Category: technology stewardship

Getting used to online interfaces

We are into our second week of the FAO/CGIAR Knowledge Sharing workshop (the first, online phase of 4+ weeks) and I was struck by a conversation in one of our mentors learning logs (we each have a space for journaling.) Alexandra (who logs in as Maria Jorge) has come back after taking the first version of this workshop earlier this year to be a mentor. Joined in this conversation copied (with permission) below, is Michael, another past participant returning as a mentor, and Gauri, who moved from past participant to co-facilitator!

Maria Jorge – Friday, 5 September 2008, 03:57 AM

Hi all,

I think this second time (I participated already in the first KS) I am more excited about interacting with people and benefit from their experiences… I also want to browse through the moodle and learn a few extra tools. I hope to have time over the weekend to explore this more.

I like the new look of the moodle! The idea of having the list of facilitators and participants timezone and city all together is great, it gives a sense of group, of ‘room’ where everybody is together. Thanks for the improvement!

Great to see so much enthusiasm and interaction already!

Nancy White – Friday, 5 September 2008, 03:55 PM
I’m giggling, Alexandra, because I don’t think we changed much at all in the moodle. In fact we exported everything from the old workshop, reinstalled it here, then just pulled out the old discussions!! What seems different?

Michael Riggs – Sunday, 7 September 2008, 09:41 PM
Alexandra, I felt the same way! I liked the “new and improved” Moodle site for KS2 when I first logged in last week. It seems much easier to get around. So much so I went back to the KS1 site to see what had changed … and realized, as Nancy says, not much! I guess the site became more familiar through the process of KS1 than I had realized, and now navigating around seems quite straightforward. Chalk one up to experience.

Maria Jorge – Monday, 8 September 2008, 02:19 AM
Hi Michael,
Thanks for sharing your impressions too, so I do not feel so weird… I guess we learn more than we realized and some issues become ‘naturally’ familiar without us noticing. I think that the idea of a week zero (i.e. extra time to browse around without much extra commitment) was good (I don’t remember this in the first KS but perhaps there was that too and I do not remember…? I started a bit late so perhaps is that what I missed then?
Regards
Alexandra

Nancy White – Monday, 8 September 2008, 10:58 AM
I would love to “quote” this conversation on my blog if you two would be comfortable. It is a PERFECT example of what changes when we get used to a tool and it starts to disappear into the background.

Alexandra, you are right, “week 0” is new. Remember that first call in the first workshop where we tried to both cover the technology and begin substantive conversations? It was a MESS!!!

Gauri Salokhe – Monday, 8 September 2008, 12:22 PM
I can only second what you both have observed. The second time around it does seem easier to use and navigate. In terms of main page (central part) there is one difference – we have tried to put all the weeks’ main activities right at the top. In week 1, we only have week 1 related information and week 0 information is removed and placed elsewhere. In my case, this helps me navigate the space better.

What I also observed is that as a participant, the constant flow of emails seemed overwhelming but as a facilitator I am excited that there is so much happening, especially happy to see that there is so much interaction between participants and everyone trying to help each other.

Maria Jorge

Nancy, you can use our conversation for your blog. No problem!

Michael Riggs – Tuesday, 9 September 2008, 01:41 AM
That is OK with me Nancy.

Two things surface for me here.

  1. Use over time should make things easier. As we master a new interface (no matter how difficult or simple) it should fade into the background so we focus on interaction and content. Design has a lot to do with how fast this happens, as does frequency of use and individual preferences.
  2. Our role impacts are experience of the platform or tool. Obviously when we design something, we have deep familiarity. But when we have a specific role, we approach the platform with different eyes. Facilitator, mentor, participant, designer. So not only does this harken back to my old saw “designed for a group, experienced by an individual,” but it suggests that we may adapt faster if we have a specific role to play.

What do you think?

Edit on Wednesday – Gauri shared some of her reflections on her blog. And I continue to ponder this not only from a “workshop” perspective, but from an ongoing communities of practice perspective.

Crap free computers

It is getting to be that time again — computer replacement. I have let my replacement cycle get out of synch and am going to have to replace both my desktop and my laptop, but the laptop is more mission critical. I’m currently keeping my laptop together with tape and prayers.

My Mac friends chide me to go Mac. I dread Vista, but I am also fed up with the religious zeal part of the Mac/PC debate. Apple has just business practices that are just as awful as Microsoft. Yes, there are design and usability issues. But I work mostly in international development where most people cannot even consider Macs due to price differentials, so I’m mostly working in a pee cee world. If money were no object, I’d have both, but hey, that is not realistic.

