Category: community indicators

Inspiration from Jennifer

Weeks ago when I started my KM Singapore prep, Jennifer Dalby offered me some great inspiration for my talk. She also pointed me to her great new, inspired Experience | Portfolio.

There is so much to learn here about sharing and digital identity, but I wanted to point out one particular thing. The “Connections” section where Jennifer invited her connections to make themselves a bit more visible as part of her portfolio. In a beautiful world, our network connections speak volumes about us. Brava, Jennifer! The responses you received sure are a great community indicator!

 

Why Health Insurance Matters

While the quote below may look unusual, it is not. My blog is not about politics. It is not about insurance. But for years it has been, under the cover of “collaboration,” and “work,” about doing what matters, about living life to use our talents and blessings.

For some, that means working for themselves. For some it means being an artist. I’m lucky – I have a husband who has health insurance that covers us. But so many I know (even my online, “imaginary” friends) don’t. People who should retire but don’t because of a lack of insurance. Probably working themselves to death. Literally. Why? Because in my country we have a system that is set up for business, my friends, not health.

So read the paragraphy below. Follow the link back. Give a little. Hold me accountable to give. And lets figure out how we can stop people from finding that, when the bad news about health arrives, they know care is right behind them.

This is from writer Patti Digh:

While I believe that writing is my calling, it is not as secure a life choice as working in a job with benefits. And recently, that has meant not paying our $1400/month insurance premium–like so, so many other Americans. It is a broken, broken system. So John is uninsured for this journey. Dear friends are launching a fundraising page, and it will be online in a few days. If you can help in this effort by giving or sharing the information with your networks, please let Amy McCracken know at forjohnfptak@gmail.com. It is a source of shame that we are uninsured, and it is a shame we must overcome for John’s sake. It is a reality we share with so many. And my writing is a choice I would not change for anything, not even health insurance. We will figure this out because there is simply no other option. xoxo

via 37days – Home of Patti Digh.

Oh, and caring is a community indicator. For sure.

 

UPDATE: Here is the link to the Indigogo fundraising site for John. And some more information.

Riffing off of NorthernVoice 12 and Online Community Enthusiasts

Photo by Alan Levine
This past weekend I was up in Vancouver, BC, for two gatherings that I always enjoy, the BC Campus’ Online Community Enthusiasts group (led by the always wonderful Sylvia Currie) and the Canadian blogging/social media conference, Northern Voice. OCE is a place to hang with people who wisely use online interaction, mostly in the learning context.

This year I was once again on the OCE hosting team and my job was to give an overview of the agenda, then facilitate the afternoon’s Open Space. I made a visual agenda, but in a circle it is rather hard to see, so I spontaneously became a human lazy susan. Alan Levine caught me in the act with a still, and later with an animated gif.

We had a great time with Dave Pollard leading us in some exercises using the terrific Groupworks group process pattern cards. They really elicited some insightful stories from the group and I was so inspired, I called an Open Space session in the afternoon to think about how I could use them in a webinar I ran on Monday. Bingo! As always, hanging out with friends new and old was the highlight.

Northern Voice is where I always submit weird session proposals and those crazy Canadians usually say yes to me. Silly them. My supporting role for 2012 was to co-facilitate Moosecamp, the OpenSpace of NorthernVoice, with Brian Lamb. Brian asked me to make a little announcement at the start of the conference about Moosecamp. I had decided on a whim to bring my new uke, and at the last minute decided to improvise a song about Moosecamp instead of saying it. I blogged about that already. 😉

This year my formal submission was a session with Rob Cottingham, Alan Levine and I on improvisation. I have been very inspired by Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore’s work to bring improv into facilitation.  Our session started with each of us telling a two minute story of where improvisation played an important role, while the other two mimed the story. Then we introduced the group to Viv and Johnnie’s improv cards, which I turned into flip chart images.

We  invited people to go to the flip chart they felt MOST uncomfortable with. They then discussed the why’s and wherefore’s of their discomfort. THEN we invited each group to create a human sculpture that expressed that card. We had eight great, laughter inducing performances.

Alan then showed us his PechaFlickr applications which draws five cards with a shared tag from Flickr and you get to tell a story to go with them. Alan had five volunteers who each added an element to a story illustrated by tug boats! Give it a try yourself here. It could be a great icebreaker!

Then we segued into a classic gibberish improv and our three volunteers blew me away. They dove right in.  I was laughing so hard I was crying.

For us, it was important that this was not just about the performance side of improv, but about how improv can inform our practices every day, help us be more present in every moment. Rob Cottingham gave a insightful, improvised wrap up that inspired us all. We have 1140 minutes every day. We might as well use them well.

