Category: technology stewardship

Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity

A couple of people have asked me for more materials related to the Community Orientations Spidergram activity. I have embedded them into some slides now up … Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity. [Edit June 2011 – here is an updated pdf of the activity! Spidergram Worksheet 2011 ]

Here is a hint I should have shared earlier. The “context” orientation is a bit odd on the spidergram. You need to decide if internal orientation is in the middle/exterior towards the outside or reversed. I tend to use internal towards the middle, but I realized my instructions weren’t so clear.

Another way to do it is to ignore the “context” spoke from an internal/external perspective and then do one layer on the spidergram around your internally focused activities. Then with a different color, do another layer on externally focused activities. I’ve done this with a few test cases and it quickly showed that some communities which have both internal and external contexts have very different internal and external activities.

Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity

View more presentations from Nancy White.

[slideshare id=1229819&doc=digitalhabitatscommunityorientationspidergramactivity-090331164047-phpapp01]

Technology Stewardship for Non Profits

Flickr CCommons by y A bunch of friends and colleagues have just written/edited a new book on stewarding technology in non profits and NGOs. Holly Ross, Katrin Verclas and Alison Levine wrangled some authors together to write Meet Your Mission. You can read about it on their wiki, including seeing chapter outlines and “bonus material.” Here is the overall scoop:

Nonprofit decision makers need to know how IT can help extend the reach and scope of their organizations. With contributions from the top experts in the nonprofit tech field, this book provides nonprofit decision makers with information to make smart, strategic decisions about technology. This book hones in on how to manage technology in an organization and offers practical advice on critical subject matter unfamiliar or mysterious to many in nonprofits. It offers a foundation of Information Technology (IT) and shows how technology can be strategically deployed in their organizations to better accomplish a nonprofit’s mission.

Here are the Chapters/Authors:

PART ONE: PLANNING AND PEOPLE.

Chapter 1: Mission First: Achieving IT Alignment (Steve Heye)
Chapter 2: Managing Technology Change (Dahna Goldstein)
Chapter 3: Measuring the Return on Investment of Technology (Beth Kanter)
Chapter 4: How to Decide: IT Planning and Prioritizing (Peter Campbell)
Chapter 5: Finding and Keeping the Right People (James Weinberg, and Cassie Scarano)
Chapter 6: Budgeting for and Funding Technology (Scott McCallum and Keith R. Thode)

PART TWO: THE TOOLS.

Chapter 7: The Foundation: Introduction to IT and Systems (Kevin Lo and Willow Cook)
Chapter 8: Where Are Your Stakeholders, and What Are They Doing Online (Michael Cervino)
Chapter 9: Effective Online Communications (John Kenyon)
Chapter 10: Donate Now: Online Fundraising (Madeline Stanionis)
Chapter 11: Where Will We Be Tomorrow (Edward Granger-Happ)

The only thing I missed from the outline is ongoing stewardship of technology and the related human processes. Once we have it, what do we do? Regular maintenance, how to support use, etc., is a huge part of stewarding technology in non profits. Maybe that is NTEN’s next book!

Photo Credit: by kevindooley

Red-Tails in Love: Birdwatchers as a community of practice

Red-Tails in LoveMy friend Sue Wolff generously lent me two books recently. The first, Marie Winn’s “Red-Tails in Love” captured my heart and mind. It is the story of a community of birdwatchers in Central Park in New York City and how they observed, loved and obsessed over a family of Red-Tailed Hawks that raised a family on an apartment ledge just of Central Park.

If you have ever hankered to read a “real life” story about an organic community of practice, one free from the business pressures of CoPs manufactured inside of corporations, read this book. The narrative is compelling, but the lessons about community life are at once simple, effective and profound.

I thought it might be fun to look at this community, as best an outsider can do (which is usually not very well) from one of the CoP perspectives Etienne Wenger, John Smith and I use in our upcoming book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community.  This work builds on what Etienne has been doing for years. In our research of CoPs we noticed 9 general patterns of activities that characterized a community’s orientation. Most had a mix, but some were more prominent in every case. By looking at orientations, we posit, you are in a better position to understand how to support them with tools and processes. They give you a lens to reflect on how your community is doing and where you might want it to be headed.

