Intro -- Bernhard Weber LO24395

From: Bernhard Weber (train@cvtelecom.cv)
Date: 04/19/00


Dear Orglearners,

greetings from the Cape Verde Arquipelago.

After a long while of just reading LO messages in an erratical way I
started responding to AM de Lange's "Expressing human experience. LO24368"
and just decided that I will answer to Ravi Palepu's "Knowledge Sharing in
the Commons LO24377". So it is time to give the Orglearner-community some
words about me, my background and my working context:

I am Austrian. I am physicist, if the original academic background
explains, what I am. I was a science-teacher atdifferent levels for many
years.

The other side was, that I became fascinated by group dynamics and
micro-sociology since the early 70-ies. I learned a lot from reading and
discussing Lewin and Gregory Bateson. "Iniciated" into social-philosophy
and especially into aporetic thinking by Gerard Schwarz, I became a group
dynamics trainer/practicioner: together with a group at the Institute of
Sociology in Vienna we started with some micro-sociological activities,
starting with classical T-groups and repeating the experiments of social
psychology, going on to realize around 1975 a series of Organization
Laboratories under the title of "Lebenswelten" ( I do not dare to
translate this terminus from the phenomenology branch of philosophy) where
we confronted university students and adult learners from "People's
University/Volkshochschulen" with each other and their different
sub-cultures in simulated situations, where they had do build up or change
Organisations, within which they "worked" together. Well this was all long
ago, but that is how I started collecting growing experiences as a
practicioner in systemic training and consultancy in a mix of
heteronomeous and autonomeous learning, which I continue to practice until
now.

I started oscillating between the two cultures: "hard science" and "social
science".

Leaving my work at the "Nuclear Safety Project" at the Institute of
Condensed Matter of the University of Vienna in 1994 I have been living
and working at Cape Verde Islands, one of the world's so called LLCD's
(least developed countries), situated in the Southern Atlantic, some 400
miles westwards of the African continent, since then.

During the last years my little enterprise TrainConsult was mainly working
in capacity building projects in the sectors "education & vocational
training" and "micro- & small enterprises" in contexts of "Development
Cooperation". Since a while I am more and more interested in Large Group
facilitation and try to find ways of integrating these new participative
techniques with the Development Cooperation Sector's traditional
approaches (Project Cycle Management...) I made such an attempt in a
recent three days "Stakeholder-Consensus-Conference" within the context of
Sectorial Program/Project to consolidate and modernize the Educational &
Vocational Trainings System of Cape Verde, where I got the oportunity to
be part of the facilitators team of TeamTechnologies Inc. Washington.

I like the LO multi-logue a lot, but set my priorities in a way, that I do
not have the time to follow it in a permanently intensive way.

Yours
Bernhard Weber

TrainConsult
management & human resources
training, consulting & development GmbH
Vienna Office, Austria train.int@train.at
Praia Office, Cape Verde train@cvtelecom.cv

[Host's Note: Welcome, Bernhard! ..Rick]

-- 

"Bernhard Weber" <train@cvtelecom.cv>

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