Full Circle Associates

People ask me, “how do I become a better blogger and how can I make money at blogging?” There are tons of great resources out there on how to become a better blogger, and I usually don’t have a good answer for the second part. But today an email from Ben Rattray of Change.org gave me a thought. Change.org is looking for paid bloggers around activist issues. There is a monthly stipend - I’m sure it isn’t huge, but this is a paid gig. It offers a good writer the chance to hone her skill, get exposure and street cred as a paid blogger. And heck, while doing some good! It’s a good combination. Check it out…Change.org

Want to blog on an issue you are passionate about for an audience of hundreds of thousands of activists and nonprofit leaders?

Want to create the premier online space for your issue and become a leading voice for social action?

Change.org is launching a social action blog network this summer and is currently hiring a team of part-time bloggers/editors to help create a movement for change around the major causes of our time.

Each blogger will lead an online community focusing on a different social, political, or environmental issue, maintain a daily blog covering news and offering commentary, convene leading nonprofits and activists working on the issue, and help people translate their interests and passions into concrete action.

photo credit: os♥to
I hate titling these blog posts with the words “community management.” After writing post 1 and post 2 on this topic (triggered by Chris Brogan), the words just feel wrong. But because this is the label that has been floating across our blog conversations, I’m keeping it in as “connective tissue.” I was actually thinking about “The Giant Ear!”

So why am I writing a third post in three days on community management? (Instead of going for a walk this morning. Uh oh.) It is “in the air.” For those who have had a baby, it’s like once you get pregnant, all of a sudden you notice all the other pregnant women walking around town! Once you start putting blogging your ideas on something, you notice others who have thought/said/tickled around the same thing. The waves of blogging conversations about community management seem to be washing on the shore closer together these days.

While catching up on some feeds, I saw Matt Moore’s bit on
chief conversation officer.

Organisations need Social Media Relations people. And because of the participatory nature of the social media, these people will have to blog. And comment on other blogs. And Twitter. And all that other stuff. They will encourage, advise and look out for bloggers and social media headz in their own organisations. And they will have to believe in what their organisations do (be it curing cancer or causing it) or else they will get found out.

Everyone wants to be Chief Talking Officer. Who wants to be Chief Conversation Officer?

Hm. Matt is talking about something different than this animal we’ve been calling community manager, but some of the functions he lists hearken back to Chris’s list. But do you feel the dissonance that I do? Just the title “officer” shows us the polarities that we activate when trying to reconcile a network activity with a corporate structure.

Control <--> Emergence
Talking <--> Listening
Planned <--> Evolving
Being in charge <--> Being able to be an effective network actor

We are recognizing these polarities or tensions. (YAY!) They are showing up in thousands of blog posts and creeping into books. They emerge from deep roots and cannot be ignored or wished away. Yet it seems to be hard to talk about them within organizations and even the “job descriptions” we see more of every day. (Check the listing of online community manager blogs on Forum One’s site or on Jake McKee’s.)

Let’s make them discussable, and we can discover the way forward. Let’s discuss them — with every boss and leader who will listen. Let’s encourage the network around organizations to tell them how they feel about being managed - or listened to. Let’s find a way to use the power of the network for our organizations, and with it, the multiplied, nested power of the communities that live in and spring from the network. (Oh heck, I’m getting all riled up and haven’t even had a cup of tea this morning!)

To circle back to this idea of “community manager,” and what it is becoming in a network age, the first thing is to be brave enough discuss the idea that it may be “management” in the frame of business structures and some “older ways” of doing things, but in terms of the action in the network, it is not management as we know it. It is is about being connective tissue between an organization and the world/network it lives within. It is about activation, listening, pattern seeking and then bringing that back into the current context of the organization - at whatever stage that organization is in becoming a network organization. It is about reconciling that businesses, in their interaction with the world (customer, vendors, regulators) have opened the door to a new way of being in the system that requires more than management. More than measurable data. More than targets and goals. It requires intuition, intellect and heart.

Heart? Community Managers and HEART she says? INTUITION???

Yes. Heart and intuition, but not in the absence of intellect. Because systems include that beautiful, irrational, impulsive part of human life - emotion. “Community” and “network” both imply human beings. The person you entrust to guide and represent and help your organization learn - this person we have been calling the “community manager” - is your person who stewards your connection to both hearts and minds. Who listens with every available channel, including intuition. How do you measure your ROI on intuition? On heart? I’d ask, what are you losing every day by ignoring them.

