Picnik Photo Fixing

Picnik is cool. I should be answering emails, and instead I'm cleaning up photos on Flickr. That's why I like this little web based photo editing app - I can work right with my Flickr photos. Very cool!

Tags: flickr, photos, picnik

Interview with Amy Lenzo, Tech Steward

I've been connected with The World Cafe community for just over a year now, and have enjoyed watching the very caring team that supports it both online and offline. Because of my fascination with Community Technology Stewardship, I'm trying to share stories about stewards in action. Amy Lenzo, the tech stewards of the community, agreed to let me interview her today. Here it is, my first "sort of" podcast. Forgive the audio quality on my side - I've just gotten VOIP telephone service and some things are not quite right. Ugh.

The picture below is the one we reference in the conversation. I love how Amy and her fellow stewards have used a visual vocabulary to "talk about" the community's technology configuration. And of course, beauty is part of the ethic behind the work.
Here's the audio...

Tags: technologystewardship, TheWorldCafe, Amy_Lenzo

Community Tag Collage

Community Tag Collage
Originally uploaded by Choconancy1.

I can't seem to blog via blogger, so I'm testing to see if I can blog via Flickr. My webhost is trying to see if there is anything that is messing up on the server side. Oi, this is frustrating. But at least, if this posts, there will be a picture.

Tagged again - Media Consumption

Meme's Kleen Kitchen
Originally uploaded by Charles & Clint.

Tara tagged me for a new one on media consumption. This meme was started by Jeremiah Owyang, calling it "media consumption diet."

Web:
I use the web so much, I think I could have an enormous list. I'll just include the obvious to save you from total boredom.

• I use Firefox for a browser, with IE on hand for sites that force me in that direction (currently my new VOIP web interface for one - I don't like that.)
  
• Email is the good ole' Eudora (soon going Open Source!)
  
• Bookmarks - del.icio.us, occasionally Furl and Mag.no.lia. I actually use my browser book marks for a few key sites.
  
• RSS reader - Bloglines. I have played with Google's RSS reader, but jeeze, how many Google apps is it healthy to use? (I use Gmail for back up, Google docs and spreadsheets, Google Groups, etc. etc.
  
• Wikis? Mostly Wikispaces, but also PBWiki and MediaWiki.
  
• Collaboration tools? Basecamp, WebCrossing, and little bits of paper (still)
  
• Twitter as of today (I think this is a mistake, but it has already proven useful)
  
• For IM, Skype, and Trillian for combining all the other standards
  
• Countless other web based sites and tools. I'm hopeless.

Radio:
Local classical and NPR stations and random stuff on the web. I don't listen to a lot of radio.

TV:
Don't ask. Too much. I feel guilty.

Movies:
Netflix about 2 per week, movies at theaters during holiday periods.

Communication:
I now have VOIP telephone (via Speakeasy), do a ton of Skype as my collaborators and clients are all around the world. Far more voice than I can ever remember and at a point I find it more tiring than text. I have a mobile phone I only use on the road and so my kids can reach me. I have a second sense for communicating with my mom. I know when she is about to call.

Books:
One word, addicted. Second word, stacks. Third thought -- never get through them all. But bookstores and Amazon love me. 'Nuff said. I started putting books into Library Thing but did not get very far. I'm clearly distracted by all this "social" media. Harrumph!

Magazines:
Not many. I have a National Geographic subscription from when I graduated high school (started by my great uncle Andrew). I pick up food mags at the grocery store and pick up anything left behind on airplanes to pass the time while traveling.

Newspapers:
Local paper, The Seattle Times. Gotta get that local news.

Music:
World, classical, folk, and whatever passes by me. I don't spend as much time listening as I used to. I've grown fond of quiet.

Now, if my friends don't shoot me, I'll tag Beth, Jim (who I know has a very interesting media diet), Tina (new friend), Jon and... YOU! (comment and I'll tag you. Lets get random!)

Tags: memes, media_diet

Holding Paradox in the Palm of Your Hand - Northern Voice 2007

Here is the audio from the session I led at Northern Voice on Saturday. My slides are a mess, but here they are, along with the audio... Holding Paradox in the Palm of Your Hand - Northern Voice 2007

Tags: NorthernVoice, three_tensions, technologystewardship, paradox

Visual Memories of Northern Voice 2007

Northern Voice 2007
Originally uploaded by kk+.

There were LOTS of pictures taken at Northern Voice this year. One friend mentioned the amount of high end photo gear was way up from last year. I saw a small bank's worth. As a result, there are lots of pictures to play with, many quite bloggable.

Kris Krug (kk+ on Flickr) is always sure to bring warm people pictures. I also enjoyed the pictures of Rachael Ashe and her very imaginative Dyptichs. Rachel's images paired the picture of a person with the tool or technology they were using. With all my muddling about technology stewardship, these pictures really visualized the relationship we have wit technology in a very human way. I loved them. Here is the one Rachael too of me (posted with permission).

Finally, the last set I'm enjoying is of the "human graphing" we did in Zach's Moosecamp session, trying to visualize ourselves as bloggers. These photos are the artifacts of the experience Zach invited us into, to have a conversation about who we are as bloggers. I love how people have now gone in and added notes and comments to explain the work. I hope he does more work like this and I certainly have thought about doing more of it myself.


Tags: nvoice2007, NV2007, Northernvoice, Flickr, photos

Elbowing Our Way Into Understanding

Northern Voice 07 - Moosecamp
Originally uploaded by Cyprien.

From the session Lee LeFever and I did at Northern Voice 07 - Moosecamp on Online Community. We took notes in the form of tags on a huge blackboard.

What the heck is Technology Stewardship Video

Here is a video (thanks Bryan) from Ignite Seattle two weeks ago. I posted the slides. Now you can see the hyper presentation. Where is the speed dial so we can slow it down? ;-)

2.1.7 Nancy White - What the bleep is a Community Technology Steward 2007-02-13 Ignite Seattle

Click To Play

Tags: igniteseattle, technologystewardship, techreport, technologyforcommunity, Seattle, nancywhite

Early Registration Deadline Feb 26 for Anecdote "Narrative Techniques for Business" workshop in Seattle

My friend Shawn Callahan will be in Seattle March 26th and in Boston on March 29th to run his Narrative Techniques for Business day long workshops. I wanted to shout out to my Boston and Seattle colleagues to recommend the workshop. Here is some background (the rest at the link above).

Story listening is not something you can learn from a manual. This workshop teaches how to find and collect stories, how to make sense of the stories and then how to design interventions that improve how things work. Participants practice each step in the process with one another and receive feedback that improves their understanding and ability to work with organisational stories.

After the workshop, participants have access to an online forum to share what they learn when they return to their organisations to apply the narrative techniques. The online forum also serves as a place to ask questions and receive suggestions in the context of real-world implementation.

Workshop topics covered include:

* when narrative approaches make sense and when to use other techniques
* how many participants to involve in story gathering and the characteristics you should look for in selecting them
* two techniques that effectively elicit stories from just about anyone
* which media to use for preserving and analyzing stories
* ways to extract meaning from a large volume of stories
* how to formulate ways of tackling truly complex problems based on lessons from the stories

By the end of the day, you will be prepared to run a story listening project using the narrative techniques you have learned and practised. This might aim at collecting lessons learned from a large project, improving employee satisfaction, smoothing the way for massive organisational change or enhancing occupational health and safety.

Tags: Anecdote, Shawn_Callahan, storytelling

My Blog is Still Hosed

Dear readers. I do hope you are reading this via RSS feed, because the main page of my blog still doesn't display most of the time. Blogger does not respond to my posts in the help group nor email sent to support via their system.

Unfortunately I'm too busy to move on the short term. I am looking into my options and hope to have this resolved in the next week or so.

I am NOT a happy Blogger blogger today.

Tags: Blogger

Northern Voice: Social Software for Learning Environments

Regular live-blogging caveats apply:

D’Arcy Norman
Going to show three examples.
Weblogs.ucalgary.ca – started off after Nvoice 2005. Downloaded Drupal and installed, not knowing if students would use it or if faculty would care. Needed a place to play with the tools. For months in languished. Over the last year two profs are running course in it. We use Blackboard on campus. (Editorial non comment on BB). Conversations on BB suck, but it doesn’t feel right. What these two profs found they could do some interesting things. We use Drupal with the concept of groups. At the top we have a groups tab. All the groups in the system. They aren’t defined by the institution, but whomever is using the system. A professor. A student. The profs created groups, students enroll and they are given a reading topic. They find articles, synthesize and write a blog post. Then they comment on each others stuff. They are doing cool conversations. Amazing stuff, and stuff that they tell us they were not doing at this level with other tools.

Copied and pasted this for a specific project with the teacher of education. The students are in schools doing practicum. They do review notes. Used to be in a blue binder and then they can’t keep adding notes while prof has it. Closed the blogs space and now they can add their stuff. They could determine who could see what. Small groups to have semi private content. What surprised D’Arcy – it has the same groups tab, because anyone can create groups, they created groups like “special topics epiphany” and 12 people joined it. Every time they blog on it, it goes in there. They don’t have to search for it, but go to areas people have self identified as emphphanic moments. Research groups, social events. Their own subtopics. Little ad hoc groups, self-assembling on the fly. Changing the learning environment. No longer “you shall log in to Blackboard and post three posts and by the way, it disappears after the end of the course. In this self-aggregating, self forming community, which persists afterwards. They push to retain the community after graduation and still participate, keep in touch. Like Anil was talking about. You can do this. Scaling it up to 400,000 students this fall. You can keep in touch with 12 students, not 300 if you want.

