Category: archives

Every Village Needs a Clown

A picture of Nancy White with a goofy face surrounded by her two grandchildren. Picture by Alex White.

(Note: This is a resurrected draft from 2009. The language I used in the draft I now know is wrong… a particular term. So I am trying a new term: clown. Please read this in the voice of Nancy White of 20098. And know I still have a challenge describing both what I used to do, and figuring out what I’m going to do next…)

This  morning I had coffee with two people I met online. I’m always struggling to describe what I do.  At one moment today I started to say I was an clown savant around  online stuff. But really, I’m  more on the clown side than the savant. And proud of it.

You see, I think every village needs its clownt. The person who will ask the dumb question out loud, who will utter something half baked, who is not afraid to fall flat on their face, with enough sense of humor to get up again. Better yet, if they can get up with grace. I aspire to that grace.

Remember, the village clown has permission to say the emperor has no clothes, that the sky is falling or that the strawberries are ripe, right as they have the juice dripping down their chin. The clown is not just for amusement or entertainment, but for sensing things, for voicing the unspoken and trying out the slightly outrageous. They have permission because they are, well, idiots. They can be loved and forgiven, tolerated and cared for.

What a delightful role. I think I have found my niche. Now, however, I have to define what village means when one lives a life both online and offline. Hmmmm…..

Unearthing 2008 drafts: Pen Pals in Prague

In 1968 my dad made friends at work with a man from Czechoslovakia. It turns out Jan and his wife Kveta had escaped their country on the eve of the Soviet take-over, leaving everything behind. Our family became friends with them and one day they asked me if I would like a pen-pal in Czechoslovakia. Always interested in other countries, I said yes.

Thus began a long term correspondence between Daniela Benesova of Prague and I. On October 11th, 2008, 40 years after the initiation of this relationship, we met face to face outside a metro stop. We had not seen pictures of each other for many years, but we instantly recognized each other, seeing the young girl in each others’ 50 year old faces. After a big hug, a day of re-meeting, renewing and reviewing a friendship began as Daniela showed me around her home town.

I wonder why I did not post this when I wrote it so many years ago. Maybe because the rest of the trip was challenging and mind blowing (Israel and Palestine) and this post never got published. Maybe it was to discover it again to day and write to Daniela…

Still relevant: “Do You Really Need A Community?”

From the dregs of drafts… I don’t think the advice has really changed and the relevance of the question may even be more than in 2008 when Beth Kanter blogged this. The very fabric of communities and the ideal of community is quite frayed since then.

Colored dots of various sizes on a field of light gray

Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: WeAreMedia Module 5: Nancy White Suggests Asking “Do You Really Need A Community?”
Nancy is making a distinction between “traditional” online communities where there are relationships between people in the community and people connecting together around specific interest area or a Tribe. This module has originally put these together under one definition of “community” with the latter being “loosely-coupled” communities. But thinking we need to re-think this a bit. Off to ponder “Are You in the Tribe?”

Maybe the focus on this module should be more “engagement” strategies – and the ways you can do this. If you have a group of people that you don’t want to necessarily interact with one another, but want them to create content — you’d still need an engagement strategy to encourage participation. It would, definitely, as Nancy suggests, impact where and how you might do this.

What do you think?

Reflective ripples and learning

From the draft posts I’m mining, I reread a fantastic 2008 post by Konrad Glogowski on his blog, Towards Reflective BlogTalk.

Remember blogs? Well, even if folks no longer blog per se, there is still a lot of writing we put out on the interwebs.

I was taken by his description of a reflective process he developed for his 8th grade students and their blogging. As I read it back in 2008, I immediately put his ideas into this stewpot of “5 minute reflective practices” I had had simmering in the back of my brain. I thought what Konrad wrote about could be used in teams and communities of practice, as well as in classrooms. With a few adjustments, it might be a very fine tool. This idea of “ripples” is very powerful.

Konrad wrote:

It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas.

You’ll need to go read the full post for the method. He links to his worksheet here.

All these years later, reflective practices remain useful and at the core of my process repertoire. Currently Keith McCandless and I are working on a draft of a new Liberating Structure (Strategic Knotworking) and we both feel strongly that evaluation should be woven into work from the start, not just at the end. I suggested that this is a form of reflective practice. I turn often these days to the work of the fine folks building the field of Developmental Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton and many others), and to the work of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner and their Value Creation Framework and subsequent book, Learning to Make a Difference.

Yes, it is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement…

Back in the day when I thought Twitter was amazing…

Twitter bird logo in white against a blue splotch of paint. Photo from Pixabay

The blog post about Twitter from the amazing, generative and poetic Chris Lott is gone, but this snippet from 2017 remained in my draft blog posts. 

Ruminate » Blog Archive » Twitter Community of Practice

A paper presented here today analyzing a mobile social network application (kind like Twitter with groups, but only accessible from mobile devices) using “information ground” theory has me thinking about Twitter and the immensely important community of practice that it, like blogging, has allowed me to participate in I’m very curious if Twitter, an analogous system in multiple ways, will demonstrate the same characteristics regarding directed, non-directed, social revelation, witty banter, etc.

It’s still vague, but I have some ideas. One part would involve content coding… what “kinds” of Twitter posts are there that we can identify just by looking at them. A few off the top of my head (and a single Twit could invoke multiple categories… and some of these categories could likely be broken down further):

* link sharing
* social sharing (the classic twit)
* direct questions
* direct answers
* banter (generalized)
* banter (directed to in-group)

This was back in the day when I was deeply engaged with many people and networks on Twitter. It felt generative. In a discussion with a friend today, she said she never uses it anymore. I said I use it when I want to know about breaking news, particularly at the local level. But I never “read” it anymore. Partly because I’m less into social media consumption, and partly because the combination of polarized issues and siloed conversations seem counter productive.

Do you still use Twitter? How?

Image from Pixabay