Wow, they got the video up fast, so I guess there are two Monday videos today! Here is a recording of the keynote I did a little over 90 minutes ago! The presentation wiki has slides and I’ll reflect on the Twitter backchannel experiment (and thank all the Twitterfolk who helped make it happen) later in the week.
Online Facilitation 13 Years On: What We Learned and What Do We Need to Learn?
Are you interested in Digital Identity? Do you know about the This Is Me project? It is an ongoing project out of Odin Labs at Reading University in the UK that offers activities and worksheets for people to understand the role and implications of digital identity and explore their own digital identity.
In the past I created a version for people working in international non governmental organizations (NGOs) and now I’m working on one for librarians. The problem is, I’m not a librarian. I could really use some help. Can you take a look and offer edits, feedback, contexts and help improve it ? You can find the collaborative draf here:
This Is Me – Librarian Draft – Google Docs.
If you’d like editing privileges, just let me know.
THANKS!
In 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?
Yesterday I woke up and checked my email. It was clear that the email lull of the holidays was over. I was taken by a post on one of my core community lists, KM4Dev, from one of my colleagues. You can see the full thread here (or if that page won’t load I save them here KM4DevSharepointDiscussions):
Dear colleagues
A few weeks ago, I posted a query on IT-tools for virtual projects and got very useful recommendations. One colleague pointed out to me that, for an organization like SDC (big, Government), one of the main elements to consider would be the IT department. This proved to be very true. Our ministry’s IT department over the past few years developed one major collaboration application (consultation tool to develop consolidated Swiss statements for UN), based on MS Sharepoint. This application has a fantastic track record: it is used, it is appreciated by ist users, it produces good results and it saves time. Our IT department therefore concludes that MS Sharepoint is the basis on which to build SDC’s collaboration platform.
We are not quite sure they are right, but for the time being they definitely got more and better arguments than we do. This is why I would like to tap into the km4dev collective experience again: what do we as a group know about MS Sharepoint as basis for building a community collaboration platform?
Some of the questions turning in my mind are:
* What was MS Sharepoint initially conceived to be? What is its development history? What are the core functions it is really good at?
* I got somewhat alarmed when seeing that MS Sharepoint is not mentioned at all in “Digital Habitat” (book by Etienne Wenger et al on Technology Stewardship for communities). Nancy, why don’t you mention it?
* What are “make it or break it” features we should ask for, which would guarantee that a useful community collaboration platform can be built on MS Sharepoint?
Wishing you all a great start into the new year. Thanks for helping us along
Adrian
Adrian Gnägi
Knowledge and Learning Processes
Being on the US West Coast, my other KM4Dev colleagues had already provided some great responses (again, see the thread!) But since Adrian had asked me specifically about why SharePoint was not in our book, Digital Habitats, I wanted to answer. My friend Jon Lebkowsky suggested that I blog my response. Considering the number of page views on my last SharePoint post I figured that might be a good idea. SharePoint and other collaborative platforms are also not new topics for the community as you can see from this summary on the community wiki: http://wiki.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/SharePoint. The topic stays alive, so I chimed in:
Adrian, by the time I woke up, my peers pretty much summed up what I would have said. I found all the messages really resonated with my experience and research.
We did not include it in the Digital Habitats book because in the community we have seen more failures in the use of SharePoint than successes and our goal was to tell stories of usefulness, not frustration. 😉
Others have already well articulated the core strengths and weaknesses of SP. From my personal experience with older versions of SharePoint (I have VERY little with 2007) is that it is built p from the metaphor of one’s hard drive. My folders. Your folders. Each community “ready to go with a click” but siloed in the very design of the software. Have you ever noticed that out of the box you can’t easily cross link once you are deep into a community space? You have to go back “up” to the top of the system, find the other space, and drill down. In essence, there is no fundamental network structure to the platform. In today’s world, that represents a significant problem for me. It actually creates more division, rather than facilitates connections.
There is also a distinction for all products that is important to consider. The differences between the tools a platform offers, how it does or does not integrate them with and without, and the features that make them usable all matter. (Quick definition: platform is the integration of a number of tools. Integration can be incredibly important and is probably the biggest “sales pitch” for any platform. Tool is a piece of code designed to do a particular thing. A feature is something that makes a tool usable. ) For example, a wiki is a tool. The wysiwyg feature, makes it easier for non-geeks to use. If a group makes a lot of tables in their wiki, they probably don’t want a wiki that requires wiki syntax to make the tables. These are examples of features.
Many platforms (not just SP) started bending their base structure (often built off of discussion threads) to “act like” newer tools such as IMs, wikis, blogs, etc. These re-purposed bits of code often lack the features we come to know (and depend upon) so they don’t feel right nor are they as useful. This is where examination of technology at all three levels: platform, tool and feature — can really matter.
As Matt says, who knows what 2010 version will bring. If it doesn’t bring a network sensibility, then MSFT will lose the game of both collaboration and cooperation because we are in a networked world and we need both. Simply having spaces for teams to collaborate won’t work for most of us, particularly in international development.
The key is always to start thinking about what ACTIVITIES you want to support in your collaboration platform, then assess the tools in the context of those uses and the environment of the user. The comments so far have really done a good job exploring some of those aspects:
- What are people already using (start where they are)?
- What are the connectivity issues (SP has a problem with this internationally, even when people have built “low bandwidth friendly add-ons)?
- What tasks do people have to do individually and together (yes, consider the range from individual, to defined group, to network, which includes internal and external folks many times! So often we only look from the organization’s perspective if what it mandates)
- Where is the locus of control of the software? we find that communities that have control of their environment tend to “bend” it to their needs more easily, more intelligently, than if they have to keep asking IT, who may or may not understand the context of their community. This is at the heart of the idea of “community technology stewardship” — in, from and for the community)
- How can the tool allow a community to face in the directions it wants to face – in other words, if it is totally inward facing (private in all ways), a mix of inward and outward, or very outward facing (meaning it wants to connect outside itself with other individuals, communities and networks)
- What is the simplest possible thing you can use now that will support your purpose and how can it grow, vs having every possible thing now and none of it is used (this is probably one of the biggest traps we all fall into)
- How can the tool connect with, integrate, grow , evolve with outside tools and services (no community is an island!)?
If SP can support the activities you want, in your context, fabulous. If not, try and open a dialog that shows why not. Use the Spidergram (http://fullcirc.com/wp/2009/03/31/digital-habitats-community-orientation-spidergram-activity/) as a talking tool, and then, if their arguments are verbally convincing, try USING different tools. The FEATURES of the tools, what makes them useful (not just thef fact that there is a wiki or an IM tool in Sharepoint), is the difference that makes a difference. SP locks everything down to its specs. It is one way, or no way. If that works, fine. It has rarely worked for me.
You may also want to see this wiki http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Technology_for_Communities_project
And this chapter from the book, the Technology Steward’s Action NotebookNancy
Photo Credit: ‘Dereliction Splendor‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71038389@N00/2218657600
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vermininc/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This 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!