PEAK: Calgary health region. Practice Enhancement Achieved through Knowledge. The idea is for Canmore hospital. A doc may have a question about something, may not have time to research. A social FAQ manager. A team of researchers go out and find info, synthesize results and put it back. Personal Learning Project library. You can see when questions submitted, which are answered/unanswered. Practitioners are using this as part of their practice. They don’t usually get the chance to get this sort of communication and support.

Q: Have you looked at interconnecting classes over the year cohorts?
A: Sort a hurdle. Some profs want each year to start fresh. Some profs create new groups for each semester but old groups are still there. All the previous writings are available. How do you give new research topics if all of the previous stuff is there. Prof actually has to do their job. More locus of control for students to do original stuff.

Q: On the groups. Assuming you do want year to year, how can you increase focus on current information and less on old groups. So folks don’t lose attention.

A: We use a logic called “views” that weights chronological order.

Drupaled.org – languished. A few in higher ed drupal community, set up an adhoc group. Stuff at Penn State, U PEI, UBC. Trying to get a group together.

Chris Lott: Qualitatively we are living at a different time. Our students are chahing. The information ecology has changed. We have not been adapting to those changing ecologies in education. Particpatory culture, change in tech, bandwidth and growth of information. 50 Exabits (50,000 libraries of congress, 2 all the words spoken since the dawn of speech)

3. Advances in learning theories. If you are outside of the education institution, it may seem like we are not taking these into account. Connected knowledge, connectivism are taking this change into account. How do you take a student who may be used to a passive environment into active, into a culture of participation, into digital and iformation fluancey. Different. Being able to say I need to go to the bathroom and being elegant in the language. That issue will dwarf the technical access divide.

Critical thinking – we talk about it all the time, but do we really know what it means. Emerging pedagogy taking into account the changes. Not the information I store but the ability to maneuver the network, community learning groups, tied to external CoPs,, which allows them to create for themselves their personal learning environment beyond the bounds of the institution. We don’t control semester to semester, but we are invited into their environment, the third space, the space of being a lifetime active learner beyond the intuitions. Ad hoc interaction. The student archives and creates, with ties to needs ofr ID management, to keep their portfolio active. That is happening with Web 2.0, social software and education can’t be blind by that. http://www.chrislot.org/wiki

A lot of obvious problems. What is critical thinking? An incremental approach which does not sever academia. Disruption. New blood. New thinking. Computers are stupid, humans are smart, separating fad, charting the unmapped territories. A whole new way to work with students and encourage learning that we’ve never had before.

Q: Many people work within technology in a university. I work in the classroom. I haven’t been able to bring tech into non tech department. They say go to computing.

A: I got into this because I am a poet. Our fluency is about that. Insinuate into programs. Anthro, English. If you are a publishing poet and teaching poetry and you don’t know about poetry blogging, we need to present these new opportunities. It is not a tech thing, but a learning thing.

Q: What’s your opinion on the danger of dissociation of distributed knowledge. Promoting an active life long approach, but relying on flat forms that are not life longed and not owned by the student. Each new application in each new environment.

A: Aspect of balance. New kinds of active learning does not mean we abandon all the old forms. Decisions. Come up with at set of tools, identified by function, not name of tool. Interchangeable. Realizing when we rely on services, even the biggest services can go away. What do you do. If institution sponsors it. Long term commitment not sure institutions are ready to make.

Ideally the institution should not have to provide that. The library – their job do to that. Would love to see the library reinvented as social learning spaces, serious about archiving. Starting point.

Q: In teaching teachers to integrate. Some embraced – history teachers, but general resistance for profs, point it to their TA’s instead. How do you bridge that for older teachers, or younger with classical approaches.

A: We work with those who are willing to work and the tide will rise all ships (or some will drown and float away)

Q: Librarian, teaching information literacy, hard to sell. So how do you sell the fluency?

A: Literacy is disconnected from the technology. PPT, blah, framing an argument, yay? They don’t kn ow you need the literacy first, but the fluency attracts them.

Q: I teach HS, just finished university. One of the problems is getting students out of high school, where HS did not have resources to integrate tech. The cost of uni and everyone willing to take the time to get into this. A bit idealistic until you can build the foundation in secondary school for a natural progression.

A: Ideally yes. But the other thing is, we have a lot of Alaska Native students. Not about taking time out from work or job as a student, but direct integration into the curriculum. Given a perspective shift on how to use it. Gigantic underserved.

A: work with faculty of education who are affecting K-12.

Jon Beasley- Murray
I’m not in educational technology, teach Latin American Studies at UBC. Thanks to Brian getting into the blog business, getting a little too positive so will try and have a few negatives.

The one ideas is to trying to see where we are getting anti-social software. The software is anti social. In Anil’s talk, passed over the obvious critique that this software is meant for the fragmentation of existing communities, missing national attention. Positive side to that, through blogs and such one can construct counter communities. Anti social communities that question certain forms of sociality and community. Most of all, through blogs, because they are excessive, optional, frivolous, unimportant and a little bit risky. I want those qualities to remain. Honeymoon between institution and blog implies some sort of marriage just being consummated. Prefer to maintain tension there.

Ways I use my blogs for research and teaching. The most recent post I made is an antisocial gesture here at UBC. We are told we are on some great trek to the future. Why is the notion of trek so attractive to admin. Also the founding myth of the apartheid state of South Africa when the term was first used for UBC.

My blog is not on Brian’s site, on blogger and not part of the institution. Marginal place to direct pot shots from. I like the fact it is not on my CV., not institutionally recognized. I had to update my CV on a university form to categorize all of my life to get points. The blogs weren’t on the CV. There was no space for them and I don’t want there to be a space. Extra liminal marginal space to think beyond the institution.

Second, think about student blogs as a space beyond, excessive, where students can take their own position on what we are doing in the classroom. I get my students to set up a blog for the courses they are taking that I’m teaching. They have the option of a UBC blog or external blog. None of them have chosen UBC. That’s the idea. They have ownership of the space. I have no power to delete their postings, tell them what color, what icons. It is their space where they answer back. I teach a course on bad Latin American literature and they like it. I tell them in the classroom why they should not like it, and then they tell me in their blogs why they DO like it. With the comments, others can chime in. Constructing a counter community, a back chat outside of the class. Enable disruption, critical thinking.

Q: You mention your blogs are separate. On Chronicle of Education, still an issue of people getting fired. How do you handle that from a tenure perspective.

A: It is one of the risks. The jury is still out if grad students who are going on the market, Chronicle of Higher Ed. Balance recklessness and risk with making it manageable. It is a risk also for students. Maybe we wait a while till we are hiring people and they HAVE to have a blog. It is always going to remain risky. Taught a course on Civil Rights in LA. A student’s paper doing a critical analysis of an article. He was critical. Second comment was from the AUTHOR of the paper. The author googled her name, discovered this jumped up student had seen her paper as poorly constructed, etc. The student was exposed to this possibility. Fortunately the author was kind. They could have written a much more unfriendly comment.

Q: Noticed about academic community, as much lip service paid towards open dialog, the amount of archived commentary and critical review of work outside of traditional pub streams is almost non existent. The notion of a public dialog about veracity, quality of work doesn’t happen. It happens chatting at conferences, with people you trust. The promise of blogging, esp with students, academics are going to be faced with more open, critical response. Unconstrained and not like typical academics.

Q: he’s describing accurately the N American academic tradition. Impression that in other cultures more efforts to engage with the public editorial space. Is your impression in other academic cultures, non north am, no western, the engagement with the public thourgh the blogosphere is happening.

A: Huge, important issue. The different ways of relating with public, intellectuals, different in France, Argentina. Against some versions of the public intellectual as well. Problematic category. The university wants you to serve the community in more and more trite ways, a market orientation. We have consumers, not students. I want to disrupt that a little bit too. Challenge that blogs and this tech pose for the institution.

A: Chris: the public conversation is happening more and more. But we are all working in a niche.


Sylvia Currie:
I’m totally an asynchronous multitasking person, so I have to stay focused. I have two parts because torn about what to focus on.

First, show you an online community called SCOPE but we can’t remember what it stands for m. I want to look at this, because we have some problems we need to solve, all around the creation of boundaries and how we extend beyond that. Then zone in on a seminar discussion taking place on blogging in education. Very active discussion. Trying to pull out highlights.

ScoPE
We started a couple of years ago, an open international online community. The pulse of the community is scheduled facilitated conversation (volunteer from community). We also envisioned at the time ongoing conversations. What we’ve found is that is not happening. One of the initial designs was based with an earlier online community from 1999. Relying on my old expertise and started to build in some areas we though would be useful, but haven’t been used. This is one example. Kaleidoscope. People can do whatever they want. Pose a question. It just hasn’t happened. People are doing that on their own blogs outside of the community. So we want to find ways to extend beyond that boundary. People are reading seminars through RSS feeds, familiar with what we are doing but not actively contributing. Who are these people and how do we keep track of them.

We created this SCOpe bloggers feed, the known blogger members and feeding that in. Mini step. Another example – we have this community library. The stupidest idea every. We have a podcast repository. Find this place to deposit a link to a podcast so other knows about it. No one has done anything there. Latest news – no news!

