Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me.   How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?

My days of passive participation are over and done with:

• For me, the reason to go to a big conference is the small group conversations with people I already know somewhat or with whom I share a common interest
• We have the tools to coordinate and connect before, during and after the event — to keep the conversation going (it starts before the conference and goes afterward as well)

I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat.  During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream.  And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference.   And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.

Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect.  The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences.  The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations.

Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes.  It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).

Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.

• Emergent intention.  Early on nobody knows for sure who will be there and therefore whether it’s worth going.  Email discussions about who’s going are key to establishing that there will be some kind of quorum which would make a long trip worthwhile.  But at a certain point, tagging the resources that emerge is essential.  Four months after tagging the AoIR conference, for example, we noticed that the EPIC conference was scheduled the same week.  That coincidence turned out to be a key to the dynamics of the conversation.
• Fuzzy social boundaries.  Tagging is open in the sense that anybody can use it and it’s visible to everyone. Tagging prospective participants or presentations is a way of encouraging participation.  Looking at the tagstream, for example, you can see that Sus Nyrop, who did participate, was hoping that Christina Costa would join us (although she couldn’t make it in the end).
• Identification of relevant resources .  Being together at a conference may focus on a particular topic, but you have to identify a lot of other relevant resources like where to stay.  We used the lodging page from a previous conference in Copenhagen to figure out where our group might stay.
• Multiple outputs. Active participation generates a lot of different outputs. Tagging is the ideal way to keep track of them.  Delicious links are here. Flickr photos are here.  Not much video produced at that conference.
• Distributed leadership. Although I used the “cp2oir08” tag more than anybody else, others used it as well.  The goal is to coax people to contribute, whether it’s a tag you came up with or not.

Tips

• Propose a tag early.  Announce it by email or by other means to get the word out.
• Tag should be as intuitive and descriptive as it can be but as short as possible.
• Weave tagging into group practice and tagged resources into the conversation.  Mention what’s been tagged by you or what you’ve found in the tagstream that others should know about.
• Think of the tagstream a community-building resource. A tagstream is the accumulation of tagged materials contributed by everyone, which  is stored on a tagging platform such as delicious, and which retrieved or monitored via an RSS feed (but which can also be viewed as a web page).
• Identify related or parallel tags (such as “ir9” that was used for the AoIR conference as a whole on Flickr, delicious, and Twitter).
• Think of the tagstream as an ideal research tool, when you’re going back to figure out what happened or when.

Photo by Bev Trayner.

Tags: face-to-face, tagging

A perennial question in supporting a community is how to focus conversations.  How to dig deeper into a topic, explore new perspectives, or move a conversation forward over time.  Those are questions that a community insider may be able to answer but may not be answerable by people who are not members, not involved in the conversation, not “initiated,” not “hip.”  The bottom line, of course, is whether people participate and learn from the conversations in the community.  And of course you never really know in advance.

But I think that “uniqueness” is a good proxy for working purposes.  In other words: could (or should) a conversation we’re proposing for your community be happening elsewhere?   Why here?  Why now?

I’ve admired CHI-FOO because its programs have been thought through a year at a time.  That takes a lot of work and a lot of focus.  That kind of planning is likely to force a community to ask those questions about uniqueness.  But have a look at this bit of the 2010 program description:

The 2010 CHIFOO program series will arm you with fundamental design leadership skills and inspire you to flirt with the edges of possibility. In monthly presentations throughout the year, experienced practitioners and speakers will explore how you can:

• Navigate through power structures and create momentum for interaction design initiatives
• Ensure that your message reaches a broad audience and produces a sense of urgency
• Take calculated risks that will further the discipline of human-computer interaction
• Stir positive change in the world through design thinking

Couldn’t you insert accountants, administrators or anthropologists into that statement without changing it much?

Some other warning flags:

• I know it’s a much honored practice, but when community announcements state “at the end of this talk you will know” x, or “you will be able to y,”  I get skeptical.
• When a topic is someone’s book, like tonight at CHIFOO, take a careful look at whether the presentation is more serving the community or the speaker’s needs. The fact that I could catch that speaker at Powell’s tomorrow night or watch him on TV (or on a video of his TV appearance) does not suggest that I’ll learn much about human computer interaction at tonight’s session on “Confessions of a public speaker.”

Maybe I should flirt with Toastmasters instead?

Tags: CHIFOO

A key story in Charlotte Linde’s Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  is about an insurance company that was having trouble getting its agents to sell certain policies.  The company’s management wanted to know whether the problem was a learning problem (e.g., so you’d “solve it” by having the training department ramp it up) or a motivation problem (e.g., so you’d solve it by changing the compensation plan or contract between the company and the agents?).  It turned out that the new sales strategy didn’t really fit in Bob’s story:

“He started from scratch, worked nights and weekends, did thousands of cold calls to build up his book of business.  And you’ve seen him now.  His efforts were so successful that now he’s driving a BMW, and takes every Wednesday off to play golf.”

