Full Circle Associates

Some days I think I’m turning into a total flake. In 2 weeks Larry and I leave for New Zealand. I have been invited to speak at the DEANZ conference in Wellington (Aug 17 - 20) so we decided to add on some time to vacation. But have I planned a stitch of the trip? Nope. Have I looked to see if I can piggyback any work or work related visits? Nope. Wassamatta with me?

Can you help? We are arriving in Aukland on the 8th. We have to be in Wellington the late afternoon of the 17th. We fly home on the 23rd (Wellington-Aukland-Los Angeles-Seattle.)

• Vacation recommendations - places to see, affordable lodging, good food
• Need an afternoon or a day of consulting? If you can get us to where you are, feed us and put us up, I’ll offer my time in exchange.
• Want to try and meet up for fun? When and where?

In other words… HELP ME!

Photo on Flickr by Travelling Pooh

This post from the sparky, smart and witty Vicki Scholtz is the best chuckle of the day for me. This post is a response to participation in the recent e/Merge 2008 which I blogged about last week.

Carnivorous Cow | Repassionated
“Maybe that’s it,” Keitu admitted. “Maybe it was exactly that notion that resonated - a kind of Woodstocky feel only with better hair and cooler clothes, and far nicer toys. But that sense of idealism, of belief, of… of passion! Somehow, although I let it go, it wouldn’t let me go!”

Bob chuckled. “You’re talking about Howard sitting barefooted under his plum tree! I wonder how many fermented plums you’ve been eating…!”

“Well,” Keitu admitted, “it makes a change from all the chocolate. Hey!” she looked up. “Do you think I could be the secret love child of Nancy White and Howard Rheingold?”

I’m a Joss Whedon fan. Loved Firefly. I also love musicals (please, don’t judge me! ). So when I heard about Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, I had to take a peek.

Then I wanted to know more about the Master Plan. Here is what I found:

Spread the word. Rock some banners, widgets, diggs… let people know who wouldn’t ordinarily know. It wouldn’t hurt if this really was an event. Good for the business, good for the community – communitIES: Hollywood, internet, artists around the world, comic-book fans, musical fans (and even the rather vocal community of people who hate both but will still dig on this). Proving we can turn Dr Horrible into a viable economic proposition as well as an awesome goof will only inspire more people to lay themselves out in the same way. It’s time for the dissemination of the artistic process. Create more for less. You are the ones that can make that happen.

Wow. I had no idea how important you guys were. I’m a little afraid of you.

Wait a minute - look at this. A new way to create and collaborate? Yeah, baby. While I see international NGO’s struggling to maintain ownership, get credit and other such things in order to keep the donor dollars running in, what would happen if international development was done in this model - by people both who identify themselves as “development professionals” (whatever that means) AND by anyone who had something to contribute. Give it away free for a bit, and then if it has value, sell it at a reasonable price. We fund based on usefulness and demand.

What would happen if learning had this model. Instead of lining up for a degree, what if people could offer and accept the offer of some bit of learning. How could these informal offers link up with the formal structures of certification or degrees? Should they?

What would happen if ….

To quote Whedon one more time… “Wow. I had no idea how important you guys were. I’m a little afraid of you.”

Window Dog

The dog days of summer are here, and I want to be outside on these glorious, sunny Seattle days. With a long wet winter, we tend to be hyper aware of the magnificence of our Pacific Northwest Summers. Right now there are raspberries and strawberries ripening in my garden. Flowers. Compost to be turned, potted plants luxuriating outside, needing water. The last two days I was up on Whidbey Island, about an hour north of Seattle, sitting on a deck overlooking the water and being blissfully quiet.

Where is the reflection on my work? On my practice. For the most part, right here on this blog. So I wanted to share some of the things I’m thinking about. Today’s is about the shift from me to we.

For the last two weeks I’ve been peeking in and participating peripherally in the South African online event, e/merge. Here is a bit about e/merge for context…

e/merge 2008 - Professionalising Practices is the third virtual conference on educational technology in Africa and builds on the e/merge conferences in 2004 and 2006. e/merge 2008 will take place online from 7 - 18 July 2008 and may include associated face to face events in a number of cities. The conference is primarily designed to share good practice and knowledge about educational technology innovation within the further and higher education sectors in the region, as well as to strengthen communities of researchers and practitioners.

I have been a part the first two e/merges (2004 and 2006). In 2006 we ran a little online facilitation workshop within the event and that was what Tony Carr and I were going to do this year. But through a nice accident, we both were overwhelmed and decided to shift gears to something both simpler and emergent. We decided to host three chats during the two week event around the facilitation of the event, asking the event facilitators and hosts to join us with their thoughts and observations. IT offered not only a simpler structure, but it would provide a little bit of time for reflection within the event. Wow, slowing down!

