Category: technology stewardship

From the Archives: Are technology and process configuration patterns enough?

In 2009 Etienne Wenger (now Etienne Wenger-Trayner), John D. Smith and I published the culmination of lots and lots of thinking about how to use technology to support groups and communities. Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities was our way of trying to make sense of the tech landscape so that communities could provision their tech without having to be a total technologist.

In my archive of drafts was this post with just one paragraph:

What are the patterns of interaction over time, what are the configurations of technology over time,  and are these distinct enough patterns so that we can simply template the tech and process, or do these change enough with and every interaction?  And we need to know how to do that. 

With the rebirth of virtual and hybrid work, this is again a useful question, even if I can’t figure out what I meant with the last sentence! 🙂

Let me give an example of why this fascinates me. 

We have a group of people who need to work/learn/do something together. At the minimum these days they have Zoom or some other synchronous video meeting tool. Most groups also have a shared document space. For what types of work is this minimal tech configuration (set of tools and how they are used) sufficient? Is there a pattern that says “simple configuration is all you need?”

If the simple configuration is adequate, what types of group need trigger more tech tools and processes? For example, we used to think that groups distributed across diverse time zones needed asynchronous communication tools in addition to the sync (video) and content sharing. 

If a group has more complicated content needs, do they need more tools for the creation, curation and sharing of content? What triggers this next level of need?

If a group is handed a very complicated technology configuration right off the bat (our corporate platform!!) that has more tools and features than the group needs, what impact does this have upon their work? Will they reduce their efficacy messing around and tripping on the tech? Fully ignore the platform? Invent whole new ways of using the tech?

Do you see what I’m getting at… there are both stable patterns AND lots of ways to subvert the patterns. So my question is, is it worth spending time to develop the patterns at all, or just let things emerge? When? Why? (I do NOT have the answer. Just the curiosity!) Oh, I see Ton is also writing about this!

By the way, if you are still reading, I discovered a box of Digital Habitats books in my basement. If you would like a copy and are in the US I’d be happy to mail you one. Let me know in the comments. If you want to reimburse me for postage, I’ll mail one further afield. They do no good sitting in my basement. And you can always get the free PDF on the website. 

From the Archives: Does having 8 legs give the Spidergram more… legs?

Sometimes I wonder what I was intending with a blog draft. Maybe I should have just deleted? 🙂

I was looking for something amongst my Slideshare uploads and noticed that the Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity had..,. whaaat? 40,305 views? Mama mia! (Update: that was in 2014. Apparently we lost views. Today it says 39,706 views! LOL)

Digital Habitats: stewarding technology has been out since 2009, but it appears that people are still finding value from the artifacts. That is gratifying.

Psst, you can get a free PDF of the book here: https://technologyforcommunities.com/2016/12/happy-holidays-free-download-of-digital-habitats/ – Or you could buy a paper copy! LOL!

Screenshot of a slide deck on Slideshare

From the Draft Archives: Google’s Death Manager

Image of a mother and her three adult children
Mom with her three kids

Death has continued to show up in our online interactions. It still seems prudent to consider how you not only manage your social media and online information while you are alive, but what happens to it after you die. Well, maybe all that free storage will disappear and this will only be an issue for those who host their own domain, and I suspect when payments stop, things will disappear. Maybe having our ephemera evaporate is a good thing… What do you think? Since the Forbes article linked below came out in 2013, I have had to manage the social media of my Mom, who passed away four + years ago. I realized I had a very mixed relationship with her social media. I saw all her emails, what kind of junk email she was targeted with, what ads Facebook served to her. I saw she did not know how to unsubscribe or block things that were irrelevant to her. I also saw how important social media was to a woman alone in her 80’s.

Close up of my Dad's face with a glass of wine in his hands.
My Dad

It reminded me of when my Dad died in 2010 and I would read his emails and feel both more loss, and feel closer. I got to read about his old-timey music community, see the last remnants of his and my mom’s RV and Miata adventure days. It took me about 2 years to stop reading and to unsubscribe and eventually let his account go. While cleaning the basement after a flood in January, I found his hard drives which I had held on to. They finally went to e-cycling a couple of weeks ago. I never looked at the content.