Bob’s story didn’t include selling the new policies or making big changes when the company’s management decided to change direction: it was a story about arriving.  Bob’s story was invisible because it was never told as such: it only existed in snippets, as an unspoken but potent reference point in people’s minds that shaped career expectations and choices.  It came into explicit existence when the ethnographers from the Institute for Research on Learning constructed it as part of a massive ethnographic project in the 1990’s and presented it to the company’s management.

I recommended it to a rather bookish consultant friend who wrote back that he couldn’t see what was actionable or practical about it.  I’ve been wondering about that comment for a while, even as the book continues to influence how I think about storytelling in organizations and communities.  Why, exactly, do I think this book is so practical and relevant?

At this particular point in history, if you doubt that it’s important to understand what’s on the minds of people who sell financial instruments, why sales agents sell (or don’t sell) something, I would suspect you’ve been living a very sheltered life. Misreading or misunderstanding organizational culture brings systemic risks.

One reason this book is not hugely popular with the storytelling or organization development communities is suggested by the fact that the story about Bob is not in the index under “Bob.”  You can find it under “discourse unit, paradigmatic narratives as, 148-49″.  So the book is a long hard slog unless you like that kind of stuff.   For better or worse I read it twice.   After I finished it the first time, I left it on a plane.  When I started over, with the idea of skimming it to re-construct my notes, I found that it was worth reading slowly a second time.  The book is chock full of big and small insights.

A fundamental point is that “remembering” is a human activity that’s situated in time and space.  Talking about “memory” as a disembodied and abstract entity is problematic and misleading. Remembering (most frequently through storytelling) is something we can observe and therefore influence if we understand what’s happening:

“A story not having a proper occasion on which it can or must be told exists in an archive if it exists at all…. If there is any place where the process of institutional remembering can be deliberately altered, it is the creation, maintenance, or abandonment of narrative occasions.” p. 222.

You have to be listening at the right time and place.  In fact Linde has a scheme for classifying narrative occasions on p 47:

Whether this is the frame you want to use or not (where exactly would you place my story of reading Linde’s book twice?), it seems to me that having some frame or other is really useful.  The situation matters: where a story is told, when, with what purpose, to whom, and how it is varied to fit the situation are fundamental to making sense of it.  A frame like hers does a lot of work, like helping you detect repeated stories, commonplace stories that anybody can tell (e.g., you can tell it in some situations even its about events you yourself did not witness), or even detect stories that are not told (I think detecting meaningful silence is a big deal: “Just listen for it” says Linde).

Linde’s emphasis on the situated nature of storytelling connects with another fundamental with practical implications: stories are social, jointly produced by teller and listener.   Telling stories that make sense is a social obligation:

“This creation [of narrative coherence] is not a light matter; it is in fact a social obligation which must be fulfilled in order for the participants to appear as competent members of their culture.” p 4.

If we live in times of change, then this should be a good time for telling stories and for understanding what we’re doing when we’re telling them:

“Times of change are rich in occasions when the past is invoked.  The past is used to reaffirm a sense of identity, to provide a ground form which to assess the effect and meaning of changes, and to provide a basis for critique of changes.  It is at times of change that a particular way of being is constructed as the past.” p. 43

When you think about how many books on storytelling come down to endless bullet lists and instructional bromides, it makes you appreciate what a huge accomplishment it is that Linde’s Working the Past is actually a good yarn about storytelling.

Last week at the KM4Dev conference in Brussels, I struck up a conversation with Joseph Sikeku, who talked about community leadership and technology stewardship in a radically different setting: a radio station in Tanzania.  Sikeku’s project uses an interesting mix of technologies:

• 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station
• Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder
• Mobile phones

Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones.  (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009  issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels).  One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon.  Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled.  Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor.  Here’s a 7 minute interview:

Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:

• Radio broadcasts are a remarkable technology for bringing people together across great distances.  It’s so prevalent as to be unremarkable.
• But radio is a very group-oriented tool, so tools like an audio recorder or a mobile phone pull the community’s configuration toward the individual end of the polarity.
• An audio recorder supports the asynchronous side and the mobile phones (either as audio devices or for text messages) support the synchronous.

It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings.  And the final question: will these ideas be useful?

I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months.  I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference).  The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.”  But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive.  A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.

The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities.  Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic.  At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.”  That was very gratifying.

