would cure itself.

That three-month timeline, I had guessed based on info that I’d seen in the context of “Polymerase Chain Reaction” testing – the type of covid test that you could get in a lab.  PCR tests carry on giving you positive results after you’re not infectious any more, and it’s because they find remnants as well as active virus.  These explanations said that 90 days (or some sources said 60 days) is about how long the viral remnants typically hang around, so that those kinds of tests aren’t useful for a fresh result within that time.

Work-arounds and “life goes on”

Meanwhile, I read up on classic self-help things for PoTS.  In the mornings, I would drink juice and eat salty things in bed for a while, to mitigate the worst effects before I tried standing up.  That did seem to help a bit.

Nearly all the work I did during those months, I did on my laptop lying in bed.  I even worked out a way to practise facilitating a group online while lying on my side, with my laptop propped up sideways.  Well, I was “the right way up” on the camera!

I personally never fainted from the standing-up incapacity, although some people do.  I would just feel gradually worse and worse until I lay down again.  I could do about 10 minutes standing, or 15 to 20 sitting up in a chair, before “the bad feeling” got too much.

As I began to recover from the sheer exhaustion of the initial illness, I experimented with going for little walks.  That was a bit more viable than standing still.

This difference is a known thing with PoTS.  It’s because, when you walk, the activity of your muscles gives a little bit of pumping-help to the circulation of blood.  Standing still, you don’t have that muscular activity, and so your heart accordingly works its hardest then.

(Or to be precise:  the heart works hardest to compensate if you stand up and then lean against a wall, because that position minimises even the slight muscular movements involved in keeping your balance.  There’s a test for PoTS which you can do at home, the “NASA Lean Test”, which involves leaning against a wall for ten minutes and tracking what happens to your heartbeat.  Here’s a PDF explaining how to do the test.)

This meant that the worst part of trying to go anywhere was any time I had to wait in a queue, like at the bus stop for instance.  I did take to carrying around a little seat.

Some ups and downs

One night, my heartbeat dipped to about 35bpm, with big thonky beats.  I was thinking, “this seems bad, I wonder if I need to go to A&E, I hope I don’t need to because that would be a lot of bother” :-)

I searched on dysautonomia plus bradycardia (slow heartbeat), and found that other people with dysautonomia had had similar dips from time to time and it hadn’t killed them.  After a while, and after some snacks and apple juice, sure enough, it gradually went back up to a more ordinary speed.

(Maybe I should’ve gone to A&E for that one?  Still not 100% sure about that.  Maybe it was bad and I was “lucky to get away with it”.)

Another time, I actually did end up going to A&E:  not because anything especially dramatic was happening, but because I got an earache/jaw-ache type thing along with the heart weirdness.  “Hmm, this is technically a symptom of a heart attack – probably isn’t, but I’d feel pretty stupid if I ignored it and I was wrong, I suppose I’d better traipse over there”.

As I’d thought most likely in the first place, it wasn’t a heart attack.  The earache was probably a separate thing.

But interestingly, this was the only time, across the months of symptoms and doctor-visits, when a medical person actually measured and documented the tachycardia pattern.  They got me to lie down and stand up again, and wrote the results into my records.  And then they recommended a web site with info about PoTS.  Respect, person in the NHS who has heard of PoTS and knows what data is relevant.

The turn-around

Three months in, my “when the viral remnants have gone” theory still hadn’t come true.  Maybe it would go on forever.

But about four months in, I did start to see signs that the PoTS-ish stuff was wearing off.  Imagine my delight when one day, I could stand up, and my heartbeat actually just stayed at a sensible 80bpm.  Woo hoo!

It does seem that maybe my autoimmunity theory had been partly correct, and it was only the timeline that was a bit wrong.  Maybe the virus remnants had hung around for an extra month.  Maybe my body took a while to calm down and reset after they’d been cleared away.

At that stage, the tachycardia hadn’t yet completely gone, but the episodes did start spacing out, rather than happening every time I stood up.  The last one (of that era) was eight months in, and I think was partly triggered by accidentally letting myself get a bit dehydrated.

(I was nearly ready to post a version of this post which said it hadn’t come back after summer 2023, but then I had another episode of it the other day!  possibly due to having recently had a flu jab, which would’ve given my immune system a nudge.  Keeping a metaphorical eye out in case it happens again.)

Energy levels

In parallel with all that, covid had wrecked my stamina.

Ironically, my lively active-travel habits before I got ill had been encouraged partly by pandemic conditions in the first place.  The infection risk in 2020/2021 had put me off going on the bus, and instead, I’d been doing a lot more cycling.

By the summer of 2022, I’d gradually worked up to the strongest and most energetic I’d been in over a decade.  I could cycle about 10 miles in a day – though I would be tired after that, and not want to do it again the next day.

Covid stole that.

I remember the first time afterwards that I tried to gently walk as far as a mile.  I had to sit down three times on the way and rest.

Picking back up from that knocked-down level took many months.  There were times when I would set out on a walk, and absentmindedly stride out in “my normal rhythm” from before, only to start feeling rubbish half a minute later.  I learnt to tell myself:  walk slow, walk slow.

In certain types of energy-limiting illness, there’s a thing called post-exertional malaise, PEM, which is really important to avoid.  PEM isn’t just exhaustion:  it’s when the amount you’ve overdone it actually does damage and makes you iller.  Because of the risk of that, I knew I shouldn’t push myself.

In retrospect, I’m not 100% sure (a) whether I avoided PEM by caution, (b) whether I did have a mild version of it a few times, or (c) whether my variety of Long Covid never actually was that kind anyway.  There certainly were times when I was ill and exhausted the day after some exertion, but I never felt so terrible, or so knocked-backwards in my convalescence, that it was conclusively PEM.

While all that was going on, I was wary of cycling anywhere, in case I suddenly tipped over into feeling too ill to ride, and then had the predicament of how to get the bike back home!  Walking was logistically less risky, because I knew that if I really got myself in a pickle, I could call a taxi.