Mom’s Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook accounts are still active and I have all the passwords and permissions. I’ve turned off all alerts and don’t look very often. A couple of weeks ago I thought I was ready to delete the accounts, but I just couldn’t do it. What if one of her old friends didn’t know she had died and tried to get in touch?

Managing the social media of loved ones after death is not just a technical, mechanical set of practices. It is part of how we mourn and grieve these days, how we hold on or let go.

A question that used to come up when I facilitated many online communities was how to handle the death of a member. There are many layers to this which we struggled to navigate back in the good old early days of online communities. Since then, people have come up with many useful and thoughtful approaches. Now Google stands ready to help you with all your Google accounts — not to manage the human side, but how to deal with our digital detritus. Very interesting!
Will You Use Google’s Death Manager To Let Loved Ones Read Your Email When You Die? – Forbes.

Moving Online in Pandemic #4: Basics of Online Meetings

4th in a series. #1, #2, #3…

A long long time ago, on a planet far away, Pete Cranston, Susan Stewart, Bonnie Koenig and I wrote this piece, So You Want to Host a Web Meeting. Some of the links are dead, but the advice is still solid. Enjoy! If someone wants to do an update, I can dig up the original file. Onward!

https://fullcirc.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/SoYouWanttoHostaWebMeeting.pdf

Susan Stewart http://guidedmeetings.com/
Pete Cranston http://uk.linkedin.com/in/petercranston
Bonnie Koenig http://www.goinginternational.com/about/

Moving Online in Pandemic: Ecocycle to Attend to What is Shifting

This is the second of a series of posts to support anyone working to move their offline/face to face group interactions online. The preamble is here. If you are an online facilitator or finding yourself in that role, join our group g here. If you are looking for resources, check here.

In the preamble, I shared my thinking that  we need to avoid starting with technology, or even the redesigned agenda as we move online. To make progress, we need to pause and pay attention to what is shifting in the systems around us. Use something like the Ecocycle to get a sense of what is happening at a systems level.

Here is a description of Ecocyle Planning from the Liberating Structures website:

Ecocycle Planning – Analyze the Full Portfolio of Activities and Relationships to Identify Obstacles and Opportunities for Progress What is made possible?

You can eliminate or mitigate common bottlenecks that stifle performance by sifting your group’s portfolio of activities, identifying which elements are starving for resources and which ones are rigid and hampering progress. The Ecocycle makes it possible to sift, prioritize, and plan actions with everyone involved in the activities at the same time, as opposed to the conventional way of doing it behind closed doors with a small group of people. Additionally, the Ecocycle helps everyone see the forest AND the trees—they see where their activities fit in the larger context with others. Ecocycle Planning invites leaders to focus also on creative destruction and renewal in addition to typical themes regarding growth or efficiency. The Ecocycle makes it possible to spur agility, resilience, and sustained performance by including all four phases of development in the planning process.

http://www.liberatingstructures.com/31-ecocycle-planning/

By seeing the whole, diving into the details, and then zooming back to the whole helps us discern a direction forward and useful first steps for moving your meetings online and especially when we are in complex contexts.

I find Ecocyle helps me focus and prioritize rather than get stuck in all the possibilities and challenges. Because it is built upon a flow, we can observe  what is moving forward, what is stuck and where we may be over or under-investing our time and resources. If we spend all our time perpetuating our ok-but-not-wonderful F2F meetings with an unthinking transition to online, we may be making a total mess of things. If we pick just ONE way of going forward, we may lose sight of new, emerging possibilities. If we rush to a single solution, we may miss the possibilities of those who think differently, the positive deviants and ideas that need space to emerge. Ecocycle situates our work in flow and flux, rather than a linear to do list or rigid plan.

