AI Conference: The Set Up

Set up day is winding to a close. I have been trying to capture the stories of people setting up the conference. Here are a few of the stories. If you are engaged, join the online conference! Yes, it has a fee, but I think it is going to be worth it. I would not be spending a week here volunteering otherwise!

Our online kiosk is in the lobby, just outside of the conference organizers’ space. I wandered over to talk with volunteers Anna from Venezuela, Shirantha from Sri Lanka, and Christina from Grand Rapids, MI, along with staffer Elayne from Pegasus. They are diligently putting together the conference bags. Without the conference assistants, there would be no conference. They are stuffing the program, green mountain coffee and coffee cups (they are a sponsor - ­ decaf and regular!), participant list, feedback form and a brochure from Roadway express into bags. 500 of these babies. They are working hard.

Anna’s Story
I was working in Caracas, in the barrio. I wanted to work with conflict resolution with social construction. I wrote to Professor Kenneth Gergen, and he recommended I visit the AI website. I read it -- all the articles, then I saw the conference announcement. My aunt lives near here. Thought this is a big chance. I’m volunteering as a conference assistant.

Shiantha’s Story
It began in 2000 when I was working with Habitat for Humanity. Mac Audell became the technical advisor. He introduced me to AI as a planning, monitoring and evaluation tool. I continued online, only in the sense of study, reading and trying to also make some models of my own. Getting data from others. I was a regular customer of the AI list serv. I have written to the list. Mac wanted me to apply for assistantship and I got it. It is going to be a learning process. I want to take that knowledge back to Sri Lanka as a model for peace and development.

Shiantha is now the Deputy Director of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies, 65 members, local and international NGOm involved in peace activities. He is also finishing his masters in Org Management, Thesis on AI.

Christina’s Story
My dad is Jim Ludema. He was kind of in at the beginnings of AI. I did such things as play in Dave Cooperider’s back yard. I grew up around AI. I am a biology major at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. I’m here because I think AI is great and I can apply it even in biology or whatever I do. Interested in public health and epidemeology.

Elayne’s Story
I started with Pegasus as a volunteer, 13 years ago. (She is now a staff member). In my real job, I work for the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development, out of Takoma Park MD. I train ­ OD, youth development and community building training. Positive youth development organization. We use AI in our work. Nice circles of intersection.

When I asked what they were feeling about the upcoming conference, Shiantha chimed in: “This will be a dream for everyone involved in AI. A dream seeing Cooperrider, working with him for a few days. He being the kind of person who began the movement. Dream of everybody involved in AI to be involved here." Christina picked up on the people vibes, saying “I really enjoyed periodically in the front entry, exclamations of people who had not seen each other in a long time. Happy to be here and get started.”

That is the vibe here ­ excited to see each other, ready to get started!

Blogging from the AI Conference in Miami

I've arrived in Miami for the Second International Appreciative Inquiry conference. I'll be helping support the bridging between the F2F and the Online conferences. I'll be blogging both to the internal event (register and join us online!) and some here as time allows. Tommorrow is set up day. Now it's time to get some sleep. Woke up waaay too early today to get here (4am!)

Marie Jasinki and Educhaos

In a fit of pique I refuse to go back and see if I blogged this already. I love Marie Jasinski. She has that lovely blend of smarts, pragmatism, drama and chutzpah that creates innovation. Seeing that I am currently exploring improvisation, it is no accident that Educhaos: Facilitating the Unpredictable! attracted me.

Educhaos – connecting educational practice with chaos and complexity theory.

It’s that dynamic space between order and disorder where educators embrace contradictions like stability and instability, structure and flexibility, planning and improvisation.

Hear how facilitating web-based role play simulations, eGames and other collaborative strategies have been influenced by chaos and complexity concepts like self-organising systems, emergence, the law of small effects and the edge of chaos, and how these concepts can be applied to the design and facilitation of learning in online environments.

