Category: facilitation

What is YOUR history of online facilitation?

History of Online CommunityIn just over a week I’ll be in Ft. Worth, Texas, opening Monday’s session of the Elearning 2010 Conference. My topic is “Online Facilitation 13 Years On: What We Learned and What Do We Need to Learn?” Despite all best intentions, I’m just now getting concrete on what I want to do in this more traditional ‘podium’ opportunity. There are so many things we could talk about. So I’m wondering, what is YOUR history of online facilitation? What are the key turning points for you? And what do you see in the future?

The fabulous ScOPE online community asked these sorts of questions in a 2007 online event facilitated by my friend Nick Noakes, and it was fun to go back and reread them. (Link here, or SCoPE_ Seminars_ Online Fac. PDF)

Here is a little context from me:

I have been living, breathing, obsessing about online facilitation since 1996-97 when I fell down the online community rabbit hole in Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds. I sensed something important, and sought to give voice to that intuition over the past 14 years. (Funny, when we set on the title, it was 13 years. oops!) Using only my offline facilitation experience, I dove blindly in, sometimes flying, sometimes crashing and burning.

Over the years I started to write about what I was learning and point to the giants upon whose shoulders I stood. Online, that meant among others, Peter and Trudy Johnson Lenz, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps (for their virtual team pioneering work), Lisa Kimball and the folks at Metanet, Liz Rykert, Howard Rheingold and all of the hosts and facilitators at Electric Minds (old and newer), The Well and the myriad of other communities I have belonged to. Offline I built upon the core facilitation knowledge of folks like Sam Kaner, Peggy Holman, Roger Schwarz, Juanita Brown, Harrison Owen, and many, many others.

In 2004, I took a stab at a more academic review entitled A Short History o f Online Facilitation.

Things have changed. The way technology enables us to be together has dramatically expanded what it means to “be together” and thus our practices of being together. Shifts have happened in online facilitation of  communities and networks, for learning, teams, communities of practice, for advocacy and action, for games and play. The horizon is so much broader.

Where to start the story…

Where to imagine where it is going?

Your thoughts?

Facilitation Card Decks

Edit: February, 2014. If you are interested in facilitation decks, see also these posts: http://fullcirc.com/wp/?s=facilitation+card+decks

Edit: January 6, 2012 – Just out, this great deck on process patterns. groupworksdeck.org – I’ll be blogging about them soon, but want to attach this URL to this blog post as it seems to get a lot of hits!

I love things you can touch and play with when facilitating face to face. This is probably why I was so attracted to the “drawing on walls” involved in graphic facilitation, kinesthetic modeling and just plain PLAY as a way to work together.

I have a stack of different card decks that have been created for various purposes that I use. I wanted to share some of them, and find out what you use and how. First a disclaimer. I know many of the people who produced these sets. They have not paid me to talk about them. I disclose below which sets I got for free.

cardcollage

IDEO Method Cards
I’ve been using these cards for years and in almost every way except as design method cards. I use the front side with the images to get people talking to each other or jumpstart brainstorming or stalled conversations. For introductions and starters, I spread the cards on the table(s) and ask people to pick a card that they are attracted to. I don’t tell them why. Then we do introductions with the cards. Sometimes I simply ask people to introduce themselves by saying why they were attracted to the card. To  tie to the theme of the meeting, I’ll ask them to  say something about the topic using the image. This requires more creativity and often more laughter – so if you need to break the “formality” barrier, the laughter is helpful.

When I need to help a group jump out of a rut or jumpstart thinking, we pull out the images and do word association just to get the mental juices going. Again, fun, funny and it works.

The cards themselves are expensive ($49 USD). You used to be able find them online to download and print. The old download on the Stanford site doesn’t seem to work. Boo hoo! Or get creative and make your own out of magazine pictures, Flickr creative commons images or your own pictures. Method Cards – Case Studies – IDEO , some ideas on Slideshare, and Boing Boing review of the cards.

KM Method Cards
Patrick Lambe and the folks at Straitsknowledge created a deck of cards to introduce people to knowledge management and knowledge sharing methods. the frotn of the card has a little drawing, and the backs give an overview of either a method, approach or tool. I have not used them many times yet, but we’ve used them similar to the Social Media card game (which itself is a great free resource) or as a rotating conversation starter on KS methods.  Key terms are highlighted on the cards and you can tell I’m an online gal. I keep wanting to click on them to a hyperlink! They have a tips and user community site at Methodcards.net

What’s Your Story
These larger format, beautiful cards by Corban & Blair are very simple. They have story starter questions on each card designed to help people enter into conversations with each other.  Pretty.  Straightforward.