The seminar discussion over the past couple of weeks, about 40 active contributors who are posting, a whole lot of others reading. I like to include them as participants. Hard time keeping up.
One, pulling resources into a wiki. We usually do this alonga seminar. Have something substantial at the end of a couple of week. Example of a blog from Moosejaw. A terrific example of blogging in younger grades. She has a classroom blog, innovative. Kids Skyping. That is going ot get to their parents, community, more aware of what students are doing. They did a project to figure out what thousand looks like. Wiki and asked people to post their names until they reached 1000. One student’s blog. “About the blogger”, first time actually seen a blog for young young grades.

Messy map Mind Meister collaboratie mind map for key items from discussion. Next step will be to collaboratively write a book about blogging in education together. Create a space, you all can join. We are finding there are many great ideas.

Here are Sylvia’s Big Questions at http://www.wiki.northernvoice.ca//Social-Software-in-Education
What makes a successful student blog?
How do instructors design for collaboration?
Is there danger of new tools, old rules trend?

Q: I’m a SCOpe meber. International community, diverse view, but often similar challenges.

A: when I think of my own work at Aboriginal College. What I do here is at one end of the continuum and there at the other. The basics. So many concerns about privacy, about students posting things that might reflect badly on the institution. You come across people from other countries and it does not even come across their mind. How did we get so wrapped up in these issues.

A: Chris –making community from anybody. Be inspired. Commit an act of literature now. How do you MAKE community.

A: It depends on the kind of community. Through the history of online communities, the ones that have worked are communities of interest and support communities. CoPs have not worked. Hard to get them actually happening. Finding the right balance between the community and individual benefit. You have to figure out the ROI for the individual to participate in the community. For support and COI it is natural. “I need to engage to do what I want to do.” With CoP’s you don’t need to engage in a CoP. (NOTE: I would disagree with that. Maybe he is talking about mandated CoPs, not organic ones.)

A: D’Arcy – is it more about top down or bottom up. That’s what matters. By doing what they are doing, they are members of the community

A: Chris, new tools allow CoPs to emerge.

A: You talk about course management systems, RSS is that interstitial moment between the class, these spaces, nerve endings that link a community or campus outside a classroom, but integrated it into it. It is a different kind of space, about learning, about how you learn, anyplace, anytime. It’s a livable thing in some real way.

Tags: nv2007, Northernvoice, edublogging, social_software

Northern Voice: Building Rich Communities with Wikis

Here is my post-session, not-quite-live blog of this terrific session with Stewart Mader and John Willinsky.

(Education context)

Stewart
Thanks to Cyprian (Lomas) to recognize the value of wikis at a blogging conference. The kind of community . Two sided community, a collaborative book of 10 case studies on blogging in education and the community of readers of that book. Design considerations. Like questions during the conversation.

Backstory: a different way of writing. Blogging close to 4 years. In 2005 started blogging about wiki in education. My own teaching. At conferences with others using wikis to do collaborative work. Started an interview series on my blog. Still going now, shifting into the wiki. Conduct the conversation via IM. What a person was doing, aim, how, approach to change something about their current teaching. What grew out of that was this aggregation of disparate knowledge from disparate sources. More than a few blog posts or an interview series. To get enough out of it. Was a blog post the right medium. So thought about a set of case studies. Then maybe since our group is disparate, to this day I’ve only met one of the people in person. The rest all virtually. Get everyone together in some meaningful way we could work together, a collection of individual work and reflection with a common theme flowing through them. We needed a place where we could work on our work and look at others work for suggestions and interplay.

Talk the Talk
Do the book about wikis on the wiki. www.wikiineducaiton.com
Over time, there are 11 case studies, ongoing project. We released the first version last October. Interesting conversation about community and product. This only exists on the wiki. We made that decision. I talked to several publishers. I told them what I wanted to do. Maybe we write this on the wiki, make available to readers on the wiki. Publishers did not like that. Something I could not budge on for the critical reason that to truly look at this inherently social medium which requires participation, you can’t put it into a form tha tonly allows passive consumption, not participation, sharing, reflection.

We ended up publishing it on the wiki. Example of the chapter. Some are open and readers can make changes. Others are closed. Not a requirement – an author decision. The open and closed is a good thing. Some wanted a narrative and explain and sum up. There is not a lot of room for edits. Some were open ended. Ended paragraph with questions to reader. Asked people what they thought about what the author was doing.

At the same time there is a button to export to PDF, so if they wanted to take it, get the tangible output, that’s available too. More flexible than a print book. We do more dynamic things.

Q: What software –

A: full disclosure, I work for the company. They approached me and offered it (Atlassian Confluence) and I wanted it. An enterprise wiki where you need multiple wikis, a sys admin role to manage sites. I liked the software and wanted ot use it. Allowed a level of visual customization to look at lot like my blog. Important to have the wiki look like the blog. One of the complaints I’ve heard about wikis, for a new person it looks too technical and difficult to use. The export to PDF. You find out about this book, never used a wiki, last thing you want to do is to have it feel like a full on wiki. It looks more like a passive website and you can engage how you want. Take the PDF and go away. If you want to read on wiki fine. If you want to comment on page, fine. If you want to change a page – you can do that, the ultimate level of engagement. Options available.

Comment: It is also to the company’s benefit to let him use their software. Good example.

A: I did not ask them, they approached me. A combination of useful software and m. y project relevant. Important gesture. Reflection of recognizing value of the project. Seeing that a lot with Web 2.0 organization. Recognizing the value of using their tools in more authentic ways.

“Publish or perish”

traditional vs wiki publishing. Not trying to slam trad publishing. Anyone adjusting to the realities of the web and the online world. The publishing industry is as well. Tough for an industry with an old structure that has worked well for a long time. Tough thing to be asked to publish a book that will also be on a wiki, editable, not necc. Have to have paid for the book, not proprietary. It is a loss of control for them. To work, there has to be a community around it and there cannot be barriers to participation.

Biggest thing learned, there are a lot of publishing options, creation options for works of intellectually scholarly content. Lots of ways. We’re just at the cusp of exploring new ways. It’s publish or perish still true, but different. Does not have to be in print. A redefinition of that. They key thing is community.

These issues around the ideas of the future of the book. Will print publishing disappear/ Not completely, but one medium vs another is changing. The kinds of books published in print are going to be less information and referential, but analytical and anecdotatl. The information and referential will become richer due to community pariticpation. A group is smarter than an individual in many ways. The more perspectives, more thread of information coming together. A group can keep each other in check so one does not dominate. We see this in wikipedia, Siegenthaller. People ask if wikipedia is too open. In one sense it is a problem, but a community can recognize the problem and change it. Faster reconciliation than in print books.

Q: Communities moderating themselves, keeping themselves in check. Is there common language about steps, when it is time to have a look. Methods for communities keeping themselves.

A: (How we moderate ourselves…) Kind of like a newborn baby. That consciousness is just emerging. Primitive way in some of the discussions about the value in a wiki you an see the version history that people have made. You no longer see just the finished project, what has gone on in the creative process. What personal and social influences. That is the beginning of thinking about it. I don’t think were are there yet. IN it’s infancy. There are still people who, when they find an error on wikpedia, go write about the error rather than fixing it. There are discussions and criticism, but that takes it deeper.

Q: The power of eyeballs. Peer review. How does your wiki book challenge the traditional perspective of expert peer review, vs. the public. Does that lower the scholarly value?

A: to some it probably does and I’ve accepted it. The peer review of this book has been valuable. While writing the book it was the 7 of us reviewing each other’s chapters. Finding the connections. Strengthened the narrative of the book. If we had written it without the wiki, it would have felt like an edited compendium vs flow. Second is the reader peer review – comments and changes. I think that combines in some ways the best ideals of the spirit of peer review and keeping the content relevant. Traditional peer review and publishing has a long time lag. With wiki have peer review from last week. May reduce or call into question of scholarly peer review. The traditional notion of expert Can review it. Combining peer and non traditional peer review, but the traditional is not acknowledge in the same way. No set panel of expert reviewers. Folded into the collective community review.

Q: You are getting the xperts when they WANT to review. Have an interest or passion. I’d trade that for 10- harried reviewers.

Q: As someone using wikis in education, what are your strategies in using wikis in a way that is inclusive, including those who would not otherwise speak up.

A: I’ve been thinking about that question for years. Thought about it first time I used a course management when a student quiet in class participates online. Some people are more likely to do things online, some less. With something exclusively online, we’re still working on ti. There are various levels of interacting with the comment, being part of the community, speaks to all of those kinds of people. If you down load the PDF you have been part of the community. And carried it to other places. If you drop a comment because you are shy of editing a wiki. Could be a watershed moment. The participation builds over time because of different levels of engagement.

Q: Wikipedia – scaring off of newbies, the conventions and level of bluntness.

A: Back to visual design. When you click from blog, not so different. You have choice of traditional wiki syntax or WYSIWYG interface. Not features, as underpinnings that need to be there.

Q: Is there a way to conceptualize the conversation. Wiki is about storing ideas and edits, but there is a conversation running through it. How do you tap that along with the text. How do you capture the conversation, the rethinking of the ideas. That’s where the blog distinction breaks down.

A: The comments on the pages is somewhat like blogging. I tap in by emphasize that posting a comment about a page, looking at the revision history before you edit is as important as the edit. See if someone happened to have taken out what you put in. Make your edit, then make a comment about why you edited. How you acknowledge others and add your voice. Big differentiation between our work with wikis in education and wikipedia. Not anonymous Can communicate as a community.

Q: Other content types?

A: starting to add functionality. Go back to the simplicity focus of wiki. Focus on bare bones text, create a page on the fly. That is what has kept wikis so simple and bare bones. It is coming in gradutally which means it may come in in a better way.

