Shahab from #CommProj12 Interviews Me About Online Facilitation

IMG_07112012_160533We are deep into week 5 of the Project Community course. The course explores the role of online communities and networks in open, innovative design engineering. (See previous posts here and our shared Faculty blog.)

Shahab, one of my co-faculty, and I did a Google hangout on online facilitation. Here is the short 12 minute version. You can find the longer 19 minute version here. I mentioned the Community Roundtable about half way in and want to share the link so viewers have an easy link to follow! The week’s reading on online facilitation is here.

via Nancy white on Online facilitation – YouTube.

Chris Corrigan on Group Size in Innovation and Open Design

In our week three of the Project Community course, we are talking about group size. While I was at the fabulous Applied Improvisation Network World Conference this last week, I got to ask the fabulous Chris Corrigan for his insights to share with the class. The fabulous payoff is in the last 2 minutes or so!

via Chris Corrigan on Group Size in Innovation and Open Design – YouTube.

The Four Fold Practice via Chris Corrigan

The Four Fold Practice « Chris Corrigan is a great bit of advice for how to mindfully work and be together. Take a look. Here are a few snippets that I really appreciated:

“None of us are smart enough to have the answers. To co-create something is to benefit from diversity and to stay in the relationship…even when you don’t know where things are going.”

“Pay equal attention to work and relationships.”

 

Playing With Sharing Evernote Notes

(Note: this post was scheduled month ago and got hung up. Just found it today!)
Since I got my iPad, one of the apps I’ve been playing with a lot is Evernote. I can prepare and/or take notes, incorporate images, etc from a meeting then send the notes via email to participants, or even make a note public. Here is my preparation note for the Graphic facilitation workshop I led at the Rome Based ShareFair last September, along with one photo from the workshop. Graphic facilitation workshop

Here is a note snippet from Etienne Wenger’s keynote at the ShareFair. Here are very brief notes from the community case clinics Etienne and I did at the Fair.

I have used this feature mostly for sending private notes to meeting participants as what I do on the iPad is usually pretty rough. I’ve found it pretty speedy and efficient. I can always fix the spelling when I get back to my desktop, as I still make a lot of typos on the iPad’s keyboard.  I like the low profile of the iPad vs the wall that even a small netbook creates on a lap or table.

More generally, I need to think about how to best organize my Evernote notes. I’m using it to read articles I’ve saved using Instapaper and ReadLater which make it easy to collect online content to read on the pad when I’m offline. But I tend to collect more than I read. So there are some workflow issues to sort out.  I still havent’ figured out my workflow relationship between readitlater and tagging on services like delicious. So many conundrums as I evolve my technology configuration.

What new tool(s) are you playing with?

Digital Habitats Editable version of Chapter 10 – Action Notebook

John Smith likes to work on his vacation, it seems. 😉 Thanks to him, we now have an editable version of Chapter 10 of Digital Habitats… which in essence is a collection of all the worksheets from the book. I’ll let him explain! This is from the book blog.

We wrote Chapter 10 of Digital Habitats as a combination summary of the whole book and as a workbook that organizes the content in a roughly chronological / process order (instead of the logical, expository order we use in the book itself).  We imagined that people would copy pages of the book and write their responses on paper.  And we published a PDF version that you could print out and write on as well.  But we’ve found that it’s useful when people complete it together, discuss it, and share it at several different stages of “completeness.”

Anybody can vew the Google Doc version of Chapter 10

Step 1: View the Google Doc version using this URL: http://bit.ly/DH-chapter10

Recently a group of students in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop completed a Word-Doc version of Chapter 10.  It turned out that the process of responding to the questions was very useful to them and the results were very interesting to compare, even thought the communities represented seemed quite different one from another.

Being able to write in the Word Doc was more useful than the PDF version because the boxes could expand according to how much there was to say about a particular topic for a particular community.  (And in one community that was at a very early stage of development, it was useful to complete just the front end and skip the rest of it.)

Here’s how to make a copy so you can work through the questions that are relevant to your community using Google Docs:

  1. Step 2: Save your own copy of the document

    Point your browser to the original:http://bit.ly/DH-chapter10 .  You can’t edit the original version, but anybody can view it.  Log in to Google Docs. (See Step 1.)

  2. Save your own copy of the document by selecting “Make a copy” on the drop-down menu under “file”.  (See Step 2.)

  3. Find your new copy in your list of Google Docs and begin the hard / fun part: thinking through all the issues discussed in Chapter 10!  (See Step 3.)

Step 3: Edit your copy, discuss, and share.

We are considering having some systematic group discussions in CPsquare, comparing completed responses for many different communities.  I anticipate that the issues raised in Chapter 10 will be challenging and difficult for some communities, obvious for others, and irrelevant for some.  Understanding more about those differences should be very useful to all of us.

If you have a completed workbook that you would like to present, please let me know.  Either way, stay in touch!

via Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities » Editable version of Chapter 10 – Action Notebook.

Thanks, John!