It took me a while to fully appreciate the work of Dave Snowden and his Cynefin framework, but now I find myself whipping out pencil and paper all the time to show it to others and use it in a variety of ways. So I was happy to see my pal Shawn Callahan’s nice little video giving a very clear explanation of the framework. Anecdote: A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework
Thanks, Shawn!
Last month I had the pleasure of co-graphic-recording with the amazing Mariah Howard at the ASI Agriculture Sustainability Symposium in Davis, California. I have some of the pictures here and am attempting a slideshow embed below!
First, I’ve been doing some work for ASI for about a year now and deeply appreciate their systems view of our food systems. It isn’t just agriculture – it is all the steps between the sprouting of the seed and your plate, and it includes a hay wagon full of policy as well. The people who care about this stuff are bright, engaging and committed. So it is great work.
The ASI team led by Tom Tommich had an ambitious three days planned, with the work from one day cascading and driving the next day. When Tom said I could bring in a second person, I said “A Graphic Recorder!” I had done some recording as I facilitated last year, but this time the content would be so dense and coming so fast, there was no way I could do it alone, nor do it justice. I’m still too new at this. So I sent a query to the International Forum of Visual Practitioners email list and found Mariah. I’ve known and admired her mom for many years, but we had never met nor worked together. So after one phone call I said “let’s do it!”
Now for those of you who have never co-graphically recorded, I have to say, it is not something everyone can do. It requires a very interesting collaborative dance and a certain “letting go” of one’s own habits and expectations. This dance is both physical (not getting in each others way), mental (co-processing the information as it comes in and deciding what to do with it), and for me, emotional (caring about the other person, respect, negotiate, push, pull, back off, drive forward.) It is an exquisite form of improv and I LOVE it. In this case, Mariah was a far superior artist, and I had a grasp of the content.
Over the first day we did 5 charts. We had spent a few hours the day before pre-planning and sketching out frameworks for each of the panels we were going to record. After the first panel – which was by far the toughest for me, we started letting go of our plans. By the third one we had totally let go of our plans and for me, things started to click. We also allowed ourselves the evening to finish off the panels and I’m VERY glad we did. They were still fairly raw at the end of the program day, but after some time adding color, connecting ideas and plain old “sense making” I think they turned out well. But the decision to “let go” of any pre-planning turned out to be critical, as was the simple act of getting used to each other as we worked. As a consequence, Mariah did most of the heavy lifting of key images, I did a lot of the content synthesis, and then we both colored and wove things together. But the images you see are far more her work than mine.
The content was dense so as you look at these, they probably won’t make sense as stand alone products. But they add a richness and can be very complimentary to the videos .
Mariah was a total pro and a champ to put up with “crazy Nancy.” I work fast, I switch directions on a dime and get really involved. I think it could be overwhelming to many. Not Mariah!
If you have co-recorded, what have been your experiences?
Now that we are a couple of months into the “signal sharing” of the Communities and Networks Connection, I wanted to share the top posts people have clicked into on the site (courtesy of the magic of Tony Karrer). I find that sometimes I am paying attention to the site, and other times it is off my radar. But when I look at the top hit list below, I recognize many of the posts as ones I have read, so for me, personally, there is resonance with what other people are finding interesting. And I find THAT interesting.
The following are the top posts in March from featured sources based on social signals, with a few annotations from posts that I found useful. Notice how many are about Twitter!
Here are the top from April so far:
I can also sort out the top keywords, but I have to mess a bit with how they display, so I’ll save that for a separate time.
It’s time to register for the Connected Futures Workshop that begins April 20.
I’m on the team again this time holding the fort on week 4. My partners in learning/crime are John Smith, Bronwyn Stuckey, Shirley Williams and Etienne Wenger. We are using Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom as our home base this round (we vary each time to add to our own learning!) Note, you’ll get a pre-press copy of the now-infamous and as of yet still unpublished “Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community” book, plus a 6 month membership to CPSquare. So be there or don’t be square. (Sorry, I could not resist!)
It should be fun. Holler if you’d like more information. Here is the boilerplate!
Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice is a five-week workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and tools to support them (referred to by some as Web2.0). We anticipate offering it twice a year. This workshop is a hands-on, practice-shifting, dive into the use of new technologies to meet community needs. At the end of this workshop, participants can expect to:
- Become more confident in managing and combining tools to support a community’s orientation and ongoing activities
- Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools enable one another, are adopted and supported in communities
- Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, community leaders and community conveners.
New technology stewards are encouraged to join us. The workshop includes virtual field trips to successful communities and dives into the use of new tools. We will explore many readily available technologies, including web conferencing, teleconferences, blogging, RSS syndication, microblogging, social bookmarking and tagging, wikis, mashups, and social networking. Each aspect has the support of experts and leaders in areas such as organizational, educational, government and enterprise communities. Participants will work through a process of thinking through new social strategies and technologies to support the ongoing life of their respective communities of practice. Participants will also receive an advance electronic copy (PDF) of parts of the forthcoming book “Digital habitats: stewarding technology for Communities ” (Wenger, White, and Smith 2008).
