Category: community

Stories, Flash Mobs and Community Matters

I’m in Denver this week at the “Community Matters” conference from the Orton Family Foundation.

This is a new network for me: town planners, small town advocates, and people who care about the heart and soul of their community. I’m engrossed in getting to know their work and them. The intellect and attention to detail of the planning perspective melded with the recognition of the power of relationship, connection, passion and emotion is a powerful mix. In fact “powerful” is a word I’ve been hearing a lot.

For some reason, many of the people I have conversed with are also paying attention to transitions – to their own, their organizations and their communities. I’m quite taken by this pattern and wonder why it has show up so vividly for me here, at this conference, at this time. Something to think about.

My roles here are delightfully diverse, even if the switch ups make me dizzy here in the “mile high” city. Tuesday I facilitated an all day workshop on “Online Media and Your Neighbors.” We were two town planners, a journalist and online neighborhood community facilitator, a deep thinker on communities for elders and the differently abled, and a community organization “jill of all trades.” We learned with and from each other about how online tools can be of value (or be avoided) for local communities. I am now thinking more about the intersection of technology in elder communities — mmmm!

Yesterday I did small scale graphic recording for the opening plenary, large scale graphic recording for for the session on “The Power of Stories” (Image above) facilitated by my dear friend and conspirator, Barbara Ganley. Tim Merriman, Holli Andrews and Josh Schachte (how could you not love a man who loves pie!) were terrific – telling real stories about the real power of stories. There are two other panels from the graphic on questions and tips for storytelling that you might find valuable here and here.

But it doesn’t stop there. Then I facilitated two 30-minute “Tool Flash Mobs” – one on Twitter and one on YouTube – to provide a brief introduction and practice with social media. In the Twitter session one woman talked about a very unusual Twitter adoption challenge. Her puppet, Suzie, needed an account. So I invited the two of them for a quick peer-to-peer consult later in the day. Talk about mind-blowing. More on that later…

In the YouTube session I decided to go out on a limb (as usual) and suggest that we not only learn about online video in a half hour, but to actually make, upload and view one. Yup, we did it. Take a peek:

The takeaway for me from the two flash mob sessions were:

  • When introducing a social media tool in a community context, think about the inflow and outflow aspects. Inflow: listening, learning, getting ideas, bringing diversity into a local community. Outflow: sharing knowledge, disseminating information, publicizing community events, helping the world see (and perhaps validate) good community work that may not be perceived as so important because it is so “everyday” for the community itself.
  • Think small, time-delimited experiments with measurable outputs so that we can think strategically about what “social media” work we want to add to our lives, and what value can accrue to our communities.
  • Remind ourselves we all don’t have to learn and work with everytool. In fact, imagine what it would be like if we ALL tweeted! NOOOOO!

Those sessions all continued informally so when I looked up it was after 5:30 and I ran off to a dinner with friends. ZOOM! Had a great dinner/conversation then walked back, did a little prep and crashed.

So here I am today – a graphic recording of Chip Heath’s keynote! WOW, I’ve been practicing drawing elephants. Tomorrow I record Frances Moore Lappe, so lots of excitement, plus one more Flash Mob and pinch-hit moderating a panel. Off and running!

Reviving Community Indicators – Learning

For long time readers of this blog,  you know I’ve been obsessed with “signs of life” from communities which I call “community indicators.” I haven’t posted any recently, but something spurred me yesterday…

This past week I was very grateful to be a supporter of Dreamfish’s online retreat for their inaugural group of Dreamfish Fellows. The fellows will be taking leadership/stewardship roles in the Dreamfish network and communities over the next six month. As the first group, there was not only the exploration of a new group, but exploration of the roles they will play. All online, because cost and distance made a face to face a less “sustainable” option.

One of the Fellows, Kate McAlpine  shared some of her work with the Caucus for  Children’s Rights, in Tanzania

She shared a draft paper which I’ve still to read, but this graphic just “rang my bells.”  You’ll have to click into it to read it, and I’ve included the PDF for ease.

This sure is a community indicator in my eyes, capturing (or “reifying” – definition below!) the learning of a community of practice over time. In this case, the indicator is learning over time, and a way to VISUALIZE and SHARE that learning. That is the bit that really stands out for me.)

Attribution: Kate McAlpine (2009) Caucus for  Children’s Rights, Tanzania.

CCR Graphics_15Dec09

Any community indicators showing up in your life? Should we start thinking about network indicators?

