Category: Monday videos

Patrick Lambe on Straits Knowledge’s Knowledge Toolkit

plambeWhen I was in Singapore for KMSingapore, I was able to visit the offices of Straits Knowledge, where Patrick Lambe, Edgar Tan and Ng Wai Kong do amazing things to help their clients create and share knowledge. I’ve always enjoyed reading their Green Chameleon blog and have greatly appreciated (and envied, I must admit) Patrick’s sketching skills! While in the office, Patrick gave me a hands-on with their Knowledge Toolkit and I said, THIS IS SO COOL, let’s make a quick video to share. So here it is. Please forgive the typos on the text. You know me. Typo queen! I’m going to share this on KM4Dev as well, as i think my colleagues there will really like this as well. So GO SHARE KNOWLEDGE!

via Patrick Lambe on Straits Knowledge’s Knowledge Toolkit – 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.

Affection: must share from Wendell Berry

CC License Some rights reserved by Frodrig on FlickrThis morning from an #agchat tweet I spotted the word “affection.” I had to click. (Thanks @USFarmerMag!) And found this from March. Take a minute and enjoy. ( I read it while listening to Rene Fleming with YoYo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile creating music with “Touch the Hand of Love.” Mama mia. Great combo. I’ll embed it below so you can do the same if you wish.)

For the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities which he delivered on Monday evening at the Kennedy Center, Mr. Berry, American intellectual and agrarian-minded elder, described how and why affection, yes, affection!, ought be considered the cornerstone of a new economy. Berry tells us that affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination. It’s a train of thought worth quoting at length: “For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world,” says Berry, “they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.” Affection, then, takes us beyond statistics and generalizations to the immediate and the particular. It focuses our attention on the beloved things right in front of us. This field,this child, this community.

Berry observes that we live in a time where affection is discounted. It’s true: rare is the public discussion where affection – or beauty, or hope, or joy – is brought forward as a good and weighty reason to do anything. But Berry believes that affection is deeply motivating. “Affection involves us entirely,” he writes. If he is right, love itself could be what moves us, finally, to care for the Earth.

You can read Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, or watch a video of him delivering it.

via LocalHarvest News – March 30, 2012.

I loved this line: “affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination.”  As I prepare to facilitate an agricultural planning meeting, this is so useful for me to have in my mind.

Where are you imagining and nurturing affection in your work? Your life? Who is imagining it for you?

 

Tree image from Flickr, LicenseAttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by Frodrig

Monday Video: Strange Meeting (and a few comments on teleconferencing)

Joitske Hulsebosch pinned this video on Pinterest and it immediately became inspiration for this weeks (irregular) Monday Video. First, take a look. Just 2 minutes 3 seconds.

via Strange Meeting – YouTube.

Fun to see, and slightly ironic as my work travel schedule is about to, um, take flight. Now I travel to facilitate longer form meetings — 3-5 day things that would be painful online, but I have to say, I wish we were progressing with our telephone and web meeting practices and tools a bit faster. I have been beta testing MeetingBurner (I have a future blog post in draft form) and had such high hopes, but in practical use I’ve run into some problems which I think are fundamental. Is it because I have “weird” online meeting habits or that tools and practices are still stuck in broadcast mode?

Here are a few of the areas that I’ve been working on that have improved my synchronous online meetings… and they seem to be to be both fundamental to healthy meeting practices as much as about technologically mediated meetings.

1. Make the meeting matter. Don’t have a meeting to broadcast information; it should be for meaning making, relationship building, working on challenges or thinking TOGETHER. These all imply active listening and response (a.k.a “conversation”) and full on interaction.

2. Be interactive. Don’t bore me PLEASE!!! There is a place for broadcast “webinars” but ONLY ONLY ONLY if the tool enables meaningful participant interaction and the presenter wants to and has the skills to interact. Otherwise send me a link to a video or audio, thankyouverymuch. And by interaction, that does NOT mean just a Q&A tool or the ability to chat with the person controlling the platform (GoToMeeting, I am not your fan.) It means open chat rooms where participants can know who else is participating, chat with them, and if there are a lot of chatters, someone to help weave the chat with what the presenter is doing. (Edit: See this post from EEKim about meaningful conversations at meetings.)

3. There is facility for joint artifact creation. This means joint note taking (a la http://www.meetingwords.com) and, in my personal ideal, a shared whiteboard with good writing tools that everyone can access (whether that permission is turned on or off selectively is again a process question.) I could write tons more about the generative practice of both shared meeting note taking and drawing together. I’ll spare you this morning…

4. Be embodied. There is facilitaty for images or video of the participants. Now I’m not a video fan. I work at home, often at dreadfully early morning hours and you do NOT want to see me. But a picture of me does bring a bit more humanity. And there are times when video is really useful. And times when it is distracting so we need to be smart enough to discern when to use it!

Four is probably enough for one blog post. Where do you stand on online meetings?