See what previous participants have said about the workshop.
Requirements:
While this workshop is intended to be challenging, it is grounded in today’s reality for communities of practice, social strategies and new tools. We assume some experience with communities of practice and with technologies such as teleconferences, web forums or email lists. Our aim is to support practitioners: participants should be in a leadership role or intending to take one on, or be convening an existing community of practice.
- Participants are expected to be conversant with basic notions such as domain, community and practice and have had experience participating in or organizing online events and learning activities (such as the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop).
- Participants should be willing to install, run and experiment with an array of tools (such as Skype) on their computers.
- Participants should be confident to converse in English.
- Participants commit to 20 to 40 hours of engagement over the 5 weeks. Since several phases and phase changes are designed into the workshop structure (we change technologies, modes of connecting, and frameworks), participants need to be attentive enough to make those changes with us when they are scheduled.
The workshop includes a lot of modeling by both workshop leaders and participants of learning interactions, stratagems, and tactics using a dozen different social technologies. We are all “teachers” and “learners.”
The workshop is designed to support:
- Getting to know each other and each other’s communities (Community)
- Creating “a workshop as laboratory” (Practice)
- Exploring real communities, from an insider’s and outsider’s perspective to see community orientations & technology integration (Domain and Practice)
- Considering the role and activity of the technology stewards in authentic situations (Practice)
- Exploring the uses of social technologies to stay in touch with each other, as well as for sustained focus on a topic (Practice)
- Experiencing the design of learning agendas and then configuring technology to pursue those agendas (Domain and Practice)
- Articulate strategies to introduce new social technologies to a community (Domain and Practice)
We’re designing the workshop to support:
- Getting to know each other and each other’s communities
- Creating “a workshop as laboratory”
- Exploring real communities, from an insider’s perspective to see community orientations & technology integration
- Considering the role and activity of the technology stewards in authentic situations
- Exploring the uses of social technologies to stay in touch as well as for sustained inquiry
- Experiencing the design of learning agendas and then configuring technology to pursue those agendas
- Articulate strategies to introduce new social technologies to a community
Readings from Wenger, White and Smith’s “Stewarding Technology for Communities” and several other sources on topics such as:
- Communities of practice theory glimpse
- Community technology stewardship
- Tools and their Integration
- Scanning the Technology Landscape
- Orientations: community experience and configuration of tools
- A More Distributed Future
- A Learning Agenda
Tuition is as follows:
Standard rate $995
NGO, Non-profit employee $795
Student $595Participants receive a free 6-month membership in CPsquare upon completion of the workshop.
If money is a challenge in this economy, write me directly to inquire about “FON” discounts. (Friends of Nancy).
Photo Credit: takuya miyamoto
Toby Bloomberg is not the type to let the dust gather. She is always looking at things, asking “what can we do with that” and, rather than just asking, she starts trying and doing. She is a force to be reckoned with!
She is at it again with her latest experiment, Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book. She asked me to be one of her guinea pigs… um… I mean interviewees… for chapter 6 on communities and networks. Of course, I had to say yes. Here is a bit of context. My tweets are embedded. Let’s see if this makes any sense!
So what’s a Twitter-book you may be asking? It’s a book written using Twitter as platform and distribution channel. Social Media Marketing GPS #smgps is the first business book to experiment with this format.
This Twitter-book is structured as a “real” business book and includes: a foreword, introduction and chapters. Each chapter will have a 1 question interview with people knowledgeable about the topic. All posts will be hash-tagged #smgps.
Chapters and interviews will be tweeted Monday – Friday through the end of April. I invite you to join me in this experiment in a new way to write a business book. Please add your insights and learnings to the stream; they’ll be incorporated into the book. My ultimate goal is that this Twitter-book will serve as a resource about social media written by and for marketers. So explore .. have fun .. discover and don’t be afraid to try it out.
Now that Toby is on chapter six, she has sussed out the process a bit and suggested earlier in the week that preparation is worth it, and that trying to not get carried away with too many tweets is also useful. That asks the writer to be both succinct per post (140 characters) and overall. With the size of the question Toby asked me, that was challenging. How to be brief but substantive, eh? It is harder than it looks.
It is also interesting to try and express something that both works read forwards and backwards. Readers reading back on Twitter, get it from tail to head. Those reading the recap on the blog and eventually the “book” (whatever form that might take) get it in order. Tricky. Interesting.
As I tweeted out my 12 140 character or less contributions, a few people wondered if I a) should be writing a blog post instead (they missed the context and Toby’s intro, I suppose) b) had too much nervous energy and c) how they might contribute. I think the burst of volume might not have been appreciated by all those people following me.
Hmmmm… what do you think? 
Are we pushing a medium too far or is this a useful, creative application? Or something all together different?
Here are a few other creative writing experiments with Twitter:
The interview for Chapter 6 is also now up here.