When I did eventually get back to the bike, around early 2024, it was a whole other reminder of how much I had lost.  Gradients I used to cycle were back to a slowly plodding “get off and push”, or simply impossible.

Now

It was in the early summer of this year, 2025, that I finally got back properly to bike-riding, and (a bit later) back to roughly the same amount of biking stamina as I’d had in the summer of 2022.  I can do 10 miles in a day again now – or at least, I can on a good day.  So on that front, I’d say it took around 2½ years of gradually working back up.

I do still get subtle dysautonomia-weirdness from time to time, where my body doesn’t feel quite right in its ability to self-regulate.  And sometimes when I’m doing a fiddly task, like knotting a thread-end when I’m sewing, especially if I’m a bit tired, my fingers tremble – which didn’t used to happen.

I still misjudge my energy levels sometimes as well, both physical and cognitive.  There was a pattern I noticed last year where I would feel lively in the morning, and think of all the things I was going to do, and then mid-afternoon I’d be wiped.  It’s a lot less now, but I still get surprised every now and again by exhaustion that I hadn’t predicted.

I also have, it turns out, a little bit of heart damage, diagnosed by a scan during the time when my heartbeat was doing such weird stuff.  It’s officially not a big bother according to the doctor.

As my heart had never been scanned before I had covid (because I never ever had any trouble with it before covid!!), it remains unknown whether covid did the damage, or I already had it all along.

A bit similar, I know my memory isn’t as good now and I make more cognitive mistakes – but it’s not really possible to attribute that to a singular cause.  Could be old age.  And there isn’t really a neat dividing line between covid and old age, anyway, because part of what the research says is that covid accelerates brain aging.

Counting the luck

I was lucky.  Some people have much worse brain-consequences as part of their covid illness.  Some people have much more lasting and drastic limitations on their energy or physical capacities.  And of course, some people die of it.

I did have a massive wave of dismay and distress when I realised what had hit me, and how not-guaranteed was recovery.  But I started strategising, as well.  If I don’t recover at all, what would I still be able to do?  What can I do in the meantime?  What will help?

It seems to me that kind of resilience-thinking is also a kind of luck, or comes from luck.  I’ve had a life which hasn’t knocked that out of me.

I’m lucky to have beem able to recover from the PoTS element, considering how many people don’t.

The worst of the heart arrhythmias ebbed away over about the same time span.

Even while I was still quite ill, I recognised my luck in having flexible work and some practical support at home, and not having to push myself physically beyond what felt safe.

I appreciated the blessing of already having a laptop, and already having an angled table enabling me to prop it up over me in bed!  (I’d got the laptop a while back – secondhand – as a means of running Dragon, for which I needed Windows again after some years primarily on Linux.)

As I started to recover a little, a kind friend came by a few times with a car, and took me to a park where we like to walk – where previously I would have got to under my own steam.

For someone with a serious illness, honestly I had a pretty good quality of life throughout.

Counting the cost:  lost opportunities

And at the same time… that illness cost me a lot.  Two-and-a-half years with far less walking/ dancing/ cycling/ strength-training than I would otherwise have done.  Hundreds of hours when I could have been doing writing or recording or making cool stuff happen, and instead I was just exhausted in bed.

In writing this, I’ve contemplated how massively expensive that was in terms of what I would have liked to be doing instead.  In a way, I think I was slightly in denial for a couple of years, with my resilient glass-half-full “well I can still do this“.  Taking in the whole catalogue… oof.

How much do I not want all that again?

A lot more than I do want most things.  Most risks aren’t worth the risk, set against another round of that.

And there’s every reason to expect that if I caught it again, it would go like that again, or worse.  (Or at least, that’s the situation until there are vaccines available against your own body overreacting.  There is some research into that – very interesting.)

Luckily there is still tons I like to do that isn’t very risky in covid terms.  And I have directed a large amount of my geeky curiosity towards the science of air quality, filtering, transmission dynamics, measurement and testing, so I’m pretty good at the risk-mitigation now :-)

Counting the cost, socially

From one perspective, I don’t feel this episode made me socially isolated.  Nowadays, quite a lot of my work and learning is online, either written or over video calls:  inherently no transmission risk, and usually no particular reason to mention it.  I’m sure I’ve met numerous people over Zoom in the last year or two who have no idea about any of this backstory.  Just doesn’t come up.

On the other hand, even when other people don’t know, I know.  I don’t necessarily out myself everywhere, but I know that I’m out of step with “the average person”, and the world as reflected in most media.

“Covid is over.”  “It’s mild now.”  “It’s only a concern for vulnerable people.”  “You can’t expect not to catch it.”  “You have to live your life.”

Even the NHS is hardly bothering with infection control these days (a false economy if ever I saw one).

In taking seriously the challenge of not being (re)infected, I’ve disjointed myself from that normalised framework.  I don’t expect everyone to understand.

It’s kind of like a whole other dimension of queerness.

Funnily enough, my queer networks have been good places on the whole for not feeling alone.  A lot of bi &/or trans people are disabled or have disabled friends.  At in‑person BiCon this year, I didn’t feel out of the ordinary as one of the masking-indoors people.

And online, there’s lots of opportunity to connect with fellow covid-careful people (of which more below).

Friendship edges

While I was “in the thick of it” with the initial illness, I reached for emotional support from various friends, close or more casual.  From some, I got listening and understanding;  with a few, that didn’t happen.

I already knew that it’s common for friendships to shift or vanish when someone becomes disabled.  In that sense, I had a way to put the gaps into context.  But I have had moments of wishing I’d been better able to foresee who wouldn’t be able to meet me there, and just not put that strain onto those particular friendships.

A friendship which has to route around certain areas to survive can still be worth having.  And when you transgress past the territory that someone’s okay with hearing about, you might find out a limit that you can’t unknow.

(Of course, I might still have tripped over similar friendship-limitations another way.  Not everyone can “meet me there” in the practical reality of my life now either.  So maybe those connections would’ve dwindled anyway.)

