Category: community indicators

Hope Wechkin — integration and the important things that surface.

Alert: Ramble post coming up…
From the Seattle Times
I wake up this morning at 5am, knowing I have to cram two day’s worth of stuff into today. Tomorrow I head up to Northern Voice in Vancouver, B.C. and today I play hooky for 5 hours to to indulge my love of gardens at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. I worked/played late last night to experiment with being an in-world graphic recorder in Second Life, stepping away from the computer only after 9pm and having eaten dinner while at the computer. (I RARELY do that.) Oh, and I stayed up too late last night, hooked in to the movie, Michael Clayton.

So there I am, standing at my tiny kitchen counter waiting for the tea water to boil, realizing I had not even looked at yesterday’s paper. I scan the front page of each section and stop when I see this article: Entertainment | Hope Wechkin — physician, violinist, singer, actor in the Seattle Times. A violin playing soprano, actor, physician and head of a pallative care unit?

Integration.

There is something drawing me these days to people and practices that cross traditional boundaries to help us be in, see and experience our work and our worlds in new light. Thus my recent obsession with visual thinking, and graphic facilitation. Why I am leading a session at Northern Voice on “Why I slowed down blogging and started drawing on walls.” Why I think I write more clearly after I practice yoga. I know that brain research has show how we can access more in our brains by having strong connections between the various parts of our brain. But I’m fascinated by how it feels and operates in daily life. I want to explore the impacts of integrating things into my work with online and F2F groups. I want to know how to do it, how to talk about it – with diverse groups so it has meaning to the agricultural researchers and those worrying about building a more compassionate world.

First, a bit about Hope Wechkin, who, as the paper headline says “physician, violinist, singer, actor – doesn’t approach anything halfheartedly.” Hope (I feel compelled to speak of her intimately, not as Dr. Wechkin, for some reason) is currently performing a self written, one woman show here in Seattle, “Charisma.”

A great believer in the power of music, Wechkin says it can “reach beyond words and beyond medicine.” She sometimes brings her violin into the hospice (Evergreen, in Kirkland, is the only inpatient hospice in the region) and plays for patients, watching the effect of music on the body’s different systems and seeing the pleasure the patients feel in what they hear.

In the piece, Hope plays 12 characters. The set is apparently a hospital bed and the costumes a hospital gown and a different pair of shoes for each character. There is a song for each. The play is about the advice others give to a terminally ill patient. Here is what Hope said in the article.

I want musicians to know about this,” she says. “You can get so battered down by the music profession. But I feel the real work is playing not where it is a competition or a job, but where it is transformative, and you can see how it transforms lives.”

Music transforms lives. We can nurture the different parts of ourselves. A picture paints a thousand words. A poem opens up new worlds. A doctor can bring her art into her profession of tending to the end of people’s lives, a time in medicine where she says “I think I have stumbled on a gem in health care. Then end of life puts everything in focus and the important things rise to the surface.”

In this online world of text, the explosion of video and photography has changed the landscape. But our forms are still fairly segmented, separate. What should we be paying attention to in our diverse practices that brings the parts of the brain together, our intellect and our hearts entwined, drawing upon different modalities?

What sort of integration should we be paying attention to?

Photo is link to the Seattle Times by BETTY UDESEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
If this is improperly linked, folks at Seattle Times, please, let me know. It was such a great photo I wanted to draw people’s attention to it!

Making Sense of Communities and Networks

Via a twit from Jeremiah Owyang I was led to a post from Nick O’Neill, Do Social Networks Follow the Traditional Business Cycle – Covering All That’s Social All the Web critiquing a recent report by Jeremiah. Jeremiah asked what we thought of Nick’s critique, particularly of the image from Jeremiah’s Forrester report.
Forrester Community Image

My response:

Since I can’t read the report, my response may be out of context. But I don’t think what the chart references is a community by my definition, which is a bounded set of people. (addition – actually, that’s only PART of my definition.) Communities don’t scale out and out.

Most commercial “communities” (which I assume Jeremiah is talking about) are actually networks and the people in them change over time. There may very likely be communities that form and persist over time as well, but their growth is never continually up. Then tend to find a stasis point which doesn’t change much.

The commercial networks right now may play out like this chart, but I think there is something specific and important that is not reflected in this chart and that is the challenge of multi-membership and the proliferation of network alternatives.

Right now, for example, social network sites are hot and have a huge growth. But we are starting to see the fatigue (too many widgets, to many alerts and messages with no granularity to their usefulness or aggregation in ways that makes sense to the individual, my friend just invited me to another network, my “friend” who I don’t really know started spamming me.)

No amount of ongoing management and continual improvements is going to be able to control the impact and draw/drain of the larger market of networks. It can fight against it, but the fact is people are fickle and will move on.

The differentiation will be those sub communities that form and persist. One strategy to explore is how to create the welcoming space for those communities, and expect the number of communities to grow, rather than the size of any one community.

Then you have not one single upward curve, but many that weave into a successful vortex that persists even though MANY people will come and go.

An example of this is the Share Your Story community at http://www.shareyourstory.org

I get a bit concerned about the hyping of community as well. This is more an intuitive than logical data-driven response, but the image above is more hype than reality as it stands on its own. I’d love to see it reframed from a network perspective which I think is both more scalable and sustainable.

Then I tweeted that I thought, out of context, the image was a bit of a hype. Jeremiah then direct-tweeted me to offer more context. I love context. So now I have a copy of the Forrester report to read, thank you, Jeremiah. It is printed out for weekend reading on the sofa. Jeremiah said I could blog about it, although the report itself is proprietary (a paid product of Forrester.) So stay tuned. I think it is important to share what we understand about communities and networks.

Yes We Can – the role of emotion in system change

I tend to avoid political commentary in my blog. (Lots of reasons – I’ll not bother you with that at the moment.) But today I was pointed to a video about Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign that appears right now on Dipdive.com that is worth sharing. Oddly, it is not (yet?) embeddable video. It should be. (The http://www.yeswecan.com website itself is down for me a the moment.)

EDIT: 9:09 AM – here is the embeddable YouTube Version

What this video does is emotional motivation. It uses words and music – two very emotionally rich media – to convey a simple point of hope. The emotional state it can engender – if it resonates with you – prepares you for taking action.

When we think about facilitating change, we often focus on our logic. Our goals. Our tactics. What this video reminds me that we also need to attend to the emotional and emotive context of our change methods and plans. Read the note of will.i.am (of the Black Eyed Peas) the creator of the video, just below the video (also here on his blog). Read about why and how he acted. Who acted with him.

I think one reason I have been so captivated lately by graphic recording and facilitation is that images carry more than “the facts.” They trigger more than the logical and important “next step.” So does the music in this video.

will.i.am, thanks for the reminder. Yes, we can.

And, on a side note. I sense this video could be a sea change for the Obama campaign. “We are not divided as our politics suggests.” Oh, I hope so, regardless of the outcome.

yes, we can