John Willinsky
I’m local, welcome here to the rain and this beautiful building. I’m across campus. It is not actually raining. Technically. So I did not wear my rain pants biking here. So when I turn my back, and notice wet pants, but it was not technically raining.

The other thing, the pleasure of talking to bloggers. I’m coming from a classroom, where I don’t reacall the last time I had standing room only. I’m here to talk about an English Teacher’s class. I prepare teachers to teach HS English.
Stuart set the tone of community. That has nothing to what I’m doing. It is about intellectual property. I’m very concerned about intellectual property, in light of the contribution bloggers are making against traditional forms of IP. About how we are badly preparing students to enter a knowledge ecology about IP except rip burn and download.

These are students with first degree in English and for a year become teachers. Learn how to manage classrooms – see how quiet it is? See, I’m a professional. We are here to prepare them. To think about education in a different way. In two words: GO PUBLIC. Help their students go public and underneath that is intellectual property. Up to now a contested idea between constricted and openness.

This is a very dramatic site – Emily Dickinson. Want to show you what students did. You may not know about teaching, but we’ll work on it and produce something of values to other. You have the luxury of attention and time now, you won’t have that in your classroom. The structure is workshop. The students come in with a rough idea. Local content – AdBusters – an approach to IP that is interesting, playing on notion of parody as fair sue. Filled with Anti-Ads. They bring in things they want to try and we go through them. ON the wiki, we make corrections as we go. We work through the ideas. And they go public with it, contributed back to the profession. They had been a teacher fo r30 minutes and they are contributing to the entire world of teachers, now learning from me.

This student worked through a quick lesson on Adbusters. They bring the materials together. We have IP issues all the time. Legality of using the materials in the schools is different than the university. They have more of a shelter. We have a source indication to recognize the challenge. The legal use of this would be to g o to actual site.

That kind of discussion, of how IP is legally constituted has particular education context. It has intellectual properties. When you bring these ideas together, when you start juxtapose you createan intellectual context that justifies itself.

The other mechanical thing is that students are able to make contributions on the wiki. Much more positive than I would be. They have this thing about “community” (Laughter).

These are the basic principles. Examples of how these work and advantages.

Edgar Allen Poe example – a small video production, use the wiki as a portal to resources to bring materials into the classroom that wouldn’t otherwise. They do it on a fly that experienced teachers might not have. When I student taught it was colored chalk that we broguth to the classroom. Did you see that tree? We need to come in from recess and see this. Antoerh version of student teacher enthusiasm ad contribution to teaching. Shareing of resources through organization and annotation. Encyclopedic work on the comic book. Bring some encyclopedic sense and organize it.

Over time this wiki is becoming an encyclopedic set of lessons. Each new lesson on Hamlet is cognoscent of the predecessors. There is a fascination with the organization of knowledge. 2 students are given the job of organizing the material. They don’t have to create and present, but index. How do we go public? We have responsibilities. We have to add value. For 2 years building lessons. The Hamlet thing is exploding. The class ended in December, and the students are continuing to work on their stuff, to contribute. IF you look at the page index, they are using it as a workspace. We would never give Duncan that much time in our class. That is like a diary or blog

2 other spin offs. The blog spin off. In terms of publishing in the schools. Duncan was using the blogs in the school. Helena found it hard to start a wiki in the school, but it was easy to create blog, so she created workspace for her students to go public. As a display and as a service. Create multilingual indexes of local events.

This is the first, http://journals.sfu.ca/gladstone/ the first grade 8 peer reviewed journal. I’m part of the Open Aspect movement, software to help journals go open access. We thought peer review was tough. Wait till you see grade 8 girls when they do peer review. It is not just about the writing, people. They’ve used this system we designed for academic peer review journals for creating intellectual property.

Philosophical thoughts came in the second year. It replace first years “hot, not, fashion.’ Substantial claims of intellectual growth that peer review journals can create (laughter). Beginning to think about educational responsibilities, connected to a world outside of school, that bring notions of IP as contribution, challenging intellectual claims on IP, that the value increases when it is shared openly. To change it to the properties – plural – students realize, when they continue after the course. To add value. To contribute to strenghthen the materials.

http://wiki.elearning.ubc.ca/tela/Reenai.OTF

Students taking current events seriously in an English literature classroom, often seen as removed from the realities of the world, to see the connections, that challenge th notion of what we are doing in the classroom.

Stuart chimes in
The IP properties of wiki – it is a creative commons license. Each chapter owns their chapter and given license to be part of the compilation. Everyone was writing something of their own and one of its uses was in his book. It can be used elsewhere. They have total control.

Q: The knowledge base is cumulative index.

Awaken the students to intellectual properties – a turning point. Under such pressures in schools for accountability, the no teacher, um, child left behind. A direct challenge to that. The achievement test drains the intellectual quality and properties of the student. These wikis give a much stronger account that A, 69%.

Q: The practice – has it been brought (my wrists started to hurt. Did not blog the final questions and answers.)

Have 2 tech coaches and 2 indexers in the class. ROLES.

Tags: nv2007, NorthernVoice, wikis, education

Anil Dash: Sort of Live Blogging at Northern Voice

I continue to have blog problems, making "live blogging" a bit of a challenge here at Northern Voice 2007 . But things seem to be up at the moment, so here goes my "not-quite-live-blog posts" from this morning. First is Anil Dash's keynote. Live blogging caveats (spelling, completeness) apply.

*****
Anil Dash

Hopped up on caffeine and a new Yorker.
It’s really an accident of timing that I’m standing here and you aren’t. I started blogging earlier. There are many people in this room I’ve learned from and from whom I’ve stolen ideas.

Offer some touch point that he’s observed in blogging. anil@dashes.com
Blogs have changed my life. That’s something I used to shy away from saying. You don’t talk about technology in that way. That idea of change is powerful and important. I wanted to tell the story. My title is chief evangelist. I mumble it at boarder crossing. Not preaching, but a witness.

What can you do with a book?
A few years back talked to a classroom of junior high students. The teacher asked, what can you do with a book. Read it. Write it maybe. What can you do with the web? You create.

If you think about things that impact our lives, music, band in high school but few do records and touring. But this has fundamental affect.

Two traits: Persistence and Awareness

How is this different from other tools and media

Persistence – something you create with lasting value. Important because so much of our communication is emphemeral. Email, IM, text messages. When you close that window, that information goes away. The messages we get from people we care about doesn’t have meaning over time. We are treating as disposable things that are most precious

Google can find you. From preservation of personal communication to finding of public. Half of today’s traffic is from posts older than one month. There are things that are meaningful over time. We need to honor that over time. Persistence. And why blogs are distinct.

You’ve seen these boring classic blogs. With the date and permalink, we are seeing a social contract. A date stamp is a social contract. When I’m at the blog, it has some accountability. People who have never heard of this, isn’t this the same as geocities? 100 million people made pages, but few went back, few had friends, family or customers view the site over time. There was no implicit way of saying there will be more information here. An ongoing basis. Continuous conversation. A change from the web page of the past. This is a place you can come and expect more from me. I will stay in touch.

That idea is one of the great and unfulfilled promises we make. High school graduation “we’ll keep in touch.” We intend to preserve loose ties. Opportunities. I was introduced to my partner from an informal friend. Those loose ties provide us with valuable opportunities. At a fundamental level that is how we judge what matters: what persists and has meaning. My uncle from India came to the states for a visit in 2001. We took him to Washington DC. He asked how ld the building was. I said 15o years old. He said we have things that are 450 years old in the living room. Heirlooms, hand me downs have so much resonance and meaning. A great pop song from the summer I learned to drive. They have incredible resonance. They seem trivial. Music. How your kids watch the same moving over and over again. Importance that they trust it is going to be there. That the movie has a different meaning over the states of our lives. We had abdicated that on the web, that we can have a meaningful connection with media on the web like we do with other media in our lives. The books we carry as we move because they were given to us by people we care about. There are few websites I can go to and say “I remember where I was when I first saw this site. “ Or I want to read it over and over again.

That is too important for us to give up. We care too much to give up on the web as something disposable.

Every time we throw away messages, when we throw away an old phone. Do I loose all those messages or do I transfer them. The assumption that things are disposable. A text message where friends tell me they are engaged. Too important. This shift to making persistence part of our digital lives. Blogging has brought this to the whole world. When we started talking about moblogging, and what to use the camera on your phone for. Send it to the web on Flickr or a blog. They are valuable.

One of the things that took a long time to reconcile, it can even be commercial and business communications that are valuable. What changed my mind is about 10 years ago we had an ATT maudlin, manipulative commercial. A guy on a biz trip on a plane, Rocket Man music, missing his family. His family trying to go through their lives on the road. He opens up suitcase and barrette in his case. Tears. Early 20s rolling my eyes. My hard nose biz partner is choking back tears! He is going to remember it. It resonates. We all have times, even on YouTube top 10 videos there are always commercials there. Meaningful things can be small things. We want to look back on them and say “remember when.” Even in the context of business to be worth remembering.

The web can be this too. The people in this room have the ability to make experiences on the web meaningful. Story of business, friends and family on a private blog. Probably the highest goal to make something that meaningful.

Awareness

Awareness is the one that is a little more invisible. It is about notification. Knowing something is going on. This doesn’t seem like a problem. Who is saying “I need more email.” We may get too much notification. Awareness – too much notification and you don’t have awareness, you may have less.

