Full Circle Associates

I’m continuing cleaning up and adapting my  technology configuration this week. Here is part 2!

I confess, I don’t pay nearly enough attention to all the good things flying past me, including things on my own Communities and Networks Connection. In case this is new to you, this is an aggregation project led by Tony Karrer. He set up a system that lets me curate content from a wide variety of bloggers interested in communities and networks (If you aren’t on the list and want to be, drop me a line!). Tony just let me know that Aggregage, the platform that powers has some new features that are now on the  Communities and Networks Connection.  Announcing the PERSONALIZATION ENGINE! That means that Communities and Networks Connection now allows you to sign-up and have your content personalized based on their interests. You can sign-up via the “Personalize Your Content” button on the right side of the interface shown on the right side of the picture on the right (right, right?).

Tony has explained it well on his site, so I’m quoting the master. He refers to his own aggregation site, eLearning Learning 

Now with personalization it’s even better. The picture below gives a sense of what’s happening:

Curators handle finding the best sources of content.  The system then uses social signals such as those coming from Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, delicious as well as clicks and views.  These are compared to averages for the source and also looks at who is providing the signal, how often they signal things, how often they signal for that particular source, etc.  Those aspects existed before and it does a good job of finding great content.  You can read a bit more about these aspects in eLearning Learning Launches New Features.

What’s new now is that the site allows you to sign up and provide your Twitter and LinkedIn information.   The site will look at your activity on these sites and the content of what you share.  It will use that to find interests as well as to cluster you with other users who are like you based on interests and sharing.  You can partially control your interests via the Subscription page as shown below:

This will change over time based on your LinkedIn and twitter activity.  You can always visit and manually select interests as well.  You can read a bit more here: Personalization Explained.

The system then can combine three pieces of information to figure out what will be most interesting to you:

• Social signal score – are people in the audience finding it interesting
• Topic match – does it match up with your interests
• Like sharing – are individuals who are like you sharing this

The system uses these to both rank things on the site and to generate Daily and Weekly newsletters.

The reason that I’m most exited about this is that I partly use eLearning Learning to make sure I don’t miss things that is good content that is relevant to me.  Now with personalization, it is even less likely that something will sneak by.

I also personally like the format of the new newsletter.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

So I’ll add my pitch – give it a try and let me  know what you think. In the mean time, here is the best of Communities and Networks Connection 2011

