Full Circle Associates

Yesterday I woke up and checked my email. It was clear that the email lull of the holidays was over. I was taken by a post on one of my core community lists, KM4Dev, from one of my colleagues. You can see the full thread here:

Dear colleagues

A few weeks ago, I posted a query on IT-tools for virtual projects and got very useful recommendations. One colleague pointed out to me that, for an organization like SDC (big, Government), one of the main elements to consider would be the IT department. This proved to be very true. Our ministry’s IT department over the past few years developed one major collaboration application (consultation tool to develop consolidated Swiss statements for UN), based on MS Sharepoint. This application has a fantastic track record: it is used, it is appreciated by ist users, it produces good results and it saves time. Our IT department therefore concludes that MS Sharepoint is the basis on which to build SDC’s collaboration platform.

We are not quite sure they are right, but for the time being they definitely got more and better arguments than we do. This is why I would like to tap into the km4dev collective experience again: what do we as a group know about MS Sharepoint as basis for building a community collaboration platform?

Some of the questions turning in my mind are:

* What was MS Sharepoint initially conceived to be? What is its development history? What are the core functions it is really good at?

* I got somewhat alarmed when seeing that MS Sharepoint is not mentioned at all in “Digital Habitat” (book by Etienne Wenger et al on Technology Stewardship for communities). Nancy, why don’t you mention it?

* What are “make it or break it” features we should ask for, which would guarantee that a useful community collaboration platform can be built on MS Sharepoint?

Wishing you all a great start into the new year. Thanks for helping us along

Adrian

Adrian Gnägi
Knowledge and Learning Processes

Being on the US West Coast, my other KM4Dev colleagues had already provided some great responses (again, see the thread!) But since Adrian had asked me specifically about why SharePoint was not in our book, Digital Habitats, I wanted to answer. My friend Jon Lebkowsky suggested that I blog my response. Considering the number of page views on my last SharePoint post I figured that might be a good idea. SharePoint and other collaborative platforms are also not  new topics for the community as you can see from this summary on the community wiki:  http://wiki.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/SharePoint. The topic stays alive, so I chimed in:

Adrian, by the time I woke up, my peers pretty much summed up what I would have said. I found all the messages really resonated with my experience and research.

We did not include it in the Digital Habitats book because in the community we have seen more failures in the use of SharePoint than successes and our goal was to tell stories of usefulness, not frustration.

Others have already well articulated the core strengths and weaknesses of SP. From my personal experience with older versions of SharePoint (I  have VERY little with 2007) is that it is built  p from the metaphor of one’s hard drive. My folders. Your folders. Each community “ready to go with a click” but siloed in the very design of the software. Have you ever noticed that out of the box you can’t easily cross link once you are deep into a community space? You have to go back “up” to the top of the system, find the other space, and drill down. In essence, there is no fundamental network structure to the platform. In today’s world, that represents a significant problem for me. It actually creates more division, rather than facilitates connections.

There is also a distinction for all products that is important to consider. The differences between the tools a platform offers, how it does or does not integrate them with and without, and the features that make them usable all matter. (Quick definition: platform is the integration of a number of tools. Integration can be incredibly important and is probably the biggest “sales pitch” for any platform. Tool is a piece of code designed to do a particular thing. A feature is something that makes a tool usable. ) For example, a wiki is a tool. The wysiwyg feature, makes it easier for non-geeks to use. If a group makes a lot of tables in their wiki, they probably don’t want a wiki that requires wiki syntax to make the tables. These are examples of features.

Many platforms (not just SP) started bending their base structure (often built off of discussion threads) to “act like” newer tools such as IMs, wikis, blogs, etc. These re-purposed bits of code often lack the features we come to know (and depend upon) so they don’t feel right nor are they as useful. This is where examination of technology at all three levels: platform, tool and feature — can really matter.

As Matt says, who knows what 2010 version will bring. If it doesn’t bring a network sensibility, then MSFT will lose the game of both collaboration and cooperation because we are in a networked world and we need both. Simply having spaces for teams to collaborate won’t work for most of us, particularly in international development.

The key is always to start thinking about what ACTIVITIES you want to support in your collaboration platform, then assess the tools in the context of those uses and the environment of the user. The comments so far have really done a good job exploring some of those aspects:

• What are people already using (start where they are)?
• What are the connectivity issues (SP has a problem with this internationally, even when people have built “low bandwidth friendly add-ons)?
• What tasks do people have to do individually and together (yes, consider the range from individual, to defined group, to network, which includes internal and external folks many times! So often we only look from the organization’s perspective if what it mandates)
• Where is the locus of control of the software? we find that communities that have control of their environment tend to “bend” it to their needs more easily, more intelligently, than if they have to keep asking IT, who may or may not understand the context of their community. This is at the heart of the idea of “community technology stewardship” — in, from and for the community)
• How can the tool allow a community to face in the directions it wants to face – in other words, if it is totally inward facing (private in all ways), a mix of inward and outward, or very outward facing (meaning it wants to connect outside itself with other individuals, communities and networks)
• What is the simplest possible thing you can use now that will support your purpose and how can it grow, vs having every possible thing now and none of it is used (this is probably one of the biggest traps we all fall into)
• How can the tool connect with, integrate, grow , evolve with outside tools and services (no community is an island!)?

If SP can support the activities you want, in your context, fabulous. If not, try and open a dialog that shows why not. Use the Spidergram (http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2009/03/31/digital-habitats-community-orientation-spidergram-activity/) as a talking tool, and then, if their arguments are verbally convincing, try USING different tools. The FEATURES of the tools, what makes them useful (not just thef fact that there is a wiki or an IM tool in Sharepoint), is the difference that makes a difference. SP locks everything down to its specs. It is one way, or no way. If that works, fine. It has rarely worked for me.

