Category: online interaction

Online Community Still Crazy After All These Years

After months of trying to get our schedules aligned, I had the chance to be a guest at the IBM “CommunityBuilders” monthly call. These are hour long sessions where people who facilitate/manage/care about communities within and across IBM talk about things together.

I am a big fan of Luis Suarez, one of the hosts of these gatherings, so it was easy to say yes. Plus I know some of the IBM community builders -some over many many years, so this was a great opportunity to think together. It was the good folks at IBM who helped me actually see my own practice and it’s value in the late 90’s and I’m grateful.

Luis has his reflections up on his blog, so I thought it would be worth pointing to them and reflecting a bit myself.  CommunityBuilders – Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy White. (Luis, do we have a chat transcript too? There were lots of great comments and questions!)

If you have been involved with virtual communities and online facilitation, I bet it’s almost impossible not having come across the absolutely fabulous work on facilitating online communities Nancy has done, and shared across!, over the course of the years. Her work around Online Community Toolkit is probably one of those essential resources for any community manager, leader, facilitator out there who may want to get things started with their own online communities, or take existing ones into the next level of interactions. Her book, co-authored with Etienne Wengerand John Smith, on Digital Habitats – Stewarding Technology for Communities is probably what I would consider a bible on online facilitation, community building and community tooling…

It was an hour long session, where Nancy covered some of the basics behind the concept of Community (And how not everything out there, other groupings, may necessarily be a community), how both technology and community are walking through a rather thin line influencing one another, for the better, in defining how community members connect with one another and how those connections influence the path technology is following; and from there onwards she dived into an engaging conversation with the rest of the audience through a rather lively Q&A session covering a whole bunch of topics going from examples of effective community tooling, communicating efficiently with your community members, measuring the value of communities towards their stakeholders, biggest new challenges for online communities today, promoting and engaging activities for communities, etc. etc.

Thus I guess I better stop here, for now, and cut right to the chase, sharing with you folks the link to the materials, so that you can have a look right away and dive into them. The link to the video recording can be found over at “CommunityBuilders Monthly Call – Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy White” (30 MB download) and you can download a copy of the slides over at Slideshare or start checking the deck through the embedded code below:

Online communitystillcrazyafteryears

View more presentations from Nancy White.
Luis also wrote something very sweet – which I want to say works in the other direction right back at him!
She probably doesn’t know this, but one of the reasons why I am so passionate about collaboration and online communities in general is due to her own contagious passion, expertise and know-how that she continues to share over the course of the years!

When I started getting interested in online communities there weren’t very many practitioners to talk with. Today it is a rich ecosystem. The evidence is everywhere. The practices have blossomed and diversified. We have gone beyond older notions of “community” and layered on “networks.”  Look at the Community Managers Rountable (see their “State of…” report here), Gautam Ghosh’s guest post on Luis’ blog. The proof that this is a maturing field are everywhere – and the fact that no one of us can keep up with it all. I keep thinking I need to redesign my online facilitation workshop (which I have not offered for several years now – shame on me). But the territory is almost too rich. What a delight.

We didn’t get to the slides at the end of the deck – the “looking forward” stuff. I’d love to know what you think are the learnings agendas still in front of us for working in and with communities and networks. Hit the “comment” button and let me know!

Crosspost from NWWCoP: Twitter Chats and Tweetups

This is a crosspost from the Network Weavers Community of Practice!

On today’s full community “share fair” meeting the concept of tweetups and tweet chats came up. I mentioned that there is an open Google doc listing some of the more well known tweetups and I would share it, so I wanted to post that link and a few others here. In poking around, I found a few more lists (Meryl’s list was updated just last week!) and resources.

How to Run Twitter Chats

There are both technical and facilitation things to consider to effectively pull people into a coherent interaction on Twitter.

Hashtags Resources

A hash tag (i.e. #nwwcop) is a way to aggregate tweets during a tweet chat and to aggregate tweets with other digital content with the same tag.

