Blogs are often touted as “individual voices.” Of course, blogs can be many things, including reflective community voices. Check out the blog of the Tassajara Zen Center in California, facing many dangerous fires in their area on the Central California coast. Sitting with fire.
What I noticed was their use of questions. Amazing. Short. Right to the heart. What can we learn from this blog about community?
The ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has an article out about a project that is near and dear to my heart and which I have been working on, the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit Wiki. Here is a snippet from the article, ending with a provocative question. Click in to read the rest!
Knowledge Sharing in the CGIAR – Tools and Methods for Sharing Knowledge: The CGIAR’s Wiki Approach
The Institutional Knowledge Sharing (KS) Project of this Program together with its CGIAR Center partners has been experimenting with a range of KS tools and methods over the past five years and has recently been assembling these and many others into a toolkit (http://www.kstoolkit.org/). This evolving resource – continually updated, edited, expanded, and critiqued in wiki fashion – is targeted mainly on scientists, research support teams, and administrators in the 15 international centers of the CGIAR. But it also serves their partner organizations, as well as development organizations working in areas other than agriculture. And it benefits from their diverse feedback too.Science has traditionally relied on a few key vehicles for sharing and validating new knowledge. The most important are experiment replication, the publication of research results in peer reviewed journals, literature searches, and formal and informal communications at conferences, workshops, and other meetings. In addition, the patent system serves as a complementary knowledge broker in instances where research spawns technical innovation. With such longstanding institutions already in place, why is there a need for new avenues to share knowledge? The answer to that question is surprisingly complex; but a few key reasons stand out.
It seems there are some other cool “social media” happenings in Seattle so I thought I should also pass this one along – happening July 12th all day, plus a Mashable party in the evening. This one is SocialMediaCampSeattle:
SocialMediaCamp brings together the brightest minds in Social Media with people interested in learning more about the power of Community Based Marketing. It works like this – we find some of the top local names in Blogging, Podcasting, Live Streaming, and New Media and we give them the stage – BarCamp Style – to share what they know with the world.We’re running at least 2 tracks at each event. A beginner track (think Blogging 101), and an advanced track (think What is Social Capital – and Why Should I Care?).
Are you in Seattle on July 8th? Then consider stopping by the Social Media Event at ZAAZ Seattle July 8th. I’m on the slate with what appears to be a very cool group of people and will be trying to unravel a bit more of the ball of string I’ve been calling “slow community.” (Caveat: I’m not the only one talking about this. So I’m not claiming the term, just referencing my recent use of it! Vanessa DeMauro had this thought in March)
Ryan Turner saw my blog post about slow community a few moons back and asked if I’d want to join in on the 8th. It is a good excuse to revisit the wonderful comments and think a bit more about the reasons for and consequences of slowing down some of our community activity – and what slowing down means. And is there an emerging “slow community” movement afoot? Are you part of it?
Because this event is aimed towards the interactive design/user experience communities, I’m going to have to figure out my bridge ideas, because I suspect I’m coming in from a different angle.
As to the rest of the evening, here is the run down! The Facebook event is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=66791410200.
By the way, check out the Zaaz/Ryan Turner blog posts on Social Media and Community Moderation from earlier in June.
I’m back from over three weeks of travel in Europe and I realized that if I didn’t sit down and write at least one blog post, no matter how trite or incomplete, I will have gone nearly a month without a blog post and I’ve not done that since I started this blog (over on it’s original blogger home) in 2004. The fact that I missed my own blogaversary in May this year tells you that blogging has simply become part of the fabric of my work and life, and yet this gap… oi! I have tons of drafted posts and lots of things that I “planned” to blog about, but time has been tight.
I was in the UK and Portugal the last three weeks to facilitate one meeting, present at a conference and both support and participate in the KM4Dev annual gathering that happened this year in Almada, Portugal. I’ll write about all these events, plus the added treat of going on vacation with our friends Bev, Jess and Rory and an added bonus of helping with a meeting in Ponta Delgaga on the island of Sao Miguel in the astonishingly beautiful Azores islands. There are hundreds of pictures to be sorted, stories to be captured and lessons to be reflected upon. There are things coming up that I want to write about. So this little post is the toe back in the water!
As always, the highlight was the people, the community feeling and the learning.