You may also want to see this wiki http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Technology_for_Communities_project
And this chapter from the book, the Technology Steward’s Action Notebook

Nancy

Photo Credit: ‘Dereliction Splendor‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71038389@N00/2218657600
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vermininc/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This curriculum and materials have not been updated in many years, but they are still a valuable resource that emerges from not only my work, but that of my teachers, Lisa Kimball, Howard Rheingold, Michele Paradise and many, many others. In a way, they are a glimpse back into the early days of the practice of online facilitation.

I have removed the original copyright designation and it is now available as a creative commons, non-profit, share alike resource. Enjoy and improve upon it, as so many others, like Tony Carr at University of Cape Town and Brad Beach of Central  Gippsland TAFE have already done!

Online Facilitation Course Curriculum Rev  Aug 2002

The last leg of my Australian adventure took me north to the Queensland beach town of Mooloolaba. I had been practicing my pronounciation so I would not mess up. Again. Last year I presented via video to the Learning Technologies 2008 conference. This year (Learning Technologies 2009 or Twitter tag #lt2009) I got to be there in the flesh and I wanted to get it right. MOO – LOO – LA – BAH with equal emphasis on all the sylables!

On Wednesday I ran a half day workshop on Technology Stewardship. (As promised, the slides are here.) It was a pleasure to hang out with Anne Bartlett-Bragg, Claire Bray, Paul Doherty, Jay Mair, BronwynDavies, Billy Ramadas, Gillian Smith, Alison Bickford, Colin Warren , and Mary McVay. We explored their own technology stewardship in their communities with the Spidergram exercise, some playing around with the Social Media game cards and conversations about our work. The afternoon flew by.

Then we retired to the Mooloolaba Surf Club for the official opening cocktail party. Surf Clubs are an important part of Australian coast culture and it was fun to get a peek inside of the place where all the volunteer lifeguards hang out, as well as a critical community center.

The conference proper was Thursday and Friday. I helped kick off Thursday with the keynote, “Me, We and the Network,” where I continued on my theme about the importance of having a line of sight to the full range of learning contexts – individual learning, group or community (bounded), and the wider, free-ranging network environment. In the middle of the talk, I tapped the group in the room to help me sing happy birthday to Larry, since I would miss his birthday on the 21st. They did a brilliant job!

While in Mooloolaba and surrounding area, I did a little shopping, including a Tweetclace! Bronwyn Stuckey (@Bronst), Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) and I went to the Eumondi markets and I, um, supported the local economy!

• The audio from my talk “Me We Network” here: http://bit.ly/5js0Yc
• My #lt2009 photos, including the surfer dudes and dudettes! http://bit.ly/6riBAq
• Feedback posts here, and here.

Something about the learning folks in Adelaide just lights me up from the inside out. It was a pleasure to be able to be part of the EDayz09 conference were many of the people I met during my tour in 2006 were present. You know its going to be fun.

Thursday Michael Coghlan met me at the airport (how FUN is it when a real person meets you AT THE GATE these days! Shocking and wonderful) then trundled me into town and dinner with Brad Beach and John (whose last name seems to evade me – so sorry John!) where we had some great S. Australian wine fueled conversations that helped me prepare and contextualise for the next day’s keynote.

Friday it was off to E-Dayz where I was going to use the springboard question “Should we be using community in learning anymore?” into an exploration of the continuum of me, we and the network as an essential bed for both social and situated learning. The venue was a big, steeply raked theatre style and I felt I should sing and dance. Literally! But I controlled myself. The slides are below, audio is here and video here. Kerry Johnson did an amazing job live streaming the entire event and will get us the video URL

In the afternoon I ran a much more informal workshop, originally intended as follow up from the keynote, but when we started, I made a couple of offers for options, one of which was to explore the role of visuals in our work. We did Johnnie Moore’s paired drawing exercise and I then gave the option on topics. MORE VISUALS. This went on for the full 40 minutes and I was so grateful to be able to play in that space as we looked at specific applications of the use of visuals in online learning.

All in all it was a great day. There is so much more I could write, but the days are flying and I need to get this posted. Darn, tho I missed talking with Graham Wegner, whom I’ve followed on Twitter for some time!

Tuesday saw Matt Moore of Innotecture and I at the Australian Technology Park facilitating two half day workshops on online communities. The morning was a small group focused on the newer practitioner, and the afternoon added a diversity of experienced and energetic online community managers and designers.

The morning’s small groups enabled us to go into details with each person and what they wanted to do online. This idea of the continuum from the individual, through bounded communities and out to networks again permeated my thinking and input, priming my pump for Friday’s keynote at Adelaide’s EDayz09. More on that later…

In the afternoon, Matt and I decided to use some exercises to help raise the range of issues associated with advancing an online community by looking at current states of people’s communities, how they got that way and possible positive and catastrophic futures. Frankly, there were some good starts to conversations, but the diversity of the group and the speed at which we went through the exercise did not completely satisfy me – nor I suspect, many of the participants. Matt later reflected that we just made it too complicated and I think he was right. When you have advanced practitioners, the key is to let them share and compare.

I’m always torn when I’m “giving” a workshop. Matt and I have tons of things we can “present” and “talk” about, but that goes counter to a lot of what we preach in terms of participatory processes. Yet content gives an hand hold, an affordance, an anchor to focus conversations. I think we need to get the mix — so we are refining for Melbourne next week where we’ll run the same pair of workshops again on Tuesday.

For me, the highlight was again meeting all the great, interesting and intelligent people and hearing their stories. I look forward to more.