Institute for Connectivity in the Americas

Connecting People. Connecting Ideas. Connecting the Americas.

"ICA showcases success stories, lessons learned, and best practices that support knowledge creation and capacity building in the Americas. In addition, the Institute promotes virtual collaboration networks to facilitate the exchange of ideas."

[Recommended by Steven Clift]

Cliff Figallo: Communities don't die...

I'm hip deep in meetings for five days so am simply sharing stuff that has been thought provoking to me.

Cliff Figallo wrote a few days ago of how the net has reconnected him to an important community from his past. Communities don't die...:

"It's only been in the past 5 years that the Net has begun to serve as our reunion space. One of our email lists is called the Prayer List. On the Farm we lived as a spiritual community. That was what we called our first cause. We didn't have a codified religion; we simply believed that as humans we had a spiritual bond between us that deserved to be honored. Since we dispersed (most of the Farm's members left the Tennessee land and our collectivity in the early 80s) we've taken many different spiritual and religious paths.

The Prayer List is ecumenical, but it's a way to stay in touch to provide support for those of us who need it. And as we age, we find that we are naturally facing more illness, more suffering, more death. Our kids get sick, hurt and sometimes die. We want to know that people we trust are paying attention and praying for us, or at least projecting good wishes to us during our hard times.

It's amazingly powerful to know that hundreds of friends are aware when there is a crisis, and it's heartening to know that the Net can extend the loving relationships we worked so hard to build over 20 years ago. And to have it work through a simple email list is an illustration of how basic the tools can be to deliver the most essential messages of all."

This feeling that a community can be "there" for you, even though the "there" is dispersed, almost indescribable, rings true for me.

Full Circle Online Facilitation Workshop - Starts Sept 6

Hm. I realized I can use my own blog to market my work. Shocking, eh? In any case, I offer about twice a year an online workshop called "Facilitating Online Interactions." I've been offering this alone and with others since late 1998. It is three VERY active online weeks spread over five weeks. Intense. Perhaps too intense for some, but it gets participants to an experience that can open up possibilities they never imagined. There are always interesting participants from all around the world. It is mostly asynchronous, but we also have 2 telecons and weekly synchronous chats.

Interested? Details can be found on the workshop homepage. The two non profit/NGO scholarships are gone, but if you want to take the workshop and will commit to full participation, and you are broke or you work for an NGO, email me and perhaps we can find a way for it to work.

P.S. This workshop is a labor of love.

ReliefWeb: Directory of Communities of Practice

Mark Hammersley has been doing amazing things connecting relief and aid workers using simple web based tools such as emails and webpages. Here comes another great contribution: Directory of Communities of Practice (for ReliefWeb)

"This is a work in progress, listing online communities for relief workers. Email discussion lists and other community resources have been selected for inclusion on the basis of relevancy and usefulness for humanitarian practitioners."

Stiki Wiki - Wiki Subtleties

Stiki Wiki floated across my digital world this morning. I like it. I like it.

Go look at this wiki. What do you notice first? What do you notice after you swim around for a while in this lovely gray and sage pool? StikiWiki adds context. CONTEXT! (yes, I'm shouting). Intuitively I'm jumping up and down at my desk because that is what I sense baffles some people with wikis -- it can feel like there is a lack of context because it is presented to us in unfamiliar ways. I'm going to play with this wiki some more!

[via David]

Common Craft - Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs

Lee at Common Craft just posted a thoughtful piece on the difference between message boards and weblogs. I had the chance to see his draft and really appreciate the distinctions (and similarities) he is trying to articulate. As I reread the final post tonight, I'm more strongly hit by the coming convergence of these forms. Perhaps in a year, we will have new hybrids and combinations. Here is a snippet:

Worlds are colliding, people. Your friendly neighborhood message board is not alone in the online community world any longer...

...in the last few years, we’ve seen the arrival of a new set of tools and processes that offer additional opportunities for message board-based online communities. The appearance of weblogs have left many observers, including me, wondering about the differences between the two technologies and how they will be used inside online communities.

Are weblogs really that different from message boards? How?

More Wiki Resources: DokuWiki

DokuWiki:

"DokuWiki is a simple to use Wiki aimed at a small companies documentation needs. It works on plain texts files and thus needs no database. It has a simple but powerful Syntax which makes sure the datafiles remain readable outside the Wiki. It utilizes GNU grep for fast text search."

Note from Nancy: Do you know of a distributed community of practice that uses wikis as their main online interaction tool? Please let me know. I need some case studies for a report some of us are working on. Thanks.

[Via Brian Dear]

Blogs, Communications Possibilities and "WHY?"

The recent Tech Soup online conversation on blogs and this article in The Chronicle, Advocacy Groups Discover the Power of Blogs to Spread Their Messages, has gotten me thinking more about the role of communications in organizations, particularly organizations that have a large geographic spread or which are distributed (i.e. the members are rarely or never colocated - together!)

What kinds of communication do we need? How much is too little? How much is too much? How public? How private? How much inward facing? Outward facing? Blogs and other forms of easy distributed publishing open up doors that ask us to then think about our strategic communications choices. "How" has given us opportunity. The "what" abounds. The "why" of what we do becomes even more important than ever.

What kinds of decision making ideas do we have to get to the best "why" possible?

[via Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT]

Olympic Athlete Blog Blackout

I mentioned this news in the previous post. Thought I should blog it as context. USATODAY.com - Olympic athletes largely barred from posting online diaries

Athletes may be the center of attention at the Olympic Games, but don't expect to hear directly from them online — or see snapshots or video they've taken.

The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other Web sites.

An exception is if an athlete has a personal Web site that they did not set up specifically for the Games.

The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists — and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first.

Why Don't We Hear this Story in the News?

First I reeled when I heard yesterday about the Olympic's athlete blog ban. What do they want to hide? Then David Weinberger blogged Tom Matrullo's experiences recovering from Hurricane Charely. IMproPRieTies: riders on the storm

The first moment after a disaster, we do not need news anchors unchained to any news, no shred of useful information, but plenty of unctuous sympathy. We do not need roads filled with NBC-2 vehicles containing anchorites powdering their noses in rear view mirrors. These we have, in droves.

--

Disasters happen. Some learn from prior experience. MCI, with its Big Blue mobile phone/broadband satellite trailer, with AC, water, snacks, has learned. They have been to Oklahoma City. To New York City. They have acquired some knowledge, and it shows. MCI’s unit posted itself near the worst hit area, but also near a Publix, (another company with some memory of what can be done), which reopened within a couple of days of the storm with generator power, and porta-potties. To these essential ingredients came people from Siesta Key offering burgers and hot dogs, cold water, etc. State Farm set up its mobile office. In very little time, a self-organized multiple-use node has replaced a distressed stripmall parking lot.

Later Tom wrote:

Mr. Bush, your disaster recovery agency is intensifying the lack of housing, taking up valuable space with its own infrastructure, and failing to take the simplest steps to alleviate a jot of the monumental problems here. I applaud FEMA's effort to undermine your political future; I simply do not wish anyone who is not the "beneficiary" of the agency's services to believe it has anything other than a hollow political purpose in being here.

I live in Southwest Florida under a mask called FEMA, a latter day Republican meta-agency. Its task is to mitigate the impact of any natural disaster upon the political fortunes of the Bush Administration -- the major disaster from which we all need immediate long-term relief.

We need peoples voices heard. Not stifled.

[via David Weinberger]