(Cross-posted to our Digital Habitats blog at http://technologyforcommunities.com.)

Tags: km4dev, video

Last May’s CHIFOO presentation was a great talk about reading by Cathy Marshall. Here are Marshall’s slides from which I’ve borrowed some images to talk about her work in this post.

Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that:

“Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is more unknown.   Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance, it seems there is nothing to say about it.”

She went on to argue that many of our commonplace assumptions about reading are wrong.  As an activity, we may think that reading is:

• stationary
• information-centric
• passive
• immersive
• individual

Instead, Marshall argued that and illustrated how reading is really:

• mobile – where we chose to read something matters hugely and we tend to take our reading with us from place to place.
• material – our physical circumstances contribute to the experience of pleasure or attention.
• interactive – we annotate pages and act upon them.
• interrupted & variable – we skip, skim, circle around, re-read and act upon reading material according to the circumstances.
• social – we share, forward, save, refer, discard and burn books and magazines in our invisible but very real social context.

There’s no problem having naïve assumptions about reading unless we’re intending to design an electronic replacement for the printed page, in which case we have to look a lot more carefully at what’s going.  That’s exactly what technology stewards need to do because, whether we’re configuring technology or planning to add a tool to a community’s overall configuration or even just supporting it on a day to day basis, we need to understand the experience of use, not just “how to use the tool.”

So we can learn a lot from the different ways that Marshall and other ethnographers have devised for getting at these commonplace experiences.  We take the ordinary as strange.  Nothing is more common than participating in a community, but a community’s configuration has a significant effect on the experience of community.

“It is also worth noting that solitary reading always was, and still is, inherently social: how we read is ultimately determined by social conventions and community membership”

You can learn a lot by observing. One piece of research that Marshall reported on examined just how complicated it is when someone reading an article in The New Yorker turns a page.  They peek forward, check an advertisement, read the cartoon, go back to verify what they last read, etc., and then continue.  There’s a lot happening that we may not bother noticing on a day-to-day level but which matters a lot when we’re thinking about designing a new electronic device.

Use a framework. One point we try to make in Digital Habitats is that it’s useful to have some framework to organize our observations. Marshall uses the CSCW matrix (that we call a polarity in the book) to look at some different instances of reading:

One interesting point she made was that people often feel like it’s creepy when they are observed doing something so simple (and personal) as reading.  As technology stewards we often have to enlist people’s cooperation, sometimes as fellow-researchers and observers of their own experience.

Compare (lots of) individual instances. In one of her studies Marshall bought multiple copies of a popular textbook and compared how students had annotated the text.  Turned out there was a lot of variation in what was important to different readers, but also convergence on the main point.  But the key idea is: how can we find ways of seeing how different people see?

This is similar to a tech steward’s practice of observing how different communities use the same software, or how they might configure it differently, or how they might even decide upon using it for quite different reasons.

One interesting thing about Cathy Marshall as she spoke to a group that’s mostly concerned with design was that she always spoke as a researcher — not venturing to speculate widely, but reporting on her own rigorous research.  Even though she committed apparent faux pas such as reading her slides aloud and there was very little (if any) “how to” in Marshall’s talk, the CHIFOO folks hung on her every word. It reminded me that professional, hands-on communities like CHIFOO are very sophisticated when it comes right down to it.

Tech stewards as ethnographers. Of course there are big differences between tech stewards and ethnographers.  Front loaded education is the norm for people who call themselves ethnographers, whereas most tech stewards come to their craft almost by accident – pressed into service and learning as they go.  Having Microsoft and other companies fund your observations like Marshall has enables a great deal of care and depth; most tech stewards are in a hurry and have to act on their hunches. And yet, the opportunity for observing change in human experience and contributing to its evolution (over shorter- or longer-terms) is common to both.  What tech stewards have lacked is a common literacy to talk with each other and the community context where their conversations can add up.

Tags: CHIFOO, ethnography

I’m organizing the fourth year of CPsquare’s shadow the leader series. We’ll be visiting with Josien Kapma, a Dutch dairy farmer living in Portugal every month for a year.  She’s a member of CPsquare and the leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl. It’s a global community for expatriate Dutch dairy farmers that’s developing its learning agenda and trying to find its legs at the same time (in terms of organization, business model, funding, and learning activities).

If you are really interested in communities of practice, you should join us as we consider questions such as:

• In what ways is diversity and a global diaspora a resource for a community? In what ways are those characteristics a challenge?
• What individual and group interests are served by the community? How are they balanced? What leadership is needed and can leaders be compensated for their work, apart from learning as a leadership benefit?
• What activities make sense and what publications are useful in the development process?

