Full Circle Associates

It is so lovely having a fabulous network – including people I just barely know, but who then hook in with a moment of insight, a remix or ready to augment a forming idea or practice. Gabriele Sani from World Vision in Italy has recently done this with the Community Orientations Spidergram from our Digital Habitats book.  He saw a post I put on KM4Dev and immediately took it further!  He has taken the spidergram and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. You simply put in the values in the table on tab 1 on the spreadsheet,  and voila, a lovely spidergram image is produced (see tab 2 of the spreadsheet).

Here is the tool: CoP-Orientation-Spidergram-Tool

This is a great tool to help people visualize the diagram at a distance – when you don’t have the comfy proximity of a white board and a bunch of post it notes. I also love the visual background Gabriele put in – lovely.

Others have been sharing their spidergrams. I’ve been tagging them on Delicious. You can find my spidergram tags here: http://delicious.com/choconancy/spidergram. Here is one from Sylvia Currie that she did with Gliffy – another way to  do the activity:

So why are seeing and sharing these practices useful? Gabriele’s spreadsheet  is useful not just because he created the it, but because he tried the work within his organization, saw the need for a “tweak,” the need to “tinker” and improve — and DID IT! Then he shared it back. Sylvia’s gave us another way to “crack the nut.” This is the value of working in the open, of iterating both internally and externally.

THANK YOU, Gabriele and Sylvia. And to the rest of you, do you have a Spidergram story to share?

For this week’s Monday Video comes a piece near and dear to my heart – as a lover of connecting!

How do you connect to people online? (the video)

How do you connect to people online? from D’Arcy Norman on Vimeo.

This resonates with the question that people always asked me when I first started teaching online facilitation: “can you create real connection and relationships with people online?” Darn tootin YES WE CAN!

What has evolved for me, however, is the distinction of the RANGE of connection and relationship we have, from the weak ties of the network which coalesce first around topical interest, to the more contained and measurable relationship in bounded groups, to the intimacy of pairs and triads where, across a diversity of tools and modalities, we reveal ourselves to each other.

These connections are not the same. They are not formed the same way. The type of relationship and trust is diverse. The usefulness is different across the continuum.

The second important thing this “online connecting” thing has taught me is that it is an amazing pallette to paint our identity out to the world, and to have others contribute to that portrait.

This is big learning for me since 1997.

P.S. The music D’Arcy used is from the amazing http://www.symphonyofscience.com/