What has been driving my delay has been Vista-Fear so I was happy to read these two ZDnet articles, the first on
crapware free PCs from Sony – which might put me over the edge for Sony’s higher cost, and the second on removing crapware from other PCs.

I am glad there is a chink in the ever growing trend of preloaded crapware on new computers. And I have a new appreciation for ZDnet, which I had not read in a while. So many good things to read, so little time.

How do you title a book well?

We are down to the little things to finish up our book, which is currently titled “Stewarding Technology for Communities of Practice.” Some of the feedback we’ve gotten from our friends is that the title is… well…. BORING!

Today we sat and brainstormed on the phone. We are struggling to come up with something more interesting. Our requirements are that the title express what the book is about, and if we get clever, we have to get REALLY clever. Half-clever just won’t do. If we go with some clever title, the subtitles will most likely be something like “stewarding technology for communities of practice…”

To give you an example of our challenges, here is the result of our brainstorms!

  • A-mazing
  • Beyond geekiness
  • Bridging the tech divide:Stewarding technology for communities of practice in the connected era
  • Bridging worlds; stewarding technology for communities of practice
  • Building community homes…
  • Communities on steroids
  • Community bridge builders of the 21st century
  • Compass and a friend: stewarding tech…. (ref to orientations)
  • Community lighthouses I’ve known and loved and navigated by
  • Connect me, baby….
  • Connecting the tech dots for communities of practice
  • Creating a new practice
  • Creating community landscapes
  • Dial me in baby
  • Exploding communities Image of fireworks, big, expanding outwards
  • I’m not such an idiot
  • It’s all local….
  • Kinship to a nest builder:
  • Landing on planet technology
  • Landscaping
  • More than magic:…..
  • Nestweb
  • Nestwebs
  • Net nests
  • 6 twigs, spit and the web: stewarding tech….
  • New affinities….
  • New nests for communities
  • No @#$%^ing way
  • Nova
  • One foot on the dock
  • Over our heads: stewarding….
  • Painting our own reality:….
  • Putting a bow around your community
  • Putting your eggs in the right basket
  • Rain dance
  • Realizing a flock of doves
  • Ship ahoy!
  • Six twigs and a prayer
  • Stewarding tech…. (Ref to orientations)
  • Straddling
  • Steward be nimble, steward be quick, Stewards jump over the community stick
  • Stewarding Tech for CoPs: weaving community nests in the 21st century
  • Straddling
  • Tech to connect
  • Techsavant
  • The insider job
  • The nerd and the socialite
  • The secret life of community technology stewards
  • The social geek
  • The Tao of tech stewardship
  • Throwing pots
  • Tieing it all together
  • Walking a maze
  • Walking the tech maze
  • Weaving community nests in the 21st century
  • Webnests
  • Webs to nests:
  • Yeah! Stewarding technology for communities
  • You want me to do what? A guide to stewarding….
  • Zen and the art of community tech stewardship
  • When Tables Sprout Wings: stewarding technology for communities of
    practice in the 21st century
  • When Communities Sprout Wings: stewarding technology for communities
    of practice in the 21st century
  • Beyond Imagination: stewarding technology for communities of practice
    in the 21st century
  • Connected Communities: stewarding technology for communities of
    practice in the 21st century

Photo Credit:

view photostream Uploaded on June 26, 2008
by The Joy Of The Mundane

More on replacing business travel from Jessica Lipnack

Flickr CC from linh_nganLast week I wrote about Obliterate or strategically use business travel?

Then I saw this post on Facebook by NetTeams wizardess, Jessica Lipnack. Her emphasis on the social processes resonates. It is worth a link here…

Facebook | Jessica Lipnack’s Notes

…Many reporters, for example, The New York Times’s fine one, Steve Lohr, whose article, “As travel costs rise, more meetings go virtual,” took the headline earlier this week. Nothing wrong with Lohr’s article, good, solid reporting with news for the newbies to the area: Cisco’s telepresence offering, high price tag aside, makes participants feel like they’re “there;” “companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales;” and this, worth the pull quote:

A report last month by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, a group of technology companies, and the Climate Group, an environmental organization, estimated that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be replaced by Web-based and conventional videoconferencing technology.

