Warm Hosting Series: Roundtable on Education & AI + Warm Data Lab

Our Invitation

We warmly welcome you to our Warm Hosting Series, an urgent call to gather and hold a practice space for relating, hosting, and mutual learning towards wiser actions.

As initiating hosts, we offer to engage in deliberate practice among us in many ways through this Warm Hosting Series:

• Roundtable discussion: our session's featured guests introduce their perspectives on the topic of the day, mostly inquiring on and around (1) human conditioning, (2) alternative modes of knowing and being in the world, and (3) everything else that restores seeing and re-thinking the underlying stories we enact.
  • For this session: We have invited Nora Bateson, Tim Logan, and Francis Laleman to inquire on AI (appropriately Large Language Models) with its rapacious and power-hungry territorial expansion, occupying places & spaces, and heralding as an intelligent synthetic to augment humanity and further pursue growth. Yet, as late Donella Meadows with her prudence, once warned: “Growth of what? And why? And for whom? And who pays the cost? And how long can it last? And what's the cost to the planet? And how much is enough?” As such, we bear careful hearing of the impact of AI with Education as the immediate contextual touchpoint and see how all this may unravel.
• Warm Data Lab: practice sharing personal stories among each other with guidance of its Batesonian-informed praxis by practitioner-hosts. Notice what stories you negotiate to tell, how you tell them, and how you invoke and receive the stories of others.
• Hosting Guests & Guesting Hosts. practice the art of hosting other guests even as a guest yourself, throughout the event including dinner time. Consider this as a mutually symbiotic sharing of responsibility, not just between minimum pairs but also in relation among others.

Our invitation is to intentionally revive a creative, thoughtful way of seeing the world and connecting deeply with one another. These natural human abilities have been weakened by several modern pressures, including:

• Our modern, tech-driven lifestyle: living in a fast-paced society while facing growing environmental challenges and their hidden consequences,
• Over-reliance on technology: everything leads us to increasingly depend on digital tools in ways that weaken our natural human skills, tempting us to skip the essential process of development,
• Forgotten wisdom: ignoring the rich inheritance of ancestral knowledge—the kind of wisdom that teaches us to care for the whole interconnected system rather than just entertaining our individual lives in isolation.

Our hope is that we all leave that wonderful evening with a greater sense of wonder, curiosity, humility, and goodwill.

With loving-kindness,
Brent Que & Ludovic Curtil

Inspiring Thoughts

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Little Gidding, Four Quartets

∞

The Great Way is not difficult
for those not attached to preferences.
When neither love nor hate arises,
all is clear and undisguised.
Separate by the smallest amount, however,
and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.

If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind. 
— Jianzhi Sengcan (鑑智僧璨), Excerpt from Xinxin Ming (信心銘) translated by Richard B. Clarke

∞

There is something happening. Conversation is becoming hollowed out. I hear an absence of stories. Spring has arrived and birds are singing, blossoms are enticing the bees, fresh green leaves are swishing in the breeze… but the humanoids are communicating in sterile tones of vertical clarity bereft of personal reflection and experience.
— Nora Bateson, Excerpt from Silent Story

Practicalities

Where: Dara (Address: Shop 3, 5-6, G/F, Soho 189, 189 Queen's Rd W, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong)

Planned Event Flow:

• 05:15 PM to 05:30 PM (00h15m): Doors Open
• 05:30 PM to 06:40 PM (01h10m): Roundtable (Hybrid)
• 06:40 PM to 07:20 PM (00h40m): Dinner
• 07:20 PM to 09:00 PM (01h40m): Warm Data Lab
• 09:00 PM to 09:30 PM (00h30m): After-party and Farewell

• Dinner will be prepared by Dara and served according to above schedule.
• Upon registration, the confirmation will contain the online access link for remote attendees to join us in the roundtable.

What to expect in this session's roundtable:

• We have invited guest-speakers from around the world with transdisciplinary backgrounds and share their latest thinking on a chosen topic. 
• Opportunity to interact with guest-speakers will be open throughout the segment.

What to expect in a Warm Data Lab:

• The space will be setup in such a way that appears like an archipelago with each island having a number of seats in circles.
• There will be three distinct but intricately connected segments: (1) A host-storyteller shares a relevant personal story and then reveals a question that acts as the centerpiece of inquiry, (2) the participants engage by exchanging personal stories among each other but within the designated context of the island, with each island having a different context; the participants are free to move around and go to other islands unconditionally, and (3) the participants return to plenum where we process our learning together.

Financial Contribution:

• There are three (3) options for In-Person admission: Subsidized, Supportive and Sustainable. And one (1) option for Online admission for Roundtable only. Choose what's most appropriate given your situation and your perception of it.
• If none of the selection are accessible to you, we encourage you to reach out.
• Cancellation policy: given venue-related commitments, ticket types are not exchangeable, and tickets a non-refundable but transferable.

Our Roundtable Guests

Nora Bateson, is an award-winning filmmaker, research designer, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute based in Sweden. Her work asks the question “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”. An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity, and the core text of the Harvard University LILA program 2017-18. Her book, Combining, was published in September 2023 by Triarchy Press. Nora was the recipient of the 2019 Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Her new book Belly is going to be released in May 2026.

Tim Logan is an education leader, connector, and facilitator. Bringing his extensive learning from a global career in youth work, teaching, school leadership and consultancy, Tim has worked with prominent clients around the world to develop new and innovative approaches to learning, well-being and youth engagement. Most recently, on behalf of International Baccalaureate, Tim co-created Festival of Hope with Jennifer Bahrami, which is growing as part of a broader portfolio of IB youth initiatives. Tim is also host/producer of the Future Learning Design podcast.

Francis Laleman is a husband, father, former academic, permaculture gardener, painter, photographer, writer, designer, workshop facilitator, educationist, contact improvisation enthusiast, Scrum teacher, and Clean Language & Solutions Focus practitioner; a lifelong student of Sanskrit, Pāli, and a range of South and East Asian languages, literatures, and cultures, and an explorer of Buddhist philosophy and practice. He considered himself as trying to make sense of life, all the while being a multi-instrumentalist mostly playing the cello and the gǔzhēng. Francis is a member of The Systemic Design Association and The Scrum Alliance, member of the advisory board of People Before Patients (Montreal), and an associate at The London Scrum Academy. He is also a home writer for Counter Arts and Enlivenment — Ažycciaŭlennie (a Systemic Design Community Publication), incidental contributor to Rainbow Salad, Zenite (an Alchemy Publication), and Japonica: Everything Japan, as well as founder and editor at resourceful eXformation.  Francis is an author of several books, a/o Resourceful Exformation. He is based in Dover, on the South Coast of Singapore.