So what would you call that role? Magician? The Giant Ear? Elder? I’m currently stumped.

(edited later for a silly typo)

My last post was on the ground, in-the-flow practical stuff of online community management in response to Chris Brogan’s great post, On Managing A Community . This one climbs up to meta-ville a bit and asks a couple of questions.

Are we talking about communities, or are we embarking on the era of network facilitation?
If you read between the lines and through the comments on Chris’s blog I think he has begun to tease out some of the differences between community and network management! (I’ll come back to that word “management.”) Read through his goals which I think are different than what we have come to expect for what I’ll call “traditional online community management.” In the past this has been about the inward set of processes around hosting, moderation and facilitation of web based discussion communities - large or small. He speaks of outreach, of reputation of an organization in the world, and of mechanisms of learn from and with groups of people and even the wider world. It is an outward looking role, not inward. It is about spawning connections, not keeping existing connections organized.

This is not your mother’s discussion board, sweetheart!

When we move to the network, a couple of things happen. The notion of managing becomes even more of an illusion than managing that herd of cats called “community.” (By community, I mean a bounded set of individuals who care about something and who know they are members and interact with each other over time.)

Instead we are talking about scanning for things important for our organizations - conversations about us, niches or needs we can fill, feedback and suggestions for improving what we do. It is filtering and redirecting those messages to where they can do good. It is a little bit like listening to the universe.

Instead of managing conflict or spammers in a walled community, we are seeking to make connections between people that advance our organization’s learning and goals. That includes between disgruntled people and the people who might address that problem, between ideas, links and content to people who might use them, and between communities that exist within the humus of the network garden.

Instead of spawning or archiving threads, we are tagging and remixing. Instead of inviting in or kicking out members, we are mapping the network of relationships, looking for where to respond, and where to catalyze action.

These are not the list of community management skills we have come to know since the first big upswing in online communities in the mid 1990’s. We have moved to from community to network…. what is the word?

If we are talking about communities, are we really talking about managers?
I don’t think it is management in the traditional sense, in the sense of control and mold (or even “facilipulate” - manipulate+facilitate!). It is about sensing, scanning, filtering and connecting. And, it is about learning. Facilitating learning. Living the learning and creating the next iteration of that learning. It is about stewarding technology as wave upon wave of new tools crashes upon our organizations.

It is about weaving between the community and the network.

What the heck would this job be called? Which organizations have the foresight to invest in it — and realize that those who help them weave their organizations in and out of the networks will benefit most from those networks? If we were looking for this person, what skills would they show up with? What would their traces across the internet look like?

photo credit: CaseyLessard
Chris Brogan has a great post today on online community management - a must read if you have or are considering an online community in your business or organization. On Managing A Community .

I have two “chunks” I’d like to contribute to this conversation/stream of posts/comments. First relates directly to Chris’ observations about community managers. That is the content of Part 1. Check the next post for a more “meta” reflection in Part 2.

Skills, Experience and Qualities of a “community manager”
1. On the practical side, I would add the following things I’d look for in a candidate (Chris didn’t write about this, but it is on my mind, so what the heck!)

• Fast, accurate and quality reading/writing skills - I always recommend a timed reading/writing test that involves looking at multiple bits of information (posts, etc.), seeing the patterns of those posts then composing a response.
• Ability to think globally, not just in a linear manner. Community is non-linear. A good community manager must be able to skip around, see patterns, scan the whole and then discern if and where to intervene in the system. People who have to go from a, to b, to c often struggle with this and can’t do it fast enough. And alas, speed keeps coming into the picture. (Ah, i still dream of Slow Community.).
• Good at multimembership or meaningfully belonging to a number of communities. A community manager is a bridge - finding the opportunities to connect in and out of the community to both build the community and carry it’s ideas/impact outside of the community. So they should be active on other community sites (as noted by Chris suggesting they have accounts on various key systems.)
• Head and heart. Community requires the emotional intelligence from the heart side and the analytical/strategic and content skills from the head side. I can’t stress enough that this needs to be BOTH, not OR!
• Social network mapping and analysis skills. Today we are not often working in the confines of boundaried communities (see Post 2) so being able to see and understand the larger network is critical.

Adding to Chris’s section on Strategy

• Understand our community’s relationship to other communities and networks in our domain. In other words, watch for connections!

Adding to Chris’s section on Reporting

• I like that Chris framed this as “in my organization.” Reporting structure needs to reflect who can champion the community manager AND, more importantly, steward relationships with other parts of the organization because rarely is an organization’s community important to just one functional area. Again, connections!

