Follow-up from the Leadership Learning Community Webinar

Last Monday I was a guest of the Leadership Learning Community for an short online gathering. The description was pretty loose and they expected around 50 people to show up.

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action
We have so many online tools at our disposal to theoretically connect and activate engagement with others. But what happens when we say “we’re building an online community” but few engage? When is it worth the work and effort? What are our options? And if we build it, what are some starting points to help us work towards successful engagement?

We were using a GoToWebinar platform, which I’ll admit, I don’t like because it is really a broadcast tool, with no peer to peer interaction and all participant interaction funneled to one person (and there were four of us involved in producing the event, so lots of forwarding, etc.)  I decided to abandon a more formal presentation style to try and engage people from the start because after all, this was what the webinar was about! So we started with some polls, and then with my host, Grady McGonagill, we took questions during the presentation and Grady and I diverged into conversation as well. Consequently, I did not get through the material. So I promised to follow up with the slides, resources and answers to any outstanding questions we did not get to. Thus this blog post. Here we go…

Questions

  • Any tips or recommended resources for facilitating hybrid online/phone focus groups with smaller groups (5-15 max)? Also, any recommendations re: optimal group size for this sort of interaction? If the group is all online – you are lucky. The most challenging groups are mixed online and offline. For facilitating, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. 1) Think multi-modality. Audio alone doesn’t work well for a lot of us to stay engaged. Have a visual element – a shared Google doc or presentation, a wiki/chat room in Meetingwords.com or use the white board in a web meeting tool. Of course, this visual aspect needs to be relevant. I really like pairing chat rooms w/ audio (be it on phone, skype or whatever) where people can talk to each other without having to wait for audio “air time.” This does challenge some people who are less comfortable multitasking. You might consider methods like “the clock” both for phone and web meetings (see here and here). 2) Think 7 minute chunks. Break things up alternating content sharing with interacting, visual with audio. Remember, it is hard to pay attention when our bodies are not in the same place. 3) Group size issues are similar to those F2F. Once you get over 5 or 6 it is harder for everyone to have a chance to speak up. With some web tools, you can do break out rooms — just like F2F!
  • How do you balance “quality control” with network engagement/ participation/ responsibility? I was very intrigued by this question. It is probably helpful to figure out what we mean by quality control. I’ll take a guess and someone chime in if I get it wrong. I’m assuming this is about content — did a member give correct or useful advice. Was the data shared accurate, etc. My experience is that in communities where people care about what they are working with (the “domain”) they also care about quality and help weed out the “iffy” stuff. The key is to cultivate habits of critical thinking and useful practices to apply that thinking (which means civility!) If we are talking about “quality people” I’m assuming this means attracting people who know something about the domain. Again, if the learning matters, you will attract good people. It can feel, however, like a leap of faith. One word? LEAP!
  • We have persons in developing countries as well as in places where the internet is not an issue… this produces a big challenge to overcome to connect the majority of them. How do you engage them? How do you make them feel part of the community (normally they believe and put money, but not always participate). Again, I need to be careful in my interpretation of this question! When we work globally, we have both similarities and differences to account for. First, if there is clarity on shared domain (what the group is interested in an how it is concretely relevant to them today!) you are ahead of the game. Many global communities I’ve been involved with have very broad, generic domains. While no one could disagree with them, they were so broad everyone deprioritized their participation. A big tent may hold many people, but a big tent can also be empty. Consider focusing the domain in a way that carries relevance for people NOW. Then make the tent bigger later. Second, cultural diversity (linguistic, national, professional, gender, etc.) can be harder to detect online, but can trip us up faster. I find making these differences discuss-able little bit by little bit helps. Encourage people to share their ways of working and interacting. Compare and contrast a bit. This helps people find common ground and know when to “cut some slack” for others’ behaviors which they may not — ahem — love themselves! Finally, talk about participation — don’t assume it. Ask for small, doable things from people to build that sense of and experience of engagement. Don’t ask for TOO much — people are busy no matter where they live! Small bites are tasty! (See also the next two questions)
  • Do you have any recommendations for technology when your community is spread around the world? In my experience where bandwidth and electricity are limiting elements the most effective technology is email based technology. The use of text on mobile phones is the first technology that might unseat email. There are also community rhythm issues when you have people coming from diverse bandwidth contexts. For example, when you have a mix of folks who are “always online and reply quickly to messages AND people who are online once a week or every two weeks, you can get a lot of asymmetry in participation with those on less feeling left out and “late to the party.” If this happens to you, encourage the always-on folks to slow down. It’s good practice for us “fast fast fast” people!
  • What does diversity mean in this discussion?  How does class diversity and online access play a role?  How do multilingual networks connect and thrive?  What hosting platform handles multilingual groups best? Diversity means MANY things and some have different implications than others. Lets start with linguistic diversity. I have used platforms that have multilingual interfaces — and which one will work for you depends on what languages you need. But the user interface is just step one. That helps people get online. But the key is having a) critical mass within each linguistic group for ongoing interaction and b) “bridgers” who help summarize and translate. I’ve blogged a bit about this issue and you can read some of the articles here.
  • Can you repeat at some point how to access the wiki? I mentioned two wikis. One was my online facilitation resources wiki here. The other is the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, a collaborative effort to capture a variety of online and offline methods.
  • CPsquare doesn’t give much on their initial website — any chance you all can give more guidance on how to connect to it? It is hard to get a sense of all the wonderful things that happen around CP2. First, it is important to know it is a membership community. You can see the blog for free, but ya gotta join, ok?  For example, there is the quarterly “Foundations of Communities of Practice” online workshop which is a deep dive into CoPs. John Smith, the community steward, told me to mention”help in real time” which is a discussion board for Q&A with fabulous people resources, the month telecon on “shadow the leader” where the community hears about the community leadership practices of one person over the arc of a year  (currently Marc Coenders on evolving his evolving business model), the R&D series on student projects where mostly PhD candidates support each other and then when drafts of work are ready, the community offers feedback. For more details, read CP2 blog for news and updates. My shorthand? CP2 is a place to engage with others who care about communities of practice!

