Category: Uncategorized

Random Sunday Thoughts: Identity/Ghosts

For some reason today my blog software noted a pingback from an old post from 2008 as noted by Patti Anklam. So I followed the link back to my original post and was once again struck by Bill Anderson’s Haiku. Here is the text from the post. 

Bill Anderson adds to the repetoire of conference capture techniques with Haiku Notes from SXSW with PRAXIS101: SXSW 2008 Reflection: Free association as a note-taking practice.

Your social footprint.
Or your ghost on the network.
You have to choose one.

Of course, to complement the text, I’ll grab one of Bill’s colleague’s visual efforts, an image from Honoria Starbuck

via Haiku as Conference Capture | Full Circle Associates.

You have to choose. Bill was and IS still so right. Our digital traces are everywhere. How do we choose to leave our footprints?

Something to think about. But the sun is out. Now back to the garden after an old trace reawaked Bill’s Haiku! (And Bill, blog, will ya!)

Digital Habitats now in eBook format!

Yay! A kindle edition of  Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities is now available!

As John wrote on the book blog,

It has been a while in coming! People have been asking about an e-book version of Digital Habitats since it was published almost 3 years ago!  It seems logical, given that technology is a central theme of the book.  Especially when it’s been assigned as reading in a class or workshop and people have scruples about using paper.

Now Digital Habitats is now available in a Kindle edition for $9.99:

It turns out that all those tables and pictures that make the book a practical handbook made it take a lot longer to put it in an electronic format.  And it took us a while to get to it.

Eventually it will be available on other platforms, but we’re starting with Kindle since free Kindle apps are available on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phone 7!

The electronic version goes with the other resources we’ve provided online, such as:

Living Example of Community Q&A Power

Bees, by kokogiak on Flickr, CC some rights reserved

From the wonderful and amazing Seattlefarmcoop : Seattle Farm Co-op comes evidence of the power of online communities and networks. Look at the time stamps.

8a. bee swarm
Posted by: “heatherleagr” (email revmoved)
Date: Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:37 pm ((PDT))

My bees just swarmed!  I caught them and they have successfully moved into their new hive.  I wonder if it is too late for them to build up enough to make it through the winter, or should I combine them with their old colony.  Any beekeepers out there with suggestions?  thanks, Heather

________________________________________________________________________
8b. Re: bee swarm
Posted by: “Andres Salomon” (email removed)
Date: Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:51 pm ((PDT))

Personally, I’d combine them with the old colony.  There *are* still drones flying (at least outside of my hives), but they’re dwindling.
It would take a lot of luck (and heavy flows) for the old colony’s queen to mate, and the new swarm to build up quickly enough to put away 40lbs of honey for the winter.

However, if the old hive has a huge amount of capped honey and you’d like 2 colonies, you could transfer food stores to the swarm hive. Recombine or purchase a new queen if the virgin queen fails to mate.

Oh, and keep an eye out for afterswarms!

When the domain — what people care about — is clear, the repetoire of a community can be nimble and powerful.

7 Minute Segments & Experts

CC Some rights reserved by Mundoo on Flickr

I’m not a big fan of “training” — it feels like something we do “unto” others. But something from this Fast Company article on training at Google caught my eye. I’ve highlighted the bit…

Once a quarter, the company tosses a larger training at the staff, called SalesPro, which takes a deep dive into one particular strategic issue, like display advertising or the mobile business. The soup-to-nuts program takes about six hours, but rather than delivering it all in one fell swoop, or even through a series of hour-long, do-it-yourself modules, Google breaks the information into bite-sized chunks lasting no more than seven minutes each, so agents can download and peruse them at their desks, on their commutes, even on their cell phones while watching Little League or waiting in line at airport security.Online games help agents dial in their knowledge. Leaderboards foster friendly competition. And quizzes following each training make sure the agents are absorbing the new information.“This is a new, complicated, and very fast-moving market,” Dennis Woodside, who took over as President, Americas, in 2009 when Tim Armstrong jumped ship to become CEO of AOL, tells Fast Company. “The challenge is: How do you get a comprehensive overview in a short period of time?”Google’s new tack is a far cry from the traditional methods of corporate training, that of corralling staffers into classrooms or having them click through tedious online modules.

via Training Secrets From Inside The Googleplex | Fast Company.

