Social Speech Podcast from Rob Cottingham

Rob Cottingham is always coming up with cool new stuff. He is the first person I knew to create cartoons about social media. He was one of the first people I graphically recorded “up front” (instead of from the back) at NorthernVoice a few years back (sadly, the video is now gone but you can see the images here). So when he invited me to be his first guest on the Social Speech Podcast, I had to say yes. Here are the deets:

The social web has gone a long way toward changing what it means to be in the audience at a speech – making an audience member less a passive spectator listening to a monologue, and more an active participant in a conversation among peers.

Nancy WhiteAnd nobody does that quite like Nancy White – except she doesn’t just rely on digital technology. She’s one of the best group facilitators in the business, working all over the world with everyone from small community groups to Fortune 500 companies. You can see her approach at work in the March of Dimes’ Share Your Story site, which several years on is still one of the examples we cite the most often of how online community can make a real different in people’s lives.

So who better to kick off Episode 1 of the Social Speech podcast? (Graphic: A quick sketch I (Rob)  did of Nancy at Northern Voice a few years ago.)

 

Thanks, Rob!

You can download the podcast on Rob’s site.

Social Media in International Development – 10 min interviews

Flickr cc image from I need your help and recommendations!

I’m about to facilitate another workshop on social media in international development for the ICT-KM program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This is the third time for this all-online workshop. In this iteration, we are trying to pay more attention to context of use, rather than focus on tools, tools, tools. The best way I know of doing this is to start the conversation with some stories of use.

To that end, I’m starting to do some 10 minute podcasts with practitioners who are  using social media in their work,  particularly those who work in international development and/or science research for global public  good (as in agricultural research.)

Who would you like to hear from? Who should I talk to?

First up, I’ll be interviewing William Anderson cofounder of Praxis101 . Bill has wrangled with the issues of sharing scientific data with his work with CODATA where he is an Associate Editor for the CODATA Data Science Journal (http://www.codata.org/dsj/index.html), and in his role as the Co-chair of the InterAcademy Panel Task Group on Digital Knowledge Resources in Developing Countries (http://www.interacademies.net/CMS/Programmes/4704.aspx ). He recently ended an eight year term as a member of the U.S. National Committee for the Committee on Data for Science and Technology and as Co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on  Preservation of and Access to Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries.

I already have a nice collection of longer podcasts including:

However, the value of a small library of short, engaging stories is priceless. So who should I interview? You? Someone you know of? Let me know! I’d like to harvest a few stories.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons picture, “Go Vote” on Flickr by M-C

Community Orientations Podcast with Shawn Callahan

Our friend Shawn Callahan has been following the work on the book – for years! He has been privy to various drafts and has recently been using the Community Orientations in his work with communities.

Recently he realized he wasn’t so clear on orientations 7, 8 and 9 so this past weekend we hooked up on Skype and talked through them. Here is Shawn’s post and the podcast.

As we talked, I was interested to hear about the exercise he did with the orientations, and see how it compared to how I’ve been using them. Here is what Shawn wrote:

BTW the community orientation exercise simply involved getting the participants of the workshop to plot on a radar chart, which I’d drawn on a whiteboard, where they thought the community was currently and then do this again for where they would like to see the community of 12 months time. It generated a terrific conversation and a feel of mutual purpose. Here is what the result looked like.

I had not thought about using the orientations for community plans or aspirations. I had been using them as a diagnostic for technology stewards to a) become aware of key community orientations and b) then use that to plan or tweak the community’s technology configuration. But both make a lot of sense to me.

Thanks, Shawn!