The Organizational Zoo Character Cards
The cards and the book from Arthur Shelley us animals as as a way to metaphorically look at roles and behaviors in the workplace. These involve humor and a little bit of risk – which makes them interesting. I have only played with them in  small, informal groups and have not used them with clients. I need to find an opportunity. This one again has a user community, known as the Zoo Ambassadors. (I was given a set as a trade for Digital Habitats from Arthur!)

Free the Genie
Colorful and related to the IDEO cards, these from IdeaChampions all have the same front – so no visual stimulation beyond the bright colors. The back of each card has an element or idea relating to “attend,” “intend,” suspend,”extend” and “connect. At the bottom there is a provocative quote. Again, I’ve just played with these, but I can imagine their use in strategic planning, review and brainstorming. The questions could be used as jumpstarters or ice breakers. The quotes are what I think make them unique.

The Mingle
New on the scene for me are these card sets from Parallax Consulting. (I was given two sets, one to look at and one to give away, which I shall do next week in Rome!) These are conceptually similar to the cards that stimulate stories and conversations, but they have a particular structure to use with circulating groups of up to 20 where people ask each other the question and record the answer. Later the answers are used as a way to introduce each other. The card sets are much less costly ($12.00 USD/set) which is a good thing because you write on them and would need a new set each time. The nice thing about this is that people can take their card away with them to remember the activity.  From a visual standpoint they are not about the visuals and all about the text. There are five different thematic sets, plus ideas for different applications. Again, I haven’t used these yet and hope to do so soon.

There are also thematic sets, like the clever US centric Media Heroes from Seattle’s Reclaim the Media project (though I struggle to read the tiny text!)

Do you use similar cards decks? Which ones? How do you use them?

Edit: March 10/14

My Old Online Facilitation Workshop Materials

onfaccurricwordleThis curriculum and materials have not been updated in many years, but they are still a valuable resource that emerges from not only my work, but that of my teachers, Lisa Kimball, Howard Rheingold, Michele Paradise and many, many others. In a way, they are a glimpse back into the early days of the practice of online facilitation.

I have removed the original copyright designation and it is now available as a creative commons, non-profit, share alike resource. Enjoy and improve upon it, as so many others, like Tony Carr at University of Cape Town and Brad Beach of Central  Gippsland TAFE have already done!

Online Facilitation Course Curriculum Rev  Aug 2002

Online Community Workshops in Sydney

Sorting community issues

Tuesday saw Matt Moore of Innotecture and I at the Australian Technology Park facilitating two half day workshops on online communities. The morning was a small group focused on the newer practitioner, and the afternoon added a diversity of experienced and energetic online community managers and designers.

The morning’s small groups enabled us to go into details with each person and what they wanted to do online. This idea of the continuum from the individual, through bounded communities and out to networks again permeated my thinking and input, priming my pump for Friday’s keynote at Adelaide’s EDayz09. More on that later…

In the afternoon, Matt and I decided to use some exercises to help raise the range of issues associated with advancing an online community by looking at current states of people’s communities, how they got that way and possible positive and catastrophic futures. Frankly, there were some good starts to conversations, but the diversity of the group and the speed at which we went through the exercise did not completely satisfy me – nor I suspect, many of the participants. Matt later reflected that we just made it too complicated and I think he was right. When you have advanced practitioners, the key is to let them share and compare.

I’m always torn when I’m “giving” a workshop. Matt and I have tons of things we can “present” and “talk” about, but that goes counter to a lot of what we preach in terms of participatory processes. Yet content gives an hand hold, an affordance, an anchor to focus conversations. I think we need to get the mix — so we are refining for Melbourne next week where we’ll run the same pair of workshops again on Tuesday.

For me, the highlight was again meeting all the great, interesting and intelligent people and hearing their stories. I look forward to more.

 

Trend Questions: Community “management?”

Having been in the “online community” world since around 1997, I have seen “community” ebb and flow. What is different this time around is the credibility that is given to those talented individuals who help steward, facilitate, care, lead, host, cajole and even “manage” online communities. While we can quibble for hours about the definition of online community (and what is or isn’t a community), the role of supporting these things finally has arrived with legitimacy. (That means people sometimes actually get PAID to do the work! Amazing!)

In my work, I am finally seeing people budget for this role – even in tough economic times. “Build it and they will come” has finally come and gone and people have gotten serious about the strategic use of online groups, communities and networks and thus are willing to invest in their care and feeding.

What is happening with online community management where you work/play? Is the role legitimate? In what fields? What kind of value is placed on the role/job?