Full Circle Associates

Google Chrome came out today in beta (of course) and instead of doing my to do list tasks, I had to download it and play with it. I had three motivations. From a selfish perspective, my main motivation is the crashing of firefox for the tab-addicted like me. I like to keep lots of tabs open and keep the browser open all the time. It seems like after about 18 hours, Firefox freezes up. My second motivation is I’m simply curious. But my more enduring motivation is that in my communities, people are always asking “should I download and use tool X?” Everyone isn’t technically curious, or has the time flexibility to try new tools and give some feedback. This is part of community technology stewardship. So I’m giving Chrome a spin today for me, for you, for anyone!

So far clean, if a bit ugly. So much blue! It feels speedier than FF. I like the tabs above the URL bar. I am able to blog easily from my Wordpress “blog it” link as Chrome imported all my bookmarks and many settings. I am still playing around with the options.

So what would I advise my communities so far? Well, it doesn’t appear to be as buggy as some people said it might be. The download and install was painless. So for those seeking something new, go for it. For a transition for a community I still need to see if the web applications used in my communities function well in Chrome. That’s the acid test.

Here are a couple of screen shots. 

Edited later: Downsides

• No delicious tag plugin. I’m a big tagger. This is a big gap.
• User agreement - CNet blogs about the fine print. Read it.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be facilitating a multilingual event. We are using DGroups (hopefully - they are moving servers and it just got delayed a week into our week long event and I need a plan B) paired with a wiki. We want to keep it simple, we want to try and include multilingual participation and we don’t have any dedicated translation resources. So we need a community based solution.

The plan is we all start together (English, Spanish, French) in one email discussion thread to introduce ourselves. We are asking people to post their introduction in their home language on wikispaces page and then, we thought we’d translate them all. But darn, that is a huge task. So I poked around Google’s Widgets and thought I’d try their translation widget in my Wikispaces onlinefacilitation wiki. Wow, it worked pretty darn well!

After the first day of introductions, we’ll split into English, Spanish and French language groups for our topical discussions on Days 2-4. We will have each group do a quick summary each day on the wiki, which again, we can start translating with the Google widget, then improve upon it. (Sometimes the machine translations are pretty funny.) On the last two days, we’ll again work across languages in one list to close out, make meaning (in EVERY sense of the word) and have that experience of togetherness, even with our language gaps.

It will be an interesting experiment. I’m very excited about it. I’ll make sure to return here and report what we learn, plus the wiki will be available for others to review after the event.