Catching up on things I missed in 2008
January 5, 2009Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I blogged. There are a couple of things that I had meant to write about, so I’m just going to get started again in 2009 by doing a quick wrap-up of those thoughts.
How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer
A must watch, ‘How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer’ is a fabulous documentary (watch it here) about network theory and testing the urban myth of six degrees of separation. Understanding networks is at the heart of understanding our complex society. Theorists in the doco argue that networks don’t grow accidentally - they evolve according to a pattern, and that this predictable power of networks is helping researchers to find solutions to problems, such as containing the spread of infectious) diseases. Fascinating.
Good to Great
In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins introduces the Hedgehog concept, and with it a comparison of a Fox and the Hedgehog. The fox is a creature that know many things but lacks consistency; the hedgehog is a simple creature that knows ‘one big thing’ and sticks to it. He uses it to argue that great companies, like the hedgehog, stick to the one thing that they can be the best in the world at. As a generalist (aka as a fox), I just can’t agree. The hedgehog might make money (?), but he sounds rather dull and boring to me. I also find Collins’ criteria for determining Great Companies less than convincing (mostly financial performance). I understand why, as a research method he has chosen to do so, but it seems to reduce the social value of organisations to the economic - that being great is simply a matter of being financially successful. I believe there are other measures of greatness. It’d be interesting to see which companies (if any) rate as ‘great’ in light of the recent ‘financial crisis’.
FOC08
A few closing thoughts on the Facilitating Online Communities course. I learnt a lot. The course helped me clarify my own understanding of the role of facilitator and the meaning of community, from both an online and face-to-face perspective. I also really enjoyed the interaction with the other participants and the chance to try some new things in a ’safe’ and supportive environment. It’s nice to hang out with people who share similar interests. I also really enjoyed organising my session for the mini conference. For me, the reward was the people (including my co-host Mark Elliot) accepting the invitation and showing up, being present and willing to engage. It taught me a lot about making offers. Leigh Blackall modelled the role of facilitator to a T. He was well organised and showed leadership when needed, but mostly tried to get out of the way and allowed us to get on with self-organised and self-paced learning, which I appreciated (thanks Leigh!).
Work and Meaning
I’ve been doing some outplacement work, so the meaning of work has been top of mind. I read about a 1974 study, where Studs Turkel observed that work is about “a search for meaning as much as daily bread” — and that “only a happy few find it, the majority loaded with weariness and discontent”. 1 Seems to me that perhaps things haven’t changed all that much in the last 25 years?
1. see: Turkel, S. (1974) Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Link.
Okay, glad that’s done. Thanks to Chris Brogan for the virtual inspiration/kick in the pants I needed to get going again. Welcome to 2009.
Meeting in Second Life
October 24, 2008I don’t know about Second Life — I’m quite happy with my first one thanks!
I tagged along to a meeting last week in Second Life. I’m a complete n00b to Second Life or to anything like it. I never really got into video games post the early 80’s Atari fad, preferring to play music or sport. So this is all ‘weird and wonderful’ stuff to me and I was quite looking forward to this meeting as part the course.
But I must confess that I got quite frustrated with it. One of the most difficult things was not being able to control my avatar. It was quite off-putting. I couldn’t seem to work out even the most basic of functions, like how to sit down. I persisted, but it still felt quite awkward and unintuitive. Why is it that someone who is quite tech savvy (I’m certainly no neophyte), can be so lame?
This first experience with SL reinforced an important point about the various barriers we face as participants and facilitators when we are interacting online. We should never assume that everyone is competent nor comfortable with the medium. Some of the participants of FOC08 have expressed similar feelings about blogging and commenting on others blogs. Just because all of these ‘tools’ are available in the same ’space’ (online) we’re used to interacting in, doesn’t mean that they aren’t different or have their own nuances and subtleties. We have to remain mindful and aware of that. As facilitators, patient and vigilant.