We get email about things we don’t care about. CC-ed emails we don’t care about. Carbon copies in emails is an act of aggression. Covering my ass but not directly addressed to you. I do it and I feel bad, but there is almost never a time when it would not be better letting it go or being more direct. Shotgun approach. I’m tying to kill this habit. These are a pain before we even talk about spam. The timing of interruption disrupts our lives. This is the least important information I can get right now. I’m waiting for a flight confirmation and you are saying the convenience of our chron job on your email news letter script server is more important. That’s not good enough. I don’t intend to be rude to my coworkers. When I send email I don’t intend to have others drop everything. But I’ll be waiting for an important email and I get this unimportant stuff. It makes me nuts. It is not their intent to infuriate me. I should get that information when I need it, when I can act on it. Disciplined thoughtful communication vs the convenience of the sender. Even without intent we are rude. Most of US and Canada vs UK – there they text me before they call. See if Im free. Gradual threshold of communication. Let me see if you are free first. That slides into absurdity too. There is something to be said to being a little more accommodating to one another.

I’m a huge fan of the WII. I get paid to sell blogs, but this machine, it is so fun. The TIVo and iPod. Technology people get excited about. They give us more control. I can shift the time of that TV show, download podcasts, I’m not interrupted by ads, station breaks, this is the play list I want to listen to. At a visceral level, the wii is something you point at the screen. Tactile, hands on feeling of control. It is a sign that we are at a threshold of what we are willing to tolerate with rudeness, interruption, others’ convenience. Control. That’s a change. It is just happening. It is new. It really hasn’t happened on the web yet. We are just about ready. The primary tool is feeds. How many of you know what these are? Impossible to use still. Yet 2/3rds know them. That you need many ways to fix it is a problem, but that you know about them is a tribute to the value of feeds. 3-4 years ago people did not know what they are. Feeds represent control over notification. Awareness without interruption. See what and when I want. A social contract that is a promise, not a threat. A timestamp is not about “oh god there is going to be another post” but information if and when I choose to go see it. We need to use as a framework about how we want to apply these technologies, where we want to go next.

It is no coincidence that all of these consumer devices can also read feeds. The tools of control go to people who recognize that control of awareness is important

Combo of Persistence and awareness

Persistence is what makes and experience meaningful.

Awareness: keeping the lines of communication open. A contract here honored respectfully of time and attention

Combination of the two is a relationship. I’m lucky I get to talk about this. Almost cringe when I put this up there. Some people roll their eyes. You should see them in Germany. It’s a really important idea. We don’t have tools that help keep relationships alive on the web. A company email is not the same as a comment on my blog.

Blogs let you maintain a relationship on the web. What was missing. Return of what the web was intended to be. A read/write medium. The promise from day one, before the hype and dot coms. We’d all be talking to one another. To form communities and find people with like interests. The future was weird and complicated, but it did happen.

Now we can make change happen. If someone has a trusted, persistent relationship with open lines of communication, we say lets do something great. I started putting together examples and amazing stories, but instead what to open it up to others to tell their stories about how the web has made changes in your life.

A few to start… This is a really simple, low tech, interesting site “Donors Choose” lets people make donations to specifically sponsored resources in your local school. You can raise fund for your kid’s classroom. Local, direct. Largely online. But they did not succeed in getting out their message. They started to blog. Then wait, what actually people connect with is your blog is your identity online. They started giving widgets for people to put on their blogs. This is the school I’m sponsoring. Help me make a difference, make a change. Doubled the contributors. To me this seemed like an extraordinary recognition that the model is no longer come to our big gala, but instead taking it to where you live, where your identity lives online. Produced measurable results and let go of the ego that “everyone has to come to us. “

This one is near and dear. Kristen’s blog on Vox, a social community. A woman in CA had started a blog, never blogged before, started at the invitation of a friend. What should I write about? No idea what a blog could be. Vox had a question of the day, a prompt to write about. It was “what were you like as a kid.” The story started boring, about the Three Amigos, and then it takes a turn. She goes from telling about a movie, to how her father played the song from the movie on his guitar. She had lost that connection. Her father started reading her blog, then tells her he stopped playing guitar because he was depressed. A conversation they were not having F2F. The prompt from outside ended up being something that reconnected her with her father. Profound thing to see. Sometimes I help come up with questions of the day. It might be silly to know what movie you liked as a kid. Kids today watching “Cars” 10 times a day. These become meaningful things in our lives. We need to have a place to have those conversations. We are geographically spread out. We don’t have places to meet. The third place that wasn’t home or work has evaporated. We have this on the web, the ability to reconnect. I will keep in touch again. Reach back out to, with a low threshold, easy to get into.

Those were stories I heard recently that changed my mind about blogging. Evan as passionate as I am, still skeptical. But see it has the ability to make real change. These are the things that talk about potential, guideline for all of us.

Q: In talking about blogs to make change, what is your viewpoint on the way communities form and the bridging of the gap between the conversation on the blogosphere how to move from conversation, connecting, relationship into more of getting things done. Absence of change of activism in last 50 years.

A: Rephrase: how do we make the efforts in blogging right now in politics be more effective, more from getting people elected and more about better governing. I don’t know enough about political blogs in Canada. IN US polarized, unpleasant and I think ineffective. The thing that happens is people want to play to the crowd, speak to those who already agree with them. Every election is decided by swing voters, people in the middle with an open mind. You don’t get a lot past that momentum with strident blogs. First there will be a reckoning, making it more expansive.

Darren: Non partisan bloggers association. Their thing is discussing issues in non partisan, non inflammatory, non partisan way.

Anil: The best community I’ve seen is Dialog Now – enabling conversations between Indians and Pakistanis. Moving to see there was such willingness to have the conversation, hungry for it instead of being dragged to it. You will see a change in the states, all presidential campaigns have blog for raising money and getting elected. The one that could impact change is the ones where they respond to how governance will work THROUGH this community AFTER we are elected. Hopefully will happen this cycle.

Q: Mike from Australia. I love reading feeds, but use Google reader, should I feel guilty about marking all as read?

A: The worse thing I can imagine is making things unbold. That sounds like hell. Don’t just mark all read, unsubscribe. They are not going to know and you can always add it again later.

Q: The way I come out it, it is like reading a newspaper. DO you feel guilty if you don’t read all the paper. The Atlantic Monthly probably has a centerfold we have never read! Or read a blog of a person who filters things (Robert Scoble.)

Q: Mac; you seemed to have articulated a purpose for Twitter, with the idea of persistence. If you build uip this huge amount of data, doesn’t that present a problem of volume and usefulness.

A: I wrote a bit about Twitter, an application that provides a buddy list for text messaging (IM, SMS). Sounds dry, but pretty fun little tool. When I discovered it I was ready to hate it. Group SMS? What happened was the low threshold. Stuck in airport, told friends, got recommendations and a record. That is why it is useful. Persistence. Same problem with sifting into what matters and search is not the answer. A combination, social search, social network filtering, friends list AND search will probably provide the right filter. Now it is ok to have a lot of stuff stored. Inexpensive. Emergent benefits from a big set of data, but not sure where it will go with social aspects of search beyond delicious, etc.

Comment: Not particularly related to blogging. A guy in KM, David Snowden, started to make his way into org field. He has a methodology called “narrative and sense making” – blogs and blog content can be anonymized into data points and filters/tags to see how things are changing through large aggregated conversation. At the research level people are making advances.

Q: Your writing is very thoughtful. Comes across well on the page. Do you edit stuff, just post it up.

A: I edit like crazy. I used to just posted stuff up there. I don’t feel I have the luxury of just throwing stuff up there any more because of business. I regret a lot of the rants I used to do. They are briefly satisfying, I don’t think they equip me well on the long term. They are on the record. I like it. It makes me try to do better. I’ve never deleted any posts. I have done quick and hasty “oh I should not have said that. Sorry.” I do make extensive use of private posts on Life Journal and Vox. Spoiled by posting just for friends and neighbors.

Private vs public posts? 1:1 I know more about Vox, but about 30% of posts are private and 1/3 of typepad blogs are private. People post more publicly when they know they can post privately as well.

Tags: nv2007, Northervoice, Anil_Dash

Getting Ready to Throw in the Blogger Towel

My blog page has not been displaying for most of the week. Publishing times out on a regular basis, sometimes at 0%, sometimes at 80%. I have sent a help request to blogger (no response) and posted to the help group (See My blog won't publish and I've done everything advised - Something Is Broken | Google Groups). My individual postings show up - the permalinks work - but the main page http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/onfacblog.htm shows a "page not available error."

After hearing a great session on WordPress here at Northern Voice, and having two people convince me how easy it is to port my blogger blog to Wordpress, I'm just about ready to do it. I hate to have to move, but I am sick of this problem. It has been a problem off and on since January.

This may be the nudge I need to move my blog to be main main page at http://www.fullcirc.com. So I'll also have to redirect the old feeds and URLs. I'm not looking forward to this, but I sure am ready for something easier than the PITA that the old Blogger has turned into. (Plus, I can't seem to upgrade to new Blogger because my blog is too big.)

Tags: nv2007,, northernvoice,, Blogger,, WordPress

Northern Voice 2007 - Community Session

Lee LeFever and I combined the two community oriented sessions we proposed for Moose Camp which resulted in a jam packed room of ideas about this thing we call, for shorthand, "Community." We put tags for the ideas that came up, creating a blackboard that helped us visualize the complex space that has emerged with online groups, communities and networks. I wanted to share the pictures, as I did not take any other notes. I believe the session was recorded and lots of Flickr pictures tagged NV2007. You can see clearer pictures of the blackboard notes here.

