Changing Our World

On of the more thoghtful and well written blogs is Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World.
In a recent posting entitled 4 World Changing Questions, and 12 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.
Dave asks, on a personal level:
1. “What one additional capacity or skill, more than any other, do you think you need to acquire or learn, to equip yourself to make the world a better place, and why? What is the single best way for you to acquire or learn (or motivate yourself to learn) that additional capacity or skill?”
2. “What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, personally, to make the world a better place, and why? ”
3. “What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your community, to make the world a better place, and why?”
4. “What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your job or enterprise, to make the world a better place, and why?”
For each question Dave asks “What’s really holding you back from doing so? What can you do to get past this block?”

I have spent a good deal of time in the past month at CLA, SLA, ALA and other association meetings around the world. We asked ourselves a lot of questions and wined and whined in sessions and lobby bars.
If we reframed the questions in the association and professional context. . . Let’s ask ourselves:
1. What one additional capacity or skill, more than any other, do you think librarianship needs to acquire or learn, to equip ourselves to make the world a better place, and why? What is the single best way for us to acquire or learn (or motivate ourselves to learn) that additional capacity or skill?
2. What one additional action, more than any other, do you think we can take collectively to make the world a better place, and why?
3. What one additional action, more than any other, do you think we can take in our associations to make the world a better place, and why?
4. What one additional action, more than any other, do you think we can collectively take, in our jobs or associations, to make the world a better place, and why?”
What’s really holding us back from doing so? What can we do to get past this block? Is it just an excuse or is it a reason that we can leap over, walk around, or address in some way?
What challenges could we surmount if we committed today?
Stephen