There are also some social connections I missed out on while I simply wasn’t physically able for the things where we’d normally cross paths.

Old friends and appreciating new people

On the other hand, I treasure the friends who’ve been able to track with me on the journey.

And like I did when I first recognised myself as bi, I’ve gone looking for other people in the same world.  Some I’ve met or swopped messages with, many I just appreciate their work and that they exist.  Tip of the hat to Breathe Easy, Julia Doubleday, Wayne Myers, Dan O’Hara, James Tindall, Trish Greenhalgh, Deepti Gurdasani, Denis, Mike Honey, Aurel Wünsch, Richard Corsi, Jim Rosenthal, 1goodtern, Nina Wildflower, Yaneer Bar-Yam, WHN, Ed Yong, Ziyad Al-Aly, Akiko Iwasaki, Danny Altmann, Jose-Luis Jimenez, Linsey Marr, Shelly Miller, Al Haddrell, Marc Johnson, Resia Pretorius, Chris Pagel, Hazel Newlevant, Sour Queer Press, Kelly @Broadwaybabyto, Fiona Robertson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul (RIP), The Sick Times, Cas Marotta, Sheffield Mask Bloc, Safe Inside, Long Covid Support, Long Covid Kids, zeroes.ca, and all the other people researching, sharing and contributing in this area of science and community.

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Kind of a geeky post coming up!  I was going to put it as a comment on the article here, as it’s in response to that – but then I got an error message when I tried to post the comment, so I thought it might as well go here instead.

The concept of a “bridge” is that people on Bluesky would be able to read posts on the Fediverse, and vice-versa – a bit like if you could go on your Facebook account and read other people’s Twitter posts.

There are data/consent implications.  Not everyone would want the stuff they post on Fedi to be ported over to Bluesky, which is why I’m on the side of making any such bridge be an opt-in system, not opt-out.

And to be fair, it looks as though things have been moving in that direction over the last 24 hours, after a lot of other people said that too!  But I thought it was still worth documenting these points – especially as some of them are quite likely to come up again in relation to some other future idea.

(For a bit more context, here’s my previous thing about moderation at scale, and here’s the post from when I first got a Fediverse account.)

Okay so here are the comments I was gonna make to Ryan’s article:

1.  In the line “opt-out seems like the only way to be broadly useful“, a lot hinges on the definition of “useful”.

With opt-out, it may well (at least initially) get more “use” in the sense of traffic, but setting that aside, what do you mean by “useful“?

Useful to whom?  According to whom?

2.  You’ve argued, and I agree, that some people will never get around to looking into these kinds of things and actively choosing.

So if you do make it opt-out, then in a bit, there’ll be some stats on who opted out, and we can write a flip side of your description:  “Certainly, of the remaining X%, some knew about the option, carefully evaluated it, and deliberately decided to stay opted in. But realistically, most of them probably hadn’t heard about it, or didn’t know how to opt out, or forgot”.

In arguing for opt-out as default, you’re arguing for the power to opt in all the “didn’t see it” people – while clearly realising that some might not want it if they did look into it.

3.  With regard to Bluesky moderation, you say “These services might specialize in different areas, eg detecting CSAM or fighting antisemitism. Jewish Bluesky users could subscribe to an antisemitism mod service to proactively filter out abuse so they never have to see and block it at all.”

The problem with this method is that not having to see things is only a subset of what’s at issue in moderation.  There is also stuff that’s still harmful even if most people don’t see it.

The “you can subscribe to not seeing certain things” method leaves all the latter stuff floating around.  Bluesky still needs to do actual moderation.

4.  “Make those judgments for your communities, instance by instance, not by network or software.”

In this context, I would argue that Bluesky functions as an instance, with about 3 million users and growing.  And I’d be amazed if it’s as well moderated as the classic mid-sized original-Fedi ones.

5.  “Opt-in is the conservative answer, and what some vocal parts of the fediverse seem to expect”

With the word “vocal”, are you hinting that there’s a silent majority on Fedi who think opt-out is better?  If so, what are you seeing or hearing which leads you to that conclusion?

It might not just be a phenomenon of who speaks up.  There might actually be a higher percentage of people on Fedi who dislike nonconsensual use of our data than there are on, say, FB or Twitter.

6.  Most people on the Fediverse know Bluesky exists.  We could make an account on Bluesky if we wanted to. In fact, some people already do have accounts on both.

7.  If you make it opt-out, whole Fediverse instances will undoubtedly opt out – so you might consider whether that’s actually the best service to the people who’d like to opt in.

My thoughts for today :-)

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Happy new year, everyone.

Overall I don’t feel optimistic about where the human race is headed.  So it doesn’t feel like a year that’s going to be happy.

But I don’t want to put a 100% negative thing out into the world, so I’ve listed some cool stuff too!  Let’s do “sources of dread” first, and then go on to that :-)

Looming concerns

The NHS is in a precarious state.  There are staff shortages, ambulance waiting times are bad, and anyone who has to go to hospital is quite likely to catch covid there if they didn’t already have it.  Even the richest people in the UK are only a couple of unlucky moments away from a health disaster.

Bigger scale, the climate forecasts suggest more floods and more heat waves.  Over the next few years, there are likely to be more and more people across the world whose home becomes uninhabitable:  through human-incompatible levels of heat, through famine, or through sea encroaching on land.

I saw a post the other day alluding to a connection between climate change and Israel’s devastating bombing in Gaza.  I thought about it, and I think the connection (or part of it) is land for people to live on.  As more land gets eaten by the sea and/or ruined, I think it’s likely there’ll be more humans killing humans as well.

Careless choices

When I look at the state of the UK, to me the weird thing is how little of the bad stuff was actually practically necessary.  Life is always uncertain, but we didn’t have to make it more so!

We didn’t have to lose so many NHS staff and care workers to Long Covid or death or burnout.  We didn’t have to push away so many migrant NHS staff and care workers, via Brexit’s combination of new rules and making them unwelcome.  Those were the results of choices by our government.