Tags: community, onlinecommunity, northernvoice, nv2007

On the Road - Pretty Quiet Blog

I am currently on the road co-facilitating a knowledge sharing workshop, then tomorrow night I head to Vancouver BC for Northern Voice 2007 | Canada's Blogging Conference. My blog has been down, but is mercifully back up tonight! I hope to be blogging from NV, but who knows. It has been a crazy week and I have to prep for my workshop on Saturday. You know what I'll be doing on the plane tomorrow night.

Just a note - people are starting to blog their thoughts about technology stewardship. THANKS! Here are a few new ones:

http://dissident.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/technology_stew.html

http://bbrowntechnology.blogspot.com/2007/02/technology-stewards.html

Testing

Blog problems. Just testing.

Daylight Saving Time transitions in 2007 (1 of 2)

For those of us who do international synchronous online stuff, March has a few tricks. Not only do we have all the time changes we have become accustomed to, the US is moving to daylight savings time a few weeks before the EU. So for a few weeks we have to adjust our calculations. If you need some information on what country changes when in 2007, check out Daylight Saving Time transitions in 2007 (1 of 2)

Great Ignite Seattle Picture

Ignite Seattle
Originally uploaded by espressobuzz.

This from esspressobuzz was too good not to blog!

A Love Note to the Planet

For some time zones it is not too late to send a love note to the planet. Check out Planetfesto. Here is what it is about in their words:

We're all frustrated by the idea that as the health of the planet spirals downward, we have to sit and wait to see if business and government will do anything about it. And will they will do enough and fast enough?

Well, what if we didn't have to wait? And further what if we believe this: individuals matter. Since the problem afflicts us all--and all of our children--the conclusion is obvious. Let's lead this one ourselves.

So here's our idea:
Use the power of the internet to reach out to individuals in every country and to rally them around the idea of embracing the changes needed to heal the planet. Together let's build a ribbon on the internet that's long enough to wrap around the entire earth-a gesture that's big enough, and crazy enough, that there's a chance it just might work. We each create a panel 6" (15 cm.) square made of a photo or drawing of what we love most about this planet, a statement of why we love it, and at least one thing we can do to help the planet's health. You can do it in as little as three minutes and it's fun and easy.

Our manifesto:
Individuals, waiting for no one else's leadership, standing up for what they believe, can change the world. Hence it's called PlanetFesto. Author Wendell Berry said "What we do not love, we will not save." And so we're launching it on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2007.


Why participate?
Well, we'll literally never make it without you. With each panel 6"/15cm, it will take 262, 965,120 of us. A totally insane number (but that's what we like about it.)

But think about the impact if we do all do it. People of every age, every nation.

* It will change the business and political landscape. Movements matter. Numbers matter. And your joining will inspire others to add to the ribbon.
* We can help educate each other on ways to help (it turns out each of us can do a lot)
* Small, individual actions add up to huge benefits for the earth

One result:
Right now huge companies around the world are planning to invest hundreds of billions of dollars on products with no thought to how they affect the environment. They're betting no one will care. Too many politicians are thinking about what's the least change they can get away with. Let's send them a message.

How you join.
When we go live, Feb. 14, you'll be able to do your part of the ribbon. Our working model is up now at www.planetfesto.org. Please help us start in a big way on Valentine's Day and tell your friends about it too. It takes less than three minutes to make and post a panel. We have photos you can use if you haven't got one. Everyone participating on Day One will have a permanent #1 on the corner of their piece of the ribbon. To show you were among those who started it.

Who we are:
This project was put together by a couple in California, along with some friends who think we have an idea. We're convinced about that enough that we've spent the last 10 months putting it together. But without your help, it'll turn out we really don't have an idea at all.

Our promises:
We will never ask you for money, share your name with other groups, try to sell you anything. This is a grassroots movement with no other agenda than to improve the quality of our life on Earth. But we do ask you for one more thing: your help in getting others involved. Everywhere. Soccer teams, bike clubs, places of worship, businesses, schools.

Let's right our wrongs. Let's be superpowers of change. Let's act with the speed of love. Starting now, this very second. Are you with us?

On 2/14 send a love note to the planet at www.planetfesto.org

I added my love note. How about you?

Tags: planetfesto

I had fun at Ignite Seattle

Nancy White
Originally uploaded by leff.

I could not believe how packed the Capital Hill Arts Center was last night for the second Ignite Seattle. I arrived about 7:30 and had to do the sardine walk to get into the room. For the "Ask Later" talks, some folks had to watch in the overflow room with video. Yowza. A testament to Brady and Bre's hard work.

The Ask Later format was a great way to share ideas and knowledge, perform and be entertained. Some of us did that better than others, but overall, most everything I heard from the first two sets had value for me. I think it was a terrific event. So now it's debriefing time for me. If you were there I'd love your feedback as well. Sort of a slow after action review.

Doing one of these 5 minutes/20 slides-which-change-every-15-seconds was a great learning experience. It is very different from my usual style which is to use space to improvise off of my key points. I did not have enough confidence to do that with the constraints. So I went for structured. Very weird for me. I also cared very much about my topic and I did worry that it would be meaningless to others. So I over packed in the content. Sigh. I think I had some good visuals.

So how did I do? I survived with a smile on my face.

t is hard for me to evaluate, but there are a few bloggers who liked it, and some of who did not. I appreciate both of these perspectives!

I think there are a couple of elements to break down in our feedback to each other of the night.

1) Listening to a topic we care about. I enjoyed the talks about things I cared about more than the ones I did not. I cut a lot more slack on presentation style on topics and people I cared about. So our personal starting points are part of our perceptions and that is not something the speaker can do a lot about.

2) Style of presentation - there was a lot of style diversity and just being able to experience that was a lot of fun for me. I picked up ideas, like the great line of subtext in Barry Brumitt's (Google) slides, and Lee LeFever's "stretch" slide in the middle. 15 seconds of de-stressing in a firehose of information all night long. I loved people who had passion and just about every presentation I heard had passion. That was a hallmark.

3) Delivery - The thing most regret was that I did not have enough time to get my talk in my head, so I brought my script. I knew it was an error, but the pressures of work took priority. Better than totally flubbing the whole thing.

4) Content - there are some of us who really pack too much into our 5 minutes. I always do this. It is my curse and I need to practice more to clear out the clutter. In this form, you want to fill the space, but not over fill it. You want to be able to talk slowly enough to be understood. This was a geeky group, so most of the jargon had context. I was probably using jargon that was not part of the room's lexicon. (Community jargon!)

4) Humor. I'm not sure what people thought, but I had no place to put the wireless mic receiver and had to put it down my bra. Such a class act (not!)

I left a comment on Marcelo's blog (I have not seen it show up yet) with some recommendations that I'd offer those planning to play in round 3. I've added a few more since the comment.

Watch the format in action via video or live and notice what you like/don't like (I found some of December's videos a bit rambly. I'd rather have overstuffed than rambly)

Have a clear, focused point - small is beautiful (I sure violated that one)

Don't feel constrained that you need to change points as the slides change. Consider building and layering so it is not 20 separate blurts of information. Beth Kanter suggested this to me in advance and I really didn't deliver on it.

Tell a story. That usually requires building over multiple slides

Leave a little space and silence to build and emphasize ideas.

Don't put your text on the screen (just as bad a crutch as my piece of paper)

Don't pitch your company, pitch your ideas

Have fun with it

Marcelo recommends not over rehearsing. That's not a blanket concept for me. I think that is a personal call based on people's comfort and familiarity, style and the content. The point is that it IS a performance, and a wooden performance - which can come from over rehearsal - is not fun for the audience. Be engaging and engaged, and do that in what ever way works for you.

My favorites (no order, and I missed the final round):

1. Avi Geiger - “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs”
2. Lars Liden (Teachtown) - Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
3. Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
4. Barry Brumitt (Google) - MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Tags: igniteseattle,, technologystewardship

What the heck is Technology Stewardship Slides

Here are my slides for Ignite-Seattle (tomorrow, Feb 13, in Seattle)

The narrative is on the Slideshare site as comments as well. I may do a flickr version if it seems useful at some point, hopefully with an audio track.

Feedback always appreciated.

Tags: igniteseattle, technologystewardship, techreport, technologyforcommunity

Adding Voice

I'm a guest in an online facilitation workshop of some friends of mine this week. I decided a little bit of video might be a good break in the text-centric nature of their workshop. My little web cam has awful resolution, but hey, it hides the wrinkles. Here is what I said.

Tags: onlinefacilitation, video

Librarians as Community Technology Stewards

Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Update: Defining Library 2.0: Is it More than Technology?:

"The biggest part in my thinking is the personal bit: librarians embracing change to become master of all information tools, digital and otherwise. A deep sea-change for some folks from the 'we've always done it this way' mode to one of 'Bring it on, baby, bring it on...' when encountering the wide ripples of change coming at us daily. This is the heart of L2 for me... Librarian 2.0. if you will. So it's about tech and it's about not huffing and puffing when a library wants to implement IM or DDR and it's about the Coffee Cart if that makes a welcoming space all the more inviting for users and so on."

The rest of the post weaves in the voices of a variety of folks who show yet more aspects of the librarian as community technology steward.