Definition Time….Reification from Etienne Wenger (Wenger, E.  (1998).  Communities of practice. Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) gleaned by a paper by Hildreth, 2002

: …to refer to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’ … With the term reification I mean to cover a wide range of processes that include making, designing, representing, naming, encoding and describing as well as perceiving, interpreting, using, reusing, decoding and recasting. (Wenger, 1998: 58-59)

Debrief: the role of visuals in online community management

Today I was a guest of the Community Roundtable, sharing some ideas about the role of visuals in online community facilitation and management. This is the first of two such gatherings this month. The second will be in the context of online learning for the Knowplace event next week. Screenshot of shared drawing

We used my free Vyew.com space plus Slideshare.net (since my visual slides created a humongous file size and I was too lazy to break it apart.) I like Vyew’s white board, simple set up and the ability to easy make every participant a collaborator with access to the white board tools.

I offered a bit of context on the general role of visuals in group processes, then some stories about translating those ideas online. After that, the fun really began as we drew together. First I asked them to draw without talking. Then there is a little tool in Vyew where you can make your cursor invisible, so people could not tell WHO was drawing what.  I asked them to activate that feature. Then we debriefed. The comments ranged from feeling free to collaborate on an image, to struggling a bit with the tools, to drawing off by oneself in a corner. Some liked the anonymity, some didn’t. Then we talked about how such exercises could be used, particularly in a work context where this might otherwise be seen as frivolous.

Afterwards my hosts, Rachel Happe and Jim Storer were kind to offer (and allow me to share) their feedback. I appreciate that in return for my time in being their guest.

Rachel’s Notes:

I thought it went very well given that most of the people on the call were completely new to the idea of drawing online or together.

The different chairs as an opener gave people a framework/context that they could relate to in order to get started.

I thought the slides plus the playing were a bit hard to fit into an hour but given that I was surprised how active people were – most people seemed to jump right in and unlike the phone, people didn’t have to take turns so everyone – even if they were not collaborating per se – could participate right away which is often really hard to get them to do verbally even if you do call on them and give them time on the call.

Intentionally cutting off talking was also interesting – kind of an odd sensation since I rely so much on getting explicit confirmation from people. Really interesting to watch how collaboration unfolds without voice.

It’s definitely given me some things to think about for our own use.

Jim – other thoughts?

Rachel

Jim’s Notes

Great session! I was trying to observe and participate, which was a bit challenging. I eventually just gave in and participated. Gave me a lot of ideas on how to introduce people to one another. Since using tools like that feels a little silly, it breaks down conventions and barriers pretty quickly. I loved to see how people co-created with each other.

Too much to digest so soon… I wish more members had joined in. They would have enjoyed it.

Thanks again Nancy. I just wished I’d had a chance to tell everyone how I started following you back in 2002 (I think) when I first found your Online Community Toolkit. 🙂

I’ll return with the debrief after the Knowplace event on the 23rd!

Here are the slides:

Thinking About Visuals in Online Communities and FacilitationView more presentations from Nancy White.

Reflections on IOC2010 Keynote and Virtual Scribing

Today I did a kick off talk at the International Online Conference 2010 (aka #IOC2010) on the “me-we-network” continuum, pegged with the semi-provocative question, “Should we be using communities in learning.” My main point was to put on the table the value of distinguishing the types of human configurations we can use, how they vary and why we shouldn’t lump them all under the generic and oft-misunderstood term “community.” Before the experience fades from memory I wanted to jot a few reflections.

This was a fully online live event using Elluminate with the cracker jack Learningtimes team behind the scenes. Shortly before the talk they let me know that they were going to have a virtual graphic facilitator scribing, live, visible via application sharing while I talked. They didn’t know I also do graphic facilitation — and was thrilled. Here we were, jumping off the cliff of learning and experimentation again. YAY!

First, if you are interested in the talk, the slides and artifacts are here. Second, if you are interested in my reflections on our process of weaving the talk, slides and scribing, read on and scroll to the bottom of the post to see the fabulous work of Dan Porter of Scriberia and the new LearningTimes in-house Virtual Graphic Facilitator! It is really beautiful. We watched for another 45 minutes after the talk ended to watch Dan rearrange objects in the image, add captions and color. He said he was using a large touch screen monitor. Waaay cool. Debrief after the picture!

nancy-communities-ioc2010.jpg (JPEG Image, 1032×815 pixels).

Click for larger image

After the talk some of the 110 participants stayed logged in. The facilitation team first went to a break out room to debrief, but we quickly realized that a debrief with the remaining folks would be useful.  We shared a few of our reflections then had some useful feedback from a handful of participants.

During the talk, I stopped to both read the chat room more closely and look at Dan’s emerging image, as much as for me, as to give the rest of the folks a rest from my typical break-neck presentation pace. In retrospect, I would have cut about 15-20% of my content to do this reflection piece with the visuals more deliberately and give more time/space for that very reflection.  Jonathan Finkelstein noted that Elluminate, while it devolves a ton of control to the individual, actually made it harder to help people move and resize windows to either see both the slides and the application sharing.  So if they did not “get” that process quickly,  they may have felt stuck  missing one or the other. One person reported seeing only the drawing and thus was confused with some of the things I said which were meant to complement an image on my slides. (I use mostly photographs and images with just a few words.) Another felt a bit overwhelmed trying to visually process both, but also said it was interesting. (A cliff jumper like me?)

