Category: networks

Designing and Hosting Virtual Field Trips (MOIP #10)

Moving Online in Pandemic is now #MOIP! This is 10th in a series of posts about the tidal wave of moving online in the time of Covid-19. #1, #2, #3,  #4 , #5 , #6, #7, #8 and #9.

I’ve mentioned my work with the Floodplains by Design network over the past few years. We have been doing a lot of experimenting and practicing with online meetings and events over the last 11 months. We captured a few of our practices and now I’ve drafted an article on Virtual Field Trips. And yes, I’m looking for your review to help improve it. Right now it lives on a Google doc where you can comment. You are also welcome to comment generally here. Care to help? I’ll post the intro below. And THANKS!

1. Introduction

At the Floodplains by Design (FbD) Culture and Capacity Action Group (C&C) November 2020 meeting, we recently reviewed and reflected upon our experiences and value of field trips to FbD project sites. (See figure 1.) COVID-19 has curtailed our face to face field trips, demanding a new, virtual way of meeting these needs. 

With the C&C’s focus on building and supporting a learning network, we are interested in the overall set of learning and network weaving practices that can help spread and deepen IFM. This document offers insights and useful practices for designing and implementing virtual field trips (VTS) to support Integrated Floodplain Management (IFM). It also helps us share in general the value of, and practices around field trips which are useful in our work together whether we are F2F or together online. It builds on our first document on Virtual Peer Assists.

We hope that through these occasional articles/resource documents we can make our learning more widely available across the FbD network and beyond. 

The first section of this document  reflects more generally on the purpose and value created through field trips. The second section addresses specific practices for planning and executing virtual field trips. A resources section follows for additional information.

Figure 1: Harvest from the November 2020 brainstorm on VTS

We created this first draft of useful virtual field trip practices using four guiding questions. 

  1. What general immediate and longer term value is created through field trips in our integrated floodplain management (IFM) work? This establishes a shared baseline understanding of field trips in IFM. 
  2. What specific purpose(s) and value creation do field virtual trips serve in our work right now? With whom? Clear purpose drives how we design our VFTs.
  3. What useful field trip practices have we learned for VTFs?
  4. How might we know when we are making progress on this purpose? Like any practice, we assume that as we learn, we can improve our practice.

I’m happy to post more here if that is useful… and know the doc got pretty LONG!

Joint Use in Online Spaces

An article in the New York Times caught my eye a while back about the power of joint use of schools and churches as community spaces for exercise, play and other community activities, particularly for communities where there is a lack of park space, or inability for the average community member to pay for private gyms and play areas. I’ve put a snippet at the bottom to lure you to read the whole thing because I think this concept of Joint Space may be a powerful antidote to what is happening with Facebook, Google and others being owners of the online spaces, and thus owners of our data.

Today, Stephanie West Allen posted (on Facebook, natch!) a link to Raph Koster’s work on games and the idea of the “magic circle.” (See https://www.theoryoffun.com/tfall.shtml ) Again, this piece about space being essential.

“The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

Read the New York Times and Raph Koster pieces together and some tinglings of ideas start emerging. Are our online convenings “performance” — of “an act apart?” Or part of a larger circle that is both online and offline?

We have flocked to Facebook and other online spaces as a “third place” to connect, gather and do things together. Because of the way our social media spaces are designed, they tend to become silos of people most like us, rather than places where we might rub elbows with the diversity of our communities.

A common scenario is a swap in which a city will indemnify a school in exchange for the school opening its gates for community use, resulting in “a new park that’s been sitting there all along — taxpayer paid,” Winig said.

The concept also extends to rural churches, making fitness part of the lifeblood of these community staples along with meetings, weddings and funerals. At the First Missionary Baptist Church in Concord, N.C., Theoma Southwell, the parish nurse, worked with the county health alliance to include a mile-long walking trail and a fitness class for older people. “ If you don’t feel well physically you won’t feel well spiritually,” Southwell observed. “They all go together.”

Unlike Uber, Airbnb and other shared economy juggernauts — profit-makers all — opening up schools, churches and other buildings for public use during off hours represents something far more powerful: shared health programs in communities in which having a safe place to kick a soccer ball or unwind with an evening run has not been an option. It is also common-sense land use policy, representing the recycling of resources instead of building anew.

“Joint use is a winner because it is simple,” said Harold Goldstein, director of Public Health Advocates, a nonprofit organization based in Davis, Calif. “In policy jargon, we call it a no-brainer.”

Source: Sharing Public Spaces to Improve Public Health – The New York Times

Eng and Corney’s “Navigating the Minefield: A Practical KM Companion”

When approached to support knowledge management (KM) in my consulting practice, I often reply “I don’t believe in KM!” This flippant but heartfelt comment reflects the failures I’ve observed as people tried to reduce the complex processes of learning, creating, sharing and applying knowledge into a set of “best practices” and databases. It was as if KM was a mechanical but glorified tool, like a fancy food processor, admired while new, and then left on the shelf. Most KM approaches failed to understand that at the heart of creating, sharing, adapting knowledge is embedded in our entrained human behaviors and rarely successfully redirected by rules. Especially for busy people. Yes, I am a skeptic of of many KM approaches.