See also Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and Librarian 2.0: Preparing for the 2.0 World

Tags: technologystewardship, library2.0

Ignite Seattle! Pressure + Peers = Learning

Next Tuesday I'm on the line up for the second Ignite-Seattle "Ask Later" speaking thingamagic. (Examples from the first event here.) I bailed last time because work was overwhelming everything. Work is intense again, but this time I'm not letting that excuse keep me from a learning experience. You see, this is a gathering where the people are smart, mostly very hip and techie. I don't think I'm dumb, but I'm older than most of them and when the word hip is associated with me, it is with respect to a certain girth of my body. But I can't resist the learning opportunity of trying to share my thinking with a room of smart people. Add the pressure of the format, this will either be a great moment of making fun of myself or great learning. It is good prep for the raft of presenting and workshop leading I'll be doing in the coming months. (7 on the calendar between now and July.)

I really want more practice explaining the ideas out of Etienne Wenger, John Smith and my upcoming book on technology for communities of practice, particularly the concept of technology stewardship. We have talked about it so much between ourselves, we have an intimate short hand and understanding. Translating that fresh to unfamiliar brains is the next challenge. The acid test. So I decided I'd pick this topic for Ignite Seattle.

Here's the bigger picture. You get 5 minutes, 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Interesting constraints! Ignite Deux: The Speaker Schedule

First Set of Talks (8:30 PM)

1. Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Radar, Ignite!) - Greetings & Salutations
2. Matthew Maclaurin - (Microsoft Research) - Programming for Fun/Children/Hobbyists/Hackers
3. Elisabeth Freeman (Author in the Head First Series, Works at Disney Internet Group) -The Science Behind the Head First Books: or how to write a technical book that doesn’t put your readers to sleep
4. Scott Kveton (JanRain) - OpenID
5. Avi Geiger (Hardware Architect,Microsoft) - “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note - trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
6. Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop; Threecast) - The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
7. Nancy White (Full Circle Associates) - What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward?

Second Set of Talks (9:30 PM)

1. Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- Elevator Pitches and Parallel Entrepreneurship
2. Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) - Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
3. Lars Liden (Teachtown) - Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
4. Kurt Brockett (Identity Mine) - A Look at Windows Presentation Foundation
5. Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) - Dr. Watson for AJAX
6. Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
7. Barry Brummitt (Google) - MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Third Set of Talks (10:30 PM)

1. Ellie Lum (R.E.Load Bags) - “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
2. Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) - Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality
3. Deepak Singh (business|bytes|genes|molecules) - An Open Scientific Future
4. Mike Acuri (Ontela) - Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
5. Heater Ralph - Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
6. Jordan Mitchell (CEO, OthersOnline) - Distributed Social Networking and a New Metaphor for Search
7. Corprew Reed (American Society for Information Science & Technology) - What the heck is the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T?

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The next one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Tuesday, February 13th. The Make Contest (Egg Slam) will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

In Seattle? Come along. Give me feedback. Reassure me afterwards that no matter what happened, it was worth the learning. :-)

Tags: igniteseattle, technologyforcommunity, techreport

If you are in non profit and don't read these, you are crazy

Beth Kanter does an ongoing amazing service to those of us interested in the intersection between non profits/NGOs and technology with her regular NPTech Tag Summaries. The latest is out...NpTech Tag Summary: Valentine's Day, Open Source As Fair Trade, and Dictatorships 2.0.

If you are new to this, there is a del.icio.us tag NpTech that a loose knit group uses to tag interesting stuff we find on the net. Beth decided to make it more useful for those dealing with overload by creating these regular summaries. She often themes them, adds visuals and voila - a great piece. It is truly a gift to the world, made possible by a loose network contributing around a single tag.

Brilliant!

Tags: nptech, tagging, npk4d

Technology Stewardship in Action

I'm working with Gabriel Shirley and others on the design team for Nexus for Change.

Gabriel just put up a great post that is a great example of technology stewardship in action. This reminded me I want to start highlighting examples of community technology stewardship in action. I'm planning to interview Amy Lenzo, one of the tech stewards for the World Cafe community next week. Some great stuff to share!

Attendr and the UnConference:

"In preparing for Nexus for Change, Peggy Holman reminded me of a new social networking tool that is designed to help stimulate interest and connections among participants before, during and after an event. It's called Attendr, and it's currently available for free to anyone who wants to try it out.

It's a kind of registration system where you fill out a profile, upload a picture, and add tags that represent your affiliations and areas of interest. Then you can identify other attendees you already know and read profiles of others to create a list of people you would like to meet. All of this plus a mashup that includes a GoogleMap of where attendees are from, flickr photos related to the event title, and recent blogs posts about your event. To see all of this in action, take a look at the Nexus for Change Attendr.

Overall, I think this is a great tool that provides a valuable service to those willing to take a few minutes to fill out a profile. I can identify not only who is coming to the event, but also whose interests overlap with mine so I have a sense of people I'd like to meet once the conference begins. And the map shows me if someone I already know is a friend of the people I'd like to meet.

Nexus for Change is not a population of techno-geeks, however, and it's clear from feedback I've received that some of Attendr's design is challenging for non-techies to understand on the first try. The biggest challenge for most people is figuring out how to identify people you know and those you want to meet. There are also some inconsistencies with site navigation that will hopefully be ironed out in a future release.

To improve the experience for Nexus users, I've created an Attendr instruction sheet that you are welcome to re-use for your own event. Contact me and I'll send you a Word version for easy editing. Early results indicate that the instructions provide most users easy access to Attendr's powerful and simple features."

I particularly appreciate not only Gabriel's stewardship for the Nexus for Change community, but his willingness to share out his learning. Thanks, Gabriel!

Tags: technologystewardship, technology_stewardship, nexusforchange, changehandbook, theworldcafe

Examples of Terms of Service (TOS)

I had to do a little research on user agreements and terms of service (TOS) as I had not looked at them for a while. I thought I would share what I found.

The really interesting thing about TOS is the schism between their purposes. On one hand they are used as a protection for site owners (legal mumbo jumbo inserted here). On the other hand they may have the intent of setting expectation of member participation. One document can't do both. So some sites have two - which I think is useful.

But ultimately, a list of rules or guidelines are not what creates the culture of a group. It is how they do or do not talk about them in small, useful ways and finally, about how they live and model them. Oh, and in open spaces, control is mostly an illusion. So we get back to wrestling with a fundmental question: can the commons stay useful even when a small but persistent set of players want to foul it up?

Anyway... here is the list.

• Radio Free Monterey FAQ from Barbara Steinberg
• A collection of user agreements from Amy Jo Kim
• The Electric Minds community rules developed by the community's original founder, Howard Rheingold.
• Women2women's user agreement.
• Emoderators An example of a policy on advertising in an email listserv.
• Emoderators/Lists A listserv set of guidelines. Note the section on copyright.
• Stone Soup Society - a site describing an online "society" game that can serve as a set of rules. More abstract reading for those very interested in alternative approaches to online interactions.
• Salon.com's community standards
• DistanceLearning List guidelines
• Mail Online House rules
• Live Journal
• AOL IM
• Google TOS
• Yahoo's TOS
• Guardian Unlimited's talk policy The Guardians's
• E-government Example of an Acceptable Use Policy
• RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines
• BBC Terms of use
• BBC message rules Rules and Guidelines
• Delicious tag TOS - mine and others
  

Tags: TOS, onlinefacilitation

Pew Internet: Tagging

Ah, I had the intention of commenting on stuff, but just too backed up. So throwing a few things out there!

Pew Internet: Tagging: "Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information.

A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content.

The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society."

Tags: tagging

Resources on Facilitating Networks

Help! I'm updating some of my materials on online facilitation. One of the newer forms of facilitation is facilitating within networks. In this case, by networks a mean unbounded, open networks where you never know all the members and there is never a clear boundary of where the network begins and ends. I tried a Google search on facilitating online networks but I really didn't find anything that was about networks in this sense.

For me, the skills include things like Maven and connector skills from the Tipping Point. The ability to scan, see patterns, connect people, information and groups, notice where a group is forming within a network and, if appropriate, nuture that formation.

What do you think of when you hear "network facilitation?"

Paint Dancing and Multiple Modalities

Back in January I stumbled upon an event here in Seattle called PaintDancing. An evening at a local private studio with paper, tempera paint, music and snacks, benefiting a local food bank. I bit. I was taken by the mixing of the modalities of paint, music and movement.

In the online world, this idea of mixing and marrying modalities is becoming increasingly important to me. We mix tools (computer, phone, digital cameras). We mix how we construct our interations over time (synchronous, asynchronous, time-shifting). We mix our internet based tools (blogs, wikis, forums, video and audio tools). We mix our communications modalities (text, images, audio, video.)

But we still haven't really brought our bodies into this. I got thinking more about this after doing an interview with Robyn McCullough who works with the field of somatics.

I often joke with people when I'm on a conference call that I have to describe my body language, an element of my cultural heritage. In asynchronous forums I will describe "leaning into the screen" with attention. I will post ::nodding:: in a chat room to "show" listening. I have embodied my body in text. But I sense there is more. What do you experience?

It turns out there is a video - dark, but you get the picture, of our gathering.

Tags: body language, somatics, paintdancing

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Many people have been linking to this fantastic video from Michael Wesch, a digital ethnographyer from Kansas State University. I think it reached the top 20 on YouTube this week. YouTube - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us



I loved this video for the last 30 seconds where we are asked to rethink things. I think that is the challenge we face. Rethinking copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, family, love ... ourselves.

If you haven't watched it, do it!

Tags: web 2.0, ethics, community_indicators

Welcome to Blogging, Chris Collison

I use Chris's book, Learning to Fly (with Geoff Parcell), all the time. I read stuff by him, particularly his work around knowledge in international development. So I was pleased to see he has started blogging at All of us are smarter than any of us…. In the tradition of that rush of links from a blog welcome, WELCOME TO BLOGGING, Chris!