Another choice was government people using the covid crisis as an opportunity to channel money to their mates – even when their mates were really not the people best placed to be doing the work.

And going back a bit:  I don’t remember the details, but I remember that Margaret Thatcher’s government had some role in removing encouragements for renewable energy.

Of course, lots of us didn’t vote for the Tories.  And quite a lot of us are still trying not to be part of helping the covid virus get around.  But we still end up at the pointy end of these poor decisions.

Going back even further, we’ve got the invention of companies as conscience-less entities whose only responsibility is to make money, fossil fuel companies trying to maintain their profits by deceiving us, and so on.

There are always good things happening too!  Let’s cruise around a few of those.

Climate/energy good things

• It looks as though 2023 was the first year when over 50% of the UK’s electricity came from renewables.  (Not officially confirmed yet, but it must’ve been very close if not quite.)
• In the Netherlands, they’re even further along that path:  sometimes they’ve got more renewable power available than they need to power the whole country!  They’re exporting it!
• People are experimenting with combining solar power with agriculture:  the solar panels are up high, giving shade to the crops or animals.
• Electric bikes are becoming more and more common.  They need only a teeny weeny bit of power compared to cars, and for some disabled people they’re the best way of transport there is.
• Working from home is increasingly possible for some kinds of job these days.  It suits some people, and reduces the amount of unnecessary travel.
• People-in-general are becoming more aware of climate upheavals as an important thing to be planning for & trying to reduce – though there’s still a long way to go on that front, and I think most people are unaware of how bad it’s likely to get.

Covid-related good things

• There’s been some highly useful research into 222nm ultraviolet light as a way to zap viruses indoors.  High-frequency UV was already in use for anti-viral purposes, for example in sterilising medical equipment.  But most frequencies in that range aren’t safe for shining where there are humans – you’d get sunburn to your skin and eyes.  222nm is an exception:  researchers are reporting that a level of it which can kill viruses is also okay for humans’ skin and eyes.  Progress!
• There’s been promising research into tech which can detect covid virus in the air in real time.  So far, this only exists in, like, one chonky experimental machine in a lab – but what if, in a few years’ time, we could have covid breathalysers, or flu breathalysers?  Or at least, there could be machines in hospitals which report in real time when there’s a virus floating in the air.
• Masks like the 3M Aura or iMask 3 are already good enough to cut the covid risk way down low, if you’re in a practical/ social/ financial position to be able to wear them.  (Doesn’t solve going to the dentist, or needing to eat in hospital.)
• There are lots of places now where you can buy good air filters, if you can afford them.
• Some people already have access to on-the-spot home covid testing which, unlike the little “lateral flow tests”, is almost as reliable as the lab testing – although I’ve not found anywhere in the UK which is selling those units yet, and they’re expensive.

Vaccine tech

There’s also a prediction that we might have better covid vaccines via a different method in a few years’ time.

Unlike the current ones, which do reduce the risk of dying but still let you catch it, these would supposedly be able to completely stop you catching it.

I must admit I’m fairly sceptical about that particular forecast.  “I’ll believe it when it happens”.  That’s not just because the first vaccines were hyped up along those lines and then didn’t, but because I’ve seen reputable science people talking about how difficult a fully-ending-it vaccine would be for that kind of a virus.  (I don’t know the full ins & outs of why – maybe something to do with how easily it mutates.)

However, I think it’s likely there’ll be some advances in vaccine tech, which might help to knock covid back down if the political will were there.

Music

2023 was a good year for me personally in terms of writing and music – two things which can still happen even when you’re not feeling well or can’t be out of bed for long, which I also had a lot of.

I finished & uploaded a recording of the song All of us, which I’d written in 2022:

In the autumn, I played on the main stage at Nottingham Green Fest.  I’d been wanting to do that for a while, because it’s so “my audience”!

I didn’t feel I played very well, and worryingly, I couldn’t tell how much of that was being out of practice versus how much of it might’ve been my brain glitching from covid damage.  A lot of people have reported memory problems after covid.

But as usual, the mistakes which were obvious to me did not necessarily loom large for the audience, and I had some lovely appreciative comments afterwards.

This gig was the first outing for my latest Single Bass song, “Can’t bullshit a virus”, written in the summer.  I’m part way through a recording of that at the moment.

In 2023 I also finished & arranged a classical-music mashup of winter tunes like Jingle Bells or Silent Night, which was then played by the adult learners’ orchestra I sometimes write for.

Covid-careful orchestra plans

I didn’t manage to get the new Nottingham orchestra going, despite my enthusiasm for that.  There was quite a lot of interest, but not quite enough people available in the same time-slot to cover the cost of the venue.  It still exists as a sort of blueprint:  a covid-careful, beginner-friendly string orchestra for Nottingham.

Back in early 2022 when I first started connecting with people over plans for this orchestra, I had originally been thinking of it as something which would complement the local classical music scene.  But now that covid awareness has been crushed back down out of the common view, I think the idea of a covid-careful orchestra looks to most people much more like a niche thing for weirdos.

So when & if I have some energy for it, I’m thinking now I’ll come at it more from the other side:  network with the other covid-careful people in Nottingham, and maybe do some non-music events first to build momentum.  And maybe the orchestra itself will come to fruition eventually, or maybe it won’t.

Systemic Modelling / writing crossover

I wrote a little while ago about learning Systemic Modelling.  I’m now slowly working towards Professional level, and it’s still proving enjoyable and satisfying.

In parallel with that, I’m currently part way through a fairly big writing project:  editing and rewriting the new Systemic Modelling Manual.

This work is right up my street!  I really like the kind of writing where it’s explaining things so people can learn how to do something.  In this case, being on the same learning journey myself, I feel I’m in a good position to identify the kinds of things people need to know to succeed.  And by working on it, I’m clarifying my own understanding of how to do SysMod.

I also collaborated with Caitlin to co-run a couple of online courses, handling the practical side and some of the communications.  That too felt very up my street.  I love creating spaces where people can learn and have a good time.