Just one more note before we dig in to how to do this. Sometimes we need to clear the field a bit. In this case, fear can cripple. Liberating Structures co-founder Keith McCandless’s work on LS started with superbug infection reduction in hospitals. Keith has been reflecting these past few days about the importance of getting past fear. He has created a playful process you might want to consider, a Pandemic Mad Tea. It can be a well spent 10-15 minutes and really get folks deep into their work, right from the start. (If you want to gain more insights from Keith and his infection reduction work applied to the emerging shut down of the SXSW in Austin this month. Check out this sketch.  It was designed for a F2F conversation, but it gives some very specific Covid-19 context.)   

How to Ecocycle Your Move to Online Meetings

  • Don’t work alone. Engage your colleagues.
  • Turn on the camera. Presumably you can’t meet face to face (F2F) with your team, so fire up your video conference software and turn on the cameras. YES REALLY, TURN ON THE CAMERAS!
  • Read about the basics of Ecocycle on the Liberating Structures website. Then briefly discuss your understanding with each other. Don’t worry if it feels confusing, and don’t spend too much time on this step. We are going to DO it together and then things will clarify!
  • Get a piece of paper, pens, post its. Draw the basic Ecocycle structures on the paper and get ready to start writing on it, putting post it notes – whatever. This is for your own personal doodling/note taking. Next you can do it digitally together.
  • Make a copy of this Ecocycle Online template and share with your team.
  • Follow the steps of doing Ecocycle Planning in the template. I’m including the steps here below in case you want to print them out as well.
    • First alone, make a list of all the things swirling in your mind about moving your meetings online. What are your activities? What are your most important stakeholder and collaborator relationships?
    • Place each activity and/or relationships on your list on your paper Ecocycle in one four developmental phases: birth, maturity, creative destruction, and renewal.What are you doing but you feel it really isn’t working. Position those around the “rigidity trap.” If you have already resolved to stop doing those things, put them in “creative destruction.” Things that have been suggested to you or which you are thinking about, but haven’t yet taken any action on, put in the “gestation area.” Note any really terrific ideas that you really think should move forward, but which are stuck (for whatever reasons) and put them near the “poverty trap” box. Finally, locate all the experiments or pilots in process (both before and in response to the pandemic) in the “birth” area.
    • Build your collective Ecocycle. In your web meeting room, share your items with each other. Discuss the placement of each of your items. You can use a shared whiteboard, Google slides (the template) using self made “post its” with the drawing tool, or share your paper artifacts on camera. Notice what you share that is similar and what is different (there is always useful information in noting both!) NOTE: If your team is more than 4 people, you may want to use your online breakout room and start in pairs, then build up to the whole. Yes, it is worth the time. In pairs you can hear and be heard and discern details that might start to get lost as you think together in a larger group. 1-2-4-All can help you tap your collective intelligence faster than a whole group conversation, even as it feels like it slows things down. Don’t worry!
    • Look at the details. Spend time discussing items that you feel belong in different areas. Tip: if something feels like it fits into multiple areas, break it down into its component elements. Things can get clearer.
    • Look at the big picture. Together discuss what you see. What patterns do you see? Where are there many elements? Few? Look on the middle right, in the “rigidity trap.” Your most liberating first step may be to decide what to STOP doing in order to make space for new and more useful meeting practices (online or off!) Too many things in gestation? Start with the great ideas that are getting stuck in the poverty trap. See promising initiatives in birth? What one step could you take to support and amplify those efforts. See MANY things in gestation? Consider gathering those folks and learn how and why they are succeeding taking their meetings online and build on current energy and success. (Consider “Discovery and Action Dialog” as a process.)
  • Decide what the next step will be moving your meetings online. You might want to consider Purpose to Practice which starts with getting clear on the PURPOSE of going online. Dig deep until you hit the hard-rock purpose!

In the longer term Ecocycle offers us approaches and mechanisms to adapt as conditions continue to change. In other words, there is no magic technology, group process approach or perfect online meeting template, so give that up. Right now is time for evolving!

P.S. Really pay attention to Creative Destruction. Don’t take poor meeting practices from offline into the online space. They only deteriorate! In a future post in this series I’ll share some fabulous alternatives!

P.S.S. The use of Ecocycle can help make sense at many levels. This article explores Covid-19 at the global level. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/coronavirus-synchronous-failure-and-the-global-phase-shift-3f00d4552940