I’m running like a maniac today, but this post from Eugene Eric Kim is to spot on to pass by. My highlights are the attention to online meeting design, shared visuals and slowing down to really notice what is going on. I hope that makes you want to click in and read. Image from the blog post by Amy Wu. Click to see the whole thing!
Last Friday I was lucky to be the Mid Atlantic Facilitator’s Network February speaker. Of course, instead of talking about something I was totally comfortable with, I decided to explore the application of Liberating Structures to knowledge sharing, AND to explore the use of the structures in an online “webinar” environment. Nothing like jumping off the bridge. But the water was wonderful. I owe a lot to the hosting team (thanks Dana and Fran), the daring participants who were willing to push their use of Adobe Connect a bit further than normal, and the support of the wider LS community of users.
Here are the cleaned up slides. I included cleaned up versions of the chat transcripts in the respective “harvest” slides (which started out blank).
We are building a nice bunch of people who want to experiment more with Liberating Structures online. If you are interested, check out our LinkedIn group and join us!
[slideshare id=31099970&doc=liberatingstructuresforknowledgesharingfinalwithharvest-140211172835-phpapp01]
(Nancy’s Note: I’ve known Sue online for quite some time. She no longer blogs but this post on Facebook and the subsequent discussion thread caught my eye. This line, in particular, resonated with something I had been drafting for this blog: “So if the lesson here is to listen to the people chasing impossibly grand and improbable ideas about community capacity building, then the proof of worth might be when those people put their money where their mouths are in a very significant way.” I wanted to be able to “point” to it in a public online space, so Sue agreed to let me post it as a guest post. Thanks, Sue! The image is from the Chihuly Glass Museum in Seattle)
A decade ago a handful of people harkened to the call to find their own power to make good things happen at the invitation of Omidyar.net. People who came there looking for an inside glimpse at the couple that founded eBay were likely more than a little astonished to find that Pam and Pierre were a man and a woman who rolled up their sleeves and dug right into the sometimes mucky business of better world building right alongside you.
All these years later some of my staunchest allies remain the people I met around that digital kitchen table. It had a profound effect on my ability to trust in both the idea of a reputation-based network (Pierre applied the eBay theory to social networking) and to see the value of investing in seeding a lot of small things that worked and finding ways of scaling them up. Of the many projects that found life there, one of the ones that intrigued me most was an idea Tom Munnecke embraced: nurturing a grassroots, positive media network. As a journalist that excited me. It was indie, and audacious, and too good to ever actually work in the minds of a whole lot of people from an industry far too full of itself to see the writing on the wall.
During that time Pierre poked me in the ribs to get me to try a couple of things that I initially had a hard time seeing the value of. One was Twitter (why in the hell would I want to sit around a digital water cooler spilling my guts about what I just ate for breakfast, and who I was having coffee with now? … and yes, that’s exactly what I said to him at the time) and the now defunct Vox (which many of us ended up using as a training ground for networked indie media blogging). Those early days conversations were a revelation, particularly when he began brainstorming about the use of Twitter as both a first-responder network in real time crisis situations, and also as a grassroots media portal for people responding from those experiences on the ground. Both of those things came to pass. We’ve seen Twitter become not only a tool of reporting and rescue in earthquakes, in hurricanes and in war zones, but one that has been embraced by the mainstream media as their own rapid headline push tool.
So if the lesson here is to listen to the people chasing impossibly grand and improbable ideas about community capacity building, then the proof of worth might be when those people put their money where their mouths are in a very significant way. Take a look at Pierre’s latest project:
and take the time to watch the 2 1/2 minute video that explains exactly why this is so damned vital and cool. His bottomline:
“Journalism is more than telling stories. It’s about telling stories that make a difference.”
And believe him when he says he’s not only in this for the long haul, but committed to making it work. He absolutely will.
Gender keeps coming up in my work a lot lately, both as a theme for meetings and work, but also in my lived experience. I have a colleague who has taken over one of my clients because we both feel the client will take on the coaching and feedback better from another man than from me. In a conversation about social capital related investments, another colleague says his rule of thumb is to ad 10% to women they are investing in over the equal-on-paper men just because he knows it pays off. Women’s role in agriculture is finally being recognized in the international development world. And in many cases, it is the development of good data to support these hunches that is finally helping us get traction in USING what we know about gender. So this article comes as no surprise. Don’t stop at the first quote… read to the second one!
“If you want to create a team that works intelligently, put more women on it than men. According to studies conducted by , Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence…“More women was correlated with more intelligence,” he says.”
Here are the three factors that emerged from the research:
OK, so now everyone jumps up and down and says, yeah, but this is different online when there is more ease of contribution and no need for eye contact. Yeah. Right.
“Interestingly, the findings hold up in electronic collaboration among a group as well as they do in verbal collaboration. In some tests, the groups came together online and could only communicate by text chat. “It turned out that the average social perceptiveness of group members was equally applied, even when they can’t see each other’s eyes at all,” Malone says. He believes this means that a high score in the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test must be correlated with broader range of social skills and social intelligence.”
Online facilitators, TAKE NOTE!
via Groups are smarter with women, MIT research shows | Profit Minded – Yahoo Small Business Advisor.
visualize it
help us see our world clearly
maybe we WILL act
Wow, Gregory Johnson, you are a gift to the world. Scientist, poet and artist Johnson distilled the massive IPCC Climate Change report into a series of illustrated haikus. You can see and download this fabulous material on the Sightlines site (another great resource – hey, give them a donation!)
From the Sightlines article:
Condensing to this degree is not how scientists typically operate. But, as Johnson proves, scientists can also be poets. Still, he’s quick to caution that this is his own unofficial artistic interpretation and that it omits all the quantitative details and the IPCC’s scientific qualifications.
The Entire IPCC Report in 19 Illustrated Haiku | Sightline Daily.