Have other questions or thoughts? Chime in with a comment.
Slides:

Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action

View more presentations from Nancy White

Poultry for Progress and the Chicken of Change

One of my jobs a few weeks ago was to facilitate sessions at the Rome Share Fair. This included making sure there was some sort of blog post or notes from each session. Well, I fell behind after one session. I got my blog post up on the Graphic Facilitation workshop, and convinced Sophie Alvarez to blog about the Communities of Practice Clinic Etienne and I did, but then there were FOUR more! Mamma mia. Here is one… from the session on New Technologies and Innovative Approaches in Rural Family Poultry. (Slides below)

Antonio Rota (IFAD) and Olaf Thieme (FAO) have been working on an approach to small scale poultry farming in rural areas that offers a glimpse into the factors that help farmers succeed in putting food on their table and making  living for their families. We joked that this session could have been called “how to make a development project that works” or, riffing off of Rob Burnet’s talk on Tuesday where he talked about an attention getting technique they used, the “Chicken of Change!” (Graphic recording I did of Rob’s talk is here.)

First, a bit about the session. We kicked things off with a human spectrogram (http://www.kstoolkit.org/Human+Spectrogram) to learn  more about the 20 people who came to the session. The group was diverse; some with a lot of experience with poultry and others with less experience but plenty of interest.

While there may be more interest in the stars of livestock, cows, I’ve learned that it is poultry, goats and other small animals that are accessible to the very poor and very rural. Chickens can produce eggs and meat for high nutrition, and selling eggs and chickens brings in income.  These little chicks offer financial empowerment for women. But poultry just isn’t on the radar screen and there are not many statistics to help shine a light on chickens and ducks for development. Poultry production can contribute to the MDGs around poverty, hunger, education, gender empowerment, health, and even reduction in HIV/AIDS. Super chickens!

I realized as I listened there is a ton of common sense in our work, but what matters is listening and acting on that common sense.

Antonio and Olaf shared a story about a village poultry project that, while scientifically sound, ran into some practical problems, like the challenge of finding high volumes of local varieties of chickens well suited to a free-ranging lifestyle, and reasonable ways to get eggs hatched. (Just a side note: in our preparation, Antonio mentioned that some people talked about “free ranging” chickens as “scavenging livestock.” Hm, interesting how language might shape  our perceptions, eh?)

I was amazed how fascinating all the elements were as Antonio and Olaf told engaging stories. There were issues of vaccine distribution for Newcastle disease. Access to vaccines varies by distance from cities and the creation of vaccine networks is critical.. Poultry raising practices in general vary by distance from cities, with more intense production in peri urban and urban settings where there are more resources and capital. In the very rural areas, women have to make due with what they find locally.  And all these things need to mesh with local customs and practices. So is the big pattern emerging? Yes, context! Local knowledge and adaptation matter.

Innovation does not have to mean rocket science. 90-95% of poultry loss is from disease and then second greatest loss is predators, including humans. Villagers developed a simple basket cage to protect their chicks out a wide varieties of material. Breed choices focus on runners who can evade predators and forage in the rural areas, not a slow broiler. In the cities, you can build hen houses for more intense production.

To grow more chickens you need more birds. Brood hens only work for small production. So villagers have created simple incubators that can be built in remote locations. Think about it. If you are targeting 10,000 women with 10 hens each…where do you find 100,000 local breed chickens? Large scale breeders offer “Ferrari” birds that require a lot of feed. Then woman have to decide, “feed the birds or feed my children?” These past dilemmas have caused evaluators to say “Chickens don’t work.” But they can.

Oil lamp incubators were developed by women in Bangladesh. This and related methods are adaptable to different contexts informed by the women’s’ experiences. For example, in the past, telling women to turn the eggs every hour, around the clock was downright impractical. Sponsors provided a lot of training, but people abandoned the work after training. One woman however was successful, but not willing to turn the eggs every hour. She turned twice a day and still the eggs hatched successfully. Voila! Local adaptation.