Here is a brief glimpse of the orientations:

  • Meetings – in person or online gatherings with an agenda (i.e. monthly topic calls)
  • Projects – interrelated tasks with specific outcomes or products (i.e. Identifying a new practice and refining it.)
  • Access to expertise – learning from experienced practitioners (i.e. access to subject matter experts)
  • Relationship – getting to know each other (i.e. the annual potluck dinner!)
  • Context – private, internally-focused or serving an organization, or the wider world (i.e. what is kept within the community, what is shared with the wider world)
  • Community cultivation – Recruiting, orienting and supporting members, growing the community (i.e. who made sure you’re the new person was invited in and met others?)
  • Individual participation – enabling members to craft their own experience of the community (i.e. access material when and how you want it.)
  • Content – a focus on capturing and publishing what the community learns and knows (i.e. a newsletter, publishing an article, etc.)
  • Open ended conversation – conversations that continue to rise and fall over time without a specific goal (i.e. listserv or web forum, Twitter, etc.)
Spidergram examples of the Central Park Birdwatchers
Spidergram examples of the Central Park Birdwatchers - click for larger image

We have been using a little “spidergram” as an assessment tool, again building on Etienne’s work, but each of us has been creative in how we use it. Sometimes it is for looking at technology choices (like in the Digital Habitats book), sometimes for community assessment and planning. So I decided to see what orientations were strong in the Central Park birdwatchers “Regulars” group chronicled in the book. Here is the image I came up with:

Would you like to try the Spidergram activity for your community? You can find a little cheat sheet and template  here. [Edit June 2011 – here is an updated pdf of the activity! Spidergram Worksheet 2011 ]

If you try it, I’d be interested to hear what you observed or learned about your community by doing this exercise.

And yes, the book is coming SOON!

Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience

Azul DeCobalto vs. Touchez LaSurfaceFor a number of years I have cringed every time one of my clients tells me that have or are planning to deploy Microsoft SharePoint as a collaborative platform. They say it is their “social media” deployment. SharePoint is many things, but it misses the critical element of social media which is networked connection between people and ideas, easy discoverability, makes visible and allows people to act on weak ties, and support for other network-like interactions rather than closed group performance.

I am not an IT manager, nor would I say my main competence is in portals and intranets. My focus is on what people DO with these tools, and very often I’ve seen people struggle with SharePoint.

Recently Tom Vander Wall has posted a really thoughtful blog post that says what I have experienced. SharePoint is a silo builder, not buster. (Thanks to someone in my Twitter network for Tweeting the link and I’m sorry I did not note who this was!!)

In SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools :: Personal InfoCloud, Tom quotes one of his informants:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.” I heard this from an organization about 2 years ago in a private meeting and have been hearing near similar statements since. This is completely counter to the Enterprise 2.0 hopes and wishes they had for SharePoint. They were of the mindset that open sharing & having the organization and individuals benefit from a social platform.

Clearly, the challenges of any platform is not just the platform, but how and WHY it was used. Driving from real needs, not simply IT convenience or standards alone. But there is something critical here that is missing from a social interaction perspective. Horizontality.

Without extensive customization (and addition of external functionality), SharePoint requires you to dive into an area, then back out of it before you dive into another area. It is built on a tree-branching model. To maximize the power of networked interaction, you need a networked architecture. If you are trying to reify and support a hierarchical reporting and accountability model based on the org chart, SharePoint fits like a glove.

Our mental models and values permeate the very coding of the software we use. When people say technology is value neutral, I say people have values and people build software, therefore the software carries the imprint of the designers’ values. SharePoint is a perfect example.

If you read the excellent comments to Tom’s post, there is some great insight as to what Sharepoint is good for and some ideas about how and why it stumbles in other areas. One of Tom’s own replies stands out for me:

There is a lot of understanding of how social tools should work and need to work in enterprise (deeply based on how people interact with others and with interfaces) that must go on top of the technology platform. I have deep interest in that story and that understanding, as it is one I rarely see inside enterprise, but I see with in the makers of the social tool products.

The point I hear over and over from those trying SharePoint to accomplish enterprise 2.0 functionality (open social interaction, ease of use, ease of working in the flow, sharing collectively, aggregating in context, and eventually getting to collaboration) is not the platform on its own to do this without very deep pockets for development. Lockheed and Wachovia are the only big deployments I know that went down this path..