Adding to Chris’s section on Measurement

• Quantity and quality of network relationships to key strategic people/communities/other networks.
• Where the person is doing facilitation within a bounded community (traditional), clarity and quantification of the managers appropriate role in the community over time. For example, if you are looking to build internal member capacity to manage their own communities, what evidence do you see that the community manager is reducing her/his visible participation and evidence of members taking up key community facilitation activities? Where that person is to be the public “face” of an organization, the strategy and thus measurement would be quite different.

My second point is about the context - communities — and the word — managers. And I think I need to make it in a separate post as it is quite different and much more meta. I appreciated the tactical, practical quality of Chris’s post, so I wanted to respond in kind. So see you in the next post!
orld?

I am heading into a period of intense work and travel, so who knows when I’ll get time to focus on blog posting. Every night my head swirls with things to write about: network collaboration, slow community, short-and-shared reflective practices, things I’ve learned from the many people with whom I am crossing paths, and many more. I have a stack of “draft posts” (mostly bookmarks with short notes as to why I think they are important). No shortage of ideas, just of time. So instead, I leave you a gift of spring that is currently sitting on my dining room table.

Flickr Photo Download: Parrot Tulip

And, just for fun, here are some of the URLs I wanted to go back and read carefully and blog about. My eyes are bigger than my stomach, eh?

http://engineerswithoutfears.blogspot.com/
http://steve-dale.net/?p=181
http://curtisconley.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
http://www.theappgap.com/collaboration-quiz.html
http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+social+media
http://socialmedia.wikispaces.com/A-Z+of+%28nontech%29+networking
http://www.anecdote.com.au/index.php
http://100trillion.wordpress.com/
http://socialchemy.com/
http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/2242000/2242753/1/print/honoria_sxsw_book_07_larger_pages.pdf
http://www.intellitics.com/blog/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080409085902.htm
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3629042
http://www.odi.org.uk/publications/working_papers/WP285.pdf
http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/
http://www.jackmartinleith.com/?p=184
http://www.davegray.info/2008/04/08/forms-fields-and-flows/
http://faraportal.blip.tv/file/712868/
http://www.gadget4all.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=00061
http://www.yesandspace.com.au/
http://panl10n.net/wiki/MeasurementAndEvaluation
http://leadernetworks.blogspot.com/2008/03/online-communities-slowing-down-for.html
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvin_Minsky_essays
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/04/the-urge-to-edi.html
http://www.change-management-blog.com/
http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/part/2008/04/slow_community_in_action.html
http://bgblogging.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/two-last-talks-from-inside-the-academy-not-playing-it-safe/
http://drop.io/
http://www.edmitchell.co.uk/blog/2008/02/26/happiness-located-in-bristol/#more-98
http://socialinvention.net/liberatingstructures.aspx
http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2008/04/10/5542.aspx
http://science.without-borders.org/
http://aboveandbeyondkm.blogspot.com/
http://webtastings.wordpress.com/

On Tuesday, while I was doing small scale graphic recording of the Interfaith Panel at Seeds of Compassion (and deeply enjoying the humor and humanity between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu!), I had the good fortune to be sitting right behind Deborah Koff-Chapin. Deborah does Touch Drawing and on Tuesday, she was using it to evoke what she was experiencing during the panel. Page after page of her work appeared, like magic. All the press photographers (we were sitting in the press section) kept coming over, taking pictures and asking her about her work. I have been reading about Deborah’s work, so it was a great chance to watch her in action.

She has allowed me to share a set of photos of the work she did that day on my Flickr site. I encourage you to check them out –> Deborah Koff-Chapin’s Touch Drawing at Seeds of Compassion - a set on Flickr.

Deborah wrote about the experience:

It was an honor to do Interpretive Touch Drawing at Seeds of Compassion. Touch Drawing is a simple yet profound process. Images are created through the touch of fingertips on paper. The process allows for direct expression of the soul, and can be used for deep therapeutic and spiritual purposes.

In the conference setting, I use Touch Drawing to visually portray the content and energetic qualities of the lectures and musical performances. Through the immediacy of the process, I can create 7- 8 drawings per hour. These drawing were created during the Tuesday event; ‘Inspiring Compassion
in Our Youth; Youth and Spiritual Connection Dialogue’. If you attended the day or are watching it online, you can use these images to enhance the feeling-tone of the presentations. Think of them as notes from the soul.

