Full Circle Associates

Recently I redesigned my Online Facilitation Workshop to include two weeks of experimental/experiential work around the question, "what should we be thinking about online facilitation in the Web 2.0 era?" I decided to do this because in the past few years, there have been significant changes and additions to our online interaction tool options and the same old patterns aren't sufficient. Here is the opener I'm working on for this segment of the workshop. Any feedback or suggestions?

*******

Technology for Online Interaction – the 10,000 foot view

What is out there? What do we need to do when designing online interactions? How have things changed and what is our role as facilitators in the selection, deployment and use of online interaction technologies? That is the core of our inquiry for the next two weeks.

The technology stewardship issues of online facilitation

It used to be you had two options: an email list or a web forum. If you were really crazy, you’d have both. Both of these options were centralized tools where the person with administration rights could pretty much control the environment, decide who could post or not, edit things, etc. Often, it was the group’s convener or facilitator who made these decisions and even did the technology set up.

The stewardship of our online environments consisted of two main sets of activities: design and housekeeping. Design would include choosing and configuring the software, helping people use it and making any substantive changes. Housekeeping meant archiving old forum threads, moving things if they were misplaced and dealing with things like ginormous uploaded images and such. It was a set of tasks that for the most part you could list and describe concretely.

Things have changed.

Welcome to the Web 2.0 era where the tools change faster than you can say “wiki,” where the tension between centralized and decentralized tool options can give you a headache and where the stewardship of technology for groups and communities is becoming an important and (hopefully) legitimate function beyond attending to the information technology aspects.

What is Technology Stewardship?

The following text is from a draft chapter of a book Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I are working on….

Defining Technology Stewarding

Technologies present new opportunities and challenges to communities. As more communities choose to use technologies to help them be together, a distinct function emerges to attend to this interplay between technology and the community: We call it technology stewarding. Technology stewarding adopts a community’s perspective to help a community choose, configure, and use technologies to best suit its needs. Stewarding attends both to what happens spontaneously and what can happen purposefully, by plan and by cultivation of insights into what actually works.

Stewarding provides technical expertise to a particular community, both in its initial and mature stages. Some communities never grow beyond their minimal needs, so active stewarding is limited and intermittent. Others develop complex and highly evolved configurations that need constant attention. Sometimes technology stewarding is a critical part of community development, facilitating the emergence or growth of a community, as when a tool allows people to connect for the first time. So it is a form of leadership that, at times, can be more a matter of care-taking, such as providing access to a password-protected site or archiving meeting records.

Technology stewarding is both a perspective and a practice. It can be seen as a collection of activities of the individual stewards and as a role within the community. The perspective is a natural outcome of taking care of a community that’s using technology to gather and learn together. Adopting the perspective means becoming sensitive to many different social and technical issues that we examine in this report, and developing a language to give the perspective more precision. Technology stewards may be invisible until the community’s needs warrant more emphasis on the role.

Technology stewarding fundamentally is a creative practice that evolves along with the community and reflects the diversity of each community. Communities are diverse and somewhat unpredictable because they set their own agendas. Unlike the trajectory of a team that’s planned from the start, the development of communities unfolds over time without a predefined ending point. They often start tentatively, with only an initial sense of why they should come together and with modest technology resources, and then they continuously reinvent themselves. Their understanding of their domain expands. New members join, others leave. Their practice evolves. The stewarding of technologies needs to support this intertwined evolution of domain, community, and practice.

Technology stewarding is something anyone can do. And indeed, in many communities, it is so distributed among the members that it is a function without a specific role. When we talk about stewarding as the role of one or more individuals, we refer to “technology stewards.” In many cases, the technology steward’s tasks are carried out by a community coordinator.

Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with or interest in technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

In many cases, technology stewarding is so important or specialized that it does become a distinct role. Although few people introduce themselves as “community technology stewards,” many are doing the work. In many communities, the technology is the focus of a smaller subsection of the community or one individual. For presentation purposes we often discuss the role as if it describes one person. In reality the work can be shared or even dispersed across an entire community, as in the case of technology-oriented communities where almost everyone can be involved.

So what does technology stewardship have to do with facilitation?

It is no longer sufficient to think about tools just from the technology perspective. Online interaction is an interplay between code and people, and stewarding must reflect that. Online facilitation is about the people using code, so the roles can have a big overlap. As we look at new tools this week, I suggest we try and take both the Tech Steward and Facilitator perspectives and see where they overlap. Are you game for an adventure? Read on….

What the heck is “web 2.0” from a facilitation perspective?

You can check Google for definitions of Web 2.0 and keep yourself busy for hours. (Tim O’Reilly is frequently cited. I like Barb Dybwad’s summary.) For our purposes, I’m going to share Barb’s quick summary:

To me Web 2.0 is about making it easier for people to connect and do things with each other. To electronically facilitate our interactions. That said, I don’t think technology alone can facilitate our interactions. We need to have intentions and practices. That’s what is interesting about Web 2.0 from an online facilitation perspective. How can networks, through the collective actions of its members, self facilitate? How do groups figure out how to facilitate themselves, with designated facilitators or not? What are the social practices that make bookmarking valuable for a group or network? How many ways can we think of for usefully using a wiki together?

Tool resources

(Note, the links won't work here - yes, still in the darned walled garden. One of these days I'll have time to liberate everything.

I used to have this nice “Tool Tour” (which you can still find in the Cybrary for laughs) that linked to examples of all the basic online interaction tools. I can no longer keep it current and if I did, it would consume days to read. I also had a piece about the design of online spaces – interestingly much of this still has some value in today’s environment, and some of the early research on online environments has things to teach us. You can find more about these in the Cybrary..

Today, as an alternative, we are going to experience 2-3 different environments and reflect on the implications for online facilitators. We will address both the social and technical aspects of these environments. This won’t be a “which software should I pick” exercise, but you are welcome to create such an exercise and invite others to participate in the Workspace.

The plan is, experience and experimentation will be our resource! Onward!