From a global perspective, there are some additional challenges which I brought up during a live webcast (recording of Part1) and web discussion (on Ning) that Tony Karrer hosted on SharePoint a few weeks ago. (If you are interested in some on-the ground conversations about SharePoint, dig around the Ning site):

  • SharePoint is not low-bandwidth friendly. Between page load times and the need to navigate up and down, people in low bandwidth areas struggle with SharePoint.
  • SharePoint does not have many offline options for those who have intermittent connectivity, but the tie in with MS Office can offer some opportunities for work-arounds.
  • For global organizations, IT tends to make the software choice without a lot of insight about field conditions and social interaction/working patterns AND are often lured to use any software offered to them free as an NGO. The false economy is the customization costs eat up any savings and then some for these organizations.
  • Global NGOs often do not have the support team to help with implementation and roll out, leaders rarely use the software themselves, setting poor examples and middle managers have little incentive for creating the culture change to adopt the tool. This is NOT a SharePoint problem, but it is a factor that increases the failure rate.
  • The organizations that have successfully implemented SharePoint have good connectivity, robust IT and support teams and usually have a strong content management (file sharing) practice. Not network collaboration.

See also on SharePoint

And related, a Maise Center report on learning platform adoption which has some interesting parallels!

Creative Commons License photo credit: d.billy

Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge

cc flickr image by System One GangThe word “tinkering” keeps coming up to my radar screen, and it makes me happy. I love the idea of tinkering and find it central to the practice of stewarding technology for ourselves, our communities and networks. Imagine. Create. Reflect. Share. Adjust and go at it again. Experiment. Mash-up and recreate. Build upon the work of others.  It is for me a deeply ingrained practice of learning both by myself and with others, particularly in my communities of practice. 

Last week, on one of our many, many, many calls in creating the Digital Habitats book, Etienne Wenger noted something about a blog post I had here and on the book blog about experimenting with the community orientations we write about in the book. it was about using the orientations via a spidergraph to explore and understand one’s community. I wrote about how Shawn Callahan had taken the idea in one direction, and I in another. Etienne mentioned on the call that he had been doing this for a long time. I stopped short, feeling embarassed that I had not recognized that I had tinkered upon HIS work, and our work, and then Shawn tinkered upon it in his own way. It made me more aware of recognizing the substrate upon which we tinker. The shoulders upon which we stand.  Etienne said something to the effect that despite the hours we spend working on the book together (along with John Smith), we often don’t know what each other is working on. We are tinkering more alone than together. 

This made me realize I had been focusing on tinkering as an individual…

John Seely Brown was recently interviewed about education and he focused on this role of tinkering. He says in the video linked below, “Let me take my imagination and build something from it. Does it work? If not, why not. If it does work, can it work better?” Be open to criticism.  Brown talks about a networked world as an open source world that facilitates this tinkering. And about how our identities are now bound up in what we have created alone and with others. And how others have built upon what I have built. New social capital.

 Take a peek.

www.johnseelybrown.com “I am what I create” says John Seely Brown addressing the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – Stanford, CA, Oct. 23-25, 2008

So we have the idea of tinkering as a way of creating our identity in the world. Tinkering as a way of learning and creating with and for others. 

cc Flickr image by kafkanAlex Soojung-Kim Pang looks at the origins of tinkering and why it feels on the rise again. (Go see the whole post – it is fabulous.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

  • The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology– explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here’s my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
     
  • Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
     
  • The EULA rebellion. The fact that you’re forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you’re just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
     
  • Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
     
  • Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
     
  • The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined– and redefined– by users.)
     
  • From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn’t discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning– just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that “working with your hands” defined you as lower class: “My son won’t work with his hands” was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

 

ilmungo
ilmungo

Anne Balsamo, who has written quite a bit on tinkering,
reflects…

 

1) Why is tinkering and “hand-making” important at this historical juncture?
2) What are the key sensibilities of a tinkerer?
3) How is an interest in tinkering stimulated or provoked?
4) What new tinkering practices are emerging in contemporary culture, especially in light of the rise of makers’ culture?
5) What is the relationship between tinkering and knowledge formation?
6) What research has already been done on tinkering as a mode of learning?  What research might be needed to understand it better?
7) How should we rethink the notion of tinkering in light of digital media?

Anne’s post has more video’s of people talking about Tinkering that were created with the Seely-Brown video shown above. Again, if you are interested in tinkering, it is worth clicking into Anne’s piece. (As a side note, Anne is also interested in the “corporeal (body-based) dimension of digitally mediated learning ” which pings on my recent note on the kinesthetic!)

So are we in the age of tinkering? Should we be paying more attention to our tinkering practices and patterns? How are YOU tinkering these days? 

 

More recent posts on Tinkering, many inspired by the John Seely Brown video.