• LAUREL PAPWORTH- SOCIAL NETWORK STRATEGY | TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011 8 ways to deal with negative comments in online communities
• How do you respond to a negative comment in an online community,on Facebook? Shut the Page down, ban the commenter, suck up to them? How about a bitchy tweet on Twitter? Fight with them? Ignore them? Promise to do better? PS:  Your marketing intern may not have that skill! Click for larger size. Ignore the negative social media commenter. MORE >>  2945 Tweets
• ELSUA | WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 20115 Reasons Why Activity Streams Will Save You From Information Overload I heart Activity Streams. mean, I * love* them to bits! From the very first beginning that I got exposed to them over at Twitter, over 4 years ago , till today, where I am using a bunch of various different microblogging / microsharing services, both internal and external, I couldn’t work, nor get much done!, without them. live them. Exactly! MORE >>  116 Tweets
• JENNY CONNECTED | SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2011 Recording of Etienne Wenger’s talk Here is the link to the talk given by Etienne Wenger to Lancaster University, UK last month  Learning in and across landscapes of practice. This is a long talk and there is a lot in it to digest. Theory. Theory in social sciences is a way of talking about the world. Theories that try to explain everything tend to be reductionist. Identity. MORE >>  31 Tweets
• JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | MONDAY, MAY 9, 2011 Roles in communities of practice Does a learning community or community of practice need roles to function well? Should you officially assign these roles to people or is it best if people spontaneously fullfil certain roles? What about the self-organising power of communities? We thought it would be nice to share some of our thinking in this blogpost. Starting with ourselves. MORE >>  35 Tweets
• ALCHEMY OF CHANGE | TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011 How “Membranes” Build Great Organizations In this article, you’ll learn about a new way of thinking about organizational boundaries; one that helps connect what’s inside the organization with what’s outside it. You’ll also get a new framework for thinking about the way organizations engage customers, partners, and other organizations. The “Cellular Business”. Tweet. MORE >>  101 Tweets
• COLLABORATIVE THINKING | MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 2011 Activity Streams: Moving Beyond Event Aggregation
• When it comes to 2011 trends, I posted earlier on ” Enterprise 2.0: A Transition From Destination Site to Platform Services “. Rather than publish a short list, I wanted to take some time to explore each trend in more depth. In this post, I want to examine the topic of Activity Streams. Level of insight : Inconvenient truth beneath the hype. effort. MORE >>  65 Tweets
• FRESHNETWORKS | SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, 2011 15 essential articles for online community managers
• Image by moriza via Flickr. To celebrate the second annual Community Manager Appreciation Day , we’ve brought together 15 essential articles for online community managers and social media managers. This collection of articles, resources and thinking should have something for everybody to learn from or to add to. MORE >>  356 Tweets
• PORTALS AND KM | MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2011 What Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 Can Bring to HR Processes
• Last week I had the pleasure of doing a webinar with the enterprise 2.0 software firm, Bitrix. We covered  “The Business Value of Social Media and Enterprise 2.0” with an emphasis on HR process because of the audience.    I want to share with you a bit of my thoughts from that session.   Others have taken similar approaches. MORE >>  70 Tweets
• MICHAEL SAMPSON – CURRENTS | SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2011 The Cost of SharePoint = License Fee x9 (It’s a Microsoft Figure)
• In response to my post about making SharePoint not look like SharePoint , Mike asked where the figure I quoted came from. He said: ” I would also like to see you cite your source for the statistic you quoted. The problem with statistics is that anyone can toss them out but unless you fully understand the context they are meaningless. My Comments. MORE >>  78 Tweets
• GREEN CHAMELEON | SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2011 Blog>> The Information Lifecycle
• It has been a while now that I talked about my experience of putting incentives for KM initiatives in place. These thoughts are very valid for global activities, though we are starting in our company to look at a second approach: implement knowledge sharing in people’s daily activities without imposing additional work. MORE >>  17 Tweets
• The Facebook Pages redesign – what’s changed and what does it mean? EMODERATION | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2011
• 7 Levels of Social Media Engagement LAUREL PAPWORTH- SOCIAL NETWORK STRATEGY | THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2011
• The Social Enterprise – Welcome to the Era of Intrapreneurship! ELSUA | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2011
• Value Creation in Communities of Practice JENNY CONNECTED | TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011
• Various ways to use social media as a facilitator or trainer JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2011
• How People Define Smart Organizations: The Biology of Great Organizations Part II ALCHEMY OF CHANGE | TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2011
• Changing IT Mindsets From Deployment To Adoption COLLABORATIVE THINKING | MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2011
• How do different age groups interact across the social web? FRESHNETWORKS | FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2011
• The Rising Need for Content Curation Skills and Capabilities. PORTALS AND KM | TUESDAY, MAY 10, 2011
• Innovation as an Emergent Property of a Value Network VALUE NETWORKS | MONDAY, MAY 30, 2011
• The sociable role of social reporters SOCIAL REPORTER | FRIDAY, APRIL 8, 2011
• Blog>> Knowledge Management in Intranets GREEN CHAMELEON | SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2011
• What is the Value of a Tweet or Facebook Fan? LAUREL PAPWORTH- SOCIAL NETWORK STRATEGY | THURSDAY, APRIL 28, 2011
• How to Use Employee Engagement to Boost Your Business ELSUA | WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2011
• Attacks on connectivism JENNY CONNECTED | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2011
• Twiitering = learning? JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2011
• The Deep Science of Cooperation: Martin Nowak ALCHEMY OF CHANGE | THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2011
• Enabling Participation: More Art Than Science COLLABORATIVE THINKING | TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2011
• 22 social media management tools – a wiki in development FRESHNETWORKS | TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2011
• Putting Social Media to Work PORTALS AND KM | TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2011
• All Work is Networked VALUE NETWORKS | MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2011
• FOSI European Conference 2011 – social networks, education, privacy EMODERATION | WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2011
• Id Rather Be A Hammer Than A Nail or Nails Come in Boxes EVOLVING WEB | FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2011
• Media Trust explains how local news hubs will work SOCIAL REPORTER | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2011
• 9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home ELSUA | MONDAY, MAY 30, 2011
• Why Smart People are Reluctant to Share MICHAEL SAMPSON – CURRENTS | SUNDAY, JUNE 26, 2011
• So many learning style tests, so little time. JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011
• A New Approach to Multi-Stakeholder Network Assessment NETWORKING ACTION | THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2011
• Enterprise 2.0: A Transition From Destination Site To Platform Services COLLABORATIVE THINKING | TUESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2011
• The social media landscape in 2011 – infographic FRESHNETWORKS | TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011
• Social Enterprise Today: Useful New Content Aggregation Site PORTALS AND KM | THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2011
• How do Social Networks Create Value? VALUE NETWORKS | TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011
• Blog>> Brains Respond to Stories as if They Are Real GREEN CHAMELEON | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2011
• New guidelines on how to keep online environments safe for children EMODERATION | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2011
• Presenting to myself on collaboration and social innovation SOCIAL REPORTER | MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 2011
• KM, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business: One and The Same ELSUA | MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2011
• Defining Collaboration – 2. Four Types of Work MICHAEL SAMPSON – CURRENTS | WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2011
• Twitter for organisations JOITSKE HULSEBOSCH | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2011
• Launching the Personal Kanban Book EVOLVING WEB | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2011
• meeting formats JOHN TROPEA – DELICIOUS FACILIATATION | FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2011