I loved Boris Mann’s recap:

Next I went to Improv Me, Baby with Nancy White, Alan Levine, and Rob Cottingham. My basic rule of thumb is “go to any session that Nancy White is involved with”. Of course Alan and Rob are no slouches either 😉 Lots of interactivity and group activity in getting people to participate, and to understand what improv actually means. Rob closed things out talking about how the very best improv can in fact be the result of lots of preparation and practice ahead of time, while still using a “go with the flow” approach to tailor presentations & experiences to the people and energy in the room.

In the Moosecamp/Open Space giulia.forsythe ran a great hands on session about how to do sketchnoting on the iPad and I now finally understand layers. (I’m slow.) She later did a sketchnote of the improv session which I TREASURE! What a great memento/take away!

via Northern Voice Retrospective [visual Notes] | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.image from Giulia Forsythe from NorthernVoice improv session

All in all it was a great weekend – learning, play, improv, music, friends and food! Perfeito!

Community Indicators from the Seattle Farm Coop

People often ask me, “how do you know if a community is healthy and thriving, particularly through online cues?”  As some of you know, I lump these into a category I call “community indicators.”

Two harder to quantify indicators are love and a sense of humor. Today I’d like to observe a bit about the power of humor.

This morning as I was reading the daily email digest of the Seattle Farm Coop, humor was abundant. The warm kind, not the sharp point of a stick (funny to some…) Here are a few snippets:

One response to a classic Q&A (which yielded some great suggestions beyond the one I’m sharing):

Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 11:32 am ((PDT))

Fellow urban farmers,

Bindweed is slowly overtaking my garden.  Has anyone successfully eliminated it their garden and how did you do it?

I’ve tried hand-weeding and (reluctantly) roundup, though neither with obsession, and my efforts did not even stop its spread.

Please send me your advice if you’ve been able to get rid of it!

The conversation evolved to include horsetail weed… My favorite response:

Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 5:35 pm ((PDT))

I use psychological intimidation with my horsetail, and it’s worked! Every time I see a horsetail, I pick it, and I tell the plant that it has become a great delicacy and that every single one of its children will get picked and eaten. I make loud “nom”ing sounds. My garden, which used to be so rife with horsetail that I called the place Equisetum Acres, is almost horsetail free now.

Passing along information from other sources, in this cases the West Seattle Tool Library (network weaving!)

 *Power Tool Drag Races*

You really haven’t lived a full life until you’ve witnessed The Power Tool Drag
Races  that take place in Georgetown every year, hosted by The
Hazard Factory.  It’s even better when you participate!

This year’s races will take place on June 9th so we definitely need to get started “refurbishing” some of our otherwise inoperative tools in time for the competition.  If you’d like to help out and just stop to see the process, please either drop us a line (library@wstools.org) or stay tuned to the Tool Library Website or our Meetup Page for more details.

And…

 Date: Mon Apr 30, 2012 2:00 pm ((PDT))

Anyone lose a goat?

News flash from the City of Seattle: On April 20, the Seattle Animal Shelter received a call about a goat that had wandered into a woman’s house when she left her door open in the warm weather.  She went into her house to find the goat lying on her bed.  Animal Control Officers picked up the stray goat and brought him to the Shelter. The Shelter held the goat as a stray but no owner showed up to claim it, so it will be adopted by a farm outside Seattle.

I have pics but they didn’t paste in–email me directly if you’d like to see.  The goat is white/gray with dark grey splotches and horns 6″ or longer.

While us Seattlites would like to say “only in Seattle,” what I observe are community indicators of a healthy community with both a thriving online and offline life. In this example, humor peppers the posts, and after a while, I can almost feel the smiles as I read. Now don’t mistake this for fluff. This community is very domain/content oriented. They are serious about raising food in an urban environment and taking care about how it is done. The humor is the warm part of this ‘electronic” communications.

Offline the community is also very rich. There is of course, the warehouse where people buy their urban farming supplies where we get our chicken feed. There are the potlucks (almost always with homegrown, really great music) and swapmeets. There are volunteer opportunities (I’m manning a Coop booth this Sunday at a local plant sale.)

What I sense is that  the “daily rhythm” of the community’s life is online on the email list. Lots of questions are answered — I have learned more about chicken health than I would ever have imagined! People are HELPFUL… ideas, borrowing tools, reusing materials that would have otherwise been thrown out but for that bit of electronic text communication.

Sometimes there are dustups — usually around political or contentious issues. But they pass.

What does it take? No mistake, there is an amazing volunteer leadership that carries the coop forward, because it is NOT a community that is all talk. There is a physical warehouse to be responsible for. There is stock. There are cash transactions. I bow down to that small but amazingly productive and passionate core — yes, another community indicator.  AND the vibrant voice of the wider community and periphery.

I love communities and I enjoy observing and participating in their indicators. What are some of the indicators you are enjoying in your communities?