The goal we set for ourselves in Shadow the Leader is to meet and reflect with a leader of a community of practice over a sustained period of time, getting to know a lot about one community.  It’s an opportunity to consider what we really know and really understand in terms of theory, of technology and of leadership.  From the very beginnings of this field, starting with Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning, we have made progress due to scrupulous observation that took into consideration what we think we knew about learning but questioned our assumptions at the same time.  The “Shadow the Leader” series has operationalized that systematic scrutiny and reflection in the life of CPsquare.

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing:

I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as I suspect the lack of of them… and hopefully determine what those challenges [to their development] are, using an institutional ethnography approach.

I wrote back that …

Detecting silence or absence is huge, and they are only visible with careful ethnographic observation informed by theory.  Last week the keynote at the http://epic2009.com conference was Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who ended up working for the Financial Times and noticed that there was an awful lot of silence around the global debt markets in 2007, despite the fact that they were much larger than the equity markets. There were a lot of reasons to not pay much attention to the debt markets at that time.  Careful ethnography that paid off in the most unlikely setting.

I can’t resist asking whether you’ve bumped into Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 … a fellow-alum of the Institute for Research on Learning with Etienne. She’s using a vast ethnographic study of an insurance company, she sets up a powerful analytical framework and one of her chapters is about silence and “stories that are not told”… Well worth the read.  (I reviewed the book in more depth here.)

Contact with Etienne is an important part of the workshop experience. He’s great to talk to –  and he has a great way of sharing access to current practice in many different settings. But it’s also really important to participate in a wider conversation of people who are exploring and applying these ideas in all kinds of settings. The practice of cultivating communities takes more than research.

While I’m at it, I’m hoping you’ve connected with this group (or at least read their stuff). Fung Kee Fung, Goubanova and Crossly are 3 of the authors who’ve all done the Foundations workshop (at one time or another):

http://www.implementationscience.com/imedia/1788022150101911_article.pdf

A final thought: if part of what you’re looking for is absence of communities of practice (partly with a view of suggesting change to enhance learning in a complex system), you need to develop a pretty sensitive eye for the diverse kinds of communities that are fully functional out there.  This workshop can’t be the last word on that subject, but it does bust some of the stereotypes that many of us adopted from reading about the “Turbodudes at Shell” in Cultivating Communities of Practice.

Tags: cpsquare, foundationsworkshop

Here’s an 8-minute interview with Nancy White, where I ask her several questions about what’s important about Digital Habitats, how the book came to be, and what’s left out. You can tell that I’ve edited out about 10 minutes of discussion. This could have been a very long conversation since we both feel the topic is important and we both have learned how to get the other person to dig into their experience. But I wanted to do a short interview, so I chopped out most of what I said.

Nancy White and I go way back, since Margaret McIntyre said I should look her up and I volunteered to help at a conference in exchange for bunking on the White House floor almost 10 years ago. We’d worked on many projects together by the time the book project got going. Of course there’s nothing like working on a book for five and a half years together to really make friends…

Technology stewardship is something that people are doing whether it’s cool or not. Talking about the book in this way reminds me that it’s very important that our thinking came from actual practice. We were practitioners first, authors and “students of technology stewardship” later. So talking about the book like this tends to naturally look back at the past and look forward toward the future. As a result there are many things we want to know about the future of our practice and the future of yours. Where does the book lead you?

Tags: interview

I’ve always found webinar software like WebEx, Elluminate, or GoToMeeting to be constraining and, because they try to be a “total solution” they don’t play well with other uses or software.  Because they’re popular they’re used in situations where they’re inappropriate.  The Digital Habitats wiki, for example, doesn’t go into enough detail about their uses in community settings.

Yesterday I noticed an interesting webinar format that solves one of the persistent boundary and participation problems that I see with this kind of software. Intronetworks held a webinar on “community management as a job.” I was late to the presentation, so when the GoToMeeting screen first came up, the first thing that caught my eye was that Twitter IDs were used to identify the speakers:

Like many such webinars, the audio channel was the main thing.  But I realized that a twitter stream with the hashtag “introchat” was the main visual. There were some slides, but visually the audience was asking questions, making comments, inviting others into the session. In the course of an hour there were almost 500 tweets. Huge audience participation relative to what the sages on the stage were offering.

It felt like the beginning of a community of practice of community managers. At least a drop-in jam session of one.

Two years ago I wrote about the Intronetworks software and was kind of critical about the hard boundaries between “inside” and “outside” their application here and here. (That may be because people want those boundaries, however.)  Interesting to see them innovate by using webinar software in such an open way.

After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here.  (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail.  Copies for sale are on their way.)

It has been really fun.  What’s next?

Stay tuned.