I can imagine how Second Life might be useful for facilitating events and creating online communities. It certainly provides for a more interactive space online when compared with non-visual mediums like email and bulletin boards. It brings together a unique blend of auditory, visual and cognitive stimulation, although I’m not convinced that helps those of us who find it difficult to multi-task or concentrate on more than one thing at a time.
All is not lost. I’m prepared to give it another go. I’m sure it’s not all that hard.
Stigmergic Collaboration & the Evolution of Group Work
October 23, 2008I’m really looking forward to the Facilitating Online Communities Mini Conference coming up soon. I will be facilitating an online discussion with a guest — Dr. Mark Elliott.
Mark completed a PhD in 2007 that developed theoretical frameworks for collective activity and mass collaboration in conjunction with a number of real-world projects and now runs a consultancy that provides services surrounding online collaboration and social media / web2.0.
The one hour session, will include a very brief presentation, but will mostly be informal and conversational. Definitely no Powerpoint.
Mark will help us to explore:
- Stigmergic collaboration as a means of explaining how co-ordination is achieved in ad hoc, massively scaled collaborative contexts (i.e. Wikis)
- How we can, as facilitators, use social media and web2.0 tools to collaborate, share and learn
- His experiences from the Future Melbourne project — the world’s first, wiki-based, collaborative city plan.
Please join us!
DATE: Thursday 6th November 2008 at 7pm EDT. Check the time in your time zone.
VENUE: Join this online event at the Elluminate Meeting Room. Beforehand, please ensure that you computer is ready to use the web conferencing software (Elluminate).
RSVP: daryl [dot] cook [at] gmail [dot] com
ENQUIRIES: For any enquiries and/or for any assistance with Elluminate, do not hesitate to contact me.
Looking at Online Discussion Forums
September 28, 2008I haven’t spend a lot of time in online discussion forums. As I mentioned at the start the Facilitating Online Communities course, I find it difficult to follow threaded conversations online. I find them too volumous and over-bearing. I’ve also avoided them because I sense (and based on second-hand anecdotes), that there is quite a bit of postulating and oneupmanship. Perhaps a result of poor facilitation? Nevertheless, it is off-putting. I don’t have the desire to become embroiled in meaningless debates and arguments over semantics.
One of the lists I do subscribe to is the Australasian Facilitators Network discussion forum. The current archive is only available to the list members, although membership and the ’structure’ of the ”organisation’ is loose and informal.
The list is, in my opinion, brilliantly moderated by Bob Dick. He is a very good communicator – clear and concise; provides very good instructions on list management issues; and is mostly invisible as a faciliator, but very diplomatic and open when dealing with any issues that arise.
Is it a community? Using McMillan and Chavis (1986) well-regarded conceptualization of a sense of Community [1], I believe that it is. To varying degrees, I’m sure that there are:
- Feelings of membership – feelings of belonging to, and identifying with, the community;
- Feelings of influence – feelings of having influence on, and being influenced by, the community;
- Integration and fulfillment of needs – feelings of being supported by others in the community while also supporting them; and
- Shared emotional connection – feelings of relationships, shared history, and a “spirit” of community.
But I don’t think the list IS the community – a community has built around the list. It’s like Nancy said in her comments on my previous post: “the network holds the set of loose ties that allow community to emerge”. This has manifested in a number of ways for me.
I have built relationships with people I met at face-to-face events that are held regularly (State-based networks). Some of those people have become close business associates and dear friends. I’ve also done further training and personal development as a result of attending these meetings and understanding the pitfalls and personalities involved.
I am very much looking forward to attending the annual conference organised and attended by list participants and strengthening that sense of belonging to this community.
How the forum might benefit from facilitation services?
This is a tricky one to answer. Paradoxically, other facilitators can be difficult to facilitate. I think the community would benefit though, by having more co-ordinated events around particilar topics of interest or issues – perhaps in the form of an online conference or phone conference format. I know that there are currently shared resources, but I also think that the community would benefit from developing these further and developing a habit of referring to them and keeping them current – a wiki would provide a good platform.
1. Cited in Blogs as Virtual Communities by Anita Blanchard.
Blogging in a Fishbowl?