The training was also adapted, moving from two full sequential days, to 28 days of working with the women in doing the work, solving the little problems. This reflected the hatching cycle. This is where the idea of the buffer zone of sand for the oil lamp hatchery was identified and which greatly increased success. Now new village industry is building on local breeds with locally done genetic improvement through cross breeding for village conditions. This is an important remote option of poultry breeds for the poor, rural farmers and populations.

Few institutions are focusing on poultry. There apparently is little focused research. No one is doing extensive training. So we need more networking for exchange of information on poultry production. And information that is locally and contextually adapted.

The days of projects with blanket design for rural poultry are finished at IFAD and FAO. From now on they will be specifically tailored around social, economic and location specific conditions. Marginal areas need local breeds, local knowledge and resources used for food security. Closer to urban and peri urban centers we can look more at market based systems.

We need to listen to farmers and local knowledge about what is possible and use a comprehensive approach, with motivation, training for success as well as technical advice.Antonio and Olaf offered a word of advice to the new player, BMGF. “If they only invest in one of the many technical factors they will fail. We have learned from our mistakes. We know we need a holistic approach. We want to share what we learned.”

New technologies and innovative approaches in rural family poultry (SLIDES)

PoultryPublication

Noodling on my fOSSa presentation

October is a month on the road… and one stop is Lyon, France, where I’ll be presenting at the third edition of the fOSSa Conference taking place from October 26 to 28, 2011.

What is fOSSa? From the organizers:

The aim of the fOSSa (Free Open Source Academia Conference) is to reaffirm the underlying values of Open Source software: innovation & research in software development.

While the first edition aimed at providing valuable information on the Open Source model at large, the second edition focused specific key-aspects of FOSS such as development, innovation & research, community management & promotion, public sector, and education. The third edition will address in an open-minded style about
– what tech people are actually doing and innovating?
– which are the upcoming issues & challenges in the open development context?
– how open activities, collaboration and knowledge sharing is beneficial to academia, education & industry?

fOSSa 2011 program includes talks about Education, Online Community Management, New Innovating Development & Contribution Paradigm, Openness and OSS trends.

fOSSa days are open to everyone and registration is free !
more information @ http://fossa.inria.fr

So what am I going to offer? Here is my first draft: Twittering: Frittering or Connecting?  The role of transversal connections in online communities and networks.

As humans, we have a long history of working in groups: families, local geographic communities, work teams. Today online technologies allow us to connect broadly using networks of all kinds. We might think of these as deep (groups) and broad (networks). The question is, how do we keep these two forms usefully knitted together? How do the emerging technologies work together as a useful habitat, and when do they actually make things harder? What are the online and offline implications? Lets explore the place of the “transversal!”

I picked up the word “transversal” from Etienne Wenger’s talk a few weeks ago at the Rome Share Fair. It resonated with my observations about the disconnect we seem to experience between high level conversations in a domain and practice, between the breadth of networks and the intimacy of smaller groups. So I grabbed the word and I’m running with it, along with his term “social artist!” Yum. Plus I’ll weave in technology stewardship. So maybe this is about roles, eh?

This week I also have a fabulous case to illustrate many of the ideas I’m thinking of sharing, the #Canlis4Free treasure hunt in Seattle. I took a ton of screen shots and uploaded them today.  But does one dare talk about one of the more exclusive Seattle restaurants when in the home of some of France’s finest cooking? Mmmm….

Graphic Facilitation Workshop from #sfrome

This week I’ve been at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) for the Agricultural Knowledge Share Fair. One of my roles was to facilitate a half day graphic facilitation workshop and then share a report to those who did not attend. (disclosure: I facilitated something like 8 sessions and thankfully some of my colleagues are helping me. Sophie Alvarez of CIAT has a great post on the communities of practice clinic that Etienne Wenger and I did together and Pier Andre Pirani is doing a post on the “chat show” we did on the application of social media in international development. Still to write are posts on the session on rural poultry, migration and land use issues for the Masaai in Tanzania, “making agricultural knowledge travel” chat show and… I think that may be it. Mamma Mia!)

In living up to the “show, don’t tell” adage, there are some beautiful images created by the participants which I can share.

20110929-220930.jpg More here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/choconancy/tags/sfrome/

My goal was not to do a drawing class. Instead I wanted to encourage people to experience then joy of the physical act of drawing, then connect that joy to the power of visuals to encourage conversation and their use in a diverse set of group processes.

After we experienced the joy of beautiful colored pens chalk and the liberation of drawing on large scale paper, we reviewed a variety of visual facilitation practices such as mind maps and mandalas, river of life, sketch noting and graphic recording, card sorting and hands on drawing icebreakers. Participants took turns with graphically enhanced flip chart note taking. Finally we did a quick graphic recording so each participant could begin their own graphic facility toolkit. They did amazing work.

What was more amazing was to see enhanced use of visual practices in the following days of the fair, as people applied what they experienced.

Ironically the next day dawned and the Internet access was out just before Rob Burnet of Well Told Story was to begin his keynote. This was particularly challenging to the Fair team because social reporting was part of the heart and soul of the Fair. So they asked me to graphically record the talk which was fun because one of Rob’s key strategies for reaching Kenyan youth was comics! In the end then wifi was back and the social reporters tweeted about the analog note taking!!

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