Philip Bakelaar's blog

Always a joy to join colleagues in Europe for the monthly cocktail hour drawing time! This month we were thinking about Spring and joy and fruit and music!

The Value Web is holding two zoom meetings, one for members in Europe and the Americas (March 10, 11am NYC time), and one for members in the Asia Pacific region (March 6, 7pm NYC time). Members have been assigned chapters of the book "Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search For A Planetary Intelligence" and will be reporting out and inviting discussion of the topics. They are inviting 1-2 members of the IFVP to attend and scribe the conversations. The graphic recordings will be sent to the author.

I was reflecting on the new global climate we operate in as the IFVP. There are sadly more international tensions than I have seen for some years, and since IFVP is only 27 or so years old, we mostly operated during a time of increasing globalization, which was supportive of international engagement. So since this is 2023 and chatGPT is a thing, I thought I'd ask it about this. I thought it had a good answer.

Why are international nonprofits valuable in our current increase in nationalist sentiment

The IFVP Institute board met on Saturday, February 18 for two hours. We discussed progress on the certification project and marvelled at the amazing amount of information that we have gathered throughout this process of gathering models and skill descriptions from over 17 models that exist in our field. We are preparing materials for our launch in partnership with INIFAC. While there are other initiatives we would like to work on, we are focusing on completing the finalization of these materials.

The IFVP board of directors met on Saturday, February 18 for two hours. We reviewed our vision and mission statements and discussed ways to support our members in their practices. We continued our conversation about the personas or different types of members and what would be valuable to them. We worked on a series of questions for a survey to help us understand how members in different regions have different experiences and needs related to their visual practice.

More and more people are using AI to generate text and images, which makes us sit up and take notice! At a recent event I was scribing, one participant said about my drawing "it's like you are translating into another language!." We take in prompts and generate (as Dan Roam would say) VIVID artifacts, visual and verbal interdependent. So I asked chatGPT to tell me about the value of graphic facilitation (I'm teaching a three week graduate class at Montclair soon) and then asked a stable diffusion AI to draw me a picture about graphic recording.

The Board of Directors met on Saturday, December 10, 2022 from 8:30-10:30am NYC time. We welcomed our new board members and spent time thinking about who we are together as the 2023 board. We spent time reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses and how we might work together to advance the sustainability of IFVP and deliver strong member benefit.

We are grateful for the nominees who were voted in over the past month, and for a board appointment to complete the process for this year. Each brings energy to the board, as well as a broad geographic coverage (Peru, Germany, South Korea and Canada). You can read more from their board applications and from Jihyun's page or LinkedIn. Congratulate them with us!

The Board of Directors met in November for a regular meeting. This was both a happy and sad meeting in that it is the time of year when we say goodbye to some members and welcome new members.

"Having a visual thinker on your team could make all the difference."Grandin, Temple. Visual Thinking (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.