Category: online interaction

Draft Archives: Threads, Connections and Costs

From 2010, this draft is ironic as we enter another year of staying home with Covid. My wide-spread life is becoming a little more locally dense again, but isolation, like leaving town, doesn’t do a lot for community connections!

image of sand on a beach in waves with two rocks as "eyes' and a semi circle of rocks as a smile.

Anyone who follows my Flickr stream knows that I love my garden and the projects my family and I cook up in that little space. Our latest addition is a chicken coop and some crazy little chicks. I can’t wait for sunny summer weather to sit on my little circular patio with my new granddaughter.

While travel often takes me away from home, the gravitational pull to stay is strong. When I’m away, I miss my walks to the local yoga studio, passing familiar homes, often waving and saying hello to some of the habitual neighborhood walkers (and their dogs.) Right now a couple of blocks from my house they are breaking ground for a community garden and I hanker to go by, to volunteer this Saturday. But yes, I’m on the road. So it is a great pleasure to be able to follow my neighborhood blog, to read about the city wide urban gardening projects IDEAD LINK!) and, of course, to stay in touch with my family online.

So last night over a lovely dinner and relaxed conversation with Dave Pollard and his brother Alan, we started talking about the impact our online interaction/time/investment has had on our lives. For both of us, it has entirely changed the trajectories of our lives.  Dave brought up the question that (in my words) asks us “at what cost?”  It has a cost and Dave has me thinking and wondering – which is a good thing.

One cost to me was that I went from very densely connected in Seattle because of the nature of my past work, to very widely connected across the globe. I have a huge network of connections of varying strength that I treasure. But I can’t even conceptualize them, let alone keep them all in my head and even keep a reasonable number of them in my heart. When I’m connected to them (online or F2F) that connection reignites. But the amount of “out of sight, out of mind” is actually very discomforting when I examine it. What does that say to the quality of the relationship, to the amount of caring we can muster for each other when our networks become very large?

Lots to think about.

From the Archives: Anatomy of an Online Event in 2009

From the draft archives (we are approaching the end of 2009!), there is some interesting differences and similarities between our online events today and in 2009. Check out these slides from Lucy Garrick. Lucy, what would you recommend today? 🙂

Virtual Open Space Conference 5.09.



 

OLD! The “chairs” technique for synchronous web gatherings

Blast from the past!

This will give you a laugh about the types of things we were doing back in the early 2000’s for synchronous online interaction. This is a conversational snippet from the now defunct CPSquare community (a community about communities of practice.) Skype allowed us global teleconferencing, but no video at the time. I love that dredging this up reminded me I learned the technique from Fernanda Ibarra! The image referred to in the conversation is below. Ah, the days of clipart. More from 2010.

Picture of a circle of cartoon clipart chairs with a name underneath some of them and instructions in the middle.
Just used this today with a group of people most of whom had not used Skype  for teleconferencing before.   I posted the slide  (modified to arrange the chairs in clock mode as you talked about in the FCoP telecon the other day) as a google presentation.  Names were ready in the center and to open I asked people to “take a seat” by moving their names — demonstrating by moving mine.  Then we used the result for the speaking order (group was small  — only 8 people)  — it worked like a charm  — Fernanda Ibarra and Nancy White — you are  geniuses! As you said in your guest appearance at FCoP earlier this week, small things do indeed make a big difference.  One person mentioned the “chair thing”  as an example of “what worked” at the end of the call when we did a round robin of what worked, what didn’t, what would you do differently — so I had the opportunity to mention that I learned about the circle of chairs from you!

best,

Ann Braun

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:00 PM, < Help_in_Real_Time@conversations.cpsquare.org> wrote:

Excellent Webinars Reply #10
Posted onSat Feb 07 2009 19:19:00 GMT-0100 (PST)
Nancy White-
One Small Interactive Exercise per Webinar
I learned this small trick from Fernanda Ibarra, who I think is a Foundations alumna as well, so maybe we can lure her here. She showed me the value of doing some small, easy interactive exercise at the start of a webinar which stealthily increases people’s familiarity with the tool and adds something to the meeting.
Fernanda taught me about the chairs. She puts up a slide (I’ve attached my version) at the start and asks everyone to use the text tool to put their name under a chair. This sets the sense of group/circle/conversation, acquaints people with the whiteboard tools and is an easy, non-intimidating task.
Attachment: chairs.ppt

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!

MOIP #9: What I’ve Learned This Spring

Working from home… in the bedroom version!

I wrote this short article for our Liberating Structures extended network of practice. I thought it might be useful here too!

The last few months have been rich with lessons for our amazing global network of LS practitioners, and all the sub-communities it holds. Here are my lessons that have been surfacing:

  1. Creative destruction RULES. DEConstruct before trying to REConstruct offline events into the online space. TRIZ is our friend!
  2. The six knotworking questions are SUPER useful at this moment in time for developing flexible, emergent plans. 
  3. Critical Uncertainties was MADE for this time!
  4. This is an oldy, but a goody: slow down to go fast. While we can dance with abandon at the novelty as we move and reframe different Liberating Structures online, we must also hold space for people to move forward together when the moment calls. This translates to fewer structures piled into an online meeting, holding generosity to extend our practiced F2F timings and keeping technical options at the min specs, vs max specs. (Purpose to Practice is helpful here!)
  5. Ask for help. Ask specifically and offer your first ideas. This way people are more likely to respond and respond generously. As our Slack community grows and grows, we want each person to find and offer value. So ask as specifically as you can. Show you have done a little thinking already…
  6. Offer help! The connections we create through these asks and offers weaves our network.

There is a LOT more… right now I’m processing what I’ve learned through three series of rather intense online events, thinking about time, space, embodiment, humane-ness and all sorts of good stuff. So more to come. But if I wait to “finish” this, I will never finish this!!

What have you been learning?