GoGoGo to this Unique Wiki Based Artifact

Brian Lamb at UBC must be a hoot at conferences. For the rest of us, we get the mirthful artifacts woven into a clever wiki. Check out UBCWiki: GoGoGo. Lamb rifs on remix, learning objects, educhaos, RSS, digital convergence and many more lovely thingamabobs. I think I found this via [Stephen Downes] but I have been messy in my clipping this week. That said, it feels good to me to credit the finder of the link. So I'll keep trying.

CoPs and International NGO Work

I'm hopscotching across online events and websites this week and there is a lot popping. I am attending iCohere's online CoP event and stumbled across this flash presentation on World Vision's global strategic planning process which includes both distributed and F2F elements blended together. The online component is using iCohere. iCohere founder Soren Kaplan is also interviewed on the Online Community Report. (You can check out the CoP conference as well as it heads into its last day.)

Scrolling around the OCR, there are also other interesting interviews (in
case you aren't subscribed already to the Online Community Report.) Next on my list to read is the Interview with
Jason Lefkowitz, Oceana

Then, over on IFETS, moderated by Bill Williams in a discussion on "Formal online discussions: reflections on process” You can see the base discussion paper here and from there, leap to the email based discussion.

Propagating a Good Thought via the Blogosphere

McGee's Musingssites John Perry Barlow for ending his email with this great quotation via a posting noticed in Hally's Comment.

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.

-- Thomas Merton

CEO Bloggers' Club

CEO Bloggers' Club is a blog dedicated to the community of CEOs who blog. Some good stuff there for any organizational leader who is or is thinking about blogging. It looks like it invites its members to "converse" on key topics through the blog. Looks like an interesting experiment to watch on a number of levels.

Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture

Christopher Allen nails some critical issues in Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture. I am snipping some key parts here, but I strongly encourage everyone to go read the full article, which is also rich with links.

The concept of Intimacy Gradient comes from architect Christopher Alexander, in his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. (Oxford University Press, 1977):

Pattern #127 - Intimacy Gradient:

Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.

Resolution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

He gives some other great examples, then narrows down to interaction software.

In social software design, there also needs to be an Intimacy Gradient. One of the problems with Wikis is that there is often very little transition between public and intimate, and doing so can be quite jarring.

He points to an interesting study by Krebs and Holley (I need to pursue this one):

That's the main point of Building Sustainable Communities through Network Building by Valdis Krebs and June Holley. When studying a community over time, they suggest a vibrant community is made up of four stages:

1. Scattered Clusters
2. Single Hub-and-Spoke
3. Multi-Hub Small-World Network
4. Core/Periphery

The ideal core/periphery structure affords a densely linked core and a dynamic periphery. One pattern for social software that supports this is an intimacy gradient (privacy/openness), to allow the core some privacy for backchannelling. But this requires ridiculously easy group forming, as the more hardened the space the more hard-nosed its occupants become.

What I notice about this is how it echoes the structure of communities of practice, where this idea of core and periphery is one of the very hearts of a vibrant CoP. It also echoes some classic community literature.

Christopher goes on to write

Part of the solution might come from the architecture world as well -- here are some other Patterns by Christopher Alexander (see the link for Alexander's resolutions for each):

Pattern #31 - Promenade: Each subculture needs a center for its public life: a place where you can go to see people, and to be seen.

Pattern #61 - Small Public Squares: A town needs public squares; they are the largest, most public rooms, that a town has. but when they are too large, they look and feel deserted.

Pattern #69 - Public Outdoor Room: There are very few spots along the streets of modern towns and neighborhoods where people can hang out, comfortably, for hours at a time.

Pattern #42 - Sequence of Sitting Spaces: Every corner of a building is a potential sitting space. But each sitting space has different needs for comfort and enclosure according to its position in the intimacy gradient.

Pattern #147 - Communal Eating": Without communal eating, no human group can hold together.