How to Capture the Content of Twitter Chats

Here are just a few of the tools you can use as interfaces for the tweet chats themselves and to aggregate the content. See the “how-tos” above.

Strategy

I think the last bit of thinking — that really might be best considered first — is thinking about WHY you want to do a Twitter chat. Thinking about intent, about purpose, can be a productive precursor to planning and action. Smile. Visit some twitter chats. Experience them. Then think about your community and network. What would work? Twitter chats are inherently open – is that ok for you? Do you want to have a defined group, or attract people to the twitter chat topic? Food for thought, eh?

Twitter Thanks and Social Media and Public Health

Months ago I got an email from Trish at PKids, an organization devoted to childhood immunization and disease prevention, asking if I’d do a webinar in the way off future of February. Well, today was the day. Last week in preparation I realized I had to get my act together. With most of my current experience in international development and my maternal/child health days nearly 15 years old, it was time to tap my network. So before I share the slides I want to send a Twitter thankyou/shout out to all the people who provided retweets, links and information. You are the best, @eekim, @stephenjdowns,  @SusannahFox, @epatientdave , @garyschwitzer, @SocMediaRckStr, @RavennaBlog, @CAPublicHealth, @paularobeson, @eqpaho, @CDCgov and all you other social media health geeks!

Here are the slides and attached is a PDF file with the slide comments (WhyMeWhyOnlinePKIDSFinalwnotes) which capture the basic narrative of the presentation. If you register on the PKIDS site, you can also access the recording of the webinar.

Why me? Why Online? Social Media and Public Health

View more presentations from Nancy White.

via Why me? Why Online? Social Media and Public Health.

Heading Back Down Under: Part 1 Australia

In late March through mid-April I’m heading to New Zealand and Australia to learn, lead and co-lead workshops and generally CONNECT. The Australian batch comprises at least two different things. Here is the first, which I’m doing with the fabulous Matt Moore.

Here is the description and information:

Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne Workshops

Five years ago, the job title “online community manager” was rare. It was an addition to someone’s existing job, or they simply volunteered. Today, every organisation has or wants an online community (whatever that means). We are working both with bounded communities and broad, diverse networks. We need to be more deliberate in how we integrate community strategies into the heart of our organizations, how they impact our real work, and how they shape our organizations.

Smart organizations are asking:

  • What new strategies are emerging for the use of communities and networks?
  • What are the emerging practices of community & network management?
  • How do we work with both externally and internally facing communities?

Join us as we take a practical and forward looking examination of community & network practices. This in-depth, one-day workshop is aimed at practising online community managers and will tackle issues such as:

Upfront and personal. Social media offers new opportunities to work with customers, citizens and other external stakeholders. With social media employees can collaborate with each other in new ways. How does employee work flow change with greater external stakeholder contact? What does this mean for geographically distributed virtual partnerships? How do we avoid creating more work for ourselves than we can handle?

Multi-membership and it’s evil twin, platform proliferation. The heaven and hell of our context today is that anyone can create a space for a community or network, and technologists are inventing new ways to support these groups every day. We have more opportunities than people have time, attention and capacity to engage in. What does this mean for organizations’ online strategies? For the people stewarding both technology and process? How do we balance the needs of our community members for both variety, usefulness and consistency in this complex environment? And to repeat an important question, how do we avoid creating more work for ourselves than we can handle?

Format

Our format will be deep engagement with no more than 25 participants. We’ll offer some pre-reading prior to the workshop, then dig in with a blend of presentation, demonstration and practice. Our goal is to attract the smartest and most engaged community managers and online thinkers, so significant time will be allowed for participants to learn from each other and co-create solutions. Your output for the day will be a set of strategic questions to take back to your organization for planning your online engagement trajectory, ideas or “sketches” of potential experiments or actions, and a deeper connection with other practitioners.

Bring your mobile or smart device (or borrow one!) — “social sharing” is encouraged. Tweet, blog, Flickr etc. We do ask that everyone be explicit if they say something they do not want made public.

