Community, New & Familiar Friends

Saturday was a great day in Adelaide. No airplanes and no scheduled talks or workshops so I could let my mind flow and not hold tight to any particular focus. Lovely.

The day started with a walk to the Adelaide Central market via the Adelaide Christmas pageant route where I saw thousands of people – families – lining the streets waiting for the start of a parade. It is wild to see a Christmas event in 40 degree centigrade heat, with “survival stations” along the way.

I then met up with Mike Seyfang (@fang), Mark Thomson of the Institute for Backyard Studies, and John Legg and Chris Rawlinson of Helpful Partners. Alas, our buddy Dave Wallace (aka LifeKludger) could not join us. We missed him, because the conversation around tinkering, creatively remixing physical and digital materials to serve real, local needs related to much of Dave’s passions and talents.

Mark had brought up the conversation on tinkering, having seen me muse about it on my blog in the context of technology stewardship. I was hungry for the conversation.

Mike put up a great blog post capturing some of the conversation. He tied it to my Friday preso on communities and networks and it is worth re-sharing the tweets and links Mike put on the post.

fang #edayz09 a community would notice @dnwallace is not here, the network simply drops the (weak) connection … @nancywhite keynote reflection.

Chris and John run a local consultancy called ‘Helpful Partners’ who specialise in making complex information clear and accessible.

Mark is the ‘old tool’ responsible for the awesome ‘Institute of BackYard Studies‘ home of shed culture and master of the great Australian piss-take. Someone I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time (thanks GB) Author of fine books like :

The Central Market meetup was really an extraordinary treat as these four wonderful guys each brought something different that magically connected to what was a very coherent “whole” for me.

Then it was time to meet up again with Michael and on to picking up E-Dayz star, Cathy Moore, and seeing her off to the airport with a few more music stories on the way. Then we drove out to the beach to have lunch with Frankie Forsythe.

With a little break for afternoon work in the cool of the hotel, Michael took me up to Mt. Lofty to see the spread of Adelaide from above and watch a quiet sunset.

Sunday morning Kerry Johnson and her hubbs Paul arranged for an informal tweet up breakfast with Leo Gaggl, his two kids and Annie Ferguson. Coffee, conversation at a relaxed pace was a great topper for my Adelaide visit. Thanks, all!

eDayz 09 – Rocking in Adelaide

Something about the learning folks in Adelaide just lights me up from the inside out. It was a pleasure to be able to be part of the EDayz09 conference were many of the people I met during my tour in 2006 were present. You know its going to be fun.

Thursday Michael Coghlan met me at the airport (how FUN is it when a real person meets you AT THE GATE these days! Shocking and wonderful) then trundled me into town and dinner with Brad Beach and John (whose last name seems to evade me – so sorry John!) where we had some great S. Australian wine fueled conversations that helped me prepare and contextualise for the next day’s keynote.

Facing my AudienceFriday it was off to E-Dayz where I was going to use the springboard question “Should we be using community in learning anymore?” into an exploration of the continuum of me, we and the network as an essential bed for both social and situated learning. The venue was a big, steeply raked theatre style and I felt I should sing and dance. Literally! But I controlled myself. The slides are below, audio is here and video here. Kerry Johnson did an amazing job live streaming the entire event and will get us the video URL

Should We Use Community EDayz09 Keynote

View more presentations from Nancy White.

In the afternoon I ran a much more informal workshop, originally intended as follow up from the keynote, but when we started, I made a couple of offers for options, one of which was to explore the role of visuals in our work. We did Johnnie Moore’s paired drawing exercise and I then gave the option on topics. MORE VISUALS. This went on for the full 40 minutes and I was so grateful to be able to play in that space as we looked at specific applications of the use of visuals in online learning.

All in all it was a great day. There is so much more I could write, but the days are flying and I need to get this posted. Darn, tho I missed talking with Graham Wegner, whom I’ve followed on Twitter for some time!

Canberra Countryside and Communities

hanging with Leigh and Sunshine

Wednesday I hopped on a plane to Canberra to spend some time with the creative and energetic Leigh Blackall and Sunshine Connelley, their two magnificent pooches, Lego and Mina, and spend an afternoon with some communities of practices folks in national government here in the capitol city. After I arrived, Leigh and Sunshine took me out to the beautiful Murrumbaidgee River, about 30 minutes outside of town. We swam in the river and had a nice BBQ dinner in the warm afternoon sun. The water was just cool enough and the current not too strong to allow us to wallow in the shallows. It was a perfect antidote to being in planes and conference rooms, well peppered with conversation.

Thursday, we headed again out of town to Braidwood. Man, I could fall in love with this town. Between the Bread Dojo bread (Matt, you are an amazing baker), the beautiful setting and community spirit, one could be tempted to bid on the old hotel and pub up for auction. heh! Then we high tailed it back to town, allowing me to walk into my appointment just on time and have a great afternoon talking about the ideas surfaced in Digital Habitats and wrestling with the challenges of working in a government organization.

Then it was off to the airport and on my way to sunny and unseasonably warm Adelaide! Mike Coglan met me and we then went out to dinner with the energetic Brad Beach and John (whose last name I did not quite get. Mike as has a great shot of Brad here. You can see John here.)

Online Community Workshops in Sydney

Sorting community issues

Tuesday saw Matt Moore of Innotecture and I at the Australian Technology Park facilitating two half day workshops on online communities. The morning was a small group focused on the newer practitioner, and the afternoon added a diversity of experienced and energetic online community managers and designers.

The morning’s small groups enabled us to go into details with each person and what they wanted to do online. This idea of the continuum from the individual, through bounded communities and out to networks again permeated my thinking and input, priming my pump for Friday’s keynote at Adelaide’s EDayz09. More on that later…

In the afternoon, Matt and I decided to use some exercises to help raise the range of issues associated with advancing an online community by looking at current states of people’s communities, how they got that way and possible positive and catastrophic futures. Frankly, there were some good starts to conversations, but the diversity of the group and the speed at which we went through the exercise did not completely satisfy me – nor I suspect, many of the participants. Matt later reflected that we just made it too complicated and I think he was right. When you have advanced practitioners, the key is to let them share and compare.

I’m always torn when I’m “giving” a workshop. Matt and I have tons of things we can “present” and “talk” about, but that goes counter to a lot of what we preach in terms of participatory processes. Yet content gives an hand hold, an affordance, an anchor to focus conversations. I think we need to get the mix — so we are refining for Melbourne next week where we’ll run the same pair of workshops again on Tuesday.

For me, the highlight was again meeting all the great, interesting and intelligent people and hearing their stories. I look forward to more.

 

Graphic Facilitation Workshop Pictures – Sydney

Monday in Sydney I ran a half day workshop on Graphic Facilitation, then we played again with graphics at the Sydney Facilitator’s network. Here are some images for fun.

Nancy White workshop – a set on Flickr (workshop)

And…


Happy Artist

The full slideshow from the Sydney Facilitator’s network  is here. Thanks to Jeanne Walker for sharing the photos!