All these images will be posted soon on the CONFERENCE ART page at www.touchdrawing.com. Go there if you would like to order a signed, archival fine art print. Contact center@touchdrawing.com if you are interested in purchasing an original or receiving permission to reproduce an image. Drawings can be enhanced with color. A percentage of any income generated by these images will be donated to support the ongoing work of Seeds of Compassion.

As I reflect back on the day, we had Steven and Patti’s large scale 4×8 foot charts on paper, my 8×11 inch sketch book images and Deborah’s Touch Drawings. All four of use were capturing at many levels - at the literal capture of ideas through words and images, of the sense and spirit of the gathering and, of what was triggered within us as participants in the gathering. It was heart, mind and soul. I am preparing some collage images for each of the other graphic recorders for a subsequent post. I want to reflect on our process as a group of graphic recorders (and impromptu singing group. “The Magic Markers”) and capture some learnings going forward for visual harvesting of F2F events.

All images © 2008 Deborah Koff-Chapin.

Today on our local public radio station KUOW I heard a great piece about Western Washington professor and scientist, Dave Engebretson. It was one of those “aha” moments about learning.
He puts together audio of music (or a collection of musical notes) derived from geologic and natural data. By listening to the patterns of the data rendered in music, we “hear” new things and experience new ways about learning about geology in ways we might never expect. This is an amazing example of finding the feeling and intellectual understanding in the data.

KUOW: Sound Focus
At 2:08 p.m. – Listening to the Universe

There is music associated with ocean tides, volcanic eruptions and the cycles of the moon and planets. David Engebretson is a professor of geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He lost most of his sight as a child and also developed a keen ear for sound and music. We visit David at his home studio in Bellingham to find out how he uses those talents to help his students better understand the Universe by listening.

Much like my recent experiences with visuals and my learning, Engegretson awakened new understanding by channeling scientific data into a musical format. The musicality of the Puget Sound tidal wave heights over time is spell binding and informative. I want to find more audio of his work.

 ”I let the force of the sun and the moon play the tune.”

Engebretson talking about the tidal work. 

MP3 here (this story is just a minute or two in from the introductions)

photo credit: James Lewis..

I work a lot inside of communities of one sort or another and they often have their own insider language. You know, jargon. People complain that jargon is exclusionary and it sure can be. But it is also useful short hand within a community and can convey succinctly something with specific meaning. The challenge for us is using that language either outside our communities or with intent to exclude.

But dang, it can be useful. Here is a great example from travel guru/insider Joe Brancatelli who does a lovely decoding for us outsiders. This time it is about talking to gate agents at the airport.

One example: When you don’t see your plane at the gate, don’t ask the agent if the flight is on time. Ask, “Where’s the equipment?” That will force the agent to go to the computer and find out where your aircraft is and when it will actually arrive. If the plane is already at the gate, ask, “When are we scheduled to push back?” Looking for an upgrade? Don’t blindly inquire about your chances. Ask, “How are the loads today?” The agent will tell you how many seats are empty and your number on the upgrade wait list.

What kind of insider language do you use? How do you interpret it for others?

Amazing chocolate airplane and photo by Stevepreneur on Flickr

Five Things, or Late to the Party But Hey There’s Still Beer « Ninmah Meets World

Beer? Did someone say beer? In the spirit of appeasing my twitter friends, here are five more, for Rachel. It was learning she loved to weld that made me give in. I am not sure I am going to tag anyone else. How about a variation. If you want to be tagged, leave a comment and consider yourself tagged.

1. My first job in Seattle was in a cookie factory, alternately stacking cookies for packaging or decorating holiday cookies. I lasted a week. My problems? 1. I was too tall for the assembly line and it was killing my body. 2. I worked too fast and the rest of the crew was getting pretty ticked with me.

2. I once had a role in a musical where I was on stage for most of the show but said nor sang anything. Any guesses? (hint: it was a male role. I also played a ghost for one scene. I’m a sucker for character roles.)

3. I don’t like black licorice.

4. I had my first bliss of nature in a stand of deciduous trees, loosing there autumnal beauty upon my head. I danced.

5. I have no tattoos. But I’ve thought about it!

One more NVoice shout out - Luke Closs had an OLPC with him and taught me a LOT, including how to balance one on your chin. Here I’m getting into it slowly by using my teeth to help. Later I balanced, but sitting on the ground so the fall would be shorter for the little green and white sweetie. I’m still a digital grasshopper, oh Master Luke!

Nancy and Luke Duelling on Flickr - Photo Sharing! by Lee LeFever