Coffee, lunch and snacks (including chocolate) will be provided. An optional, no-host drinks and social dinner will follow to support continued conversation. We encourage you to join us for the evening’s informal part of the day. We all know that’s where the really interesting conversations emerge!

Who Should Attend

Practicing online community managers, facilitators or similar functions. Technology stewards who provision and support technology for communities or networks. Organizational leaders with responsibility for online interaction goals or processes. While this is not an introduction to online communities or online community management, motivated and interested participants with less experience are welcome if they come in the spirit of a deep dive!

Your Workshop Hosts

Nancy White is an internationally recognised online facilitation expert-practitioner. She has worked with organisations as such as: The United Nations; Australian Flexible Learning Network; Boeing; the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research; IBM; and the World Bank. She is co-author of Digital Habitats with Etienne Wenger and John D. Smith. Nancy blogs at http://fullcirc.com/wp/ as well as teaches, presents and writes on online facilitation and interaction, social architecture and social media . Nancy confesses to online interaction, learning and chocolate addictions.

Read about Nancy’s 2009 Australia visit.

Matt Moore has worked developing face-to-face and virtual communities with organisations such as IBM, Oracle and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. He is currently a director of Innotecture and occasionally teaches at University of Technology Sydney.

Costs and Registration

All the workshops will be held in locations that are easily accessible from the CBD of each city. Each workshop costs $500+GST per participant. Please use PayPal to book with Visa/MC or contact us for alternative payment options.

Sydney (Monday 4 April 2011): Book now
Brisbane (Wednesday 6 April 2011): Book now
Melbourne (Monday 11 April 2011): Book now

If you pay and then subsequently cannot attend, we cannot provide you with a refund but an alternative participant from your organisation can be nominated.

Fish Bowling, Solo Galaxies and Free Writing in Holland

Note: I’m working a back log of “draft posts” that have yet to see the light of day. This is one from my trip to the Netherlands in December!)

Just a quick post from the Netherlands where I’ve been working with the fabulous Marc Coenders on an evaluation project for ICCO and it’s ComPart “project.” It has been lovely to work with the Compart team of Maarten Boers, Pier Adrea Pirani and Pete Cranston (the last two from Euforic Services and old KM4Dev pals.) It was a bit like “old home week” to use an American expression. The work has been fascinating, intense and challenging. The key word that keeps coming to me is fractal. Just when we get to one moment of understanding, things tilt just a bit and a new pattern slips in shifting things again. This is great for meaning making, not so great for finishing an evaluation report! 😉 It reminds us that we are working in a complex environment and if we are to succeed, we have to work with emergence. (See Peggy Holman’s terrific book, Engaging Emergence). We expect to be able to share the evaluation early in 2011 after the team has had time to absorb the findings!

As a little “side benefit,” Maarten Boers of ICCO hosted a borrel, or gathering for the knowledge sharing/KM/social media types in the area at the end of the day, some from my dear old KM4Dev network. It had been a long and intense day of meetings, plus silly me managed to catch quite a bad cold, complete with fever, etc. So I was really pushing my physical limits.

We planned a Fish Bowl for the borrel focusing on the interplay between organiztional change and technology, springing off of the evaluation work at ICCO with their “ComPart way of working.” I was greatful to be able to mostly listen from the outside of the fish bowl and took copious notes, some of which I’ll put below.

But I have to say, there were a few funny, wonderful moments when we, most of whom were working both in a second language and from a very tired state, misheard things and we created something new (and funny) out of it.

  • What about “solo galaxies,” misheard from “solidarity.” Earlier in the day I was taking notes on the flip chart and I thought, hm, what a unique thing. Did that mean someone was really working in isolation, a “one star galaxy?”
  • We have the fish bowl method, but what comes to mind when you say “fish bowling?” Who is bowling? Are the fish the pins? My visual imagination went crazy.
  • Later during the conversation I brought up the concept of “free riding” in networks and communities and how do we distinguish this from legitimate peripheral participation. Some one wanted to know what writing had to do with it and wasn’t free writing good for getting past writer’s block?

I love this stuff.