He concludes:

We are still breaking ground and exploring new ideas in the world of social software. However, there are already extant fields of study which may give us insight into this new venue. Architecture is one of them. By better understanding ideas of intimacy gradients, pattern language, refuge and prospect, savannas, and defensible spaces, we may gain new understandings of how to build social environments which are attractive and enjoyable to more people.

Having designed and facilitating in a variety of online interaction environments for the past 8 years, itimacy, privacy, the expansion and contraction of different gradients has been a key part of building the appropriate types of social bonds for a variety of online interaction purposes. Whether it is done with the base configuration of software, with how we deploy the software, or at the most basic, how we choose to act and support agency in the simplist of interaction tools (like one email thread) matters. It is not just the simple exchange of text. It is interesting to see how this is now a much more central concern to designers and implementation folks. Glad to see it.

Microsoft Social Computing Group

Just across the lake lives the Social Computing Group , a neighbor I'm hearing more and more about. You see, it used to be when someone mentioned Microsoft software and social aspects of online interaction, I would start laughing. Most of the smart folk working on that stuff at MS would come and go like a spring bluster over Puget Sound. But lately more and more of my friends and colleagues in the field of online interaction have been coming up to talk to and with this group at MS. And from what they are telling me, something has indeed changed. I'm looking forward to hearing more about blog and wiki interfaces, social applications etc. I'd love to play with some of their prototypes like Wallop mentioned on the page above.

Here is their mission:

Our mission in the Social Computing Group is to research and develop software that contributes to compelling and effective social interactions, with a focus on user-centered design processes and rapid prototyping.

Our work includes the Sapphire project, sharing, mobile applications, trust and reputation, collaboration, and story telling. To facilitate the rapid prototyping, we also have an online lab for running studies to evaluate our social user interfaces."

Which Language: Status, humility or strategy?

Bev Trayner, as always, gets me thinking. Working in many intercultural situations I see the impact of imperfect communication due to language difficulties. I recognize that as a predominantly English-only being, I add to that challenge (I speak rusty Portuguese as well) Beve writes about people who give her advice about her choices of languages:

"This puts me in a bit of a conundrum when well-meaning Portuguese friends and colleagues urge me to write (informal) e-mails in English, not Portuguese. Writing them in English, they tell me, looks more educated than writing in Portuguese with mistakes. Someone who writes in English maintains their superior position, whereas writing in Portuguese as a second language puts you in an inferior position in relation to people who write it correctly - and you risk not being taken seriously.

So, do I stick to my principles and enter other people's world's - creatively using their language, but at risk of being looked down on? Or do I stick to the language I know best and maintain my lofty status?"

In online communication, we have a bit more luxury of time when using asynchronous tools. What should our language strategy be?

Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice

Inter-Organizational Communities of Practice by C. van Winkelen

In this report, we briefly look at the key drivers behind these trends and the main learning that has been gained about how to design and sustain these communities effectively within organizations. We will then move on to some of the additional issues that need to be considered when communities reach across external boundaries to support inter-organizational collaboration.

The question at the heart of this report is how to gain satisfactory returns from the investments made in forming and supporting communities of practice. Having looked at the practical activities needed to support effective communities, the report ends with a view of the way in which the value they generate can be measured.

The end has the punchline, though. “A group of participants becomes a community through being a community. It is through interacting and experiencing common events that the community is created. “The emphasis on events, in my experience, is well placed, particularly on distributed CoPs. Events act like a pulse, a heartbeat, that can drive the otherwise diffused attention of folks who rarely, or ever exist in a F2F community. This is key to our upcoming online and F2F workshop in Lisbon. I am becoming a community events evangelist.

A Weblog Publishing/Newsletter Hybrid

I got a call out of the blue the other day from a guy wanting some feedback about the platform beneath H20Notes - community weblog. Their product offers an interesting hybrid of blog and newsletter. There is no RSS feed as they want folks to subscribe, thus forcing the email choice. I like the newsletter/blog combo. I'm not so sure about the lack of RSS. I don't want more in my email box, I want less! But I want access to my blog sources via my newsreader. Dang, I'm already getting set in my blog ways.