Online Community Still Crazy After All These Years

After months of trying to get our schedules aligned, I had the chance to be a guest at the IBM “CommunityBuilders” monthly call. These are hour long sessions where people who facilitate/manage/care about communities within and across IBM talk about things together.

I am a big fan of Luis Suarez, one of the hosts of these gatherings, so it was easy to say yes. Plus I know some of the IBM community builders -some over many many years, so this was a great opportunity to think together. It was the good folks at IBM who helped me actually see my own practice and it’s value in the late 90’s and I’m grateful.

Luis has his reflections up on his blog, so I thought it would be worth pointing to them and reflecting a bit myself.  CommunityBuilders – Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy White. (Luis, do we have a chat transcript too? There were lots of great comments and questions!)

If you have been involved with virtual communities and online facilitation, I bet it’s almost impossible not having come across the absolutely fabulous work on facilitating online communities Nancy has done, and shared across!, over the course of the years. Her work around Online Community Toolkit is probably one of those essential resources for any community manager, leader, facilitator out there who may want to get things started with their own online communities, or take existing ones into the next level of interactions. Her book, co-authored with Etienne Wengerand John Smith, on Digital Habitats – Stewarding Technology for Communities is probably what I would consider a bible on online facilitation, community building and community tooling…

It was an hour long session, where Nancy covered some of the basics behind the concept of Community (And how not everything out there, other groupings, may necessarily be a community), how both technology and community are walking through a rather thin line influencing one another, for the better, in defining how community members connect with one another and how those connections influence the path technology is following; and from there onwards she dived into an engaging conversation with the rest of the audience through a rather lively Q&A session covering a whole bunch of topics going from examples of effective community tooling, communicating efficiently with your community members, measuring the value of communities towards their stakeholders, biggest new challenges for online communities today, promoting and engaging activities for communities, etc. etc.

Thus I guess I better stop here, for now, and cut right to the chase, sharing with you folks the link to the materials, so that you can have a look right away and dive into them. The link to the video recording can be found over at “CommunityBuilders Monthly Call – Online Community Still Crazy After Years with Nancy White” (30 MB download) and you can download a copy of the slides over at Slideshare or start checking the deck through the embedded code below:

Online communitystillcrazyafteryears

View more presentations from Nancy White.
Luis also wrote something very sweet – which I want to say works in the other direction right back at him!
She probably doesn’t know this, but one of the reasons why I am so passionate about collaboration and online communities in general is due to her own contagious passion, expertise and know-how that she continues to share over the course of the years!

When I started getting interested in online communities there weren’t very many practitioners to talk with. Today it is a rich ecosystem. The evidence is everywhere. The practices have blossomed and diversified. We have gone beyond older notions of “community” and layered on “networks.”  Look at the Community Managers Rountable (see their “State of…” report here), Gautam Ghosh’s guest post on Luis’ blog. The proof that this is a maturing field are everywhere – and the fact that no one of us can keep up with it all. I keep thinking I need to redesign my online facilitation workshop (which I have not offered for several years now – shame on me). But the territory is almost too rich. What a delight.

We didn’t get to the slides at the end of the deck – the “looking forward” stuff. I’d love to know what you think are the learnings agendas still in front of us for working in and with communities and networks. Hit the “comment” button and let me know!

Learning With Ivan Brunetti

Learn through seeing. Learn through doing. Obvious, but so easy to forget.

I’m still in serious work-avoidance mode for things that require the analytical part of my brain. Mostly I’m thinking about two graphic facilitation workshops I’ll be hosting in May (Pretoria, South Africa) and July (Rossland, BC) so I’m tapping into the fertile ideas of my network.

Via Facebook I learned it was Dave Gray’s birthday (hold all comments about birthdays in the social media era!), and of course I then visited his XPlane blog for visual goodness and found a post about a visual thinking practice session he held recently on building characters. Without words. Yeah!  (Visuals at VTS Flickr Set) The group used an exercise from Ivan Brunetti shown in the YouTube video below.Simple. Elegant and I bet, effective (I am going to try it, but thought I’d get the blog post out first!)

I was particularly taken by the sequence Ivan suggested. Get the visual core, then build the context. I would not have thought about that order, but now that I’ve SEEN it, it makes total sense.

via YouTube – Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti.

You can buy the book here.