Anyway, here are the notes — there are some terrific one-liners. I apologize for not catching who said what, nor for having a list of participants. Not such great network weaving on my part!

On December 9th a group of practitioners joined up at ICCO’s headquarters in Utrecht, the Netherlands for an informal borrel (drinks) and conversation about the interaction between organizational change and technology. We used a “Samoan circle” variation of the fishbowl process, starting with ICCO’s ComPart team (originators of a new way of working and a wiki-centric platform of tools) sitting with evaluator and learning consultant, Marc Coenders. As the other evaluator, I (Nancy White) started on the outside and took very random notes… these are far from complete or fully accurate, but reflect the things that caught my interest. And of course the notes reflect nothing I said when I stepped into the fish bowl. Heh!

  • Disruption <–> Opportunity
  • ComPart’s original motivation – learning networking, but that wasn’t actually where things went
  • Learning can bring discomfort (my question, do we make that discomfort visible and discussable?)
  • “It is good if you like a lovely, really rocky ride” Pete Cranston
  • Introducing a suite of web 2 tools is different than when we introduced email into our organizations. yet both changed our organizations.  With Compart and web2, tools are always/quickly evolving. Faster, more complex vortex of change as tools impact organizations and organizations shape tools.
  • Some teams took to the ComPart way – “just flew” – others did not (Why?)
  • Start with need or start with tool exposure and find needs? (or both?)
  • “No one is waiting for tools” and “everyone is waiting for a solution” and “if you don’t know what a wiki is and how to use it, you won’t ask for it.”
  • Finding the balance between the polarity of “demand” and “offer.”
  • The organizational level is too big and generalized to be the locus for focus. (Locus focus? Hocus pocas? Yes, I was tired.)
  • The beginning of ComPart showed possibilities more broadly. Now need to narrow.
  • What are the cost/benefits with respect to tool and process adoption?
  • People like to ask a colleague how to use a new tool.
  • Impact of new tools and processes spread beyond the actual users
    • what is the ‘ripple’ impact?
    • is this a form of ‘legitimate peripheral participation?’
    • is this a form of free riding? (Tragedy of the commons)
    • what does technological peripheral participation look like? Do for people?
    • is this related to the problem of “you do this for me” or “we do this for us”?
    • what is obligation of employer?
  • Point to ODI’s six functions of a network.
  • How do we take into account the expense/value of facilitation (budget)?
    • rhythm of pumping the “knowledge heart beat”
    • mandate (which people resist) and voluntary (which people deprioritise)
    • is “particpation” just more jargon these days?
  • To take seriously, and to seriously involve.
  • Mandatory stuff –> unconcious, power politics, fragmentation
  • Face the truth sooner when things are/aren’t working and respond versus sticking to your plan.
    • Do NGOs do this less often than businesses?
  • Go where there is interest.
  • Role of leadership – walk the talk, model collaboration. If leadership does not have comfort wading into new tools and practices, not likely organization will fully move tere.
  • Lack of clarity of what our “partners” really need or want, all the while we talk about putting them i the center.
    • In the ComPart learning history, it was noted that in the early days it was difficult to even get names of partners to contact.
    • Negotiating with internal/external boundaries is tricky
  • How do we relate internal learning networks to external related networks?
    • tap into existing communities before creating own
    • intrinsic value of both inside and outside communities, but caution of overload and overlap
  • Individuals often have their own “eccentric” routings to get to knowledge that are useful for them, but foreign to others and hard to share w/ others.
    • how they negotiate boundaries is also individual
  • What is the role here for network weaving?
  • “Empherality is ok”
  • personal and professional motivation
  • What if ICCO celebrated the learning that came from the “inssurection” of ComPart?
    • “inovation always starts bottom up” (the guy in the blue sweater)
    • sooner or later management gets involved for positive or negative reasons
    • that’s how organizations learn
  • How to recognize when we are “in over our heads” and not make wrong headed moves
  • Watch for experiments that are “too high risk”
  • “Most ICT programs fail due to lack of user participation and lack of WIFM (whats in it for me)/motivation