Options to My Online Facilitation Workshop

I know this may seem counter intuitive to both assist with and publicize another online facilitation learning offering, but I see this as complimentary. Some people like an organized, fairly structured offering. Others groove on things that are open and self organized. I love it that we now have those options.

On the Online Facilitation List we have been playing with an open source ongoing knowledge fair on online facilitation. We have a planning wiki. Sylvia Currie, of SCoPE took the bull by the horns and did two things. One is she set up a page on her Moodle site that starts setting the scene. She has fed the Google Calendar we set up to identify all free offerings we can find around the web on online facilitation - very cool. Then she set up an offering, Learning the Art of Online Facilitation. This 3 week seminar is a collaborative learning opportunity facilitated by Nick Noaks where we will learn from each other. My sense is this is about experienced facilitators talking to each other, but I could be wrong!

So, for those who prefer something in this vein, you have options! It runs March 1 - 21. Find out more here: SCoPE: Seminars: Learning the Art of Online Facilitation: March 1-21, 2007

Hmm, I had better start a tag.

Tags: onfacknowledgefair, onlinefacilitation

Updating My Online Facilitation Workshop - Feedback Wanted

The last time I ran my "Facilitating Online Interactions" workshop was the first quarter of 2006. I've gone silent since then because I think the world has changed and my workshop has not quite kept pace. I had good intentions for a redesign, but instead I just kept stuffing more into it. Finally, I stopped running it, feeling that I was not doing anyone any service with the old format.

So now, urged on by a few people who really want to take the workshop, I am working on the redesign. I am sharing it here first, asking for your feedback. For those of you interested in participating, I'm thinking about starting the first module on March 12. Email me and I'll keep you posted (nancyw at fullcirc dot com). If you express interest in a comment, make sure the link to you has contact info or leave your email.

First, the format will remain all online.

Second, it will no longer be "three active weeks over five weeks" but instead broken down into two main modules and a series of monthly thematic sessions. Most of the thematic sessions will be syncrhonous, but maybe a mix. I'm still noodling on that.

The Modules:

Module 1: Basic Online Facilitation - 2 weeks
This module still rests on much of the same material I have been using since 1998 and it builds on classic facilitation knowledge and applies it in the online environment. It will cover the basics of all of these areas EXCEPT design, which will move to the second module. A couple of the items in the image will be combined.



The bits are:

• FRAMEWORK #1 - Group Facilitation In Person and Online
  
• FRAMEWORK #2 - Purpose: Why Online Interaction?
  
• FRAMEWORK #3 - Assessment & Evaluation
  
• FACILITATION PROCESS #1: Entry & Engagement, Sociability, Relationship & Trust Online (including rituals and cycles)
  
• FACILITATION PROCESS #2: Norms, Agreements & Accountability
  
• FACILITATION PROCESS #3: Facilitating "conversations" and discussions, task and action
  
• FACILITATION PROCESS #4: Dealing With Conflict
  
• FACILITATION PROCESS #5: Intercultural Awareness
  FACILITATION PROCESS #6: Harvesting, Weaving and Creating Summaries

Module 2: Facilitation and Technology - 2 weeks
This section will address the diversity of options for designing and facilitating across a range of technologies. This is where all the "web 2.0" stuff will come in, the basics of the tool landscape, working with technology stewards and of course, the ever present awareness of the tensions of working in a technologically mediated environment. We'll survey the range of tools, experiment with them and use them for this segment. Learn/Do/Reflect will be the mode of learning with an emphasis on mentors working with workshop participants.

Theme Segments (I need a better name) - Either 90 minute synchronous session or combined with 2-3 days of asnch.
I'm thinking of offering these as either part of the workshop package, or people can subscribe to them individually. Alumni of past workshops are always welcomed for free. Know that some of you alumni will be asked to help lead and facilitate these sessions.

These sessions are intended to dive into a particular aspect of either a facilitation or technology related issue. Guests will be brought in. Non workshop participants will be charged a modest fee and some portion of that fee will be paid to the guest. I have to figure out the mechanics. I'm not looking forward to the bookkeeping part of it. Some ideas for the theme segments include:

• Facilitating in multilingual environments
  
• Introducing and facilitating groups to/in wikis
  
• Facilitating in blog based communities
  
• Facilitating distributed CoPs
  
• Facilitating learning groups
  
• Synchronous online facilitation

I would schedule at least one of these each month.

So, what do you think? What do you like? What is missing? What should be cut? I'd really appreciate your feedback.

Tags: onlinefacilitation

KM4Dev Journal Call for Papers - Tech Stewardship in Knowledge Sharing

Call for Papers

KM4Dev Journal Vol. 3, Issue 1, June 2007

“Stewarding Technologies for Collaboration, Community Building & Knowledge Sharing in Development”

The ‘Knowledge Management for Development Journal’ (KM4D Journal) is an open access, peer-reviewed, community-based journal on knowledge management in development – for and by development practitioners and researchers. The journal is closely related to the KM4dev community of practice, and can be read and downloaded at: www.km4dev.org/journal

Vol. 3, Issue 1, to be published in June 2007, will focus on innovative practices and uses of ‘technologies for knowledge sharing’. This focus comes on the wave of new web based tools and processes supporting knowledge sharing, knowledge management and organizational learning that have emerged. Sometimes called "Web 2.0" technologies, these tools allow people to collaborate over time and distance in both new ways and in new networked forms. It builds on previous issues on the importance of networks, working across boundaries and even sustainability.

Guest editors are comprised of Nancy White, Beth Kanter, Beverly Trayner, Partha Sarker and Brenda Zulu, in combination with Chief Editor, Lucie Lamoureux.

Rationale International development has always had to work across time and distance. With the increased access to internet connected computers and the development of a wider range of web based collaboration technologies, sometimes called "social software," a new practice is emerging of stewarding technology for knowledge sharing, knowledge management, collaboration and learning. By stewarding, we mean paying attention not just to the technology, but how it usefully applied by groups. Groups from within, across and between organizations can now work together every day without being in the same location. Collaborative networks which were never possible due to geographic limitations are now sharing knowledge, collecting data and doing team work.

The emergence and application of tools such as blogs, wikis, tagging, social search, web based content and learning management systems, pod and vodcasting intersect with various forms of collaboration such as distributed communities of practice, networks, and online communities.

Attention to the useful stewarding of technology is particularly important. The market changes rapidly. The accessibilty of the tools means many people are experimenting in diverse way. We are learning new processes and practices of technology in use and understanding the implications of technology on group dynamics. Sharing stories and knowledge in terms of how this technology is being stewarded is a critical piece of increasing both access to successful practices and increased success in collaboration. In this issue we hope to "shine a light" on technology stewardship for knowledge sharing and collaboration in development.

This issue

It is easy to focus on the technologies. They hype around "Web 2.0" and the crowded market of technology providers can make it easy to be both distracted and overwhelmed by the tools. But technologies alone don't create change or achieve goals. It is the people and practices using the tools that matter. This issue of the KM4Dev Journal will address the question of how how the international development community is identifying distributed collaboration opportunities, picking and configuring technology and developing practices to support the collaboration. The emphasis will be not just on the technology itself, but the processes of using technology to collaborate. What have we learned about what works, what doesn't work and what is just another distraction?

The issue will include papers from technology stewards and online knowledge sharing practitioners in the South and North. Of particular interest are recent experiences with both the the processes of supporting distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the use of web based tools in that collaboration.

We invite technology stewards and online knowledge sharing practitioners, NGOs, resource centres, research institutes, think tanks, bilateral and multilateral development agencies and other organizations working in the context of development cooperation to propose papers covering topics such as:

• Main challenges for distributed knowledge sharing and collaboration

• Preconditions, entry points and strategies for using web based technologies for collaboration and KS

• Experience gained in supporting adoption of distributed tools and processes for collaboration and KS (case studies featuring Dgroups experiences are especially welcome)

• Specific approaches adopting web based collaboration technologies

• Effective capacity building practices ensuring the long-term viability of distributed collaboration and KS

• Considerations on how to balance web based collaboration and KS with more traditional F2F approaches, including issues of inclusion or exclusion with both approaches

• Specific issues of development cooperation to be considered in capacity building for distributed collaboration and KS such as internet access, cost of technology infrastructure, intercultural communication, impact of technology on power, gender, or learning modalities

• Reflections on capacity building for South-South distributed collaboration and KS

• Future agenda for the stewarding of technology for collaboration and KS

About the team of guest editors

Nancy White is an independent consultant from the United States and a KM4D Journal Editorial Board Member.

Beth Kanter is an independent consultant from the United States.

Bev Trayner is an independent consultant from Portugal.

Partha Sarker is a Researcher with Telecentre.org (Canada) and Co-founder of Bytes for All (India).

Brenda Zulu is a Zambian freelance journalist and OneWorld Africa (OWA) volunteer editor.

Proposed deadlines

Submission deadline for the title and abstract 28 February 2007

Acceptance of paper proposal 15 March 2007

Submission of paper 15 April 2007

Peer-review completed 15 May 2007

Author revision completed and final version of paper submitted 31 May 2007

(e)-publication date 15 June 2007

If you would like to submit a paper, or be actively involved in this initiative in any other ways, please send your abstract (minimum one paragraph – maximum one page) or your message by email to km4dj-editors@dgroups.org

Tags: npk4dev, technologystewardship, community, collaboration, knowledgesharing