Bi community contributions

It’s currently looking like there won’t be a BiCon next year.  I don’t mind, because I think it had got into a bad feedback loop of people scrambling to make it happen and burning out, and I don’t want any more people to burn out on it.

The good part is there’s now a small group of people thinking more long-term about what needs to be in place to support potential teams, including access to the collected wisdom of past teams.  If BiCon is to survive, I think this is the kind of thing which needs to happen.  And at some point I do want to send some more writing/organising energy in that direction.

Fediverse connections

Late 2022, I’d got onto the Fediverse – social media a bit like Twitter.  Overall I’m still liking that.

There’s fewer people on there than on Twitter – but that doesn’t necessarily mean fewer interactions, because Twitter mucks about with the visibility of your posts, whereas that doesn’t happen on Fedi.  I ended the year with about the same number of people following me as I had on Twitter.

Interestingly, it seems to be working better than Twitter for people to discover my music – I suspect mainly because Single Bass has been getting radio play on Radio Free Fedi!

Thanks & wishes

Thanks to everyone who supported me in 2023 in one way or another!  Let’s wish for peace and justice and a sustainable world.  And let’s wish for at least some lovely things & lovely connections in 2024, even amidst all the other stuff.

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I was thinking about the overall dynamics of instance-level federation on the Fediverse.

The admins of each instance can choose to stay connected to each other instance as a whole, or can choose to block or limit it.

Blocking instances, blocking individuals

Threads, the Twitter-alikey software from Facebook, has just taken the first small test steps towards connecting with the wider Fediverse.  In that context, it would effectively be a kind of giant Fediverse instance.

It was in one of the conversations about Threads that someone made a comment which I’m bouncing off here.  It was along the lines of, “I’d never block a whole instance, only individuals”.

Principles & practice

I think the writer was saying it as a point of principle:  like “it’s not fair to block one person’s connections for what another person did”.

But suppose you did rule out instance-level blocks, and only blocked people individually.  What would that look like in practice?

Who does the housekeeping

A well-moderated instance does its own housekeeping.

• If one of the people on that instance accidentally crosses a line in the instance’s rules, the mods will have a gentle word.
• If a new person makes an account on that instance, and it turns out they spam people or harass people, they won’t be allowed to keep doing that:  either they’ll stop, or their account will be removed.
• Well-moderated instances often make you write a little intro-application before your account is activated, which cuts down on casual or automated spammers.

A badly-moderated instance neglects that care.

On a badly-moderated instance, new people can join all the time who just want to be annoying!  or worse!  And nobody stops them!

Workload implications

Now let’s think about that difference from the perspective of being an instance admin, with people on your instance that you want to take care of.

If your instance connects to a well-moderated instance, you probably won’t need to do tons to moderate the posts of people from there.  Either the people who join there are considerate of others in the first place, or the mods of that instance take care of it.

Sure, there’ll be situations which still take work.  For example, there might’ve been subtle racism or sexism or ableism in a post, which neither you or the original poster had spotted until the post was reported.  Then, to moderate fairly, you have to raise your own skills, and maybe do some consultation.

But the load is shared.  The obvious problems “at the other end” are taken care of by the mods “at the other end”.  A lot of potential bother never gets as far as your instance.

On the other hand, if your instance connects to a badly-moderated instance, any blocking of badly-behaved people is going to have to be done by you!

You’ve invited an endless, tedious, very boring process of blocking people for doing annoying stuff.

Imagine that situation, and imagine running the numbers on your moderation workload.  If you’re willing to connect with badly-moderated instances, then it’s likely that 90% or more of your moderation workload is going to come from those instances.

Did you really want ten times as much work?

(To keep this post simple, I’m not really talking about “middlingly-moderated instances”, but that’s a thing too.  A common limitation is not really having enough mods for the number of users, so although they do give the boot to annoying accounts, it might take a while.  Also, if you auto-approve without an intro, you’re likely to be hosting more spammers and bots than the instances that ask for intros first.)

“One strike & you’re out” allows a lot of strikes

What’s worse is:  Of all the new accounts being set up on badly-moderated instances every week, you don’t know which ones are going to be spamming or abusing “your people” until after they’ve done it.

If you federate with somewhere badly moderated, then as well as bringing upon yourself more work for you, you’ve opened the door to an endless stream of bother and abuse for the other people on your instance.

Every badly-moderated instance is one more opportunity for spammers and wind-up merchants to make new accounts, again and again each time they’re blocked.  The scale of it is impossibly unwieldy.

When you’ve opened a floodgate, picking out individual droplets from the stream of it will not stop the stream.

The unpleasant posts will be aimed disproportionately at women and at people of colour, because that’s how online harassment stats always go.  If you’re a white bloke (or your account looks like you’re probably a white bloke), you can be pretty sure you aren’t getting the full experience of how bad it is.

So if you’re not content for your instance to be enabling a horrible environment for at least some of the people there, in practice you are going to have to do some wholesale blocking.

(Even blocking whole instances one by one is pretty unwieldy & endless, given how easy it is to start another one – which is why people are working on instance-level opt-in blocklists and allowlists.)

Is it unfair?

Circling back round to the principle:  is it unfair, to “the people who did nothing wrong”?

I think there are some nuances here.

Someone who doesn’t realise how the Fediverse works, and chooses a middlingly-moderated instance as their home base, and finds that there are people they’d like to follow and can’t, due to an instance-level block… I’d agree that’s hard lines on them.

On the other hand, if someone chooses to join an instance whose code of conduct is “no rules” or indeed “we like winding people up”, then they probably weren’t looking to contribute to the overall good vibes of the Fedi, and I don’t feel sorry for them.

But beyond that:  fairness has to include the people on your own instance.  If an instance creator sets out to provide a space for constructive and usually-friendly discussion, and people have signed up on that basis, then there has to be some minimum level of curated space for those people.  That will inevitably sometimes require limiting connections to people who don’t share your aims.

And the way that’s done has to be manageable for the moderation team, or the instance won’t survive.

