Matt and Nancy blather about slow communities

cc on Flickr by by fatboykeWe missed our partner in crime – er- podcasting, Ed (how can life interfere with our podcasts! Alas!) but Matt Moore and I had a fun time yesterday as he recorded our conversation about Slow Communities . We rambled for about 20 minutes, then finished.

Afterwards I said – hm, we didn’t get to any practical ideas about what to DO about volume and speed, and how to be discerning about when to go fast or slow. Matt suggests sending us postcards! 😉 I am copying the whole post here… hm, is that rude of me? I want to annotate the timestamp notes, and this seemed the most efficient way.

Nancy has been writing & talking a lot about “slow community” recently – video, slides & post here & here. Sadly Ed Mitchell couldn’t join us as planned (but we’ll nab him again in the future).

One thing we didn’t tackle in the podcast was the matter of practical tactics: What should community members & coordinators do?

Answers on a postcard please…

Download the mp3

00:00 – Nancy’s conversations about slow communities
03:30 – Matt’s fast community anecdote
* N’s note: what to do/how to respond to unrealistic expectations about speed of community building and expectations of learning through reflection if you don’t take time to reflect!
06:00 – When is slow appropriate?
* and for whom and how do we know if my slow is your fast?
06:30 – The importance of sustainability
* hm, and now that I think about it, also scalability. Is “community” generically scalable? I don’t think so. Does it have costs to sustain? Yup. Are the benefits sufficient and are we willing to pay the freight?
07:15 – Fast is good for social media experiments
* and brainstorming, iterative design, and getting the chores done…
08:00 – We need to learn & reflect
* do leaders role model reflection and learning?
10:30 – Rhythm, pausing & athletics
* I want to dive deeper into this “rhythm” thing…
12:15 – Organisational seasons & hurricanes
14:00 – More is not necessarily better
15:30 – Community obesity
* Oh, I LOVED this one. A Matt Moore gem, for sure. Also Infoluenza…
* Matt forgot to include “community and network speedometers” — what does making the pace visible do to our awareness and subsequent choices/behaviors? A feedback mechanism showing me how many emails I have read/written, groups responded to, blog posts, tweets… and time spent on them? Dunno?
* Multimembership
* How many relationships… and what is the depth/quality of those relationships
17:00 – Networks & communities
* are networks fast and communities slow? I don’t think that is quite it, but something is there…
18:00 – Admitting that you have a problem
* Moi?
20:00 – Mindfulness & self-awareness as critical skills
* It is almost impossible to micromanage in many of our current environments, so self management becomes a critical skill and practice
22:30 – Nancy applies the brakes with meditation
24:00 – What do we really need?

Photo credit, Flickr, CC

view photostream Uploaded on July 14, 2008
by fatboyke

One thought on “Matt and Nancy blather about slow communities”

  1. really sorry I couldn’t make it, but glad you had a good time – hope I can come along to the next one 🙂

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