Remembering back to last month’s live integration of Twitter in a F2F presentation, I also realized that I could have scaffolded  the visual participation – again by reducing some content and using some small activity up front to help transition into the multiple visible options.

At this point Dan was wrapping up his visualization work and joined the conversation, adding a bit of the technical how-tos (responding to some participant queries). We talked about options of him chiming in, but he decided since this was a fairly new practice of scribing live online, he’d just scribe.  We talked about how cool it was to compare the electronic scribing to our offline paper/chalk/pen work. Electronically you can move objects, clone, resize and color – things that are pretty darn hard with paper!

Dan will be scribing Friday’s keynote and will again be doing it for another LearningTimes facilitated event, this time with the Smithsonian (it looks very interesting! “Problem Solving With Smithsonian Experts” online, free, in April. Check it out. ). We agreed it would be fun to reconvene and debrief again after these events to consider what we learned as presenters, scribers and participants in live online events.

People like David Sibbet and Nancy Margulies have been doing amazing work with this as well. If you are interested, do check out their work.

Finally, related to the visual part of this post is a useful video from David Sibbett which brings home some of the points about the importance of both the visual and the kinesthetic in our learning — something we need to weave into our online work. TEDxSoMa – David Sibbet – 1/22/10.

Thanks to Dan and the Learningtimes folks for walking the edge together today at IOC2010!

Useful Books on Online Community Building

Back in January, Meredith Farkas had a great post talking about how she was planning to teach Web 2.0 with Web 2.0 tools. I love reading people’s reflecting and “thinking out loud” about their work. I learn a ton from these posts. So first, thanks, Meredith.

I appreciated that Meredith was going to facilitate learning by doing and talking with people doing community. She also  noticed the lack of useful books about books on online community building. Here is a snippet from her post and the response I left in her comments. Any other recommendations?

via Teaching Web 2.0 with Web 2.0 | Information Wants To Be Free.

I made a lot of changes to the topics covered in the class in light of how much Web 2.0 technologies have changed. I’d originally wanted to teach a class on online communities, but I couldn’t find enough good readings (or a textbook) for an entire course (now that Nancy White, et al.’s new book on Digital Habitats is out, it might be easier to do). I decided instead to focus more on online community-building in the course and am spending two weeks on it. I’m also having three guest speakers who run online communities: Frances Roehm of Skokie Net, Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, and my hubby, Adam Farkas, of ODwire. I know there are a lot of other topics I could have covered (cloud computing, mobile technologies, mashups, etc.), but I’m pretty happy with this semester’s lineup and I look forward to read my students reflections and discussions on these topics.

My Response:

Meredith, I’m looking forward to seeing your course unfold with a large group – I find the diversity of conversations in a larger group VERY stimulating, even if more work!

As to books about online communities. Your observation about the gap is astute and the gap is there for a reason. If you look at the cycles of attention around online community you have the first significant rise after the publication of Howard Rheingolds “Virtual Community: Homesteading…” (By the way, the full text is available free online, thanks to Howard)

Then we had a few more great offerings from Amy Jo Kim, Cliff Figallo and Jenny Preece. There is also an excellent edited book by Smith and Kollock “Communities in Cyberspace.” They and Preece, I think, opened the door to academic interest and study of online communities.

From this initial start there were some other books, mostly aimed at what we now know were naive expectations about early forms of online communities for business application. There was a lot of hoopla.

THEN came the dotcom crash. “Build it and they will come” was realized as a pipe dream. And the interest in online communities subsided. (And I’d say for more than economic reasons – the limitations of software, the adoption rates for going online, etc.)

With the emergence of what we now call “Web2.0″ and “social media” (which, by the way, have their roots back into the 60’s and the history is a VERY fascinating online community and network story unto itself and an example of the interplay between technology and community – we explore it a bit in the start of Digital Habitats), and the increase use of the internet, another wave of “online community” emerged. This one was more diverse.

There was the “online community” associated with buying things prompted by the longevity and success of Amazon (ratings) and eBay (reputation) and more sophisticated applications that allowed businesses to tap into the people side of retail.

There was the “online community” associated with social networks. Here is where I’d say this is not online community and that the differentiation – or more accurately, the continuum between individual, community and network — really started to emerge. I’ve been writing a lot about this continuum on my blog and in my slide decks (choconancy) if you are interested. I won’t bore you now.

This has, in my mind, not only extended the possibilities of how we interact together online for a purpose, but also diversified design and facilitation approaches – something I don’t think books are addressing. You find this juicy stuff these days in Twitter chats with the #KMers and #lrnchat and others. It is still a distributed discourse – which is both fascinating and time consuming.

If you want to see some of the other books I’ve find useful, you can find them here.