Twenty percent? Me thinks a lot higher. But, numbers aside, where Lohr’s article is like all the rest – and where it misses the point – is in this: Technology alone does not solve the problem. I’ve harped on about this before. Our old motto, “90% people, 10% technology,” is being drowned out by the reflexive action whereby companies/organizations throw technology into the hands that once held airline tickets.

Here are a couple of more related articles if you are interested in this topic of when and how to replace F2F meetings with virtual meetings.

July 31 Addition: As an added afterthought (I keep adding links) this is also a technology stewardship issue. Who is building the capacity to use these tools well? What does their community of practice look like!)

Photo Credit:
Uploaded on July 7, 2008
by linh.ngân

Ask Idealware: Solutions for Tagging and Archiving a Discussion List

Laura Quinn asked me to contribute an answer towards Idealware’s Ask Idealware. It was a great question so I happily shot off an answer in email. It also made me realize that this was yet another thing contributing to my recent pattern of “not getting to blogging.” I have been writing for other publications, traveling and prioritizing more time for my own health – exercise and meditation – and blogging keeps coming out on the losing end. So Laura said it was fine to repub on my blog so my total silence can be broken! 😉

Anyway, here is the piece!

Melanie asks:

I’m working with a group of public radio station fundraisers who want a way to communicate regularly online to share tips and tests they have done in conjunction with project we are working on together to increase the number of donors to public radio nation-wide. The consensus of this group is they would like to do this via listserv. I really dislike listservs and would like to find a different option. Especially so we can easily archive and tag the posts. The vast majority of this group tells me they will be most likely to participate if something comes to their email inbox, not if they have to go to a blog to read and make comments. Is there a blog/listserv hybrid solution, perhaps using rss or something like that?

Nancy White, with Full Circle Interaction, responds:

If I hear you right, there are a number of things you want to support in this interaction:

  • Q&A and sharing of tips within the group via email
  • Archiving and organizing the tips so they can be found later, especially via tags
  • You intend to use the offerings as is without synthesis or editing (or not?)

Here are a couple of ideas that come to mind. They offer a bit of variation – so it depends which of the above activities are most important. The real challenge is most discussion tools haven’t yet integrated tagging even in web interfaces, and I have not seen any that enable tagging via email. So instead of having people tag as they post, it has to be done post-posting. That adds work. But it probably increases the consistency of tagging. Getting a group unfamiliar with tagging to institute a consistent tagging practice is not so quick nor easy. 😉

  • Combine an email list, tagging tool, and wiki. Use an email list with a web repository that offers a permalink to each post, then use an external tagging tool like del.icio.us to tag them. Aggregate those tags automatically into something like a wiki. For example, with Wikispaces you can automatically feed del.icio.us tags into a page. So you can either make a page for each tag, or if there aren’t too many tags, aggregate them on one page. If you do this, I suggest that you have an overall tag (like nancycrazyforchocolate) and then a tag that addresses the specific content of the post. This requires somebunny/bunnies to do the tagging. Maybe ask people to take turns doing this and have an initial conversation about shared tagging practices.
  • Curate the Q&As. The KM4Dev community functions in the day to day via a DGroups email list with a web repository. They pair this with a wiki (using Mediawiki) on their server where they collect “community knowledge” The community practice is whomever asks the question, collects the answers then summarizes them on a wiki page. A template helps organize those who feel a bit intimidated by the practice. Again, DOING this takes time to develop as a community practice. It is finally pretty well adopted by the KM4Dev community, but after 2 years of bugging by yours truly, now known as the wiki pest from the west.
  • Use a blog but set up email subscriptions. I’m not sure – and this would be good to ask one of our community’s blog experts, if there is blog software that not only delivers blog posts by email, but allows posting of comments by email. Here the key practices would be requiring the initiator of the question to actually post it on the blog and tag it initially. And remind people of the power of search.

Finally, I have to ask the hard question. Will people go back and use the archived and tagged material, or will they follow the age old pattern of just asking again? Will they wade through multiple messages or is synthesis going to really add significant value? We find in KM4Dev that community members tend to re-ask, but other, non members, seem to be hitting the wiki, suggesting that the artifacts we’ve produced are of value beyond the community. But in community, we seem to love that personal response that comes at the moment of asking and answering.

The Ask Idealware posts take on some of the questions that you send us at ask@idealware.org. Have other great options? Disagree with our answer? Help us out by entering your own answer as a comment below.