So when Paul Corney and Patricia Eng invited me to take a look at their new book, “Navigating the Mindfield: A Practical KM Companion,” I had a glimmer of hope. Why? I have interacted online with Paul for many years via the global community of practice on KM in international development, KM4Dev, and have found him sensible and practical, while also pushing and looking forward. Those are all good indicators of a viable KM approach. 

Eng and Corney’s book is at first a somewhat basic and “obvious” book. It ticks the check marks around understanding what KM is and it’s diverse value proposition. It is a GREAT introductory text for someone who has just been handed a KM responsibility. It is filled with common sense, which we know from experience isn’t always so common. Usefully it is grounded with stories exemplifying the ideas provided: a real world check. 

For me, as an “old hand,” the book sings in Chapter 7 – What Surprised Us. After analyzing all their interviews and research, Eng and Corney put their heads together to identify the surprises that ultimately spring from what they describe as KM being “all about people.” People are not orderly, obedient and prepared to live in the (fantasy) land of “best practices.” Their contexts are diverse and often complex. In describing these surprises, the authors sketch out the reality that KM is a complex practice and requires complexity appropriate strategies and adaptations. My favorite is #2, “Operational KM to the fore, strategic KM to the rear.” This is a classic polarity, a wicked question. How can we be both operational and strategic? Focus solely on an operational challenge, KM dies when that operational imperative ends. Strategic only and buy in at the front line rarely happens. KM, at its best, dances within these two polarities, rather than tries to resolve them. 

The issue for me is to be always thinking forward about KM and how it can add value in ways the generatively move a system in the direction we want it to go. If we rely on a single model or framework, that task is impossible. So watch out for the trap!

If you are just starting out with KM, read the whole book and absorb the stories and lessons. If you are an old/jaded/in-a-rut practitioner, start with Chapter 7 and be prepared to discover lessons you probably already know, but haven’t applied. That darned old common sense isn’t always so common. So let’s start practicing it again. Let’s get more creative … or maybe that isn’t the word. Let’s use, for example, complexity frameworks to understand and expand what works and ditch the failing old plans. Maybe KM can be real!

KM4Dev and Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner – April 6-7 2017

Care about communities of practice? Care about how we build and share knowledge in any context? In international development? Like hanging out with fun and interesting people? Then get yourself registered for a regional KM4Dev gathering here in Seattle on April 6-7. Our focus is communities of practice: the heaven and everything else. (Registration)

Our goal is to share practical experiences of the application of Communities of Practice (CoPs) and explore what is working, not working, when and why or why not. As practitioners, we will share stories and cases on day 1 to extract patterns and insights with a particular focus on the purpose of a CoP in a particular context, its fitness for purpose and practices that support success.

On day 2, tighten your seat belts as we will host a rare public workshop with CoP leading thinkers, Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner who will share their Value Creation Framework to  identify and measure value created by communities and networks. Together, the two days will link the essential anchor of purpose, with an emerging framework for assessing our progress towards purpose. I don’t know about you, but there are not many frameworks that really dig into the value of CoPs and networks… too many just measure activity. This is a GOLD MINE, my friends. Don’t miss it!

This is a practitioners workshop, using examples and experience, bolstered by theory. It is not a “CoP’s Introductory” workshop nor a review of CoP theory. Come with your real world stories, challenges and insights, prepared to share, think, and make sense of our work. We will use a variety of participatory methods, many drawn from Liberating Structures http://www.liberatingstructures.com/, to engage and unleash the knowledge and energy of everyone present.

Don’t work in international development? We still love and welcome you!

We will gather in the brand new Centilia Cultural Center at Plaza Roberto Maestas http://www.elcentrodelaraza.org/room-rentals/, hosted by the long time Seattle institution, El Centro de la Raza. In the south end of Seattle, steps away from a Light Rail station, the Center itself is a hub of community and network activity of the Latino community in the area.

Come both days or just one (same price either way). Just JOIN US. Register HERE. Questions? Leave them in the comments.

Connections Shape Us – Food for Thought from Scientific American

Good food for thought on a Monday morning.
From the Scientific American blog post

Network thinking lets us scientifically understand the world around us as one of connections that shape observed phenomena, rather than as one where the intrinsic properties of people, genes, or particles determine outcomes. Like previous scientific revolutions, the network revolution also has the promise of reshaping our basic commonsense expectations of the world around us, and may allow us to recognize that we are not a basically individualistic, asocial, and quarrelsome creature that comes in bounded linguistic, ethnic, racial, or religious types, but a social species linked to one another by far-reaching network ties.

via How Networks Are Revolutionizing Scientific (and Maybe Human) Thought | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network.