Month: May 2011

Collecting Graphic Recording/Facilitation Icon Ideas

I preset this blog post in advance, as I’m on the road again… just when my greens are finally growing in the garden. Timing is everything. I’m off to Pretoria, South Africa and Dar es Salaam Tanzania (with a weekend stop in exotic Zanzibar!) One of the workshops I’m facilitating in S.A. is on graphic facilitation and I’ll be doing the graphic work in Dar. In July and October I’m co-facilitating two more longer form graphic facilitating workshops, sSo it felt like time to show you a little project I’m working on.

Graphic Recording and Facilitation Icon Ideas – Nancy White – Picasa Web Albums.

Now there are a ton of sources out there for icons. Drawing books. Children’s books. Cartoons. Google images. But I realized I needed to PRACTICE and think about the process of drawing icons myself to better encourage that practice with colleagues. So I took a big bite of bravery chocolate, picked up my pens and started creating my own practice book. But instead of keeping it on paper, I’m sharing it online. I usually use Flickr, but frankly Picassa was feeling like a good choice this time.

Do your have a visual practice book you can share? Want to add images to this one?

Finding Process Ideas From Our Networks

This linked set of tweets tells the story about why we don’t have to k now all the different processes we can use in groups, in our work. (This is also a nice Twitter Story which I can point to when we are talking aboutNetworks at CSIR in Pretoria next week!)

We need to focus not on encyclopedic knowledge, but to know

1) how to learn and practice new processes,

2) how to ask the right questions to select processes (alone and with others) and,

3) to tap the wider knowledge of our networks to identify our options.

via Students self-organize their own curriculum – storify.com.

How Tech Shapes Us and We Shape Tech

A tweet led me to a post today at Rethinking Technological Literacy — Campus Technology. Mary Grush writes:

Turkle introduced attendees to her concept of “technology as the architect of self”–that even as we shape our technologies, they shape us. It’s a two-way street that is producing a complex set of problems and conditions surrounding the relationship between people and technology.

This strongly resonates with what we posited in Digital Habitats at the community level. Our choices of technology shape the community and the community influences and shapes the technology, both in how it is designed, deployed and used in practice.

I’m reading Turkle’s new book (Alone Together) slowly and how she frames the negative consequences of this interaction. I think we need to pay attention to both the negative and the positive.

Curating our personal technology configurations

(Crossposted on Technology for Communities and Network Weaving CoP)

A conversation emerging in the Network Weaving Community of Practice (NWWCoP) focuses on this question: how can/do we use social media for intentionally weaving our networks? As we prepare for a synchronous conversation today, I realized I can frame this question from a technology stewardship perspective, specifically the idea of curating our own personal technology configurations so that they can help us tap into and amplify the value of our networks.

What is a Technology Configuration?

From Digital Habitat’s we framed the idea of configuration this way: “By configuration we mean the overall set of technologies that serve as a substrate for acommunity’s habitat at a given point in time—whether tools belong to a single platform,to multiple platforms, or are free-standing.”

For a while I was obsessed with tagging material that helped us see others’ configuration, via my Delicious tags. Each configuration teaches me something new and gives me a new perspective on my own and the configurations of my communities. (See also other posts on the Digital Habitats blog on configuration.) In some ways, these felt like a type of fingerprint. While many communities used similar tools, the individual variations were fascinating. This made sense to explore at the community level, especially with more bounded communities.

While community’s have their configurations, so do individuals. When working with networks, where we are tapping into the value of connections between people, it becomes the intersection of individual configurations that fascinate me for many reasons. Here are a few:

  1. How do individual’s configurations intersect and complement or compete with their community’s configuration.
  2. How does the intersection between and individual’s configuration and their community’s make the individual’s networks available to their community? Specifically, what are the individual-to-individual configuration implications?
  3. How do we use our individual configurations for network weaving itself? (For example, see http://oneforty.com/i/toolkits)

Let’s get a bit more concrete about #3. Clearly a lot of non profits are interested in social media generally, but lets focus on network weaving for a moment.For example, some of my key network weaving practices include “closing triangles” (introducing and helping people connect), sharing information from smaller, closed groups out to the larger world/networks, and curating resources within and across networks. What configurations might I use for these?

  • Closing Triangles – email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook – all to do introductions and to “begin the conversations” while linking to relevant bios and backgrounds. The emphasis is on the social interaction and visibility of individual identity.
  • Sharing Information – blogs, Twitter (and related tools), delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube (and all content sharing sites) – the focus is on publication in some form or another, then connecting people to that content.
  • Curating Resources –  mostly the same as sharing information, but with the added layer of tags, rating mechanisms, aggregation tools.

Managing Our Configurations

A major challenge we run up against in this proliferation both of practices and tools is how to manage this. There is a lot of talk these days of dashboards and tools like Social Base.  I have resisted digging too deeply there due to my own habit of “rabbit holing” and not getting my work done, but clearly this is on my radar screen.  What I’ve seen so far has been more about tracking metrics of social media rather than tying the media to the practice and desired outcomes.

Any guidance for me? What is your practice of managing your technology configuration from a particular practices perspective, such as network weaving?