Year: 2009

Online Community Workshops in Sydney

Sorting community issues

Tuesday saw Matt Moore of Innotecture and I at the Australian Technology Park facilitating two half day workshops on online communities. The morning was a small group focused on the newer practitioner, and the afternoon added a diversity of experienced and energetic online community managers and designers.

The morning’s small groups enabled us to go into details with each person and what they wanted to do online. This idea of the continuum from the individual, through bounded communities and out to networks again permeated my thinking and input, priming my pump for Friday’s keynote at Adelaide’s EDayz09. More on that later…

In the afternoon, Matt and I decided to use some exercises to help raise the range of issues associated with advancing an online community by looking at current states of people’s communities, how they got that way and possible positive and catastrophic futures. Frankly, there were some good starts to conversations, but the diversity of the group and the speed at which we went through the exercise did not completely satisfy me – nor I suspect, many of the participants. Matt later reflected that we just made it too complicated and I think he was right. When you have advanced practitioners, the key is to let them share and compare.

I’m always torn when I’m “giving” a workshop. Matt and I have tons of things we can “present” and “talk” about, but that goes counter to a lot of what we preach in terms of participatory processes. Yet content gives an hand hold, an affordance, an anchor to focus conversations. I think we need to get the mix — so we are refining for Melbourne next week where we’ll run the same pair of workshops again on Tuesday.

For me, the highlight was again meeting all the great, interesting and intelligent people and hearing their stories. I look forward to more.

 

Graphic Facilitation Workshop Pictures – Sydney

Monday in Sydney I ran a half day workshop on Graphic Facilitation, then we played again with graphics at the Sydney Facilitator’s network. Here are some images for fun.

Nancy White workshop – a set on Flickr (workshop)

And…


Happy Artist

The full slideshow from the Sydney Facilitator’s network  is here. Thanks to Jeanne Walker for sharing the photos!

First Australian Workshops Rock!

Kali's practice recordingYesterday kicked off the first of my Australian workshops and events with a morning on Technology Stewardship, and afternoon on Visual Facilitation then 2 rousing hours drawing on walls with the NSW KM Forum and the Sydney Facilitators Network.

I don’t have all the slides up yet (Wednesday!), but you can see the first blog post from Bernadette Harris of Harris Bromley. I loved how she connected many of the community concepts to her work in leadership.

In the afternoon we explored the purpose and some of the basic practices of visual facilitation and the role of visuals in our work online and offline. I love watching people play with paper, pens and chalk and seeing the beautiful things they create appear in minutes. This was echoed again in the evening when nearly 45 people crammed the walls drawing on walls togetherat UTS taking turns bringing line, shape, iconography and color into the room. The images were stunning (see them here.) Visual, if nothing else, add beauty and joy which is reward enough for me!

It is not (yet) too late to join us in Sydney today for the intro and advanced online community workshops!

Australia: Notes from the Road

I’m blogging from my trip down under. I thought it might be nice to cross post one here for a little blog continuity!
fogAll work and no play makes Nancy a dull and out-of-shape girl, so today I headed out early to Australia’s beautiful Blue Mountains with Bronwyn Stuckey et al for a bit of a tramp in the misty woods near Katumba to see the “Three Sisters.” (Full trip pictures here.) I deeply appreciated the chance for a bit of play, because my two weeks here are packed with workshops and conferences. So some time on the wild is perfect.

While a dense, misty fog kept us from seeing the sculptural grandeur of the Three Sisters formation, we had a wonderful walk. The weather kept away the tourists and for long stretches of the walk down the The Giant StairwayGiant Stairway and along the valley wall we had the woods to ourselves. We took our time going down the over 500 steps, but even still, my knees and legs were a bit wobbly.

As we walked along the ridge above the valley, the sounds of the birds were amazing. We saw vivid red and blue birds (I need to look up the name), small finches and heard many more. Along the way, we had the a pair of Lyre birdsextraordinary good luck to come upon a male and female pair of Lyre birds. Apparently they are attracted to blue. I was wearing blue. Heh! The walked towards us, giving me time to pull out my camera and catch the pair before they flew up to a distant gum tree.

There were many small, colorful spring flowers – miniature show pieces – and burbling waterfalls. Thankfully, we did not have to walk back up the 500 stairs, instead taking the worlds steepest funicular train. We snagged the front seats (which are really the back seats going up) and in just a few minutes, we were back up at the rim and headed back to Echo Point were we started. Here are a few shots of the ride up:

Blue Mountain Tramway

Tomorrow the workshops begin – on Monday, Stewarding Technology for Communities in the morning, Graphic Facilitation in the afternoon. Join us?

Johnnie Moore, Monoliths and Individuals

CC flickr photo from ElDaveJohnnie Moore’s Weblog: The genie out of the bottle

All this inventive technology is being made available to just about anyone with a web connection.

How does it compare for engagement and collaboration with anything inside the firewall of organisations? I’ve argued before that, over the last few years, the technological advantage has shifted massively away from companies to individuals. I think we may only have scratched the surface of the impact this will have.

Yesterday I was talking to a potential collaborator who has some business inside of a big company. I usually work in the non profit sector, but this bit sounded interesting, I liked the potential colalborators’ expressed values so we are continuing the conversation. There was one bit that really struck me… a comment about their resiliience in dealing with slow moving, often self-contradicting companies.

My response was that I cope with the frustration and discouragement of working with monolithic organizations by focusing on the potential, possibilities and the growth that happens within individuals. Eventually these individuals influence their organizations, or they leave. It is potentially quite subversive. Change or lose your best talent.

Seriously, I need to write up my triangulation thoughts. This is relevant and is giving me a new frame to understand and talk about my work. But it is month end. Billing and Austraila prep rule the day!

Photo Credit: Creative Commons picture on Flickr from ElDave. Thanks!