The chats attracted the event facilitators plus other participants and have been FANTASTIC. The open format with a loose theme somehow created a safe, warm and humorous place where I felt the shift from “me to we” each time. In our last chat today, we talked about how we pay attention to and invite that shift from me to we. Some of the triggers people noticed include:

• Being acknowledged as a contributor (in a reply, summary, etc.)
• Getting comfortable (posting, the technology, the people)
• Having enough space to establish an identity, then letting that go

How do you invite this transition from me to we in your facilitation, online or off? Can you share a story of when you felt or experienced this shift?

Here is the video of the short talk I did on Slow Community at Zaaz last week. Boy, I don’t hold still, do I?

Slow Community

Pete Shelton (IFPRI of the CGIAR along with his co-blogger, Stephan Dorn) has a must read post for anyone trying to introduce “web 2″ tools to their work communities. He speaks of researchers here (in international agricultural research) but I believe they apply in many other settings as well. Read the whole thing… Three lessons from a year of teaching 2.0 to researchers

1. Focus on the job, not the tool.
2. Researchers like hearing from other researchers, not us.
3. Don’t assume you know what researchers need- go out and ask them!

Photo from Edmittance on Flickr

Liz Strauss asked, Do Crayons Qualify as Social Media? . Absolutely-fricken-YES! If social media are the tools and affordances that allow us to communicate, interact, create, converse and invent with each other, then the world is full of social media. It was not born with Web 2.0 (whatever the heck that really is). Our tools transcend their initial uses, and more importantly, our practices need to transcend across our contexts!

I promised earlier this week that I would post a follow up about my offering Tuesday night on Thinking about “Slow Community” (particularly online). Before it all (slowly) leaks out of my brain, here are some notes, comments and pointers to the ongoing Twitter conversation about “slow community.”

First, the host of the evening, Ryan Turner, wrote:

Nancy,

You ROCKED it last night. I knew you would. Thanks so much for making the time.

I think your talk pretty much blew everyone’s mind. It certainly got mine spinning, and I really think you’re on to something with the slow community idea. I too question whether it’s really slower or actually less–and I also wonder whether there’s a combination of those that ends up making sense. Do we partition our relationships? Our conversations (across relationships)? How do we manage work, where project groups form, dissolve, and re-form, but relationships (personal, intellectual, thematic) persist? Doesn’t seem to me anybody’s yet invented the social router, which could manage our cross-channel traffic in meaningful ways … though I do have some ideas … not to say a prototype ….

It was great to reconnect with you, just a bit, and I hope we can continue.

Best,
Ryan

Phew. And here I thought I was babbling and incoherent. Thank goodness the other folks were all interesting. I enjoyed the offerings from Brian Fling of Flingmedia - Brian, did you talk about slow community at FOO Camp?; Justin Marshall of ZAAZ, Samantha Starmer from REI - Samantha, I have added “metadata strategy” to my online interaction checklist!; and Wendy Chisholm, who has opened my eyes to accessibility - even on a little old blog post - in a way that I needed. Thanks, Wendy!,

After the talks, I had the chance to have conversation with a few folks - unfortunately I did not write down names. I should have. Oi. Here are the points that came up that I can remember.

• If everything is so overwhelming and fragmented, what are the solutions? (The young guy who loved the chicken wings). I started to babble about a systems approach, but I need to actually understand better what that means. But I SENSE that this is important. True to my style, it usually takes me a while to figure out intellectually what I intuit.
• What is the role of information FLOW in creating a useful community experience, rather than overwhelm (the guy from Boeing).
• What is it we are really asking about - slowness, volume, simplicity?
• What should businesses be thinking about if they are in this crushing phase of “must have community?”
• What is the role of identity in all of this?
• And of course, Ryan’s “social router” which has MY head spinning.

On the Twitter front, besides the tweets already posted on the wiki, here is the latest round… thank you my TweetFriends. Oops, can’t do a screen capture. Since Windows did its last update, some of my old programs aren’t working. I was wondering when this was going to happen. Grrr. I’ll come back and edit it in. In the meantime, you can see them on Summize. I’ll go download Snagit and be right back!

(Later… here are the screen captures of the Tweets)

I started drafting this post on May 12th and here it is the 10th of July. But as you can see, this week is my “catch up on my bloggin” week. So be warned! What follows is my very  brief “catch up and report” on my Ethiopia trip. I’ll do a separate post on the Community 2.0 conference in Las Vegas that happened as the second leg of the trip.  You will notice that the text reads as  if it was written in May. Much of it was. Grin.

