Full Circle Associates

It is so lovely having a fabulous network – including people I just barely know, but who then hook in with a moment of insight, a remix or ready to augment a forming idea or practice. Gabriele Sani from World Vision in Italy has recently done this with the Community Orientations Spidergram from our Digital Habitats book.  He saw a post I put on KM4Dev and immediately took it further!  He has taken the spidergram and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. You simply put in the values in the table on tab 1 on the spreadsheet,  and voila, a lovely spidergram image is produced (see tab 2 of the spreadsheet).

Here is the tool: CoP-Orientation-Spidergram-Tool

This is a great tool to help people visualize the diagram at a distance – when you don’t have the comfy proximity of a white board and a bunch of post it notes. I also love the visual background Gabriele put in – lovely.

Others have been sharing their spidergrams. I’ve been tagging them on Delicious. You can find my spidergram tags here: http://delicious.com/choconancy/spidergram. Here is one from Sylvia Currie that she did with Gliffy – another way to  do the activity:

So why are seeing and sharing these practices useful? Gabriele’s spreadsheet  is useful not just because he created the it, but because he tried the work within his organization, saw the need for a “tweak,” the need to “tinker” and improve — and DID IT! Then he shared it back. Sylvia’s gave us another way to “crack the nut.” This is the value of working in the open, of iterating both internally and externally.

THANK YOU, Gabriele and Sylvia. And to the rest of you, do you have a Spidergram story to share?

I’ve written for years about community indicators. From the Orton Family Foundation comes a nice reification of visual community indicators – photos of our communities. You might want to enter some photos of your community. Or collect those contributed via Flickr as a great indicator of YOUR community.

Orton Family Foundation Heart & Soul Photo Contest

There’s something special about every community—the corner barbershop on Main Street, acres of wilderness, busy local shops, a striking shoreline, lively gathering places and deep-rooted traditions. That character is why people love their towns, it’s why they live there, and it’s also increasingly in danger.

Enter the Orton Family Foundation’s first Heart & Soul Photo Contest and help us and citizens of small cities and towns across the country celebrate, nurture and revive community heart and soul—the special cultures, landscapes, economies, traditions and values that make places unique.

1. Take a photo that captures the heart and soul of a community you love.
2. Fill out the contest entry form.
3. Upload up to 5 photos to Flickr and post them to the Community Heart & Soul Photo Contest Group.
4. Tell your friends, visit often to see new photos, and come back in January to vote for the winners.

The entry period is open from November 5, 2009 until January 5, 2010. Finalists will be announced in late January, followed by public voting to choose the winners. The First Prize winner will receive a Flip minoHD camcorder, and two runners up will receive gift certificates to B&H Photo/Video. All finalists and winners will be showcased on our website and in the Heart & Soul gallery at the COMMUNITYMATTERS10 Conference to be held in Denver, Colorado, October 5th through 7th, 2010.

Wednesday I hopped on a plane to Canberra to spend some time with the creative and energetic Leigh Blackall and Sunshine Connelley, their two magnificent pooches, Lego and Mina, and spend an afternoon with some communities of practices folks in national government here in the capitol city. After I arrived, Leigh and Sunshine took me out to the beautiful Murrumbaidgee River, about 30 minutes outside of town. We swam in the river and had a nice BBQ dinner in the warm afternoon sun. The water was just cool enough and the current not too strong to allow us to wallow in the shallows. It was a perfect antidote to being in planes and conference rooms, well peppered with conversation.

Thursday, we headed again out of town to Braidwood. Man, I could fall in love with this town. Between the Bread Dojo bread (Matt, you are an amazing baker), the beautiful setting and community spirit, one could be tempted to bid on the old hotel and pub up for auction. heh! Then we high tailed it back to town, allowing me to walk into my appointment just on time and have a great afternoon talking about the ideas surfaced in Digital Habitats and wrestling with the challenges of working in a government organization.

Then it was off to the airport and on my way to sunny and unseasonably warm Adelaide! Mike Coglan met me and we then went out to dinner with the energetic Brad Beach and John (whose last name I did not quite get. Mike as has a great shot of Brad here. You can see John here.)

I’m always interested in where people started in their “practice” no matter what the practice. So I was tickled to be led to Twitter / Search – #myonlineorigins.

What are your online origins?

Photo Credit: quapan

I have been following the twitter hashtag #seascorcher where all of us Seattlites are connecting, communicating and often commiserating about our record breaking heat wave.

It has been interesting to reflect on a) how much I’ve been on Twitter today and b) what I’m Tweeting about. The local issue has caused me to connect and focus locally which is quite different than my normal pattern. (You can read the recent tweets here Nancy White (NancyWhite) on Twitter).

The heat has me hiding inside in front of a fan, downstairs, with my main computer off and just my little netbook on my lap. A large ice tea has been refilled many times by my side. It is too hot to focus on some of my work, so Twitter has been both amusement and communication, but with a very different use pattern than normally. I’ve tweeted FAR more than usual as well. I’m reading tweets voraciously when I normally dip in and out and skim, skim, skim.

What I find really interesting is the shift of focus. You know that old saying, nothing pulls people together like a crisis. Our heat is doing that. People are swapping cooling tips, places to get ice cream, air conditioned public locations for cooling off, and of course, the current temperature. The news media Twitterers are at it bringing many flavors of classic and citizen journalism into the story. The local coop is tweeting cooling food ideas. Everyone is getting into the game.

Is this community building? It could be. Some connections formed this week will grow. Others stay anonymous and ephemeral – the moment enjoyed and passed on. Very network like. But it gives one slice of a geographic community.

And you know what? It is fun. I feel more connected to Seattle that I usually do, since I work with global networks. Yet even my global friends are chiming in. This is fascinating. The power of events, of something at a specific point in time that captures our attention. And imagination!