Selecting your home instance

Part of the beautiful elegance of the Fediverse (notwithstanding its many limitations haha) is that when people choose an instance to make their home base, they can – at least in theory – select for their preference on moderation frameworks, as well as their preference for many other things.

I say “in theory” because of course, actually being able to do that requires (a) realising it’s a possibility, (b) knowing where to look to get a sense of each instance’s moderation policies, and (c) if you’re lucky, finding one that’s able to deliver what you were looking for.

You can intentionally go looking for an instance where the admins prioritise safer space over wider connection.  Or you can intentionally go looking for an instance where the admins are more relaxed about who can connect, at the expense of putting up with more bother.  It’s a kind of spectrum.

Adding further dimensions to the spectrum, you can look for an instance where the admins are skilled in certain types of safer-space moderation, because of their own cultural backgrounds and/or the work they’ve put in to be able to pick up on subtle implications.

(Of course, ideally the mods of all instances would be able to accomplish an adequate level of recognition of, say, racism or antisemitism.  It’s an abdication of responsibility to suggest to Black people or Jewish people that they should go and be on Black-run or Jewish-run instances.  But I’m acknowledging that cultural competence is a thing.  These are skills.)

The option of moving

And if you don’t like the policies or decisions where you ended up, it’s possible (albeit with some tedious admin) to move to a different instance, and take your follow lists with you.  In the year or so that I’ve been following people on the Fediverse, I’ve seen quite a few people do that.

(Mastodon software doesn’t yet let you re-import your old posts at the new place, though I seem to remember hearing that some of the other Fediverse software does enable even that nowadays.  It’s common to leave the old posts up at the old account.)

I’m seeing a bit of an uptick in discussion recently about moving from one instance to another – I think because of the prospect of Threads connecting with the Fediverse.  Some people are about to move to a different instance because they don’t want to federate with Threads, and their instance admins are planning to give it a try – or because they do want to federate with Threads, and their instance admins are planning not to.

A note on Threads

To loop back round to Threads…  I personally don’t see any need to “wait and see how that goes”.  We already know what Facebook is like and what their priorities are:  if in doubt, please read Erin Kissane’s excellent, careful explanation of Facebook’s role in the Myanmar genocide.

I don’t want to federate with their callous, reckless company, because I don’t want to give it any more of my time and energy.  I’m glad that the admins of scicomm.xyz, my main Fediverse base, already came down on the side of no Threads federation.

I do also think that if Threads federation takes off, the admins who decided to “give it a chance” are likely to encounter the dynamics I describe above.  From estimates I’ve seen, I get the impression that numerically, Threads is something like ten times the size of the whole Fediverse;  and I suspect the moderation there is middling at best.  That’d be a hefty addition to the modding workload.

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If you add the flour all in one go, the mix tends to go lumpy.

Instead, you sprinkle in a little bit of flour, and then you mix that until it’s smooth again.

The mix is my ability to do the current lot of things.  The flour is the new thing to try out.  Not too much all at once!

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Way way back in 1997, I went to a taster event for Clean Language:  how to ask questions which, as far as possible, don’t push your own baggage onto the other person, either accidentally or on purpose.

From that very first day, I thought the whole idea of it was really cool!

Over the years, I dipped into a few more courses to learn more, about how & when to deploy this stuff & what it’s useful for.  But it’s one of those things that typically only gets taught in a few geographical locations in the UK – none of which was Nottingham :-)  I didn’t do a lot of it, compared to what was available if I’d been willing to travel more often.

It was only at the start of 2022 that I discovered how much in that world was now happening online, including courses and practice sessions taking place on Zoom.  I got interested again, and hopped back onto the learning curve.

What is Clean Language?

The other day, I was talking with a friend, and we were agreeing that “clean” is rather a loaded word!  There’s “clean” as opposed to using illegal drugs, “clean eating” as opposed to “junk food” – and even the original meaning of “clean language” meant “not using rude words”.  Potentially kind of a judgemental ambiance!

In this context, though, it means something more like:  intentionally choosing language which isn’t carrying your own agenda or your own presuppositions.  You might’ve already noticed: some phrases are more “open-ended” than others :-)

The two most classic and multi-purpose Clean Questions are:

(The “blank” part in those sentences would always be something that the other person already said, so that you’re not “putting words in their mouth”.)

Even then, you’re still choosing which question to ask, and when exactly to ask it.  Your agenda could still leak through via those choices if you’re not careful.  But starting with carefully-chosen words can make an enormous difference.

Interestingly, one thing I’ve done a lot of over the years is Thinking Sessions, as developed by Nancy Kline.  And the key question in a Thinking Session is also a “clean question”:  “Is there anything more you think, or feel, or want to say about that?”

So without really thinking about it in those terms, I had been practising a form of “Clean Language” at those times.

Where did it come from?

David Grove (1950-2008) was the originator of Clean Language, and then other people have learnt from him, built on his ideas, and adapted them for different contexts.

He became interested in traumatic memories and phobias and while working with Vietnam War veterans he realised that some of them couldn’t remember particularly traumatic events, but they would still have feelings about them.  While observing very carefully what was happening, he noticed that, “If I didn’t force people when they were talking they would naturally start using metaphor to describe their experience.”

Even when the person couldn’t talk directly about what had happened to them, they could talk about the metaphor.  Then when he and that person spoke in terms of the metaphor, it would often change in some way.  And the changes in the metaphor could transfer across back to the real-life trauma, and have healing effects on it.

David also became interested in the use of questions in therapy.  He analysed the questions or paraphrases used by major therapists like Virginia Satir and Carl Rogers, and noticed they would often redefine what their clients said.  David thought this ‘robbed’ the client of some of their experience and so began to look for a way of working that would be free of any presuppositions.  He found that repeating clients’ words verbatim and asking questions which ‘interfered’ with the client’s experience the least were in fact the most effective in bringing about change.  Clean Language was created as a means of questioning clients’ metaphors in a way that neither contaminated nor distorted them.