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Cleaning the messy office. Cleaning closets. And reviewing my personal technology configuration. In my current case, I’m talking more hardware than software! That’s what I’ve been doing over the slow weeks of early January before client work tends to kick in (and yes, I’m available!)

After cleaning up my office (lots of paper recycled and still two drawers of articles printed off from the net that I can’t quite let go of, organizing accounting stuff, etc…) the next thing I had to deal with is my internet service. I’ve had DSL, orginally through the beloved Speakeasy, but now part of Megapath. I loved the localness and great customer service of Speakeasy, but after about a year of their VoIP service for my phone I started having problems. And they said I needed to buy more bandwidth. I was stubborn. They sold me the package based on the level I bought and it SHOULD work, right? So I dithered for another year, contemplated moving to Quest Fiber, but once CenturyLink took over the complaints scared me away. That left me with Comcast. Sigh. I resisted for years. But we have Comcast for TV service (I am married to a television fan).  So after researching, I took the plunge.

But, if I canceled my old Speakeasy internet and phone for my business, I still needed phone service. Comcast pitches the old “six months at a reasonable price,” then it balloons. And I don’t use my phone THAN much. So I decided to follow the advice of Eugene Kim (now at his new venture, Groupaya) and port my business line to GoogleVoice, then use the OBI110 device (Amazon associate link – full disclosure)  to bridge Google Voice to my regular phone handset (not needed the computer to be on for calls). There are a few little twists to this process, which Eugene has generously captured on his wiki. This link is particularly helpful if you have to port a land line into Google voice via a mobile line, as Google does not port land lines.

So far so good. I purchased the required cable modem as directed by Comcast (Motorola SB6121 SURFboard DOCSIS 3.0). Check. Bought a new router as my two year old router has been needed more frequent resets. (Linksys E3200 High-Performance ) Check. Scheduled install of Comcast 20MBS service for yesterday.  Check.  Clean out the stereo cabinet where I hope to put all this equipment (and free a little more room in my micro-office.) Check.

Delay leaving for meeting Sunday afternoon to be there when the Comcast tech arrived and … Comcast was a no show. Somehow, it seems, our appointment was cancelled. Now rescheduled for Thursday. Grrr. Am I going to regret this choice?

Today I still went ahead with the line porting. I got a cheap TMobile pay per use sim card, popped it in my old Tmobile handset (unlocked that I use for travel), and ported my business phone to my mobile. That took about 2 days. Today I started the porting process to Google Voice. Now I have to learn the ins and outs of GoogleVoice, how to get voice mail and all the myriad of options. Mamma mia. It ain’t simple.

Then I set up the OBI110 and tested my phone with it. The audio quality was terrible with lots of breakup, but I suspect this is an exacerbation of the problem I’m having with my VoiP from Megapath, so I can’t judge the sound quality until the new internet service arrives. Yes, I’m impatient. I also need to assess if the headset I’m using is fried, further deteriorating sound quality. I’m hard on headsets.

But wait- that’s not the only change. I have been frustrated a the current limitation of our home audio/video system. I want to stream music from my computer, I want to get rid of half the devices cluttering up our tiny living room and I want to bring more music into my daily life, not just when I’m at my computer. So we bought ourselves an 28th anniversary present of a Sony home music system (Sony BDV-E780W Blu-Ray Disc Player Home Entertainment System which we got on sale much cheaper than the current Amazon price – yay! But it still hasn’t shipped. Boo. ) which will replace the Roku box, the BlueRay DVD player, the old Onkyo tuner  and trigger my husband to finally remove the VCR that isn’t working from the stack! The five small speakers will replace the huge, ancient (well used, loved and now not so great) speakers, freeing up more space in the micro-living room. We’ll be Freecycling the speakers.