I’ve been doing a lot of online events and I’ve been trying to break things down more or less in seven minute segments to try and alternate information delivery with more intentional group interaction (shared whiteboarding, polls, chat, etc) If nothing else, it is a good reminder for me to shut up for a bit! It seems to help quite a bit in my experience.

Now here is another interesting segment on the Google efforts that resonates

“People learn best from experts,” Newhouse says, “but they learn best from experts who are not droning on and on.” The secret to the Product Spotlights, she says, is that rather than relying on product managers to dream up a course, the moderator simply guides them to the aspects of the product most relevant to the sales staff. Woodside says the new training method probably costs about the same as the old approach. Its more investment, he says, than cost.

I’d replace the word “expert” with “practitioners.” And really work hard to help those practitioners know/see/feel/hear how important their knowledge is to others. One of the things that always amazes me is how often people think what they know isn’t valuable to others. Most often it is. (Funny, there are also a few who think they are the center of the universe. And they probably aren’t!)

Curating our personal technology configurations

(Crossposted on Technology for Communities and Network Weaving CoP)

A conversation emerging in the Network Weaving Community of Practice (NWWCoP) focuses on this question: how can/do we use social media for intentionally weaving our networks? As we prepare for a synchronous conversation today, I realized I can frame this question from a technology stewardship perspective, specifically the idea of curating our own personal technology configurations so that they can help us tap into and amplify the value of our networks.

What is a Technology Configuration?

From Digital Habitat’s we framed the idea of configuration this way: “By configuration we mean the overall set of technologies that serve as a substrate for acommunity’s habitat at a given point in time—whether tools belong to a single platform,to multiple platforms, or are free-standing.”

For a while I was obsessed with tagging material that helped us see others’ configuration, via my Delicious tags. Each configuration teaches me something new and gives me a new perspective on my own and the configurations of my communities. (See also other posts on the Digital Habitats blog on configuration.) In some ways, these felt like a type of fingerprint. While many communities used similar tools, the individual variations were fascinating. This made sense to explore at the community level, especially with more bounded communities.

While community’s have their configurations, so do individuals. When working with networks, where we are tapping into the value of connections between people, it becomes the intersection of individual configurations that fascinate me for many reasons. Here are a few:

  1. How do individual’s configurations intersect and complement or compete with their community’s configuration.
  2. How does the intersection between and individual’s configuration and their community’s make the individual’s networks available to their community? Specifically, what are the individual-to-individual configuration implications?
  3. How do we use our individual configurations for network weaving itself? (For example, see http://oneforty.com/i/toolkits)

Let’s get a bit more concrete about #3. Clearly a lot of non profits are interested in social media generally, but lets focus on network weaving for a moment.For example, some of my key network weaving practices include “closing triangles” (introducing and helping people connect), sharing information from smaller, closed groups out to the larger world/networks, and curating resources within and across networks. What configurations might I use for these?

  • Closing Triangles – email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook – all to do introductions and to “begin the conversations” while linking to relevant bios and backgrounds. The emphasis is on the social interaction and visibility of individual identity.
  • Sharing Information – blogs, Twitter (and related tools), delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube (and all content sharing sites) – the focus is on publication in some form or another, then connecting people to that content.
  • Curating Resources –  mostly the same as sharing information, but with the added layer of tags, rating mechanisms, aggregation tools.

Managing Our Configurations

A major challenge we run up against in this proliferation both of practices and tools is how to manage this. There is a lot of talk these days of dashboards and tools like Social Base.  I have resisted digging too deeply there due to my own habit of “rabbit holing” and not getting my work done, but clearly this is on my radar screen.  What I’ve seen so far has been more about tracking metrics of social media rather than tying the media to the practice and desired outcomes.

Any guidance for me? What is your practice of managing your technology configuration from a particular practices perspective, such as network weaving?