After a great week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I’m back in the USA (after 28 hours of travel!!) and in Las Vegas at Community 2.0 Conference . Talk about culture shock. From the streets of Addis, where the smell of Ethiopian coffee floats out across streets filled with people who are alternately desperately poor and begging, or part of the emerging middle class, to the surreal neon and hype of Las Vegas, my head is totally confused. Here is the Ethiopia part of the story.

The week in Addis was wonderful. I was there to co facilitate a face to face follow up workshop on Knowledges Sharing for the CGIAR. This came after a four week online workshop. Simone Stagier blogged a lot of the workshop sessions here.  Lots of pictures here.

I arrived on Saturday night on the same flight as one of our workshop participants, Pete Shelton. We had a brief stopover in Khartoum - wow, a dessert town in every sense of the word. Photos here. Then on to Addis. After a long wait for visa and passport control, we headed to the ILRI campus, our home for the next week. Ah, sleep.

Sunday Pete and I  went into town to the National Museum, the home of “Lucy” the oldest known human skeleton. We followed up with our first Ethiopian food (I now love Injera - in Ethiopia it has a tangier, sour-dough taste. I understand in US restaurants not everyone uses the teff grain) which was a great way to start the trip.

On Monday I met up with my co-facilitators, Simone Stagier and Petr Kosina  to do our prep. We decided to check and find out who had arrived and we had a little surprise. Three of our participants had also come in early and since they had to leave early, we created an impromptu session Monday afternoon. It is always good to remain flexible.

On Tuesday the workshop officially kicked off with a World Cafe, capturing the highlights of what we learned in the first online phase (4 weeks). In the room were 21 people passionate about knowledge sharing in international agricultural research. From Africa, Europe, Asia and the US, we spent the next three days working, eating, learning and playing together. As I always find, going from online to F2F totally jump starts both the personal interactions and the work. Plus being able to stay and meet on the campus created a great container for social interaction - for me a key to learning.

We covered a lot of territory on knowledge sharing tools and methods and each person worked to plan a knowledge sharing project at their home institution. As each person did and shared a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) on their projects, it was interesting to see that the most shared challenges were technical (connectivity in many of the countries where people are doing their work) and social (getting engagement in KS, especially in a research based culture that rewards formal publishing). It was a perfect reminder that we need to pay attention to both areas and that neither the implementation of a new tool, or the presentation of an opportunity easily triggers knowledge sharing.

Despite little connectivity during the workshop, we tried to share our collective learnings about tools. At the end of the workshop on the “still want to learn” list of many was “more tools.” We were told in advance that people in the networks we were targeting were not so interested in tools, but clearly this group was. We also used a variety of knowledge sharing methods and spent a lot of time talking about the social processes of tools, so I think we did a pretty good job keeping a “holistic” view of knowledge sharing.

On Saturday one of our local hosts, Nadia and her husband David took three of us out into town - a little sightseeing, coffee sipping and of course, some shopping. Thank goodness there are no ATMS and no credit cards, or I would have gotten carried away with beautiful jewelry, fabrics and lots of very cool rural farming artifacts (grain baskets, dairy gourds, etc). As it was, I was happy to contribute to the local economy.

As I left Addis that Saturday night, I was again reminded of the power of travel to open our eyes to new experiences and to help us see more clearly our own identity. Ethiopia is the fourth country in Africa I have visited, and a reminder of the diversity of the continent, something we American’s often lump together as “Africa.” From the high mountain geography, to the distinct Ethiopian culture, to the impact of colonialism from Italy and the Soviet Union, to the unique taste of the teff-based Injera.

Then there was Las Vegas. Mamma mia…

I wanted to point out a new article on the CGIAR’s ICT-KM site about the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit Wiki that I’ve been working on and which has become near and dear to my heart. Here is a snippet:

Knowledge Sharing in the CGIAR - Tools and Methods for Sharing Knowledge: The CGIAR’s Wiki Approach
The Institutional Knowledge Sharing (KS) Project of this Program together with its CGIAR Center partners has been experimenting with a range of KS tools and methods over the past five years and has recently been assembling these and many others into a toolkit (http://kstoolkit.wikis.cgiar.org). This evolving resource – continually updated, edited, expanded, and critiqued in wiki fashion – is targeted mainly on scientists, research support teams, and administrators in the 15 international centers of the CGIAR. But it also serves their partner organizations, as well as development organizations working in areas other than agriculture. And it benefits from their diverse feedback too.

Science has traditionally relied on a few key vehicles for sharing and validating new knowledge. The most important are experiment replication, the publication of research results in peer reviewed journals, literature searches, and formal and informal communications at conferences, workshops, and other meetings. In addition, the patent system serves as a complementary knowledge broker in instances where research spawns technical innovation. With such longstanding institutions already in place, why is there a need for new avenues to share knowledge? The answer to that question is surprisingly complex; but a few key reasons stand out.