Debbie Kroeker’sThoughts on Connectivism

Watch this. It speaks for itself and it speaks to me. Not just about learning, but about life. Sometimes letting go is the most powerful (and difficult) thing to do. Thanks, Debbie. (Hat tip Stephen Downes OLDaily)

Thoughts on Connectivism on Vimeo on Vimeo

via Thoughts on Connectivism on Vimeo.

Thoughts on Connectivism from Debbie Kroeker on Vimeo.

Community for the 21st Century Harvest

On April 1st, amidst all that was going on in my family, I had the chance to step into a different “space” and participate in WeDialog’s first online world cafe on “community.” Since this was a “audio” online experience, I grabbed my pens to try and add a visual aspect for myself. Here are my images:

But hold on to your socks, because Amy Lenzo also recruited two of the BEST graphic facilitators to listen and scribe what they heard, Nancy Margulies and Susan Kelly.

. Here is some of the text from the WeDialog official harvest page:

“Conversations for the 21st Century” launched on Friday, April 1st, with more than 200 people participating in a three hour conversation on the topic of “Community for the 21st Century.”   The series is a production ofweDialogue, the new partnership between Amy Lenzo and Ben Roberts, which was formed to offer online services for the World Café Community Foundation.

Participants came from around the world – the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, India and Australia, responding to email invitations from the hosts, conversation starters, special guests Heartland Circle, the Powers of Place Initiative, Berkana Institute, and the Tamarack Institute, our sponsors the World Café Community Foundation, and a wide variety of friendly networks and a robust social media campaign using Facebook, Twitter and various other blogs and online communities.  Over 550 people registered.

A 20 minute round-table of “conversation starters” (a term coined by Heartland in their Thought Leader Gatherings) – Peter Block, Maria Scordialos and Sarah Whiteley and Nancy White – set the context for the full World Café conversation that followed.

Together, the conversation starters offered a wide range of perspectives on what “community” means to them and the ways that they see it evolving as we create, in Peter Blocks’s words, “a future distinct from the past.”

There is a 22 minute audio file of the conversation starters’ words on the World Cafe community blog (for some reason the audio file wouldn’t embed here).

We were very fortunate to have experienced World Café graphic recorders Nancy Margulies and Susan Kelly with us – Nancy for the morning session and Susan Kelly throughout the whole day. Their gleanings from the conversation starters follow.

via Community for the 21st Century – The World Cafe Community.

I simply LOVE these harvests. Brilliant. And hosts Amy and Ben did a terrific job. I look forward to the next offering from WeDialog.

Understanding and supporting networks – May 5 online event

A heads up for what looks to be an interesting event on May 5th sponsored by ODI (Overseas Development Institute) and some good pals of mine. I’ve enjoyed working with Ben Ramalingam, Enrique Mendizabal and Simon Hearn over the years. I’m pleased to be one of the “discussants” with Rick Davies, someone whose work on evaluation I value and follow.

Understanding and supporting networks: learning from theory and practice


Thursday, May 5, 2011, 15:00 – 17:00 (London time, GMTT+1) (That’s 7am Pacific Daylight)

Speakers: Ben Ramalingam, Enrique Mendizabal and Simon Hearn
Discussants: Rick Davis and Nancy White
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/323577982
NGOs join them, researchers collaborate across them, civil society rallies around them, policy makers are influenced by them and donors are funding them. Networks are a day to day reality and an important mode of working for almost all of in the aid sector. They are increasingly being used as a vehicle for delivering different kinds of development interventions, from policy influencing and knowledge generation to changing practices on the ground. But how often do we pause and reflect on what it means to engage in a network or think about how networks work  and how they could work better?

This webinar will present two papers by the Overseas Development Institute that challenge the current ubiquity of networks and offer ideas and reflections for those facilitating networks. Ben Ramalingam will present his paper: Mind the Network Gaps, in which he reviews the aid network literature and identfies theoretical lenses which could help advance thinking and practice.

Enrique Mendizabal and Simon Hearn will discuss a revised version of the Network Functions Approach and how it can be used to establish a clear mandate for a network; and hence avoid situations where networks are established without consideration of the costs involved.

Following the two presentations we will hear comments and discussion from two experts in the field; Rick Davies, an evaluation consultant and moderator of the mande.co.uk website, and Nancy White, a expert on communities of practice and online facilitation and author of the book: ‘Digital Habitats’.

Title:
Understanding and supporting networks: learning from theory and practice
Date:
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Time:
15:00 – 17:00 (London time: GMT+1)

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4.11 (Tiger®) or newer