The router I bought has a USB port and I plan to put a large external hard drive on that as my file back up (and if I can configure it with some of the constraints I’ve heard about Comcast) be able to access some of my key files from the road. Then I can also transfer all my audio library so I can stream to the new wifi enabled stereo and play on another remote speaker that, natch, came free with the stereo set. I understand that there are some format constraints with Sony (and which almost caused me NOT to buy it, but it was a weak moment, what can I say.)

The final part of my configuration update will be a new desktop. Since my computer is essential business equipment, I tend to replace it every 2-3 years, donating my old computer to Interconnection here in Seattle. They make it free and easy. Thank you, folks! I bought an iPad2 last summer – my first Apple product — and I hate to admit it, but I love it and use it. A lot. Which has me considering an Apple product to replace my pee-cee. For years, the money I invested in PC software was a major barrier, but I’m doing more and more in the cloud. I open Office much less often and everything else I can use on a Mac. So should I do it? What is the migration path? I have gone to the Apple store a few times considering MacBook pros hooked into my existing ViewSonic 21 inch monitor. Or the slimmer MacBook Airs. But to be honest, where I travel in my work, I rarely have secure places to lock up computers and I hate carrying that much money around. So I travel with cheap netbooks. So do I need a laptop? Why not an iMac all in one? SOOO many decisions. I have not decided on this last step and missed my December 31 deadline (for accounting purposes) so I’m sitting with the question. There is no urgency. It may, however, impact how I set up my remote drive on the hub. Hmmm…

It is no wonder my mom calls me every time she needs to change her tech configuration, or why my husband has me do most of it for him. This takes a lot of time and consideration.  Technology stewardship is not for wusses! Even for me, who helped write the book.

How do you manage your personal technology configuration? Any tips or breakthroughs? Please, SHARE!

John Smith likes to work on his vacation, it seems. Thanks to him, we now have an editable version of Chapter 10 of Digital Habitats… which in essence is a collection of all the worksheets from the book. I’ll let him explain! This is from the book blog.

We wrote Chapter 10 of Digital Habitats as a combination summary of the whole book and as a workbook that organizes the content in a roughly chronological / process order (instead of the logical, expository order we use in the book itself).  We imagined that people would copy pages of the book and write their responses on paper.  And we published a PDF version that you could print out and write on as well.  But we’ve found that it’s useful when people complete it together, discuss it, and share it at several different stages of “completeness.”

Step 1: View the Google Doc version using this URL: http://bit.ly/DH-chapter10

Recently a group of students in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop completed a Word-Doc version of Chapter 10.  It turned out that the process of responding to the questions was very useful to them and the results were very interesting to compare, even thought the communities represented seemed quite different one from another.

Being able to write in the Word Doc was more useful than the PDF version because the boxes could expand according to how much there was to say about a particular topic for a particular community.  (And in one community that was at a very early stage of development, it was useful to complete just the front end and skip the rest of it.)

Here’s how to make a copy so you can work through the questions that are relevant to your community using Google Docs:

1. 

   Step 2: Save your own copy of the document

   Point your browser to the original:http://bit.ly/DH-chapter10 .  You can’t edit the original version, but anybody can view it.  Log in to Google Docs. (See Step 1.)

2. Save your own copy of the document by selecting “Make a copy” on the drop-down menu under “file”.  (See Step 2.)

3. Find your new copy in your list of Google Docs and begin the hard / fun part: thinking through all the issues discussed in Chapter 10!  (See Step 3.)

Step 3: Edit your copy, discuss, and share.

We are considering having some systematic group discussions in CPsquare, comparing completed responses for many different communities.  I anticipate that the issues raised in Chapter 10 will be challenging and difficult for some communities, obvious for others, and irrelevant for some.  Understanding more about those differences should be very useful to all of us.

If you have a completed workbook that you would like to present, please let me know.  Either way, stay in touch!

via Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities » Editable version of Chapter 10 – Action Notebook.

Thanks, John!

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

What is fOSSa? From the organizers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tweet led me to a post today at Rethinking Technological Literacy — Campus Technology. Mary Grush writes:

Turkle introduced attendees to her concept of “technology as the architect of self”–that even as we shape our technologies, they shape us. It’s a two-way street that is producing a complex set of problems and conditions surrounding the relationship between people and technology.

This strongly resonates with what we posited in Digital Habitats at the community level. Our choices of technology shape the community and the community influences and shapes the technology, both in how it is designed, deployed and used in practice.

I’m reading Turkle’s new book (Alone Together) slowly and how she frames the negative consequences of this interaction. I think we need to pay attention to both the negative and the positive.