Still relevant: “Do You Really Need A Community?”

From the dregs of drafts… I don’t think the advice has really changed and the relevance of the question may even be more than in 2008 when Beth Kanter blogged this. The very fabric of communities and the ideal of community is quite frayed since then.

Colored dots of various sizes on a field of light gray

Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: WeAreMedia Module 5: Nancy White Suggests Asking “Do You Really Need A Community?”
Nancy is making a distinction between “traditional” online communities where there are relationships between people in the community and people connecting together around specific interest area or a Tribe. This module has originally put these together under one definition of “community” with the latter being “loosely-coupled” communities. But thinking we need to re-think this a bit. Off to ponder “Are You in the Tribe?”

Maybe the focus on this module should be more “engagement” strategies – and the ways you can do this. If you have a group of people that you don’t want to necessarily interact with one another, but want them to create content — you’d still need an engagement strategy to encourage participation. It would, definitely, as Nancy suggests, impact where and how you might do this.

What do you think?

Reflective ripples and learning

From the draft posts I’m mining, I reread a fantastic 2008 post by Konrad Glogowski on his blog, Towards Reflective BlogTalk.

Remember blogs? Well, even if folks no longer blog per se, there is still a lot of writing we put out on the interwebs.

I was taken by his description of a reflective process he developed for his 8th grade students and their blogging. As I read it back in 2008, I immediately put his ideas into this stewpot of “5 minute reflective practices” I had had simmering in the back of my brain. I thought what Konrad wrote about could be used in teams and communities of practice, as well as in classrooms. With a few adjustments, it might be a very fine tool. This idea of “ripples” is very powerful.

Konrad wrote:

It’s not enough to know how to grow a blog, to pick a topic and keep contributing to one’s blog. Our students must also be aware of the class communities in which they learn. They have to have opportunities to think and respond to other writers. They need opportunities to engage in and sustain conversations about their own work and the work of their peers. Blogging is not about choosing a topic and writing responses for the rest of the term. It is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement with ideas.

You’ll need to go read the full post for the method. He links to his worksheet here.

All these years later, reflective practices remain useful and at the core of my process repertoire. Currently Keith McCandless and I are working on a draft of a new Liberating Structure (Strategic Knotworking) and we both feel strongly that evaluation should be woven into work from the start, not just at the end. I suggested that this is a form of reflective practice. I turn often these days to the work of the fine folks building the field of Developmental Evaluation (Michael Quinn Patton and many others), and to the work of Etienne and Bev Wenger-Trayner and their Value Creation Framework and subsequent book, Learning to Make a Difference.

Yes, it is about meaningful, thoughtful engagement…

Back in the day when I thought Twitter was amazing…

Twitter bird logo in white against a blue splotch of paint. Photo from Pixabay

The blog post about Twitter from the amazing, generative and poetic Chris Lott is gone, but this snippet from 2017 remained in my draft blog posts. 

Ruminate » Blog Archive » Twitter Community of Practice

A paper presented here today analyzing a mobile social network application (kind like Twitter with groups, but only accessible from mobile devices) using “information ground” theory has me thinking about Twitter and the immensely important community of practice that it, like blogging, has allowed me to participate in I’m very curious if Twitter, an analogous system in multiple ways, will demonstrate the same characteristics regarding directed, non-directed, social revelation, witty banter, etc.

It’s still vague, but I have some ideas. One part would involve content coding… what “kinds” of Twitter posts are there that we can identify just by looking at them. A few off the top of my head (and a single Twit could invoke multiple categories… and some of these categories could likely be broken down further):

* link sharing
* social sharing (the classic twit)
* direct questions
* direct answers
* banter (generalized)
* banter (directed to in-group)

This was back in the day when I was deeply engaged with many people and networks on Twitter. It felt generative. In a discussion with a friend today, she said she never uses it anymore. I said I use it when I want to know about breaking news, particularly at the local level. But I never “read” it anymore. Partly because I’m less into social media consumption, and partly because the combination of polarized issues and siloed conversations seem counter productive.

Do you still use Twitter? How?

Image from Pixabay

First there was email apnea…

More from the old blog drafts…

A woman looking at her phone, in a room of chairs but no other people.

I was fascinated in 2008 to read Linda Stone’s work on email apnea. Linda Stone: Just Breathe: Building the case for Email Apnea

Email apnea – a temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email (Linda Stone, February 2008)

Today I wonder about social media apnea. Are we starving ourselves of oxygen, one Instagram or Tick Tock at a time? Back in 2008 Linda predicted “a significant part of every fitness regime.” I think I need to up my breathing practice game.

Bev Wenger-Trayner Place, Pulse, Party

Beverly Wenger-Trayner’s old Eudaimonia blog post “What makes something a place?” is no longer online but in my archives of draft blog posts, this bit of text was saved. It seems to elegantly follow the words of Gardner Cambell in yesterday’s post, that I’m adding it into the slip stream. What do you think, Bev? Your description still resonates for me

Funny, I have been thinking about “place” related to another line of inquiry, and that is place as a recognizable border when I feel I am shifting between community and network. In my networks, I don’t feel the absence of place, but instead focus more on PULSE. In community, and even moreso in TEAM when I am intricately reliant on my partners, place becomes MUCH more central.

In communities of practices, I think I slip between place and pulse. Hm, I think I need to think about this concept some more and blog about it. After I do more housecleaning. (On a roll. Painting.)

Network. Resonance. Place. Pulse. There is something there….

Pen and ink doodle with lines, eyes, hearts, hands, flowers and words.