Some of the questions which historically had been asked in therapeutic contexts, he was rejecting for, in a sense, carrying too much of “the therapist’s agenda”.  Instead, he tried to develop and fine-tune questions which would be as respectful as possible of the unfolding of that person’s metaphors.

That was the beginnings of Clean Language, and the metaphor-landscape aspect of it is what we’d nowadays call Symbolic Modelling.

Into varied contexts

Since then, these skills haven’t stayed only in therapy-world.  There are loads of contexts where it’s useful to be able to ask questions without accidentally injecting your own presuppositions into the conversation!  For example,

Systemic Modelling

Systemic Modelling, SysMod for short, is one of the offshoot things which built upon David Grove’s work.  The most obvious differences from the original stuff are that it’s for groups, and that it’s for “ordinary” (non-therapy) situations, anywhere a group of people want to share ideas or collaborate more effectively.

As you can read in her book From Contempt to Curiosity, Caitlin Walker started thinking about how David’s ideas could be useful to the young people she was then working with:  kids around 11 to 14 who were having difficult times and getting “into trouble”.

I wanted to find a way to hold the young people in the same space of acceptance, respect and curiosity, and to find a way that they could hold themselves and one another in that space too.  [That is, the same kind of accepting space as David Grove would generate for working with one person.]

This wasn’t a therapy context:  it was an educational one.  And it wasn’t likely that most of the young people would want to sit quietly by while one of them went in-depth!  So for the Clean Questions to be useful in that situation, there obviously had to be some practical differences from the one-to-one version.

Instead of following the trail of one person’s metaphor, Caitlin would ask similar questions to each person in the group, taking turns.  This meant that, as well as understanding themselves better, the young people were also getting ideas from each other – a theme which remains central to Systemic Modelling to this day.

Stories from the book

One of the first things that first group did – because several of the young people had wanted this topic – was to model how each of them typically lost their temper.

For one, the metaphor was “I just switch”; for another, it was “I go red”, and for another, “everything just goes quiet”.

As the young people took it in turns to describe their experience, pretty soon they weren’t only noticing how they lost their temper:  they were having ideas about what could help each of them to stay calm.

Once [the first child] had a strategy for managing his temper then they all wanted one.  We set about finding the difference between one for someone who snaps and one for someone when things go quiet.  These metaphor models acted as an amazing form of group learning.  Each of the kids … started getting curious about how their anger worked.

… once we’d got the anger stuff sorted and the kids in both groups were a calmer unit, we could move on to the other themes they’d wanted to cover.  …  Just as with their models for anger, each kid developed and drew a metaphor map for when they were learning really well and again these went on the wall.

…

I realised how important it was that I’d started from a position of not knowing.  If I’d started the sessions by asking Moses to control his temper or James to learn to read, then I would have given them the message that they weren’t good enough as they were.

…

[As the sessions went on:]  They wanted to know how things worked and what could be done about them.  They started using the tools outside of the sessions.

One boy explained to his teachers that he couldn’t manage crowds in the corridor and they agreed he could arrive at the class early and leave early so he could keep his state calmer.

One girl said that her teacher had said that her form group would never amount to anything and she’d asked “what’s your evidence for that miss?”

Ha!

I could go on quoting more and more bits from Caitlin’s book, because it’s full of good stories. But for now I’ll just include one more, which is possibly my favourite:

There was a lovely point in my work with the girls’ group when I was rattling off instructions to the class and Mary Lou interrupted me.

Mary Lou:  You’ve got to slow down, Miss.  You’re talking too fast.

Caitlin:  What do you mean Mary Lou?  You talk faster than me.

Mary Lou:  It’s not for me, it’s for Naomi.  When she’s learning at her best she likes to get one idea like a pebble in a pond and then the ripples to settle, so she knows she’s got it.  When you talk fast it’s like you’re throwing pebbles at her and she’s all over the place.

… The kids had moved from learners to facilitators and were now starting to advocate for one another’s needs.

I love that!

Anyway, that work was years ago now, and as well as continuing to support young people, Caitlin has been bringing Systemic Modelling skills to teams and organisations all over the place.

It’s evolved, but what’s stayed a constant theme is that people come together in a group of about 5 or 10 participants, share ideas about something, hear from others, and – if it’s an ongoing team – discover how to work better together.

Back to my own learning journey

Soon after I found out about the nowadays-online stuff, I had the chance to sample & enjoy a few SysMod sessions as a participant.  Then I got interested in learning how to run the process myself.

Caitlin had plans for more books, and not enough time to write them all, so after various bits of conversation, we came up with a trade:  my writing & co-writing skills, for the opportunity to be on some of her courses.

Catching covid last autumn put a big dent in my activities for a while, mainly due to dysautonomia which limited my ability to stand up or sit up.  But with a bit of ingenuity, the SysMod process-learning & practising turned out to be something I could do while horizontal!  It took some experimentation to arrange the laptop, my notes and me :-)

Putting together the ingredients

As I started trying out the process, it turned out I did already have some of the ingredient-skills.

One ingredient is knowing a handful of Clean Questions, which I’d already practised on & off over the years.

(Behold a tatty piece of paper which I’d kept for many years.  I think this was maybe actually from that first taster day in 1997!  It shows a small set of Clean Questions which are recommended as good ones to learn early on.)

Another ingredient-skill which I already had is keeping track of fair shares of time & attention in the group.  I’d got in the habit of noticing that when running other group things, like discussions or social meetups or this other thing I invented called Unstick Your Creativity.

Among the things I didn’t already know were some new useful phrases (like the SysMod classic “Who’s got something different?“), and the overall structure of a Systemic Modelling session.

Another skill is sensing when’s a good time to invite the group to start asking questions of each other.  This transition is important, because the idea in SysMod isn’t that the facilitator stays at the centre of the conversation:  you want to be catalysing communication in a network all across the group.

To my great satisfaction, in June I got to Foundation level.

That means I have all the skills to run a basic SysMod session. Yay!