September 25, 2008A Personal Reflection on my Blog Network
I plan to divert a little from the assigned topic on blog networks for Week 7 of FOC08. This post will be a little longer than usual too. Please indulge me.
I’ve been blogging on an off since April, 2005. When contemplating this task, I began to reflect on my own experiences over the last three and a half years, and wonder whether my own blog is insular or part of some wider network.
In one sense, I feel that it’s quite insular – a lone voice in the ether where I add tid-bits of information and collect random thoughts. I wouldn’t be the first blogger to wonder: if a blog falls in the forest …
I’ve received only just more than a handful comments over this time. My blog doesn’t receive a lot of traffic – somewhere in the vicinity of 350 page views per month. And from what I can tell, there are just a few repeat visitors – mostly from some of my ‘real life’ friends like Nick and Marty. I guess this is in itself a small network or blogging community. It allows me to keep tabs on Nick as he is bobbing across the Atlantic and still feel someway connected to him. It also let’s me discover what delicious vegetarian recipes Marty has concocted and how his running is going.
On the other hand, I keenly feel how connected my blog has allowed me to be in a much wider network and community. As a direct result of blogging I have formed a number of significant relationships and joined a number of new networks.
Before I started blogging, I was following another of my ‘real-life’ friends Tony. He is friends with Johnnie and Hugh. From there, I started following other blogs and following threads that interested me. A lot of these are listed in my blogroll.
As a consequence of following, reading, absorbing, learning – I began to reorient my career towards the things I was becoming more interested in – the intersection of technology and the human side of business.
From Johnnie’s blog, I discovered Anecdote and
after reading and responding to a post on their blog, I ended up working with them. Perhaps I’m biased, but I think the Anecdote blog is one of the best examples of a niche business blog on the web. I witnessed first hand the power of building a community around that blog and the brand. I have learnt a great deal from reading it and from Shawn and Mark who write it.
My work with Anecdote extended my network and connections with other bloggers – like Nancy White, Patrick Lambe, James Robertson and Matt Moore whose work (and blogs) I admire a lot.
I was fortunate to be able catch up with Johnnie in person when he visited Melbourne on holidays recently. With Tony, we enjoyed a casual lunch by the river and chatted for a long while.
That meeting felt like a fateful event – like I’d come full circle and connected some loose ends.
Johnnie commented (I’m para-phrasing here and hopefully not talking out of step) that he also sensed a ‘community’ of like-minded people that share similar values about their work that have managed to make connections across the blogosphere. Relationships and connections which are complex, multi-dimensional, intertwined and have manifested in many different ways.
What we have by definition is the same social network: a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, friendship etc.
I also find Downes’ argument compelling, and a useful way of describing the phenomenon that I’m trying to explain:
The community is the network. There is no centralized place that constitutes community, there are only people, and resources, that are distributed, that are all acting on their own behalf and in their own interests … where the network consists of a set of self-selected relations using a variety of contextual information … to establish meaning, and where this meaning not only defines the community but emerges from the community.
I also belong to the Melbourne blogging community. I use the term quite loosely here, but by following other local bloggers such as Cameron, Michael and others, I’ve ended up at a number of face-to-face meetings organised by other Melbourne bloggers and digital media folks and have met a lot of great people. Regular ‘community’ events take place, and I maintain contact with a number of people I’ve met through this network.
Of course, I also belong to a very big network or community of people who choose to blog – the
blogosphere. Getting philosophical: can we not agree as people, to be part of the whole? Quantumly aren’t we all related?
Blogging has also lead to my interest in using other tools and social media, del.icio.us, flickr, podcasts, facebook, twitter – each of which has increased the number of loose connections or weak ties that I have in my network. In turn, there have been many instances where these links have lead to participation in social events, conferences and work collaborations. Most importantly it has created interesting conversations.
When I pause to think about this, I find it quite amazing.
Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”
Through blogging, I guess I have made my own world. It has lead me to make fundamental changes to the work I do and the approach I take to it. It has also extended my personal and social network beyond the boundaries of where I was once comfortable. I am grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and for the meaning it has created.