At Professional level, which I’m studying now, you learn a lot of other useful skills as well.  For example, you might be using “evidence, inference and impact” to unpack any disagreements which come up in the group.  You’d also be encouraging the participants to notice and learn the skills themselves, so they become more and more able to do the process without you.

Resources & opportunities

For anyone interested in the general area of “Clean”, there are quite a few good resources nowadays.

Penny Tompkins and James Lawley, the first people to study and build on what David Grove was doing, have an abundantly rich web site with essays to read for free, as well as some paid-for courses and videos, and a book, Metaphors in Mind.

Several other people have written books: for example, Wendy Sullivan & Judy Rees’s Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds, Julie McCracken’s Clean Language in the Classroom, or Marian Way’s Clean Approaches for Coaches.

Marian and Caitlin host a friendly online space called the Clean Campus, where anyone can make an account, take part in conversations and find out what’s coming up.  In fact, you can read quite a lot of that site without making an account.

Editing note November 2025:  This post originally carried on with some info about free events coming up.  Those particular ones have gone now, so I’m editing them off.  But there are more – see e.g. the events page on Clean Campus.

While doing that edit, I also took the opportunity to update the quote about David Grove:  originally the FAQ had referred only to questions asked by other therapists, but for Rogers and maybe others, they don’t necessarily ask questions and it’s more about how they shift the meaning as they paraphrase.  Some of us talked about that, and then Caitlin and/or Marian updated the FAQ phrasing.

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A lot more discussion has happened since my last post here, both at BiCon itself and online since.

I understand better now (I think) why the 2023 team’s proposal suggested such a central role for Continuity, and so much more work for Trustees.

(I don’t know if the team would say these were the main points, and I may have missed some others. That’s just what I’ve picked up so far from listening to them. Honestly, the more I hear about what they went through this past year, the more sick I feel about the support they didn’t have.)

Also, the 2023 team was relatively new to BiCon themselves,¹ and weren’t around for the era of the old organiser-to-organiser online support group, or the bi activist weekends – so those weren’t points of reference for them which might come to mind as potentially part of the solution. BiCon as a community & system has never been that great at supporting current teams, but some earlier teams had a much wider network of experience/ advice/ troubleshooters/ supporters to draw on than this year’s team had experienced.

At one point, I was talking about “how it used to work” and someone referred to it rather disparagingly as “nostalgia”! But I wasn’t wistfully reminiscing of “lost glories back in my day” haha :-) The point is, there are structures which have fallen into disuse which, pragmatically, I still believe could be valuable. It hasn’t always been as thin and isolating as what they’d experienced.

New shoots

I’m happy to see that a fresh groundswell of relevant grassroots initiatives has sprung up in the last few days.²

It remains to be seen which of these will stay in existence over time. I’m cautiously optimistic that that isn’t impossible, if we’re thinking about future sustainability as we set them up. I need to mull over for myself how much energy I can put to this in future (esp as my health is still unpredictably dodgy since covid last Oct), but I do think I can help to get things onto a better footing.

If you’d like to be involved with any of these, one way to connect is to hop onto the ongoing BiCon Discord. Or, if you don’t like Discord, email me, jennifer at uncharted hyphen worlds dot org, and I’ll forward your email on to the person who’s doing email coordination.

Continuity’s role

Meanwhile, there’s also been further discussion about the 2023 team’s original proposal.

I got to thinking about: if BiCon Continuity Trustees aren’t the organisers of the community support systems for teams, what is their ideal relationship with those systems?

(The next two sections are a near-copy of something I already put up on the BiCon 2023 Discord.)

Practical proposal

Suppose we say that Continuity has a responsibility to monitor these structural underpinnings, like a sort of “health check”. For example, perhaps they would set a standing agenda item for themselves, of brief reviews of each area. And if they detect a gap or malfunction, they should make all reasonable efforts to “send out the bat signal” across the wider community (the level of alert varying according to the level of the problem).

I see this as different from making Continuity responsible for things happening. It invites the wider community: “step up now, your help is needed in this particular way to ensure BiCon succeeds”. If the necessary support/ energy/ leadership didn’t then emerge from the wider community, Trustees would continue to have responsibility to escalate the alarms, “things are failing here, people”, up to and including “next BiCon may not exist for lack of support”.

The fact that in this model, Trustees’ role is to alert, and not to do, would address one of my main concerns: that the wider community not be lulled into a disempowering and i.m.o. risky sense of “Continuity will (and can) ensure it all happens”.

My other main concern is for Trustees not to be “spread too thin”, detracting from their core responsibilities of money & safeguarding. Most of the time, I would expect this regular monitoring to be a relatively light addition to their workload (especially if the bat signal goes out early enough, so that problems never get giant).

At the same time, this framework would create a formal mechanism for ensuring that important things don’t fall out of all awareness – which I agree is vital.

A few more details

Frequency of reviews would be based on whatever frequency we think seems likely to catch problems in reasonable time. I could imagine perhaps by default reviewing around every 3 months or so (if that makes sense with Continuity meeting-rhythms), but potentially with higher rates

Planning the initial rhythm/framework of reviews would be for Continuity to undertake with help from others, and then it could be tweaked as we saw how it worked in practice. Perhaps the review mechanism itself could be reviewed and reported on as part of Continuity’s report to BiCon.

Building on the 2023 team’s recommendation of a “project sponsor” for active BiCon teams, I think it would be good if each major area had a “Continuity Link” person, either a Trustee or potentially (subject to Trustees’ approval) another person who regularly goes to Continuity meetings.

(Examples of areas: reactivated biconorganisers group, teams’ starter pack with key documents, community archive.)

The Link person would be the first contact if that area needs support from Continuity (e.g. money), and also has the responsibility of being able to give updates to Continuity when these recurring agenda items come around.

Further input welcome

Comments welcome on all of this, either here or in the ongoing online discussions :-)

(I’d slightly recommend putting them either here or on your own blog if you want them to last &/or stay linked with what I’ve written, because Discord isn’t the best place to re-find stuff later.)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2023. All rights reserved.

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