Learning Alliances

This is a great example of how a new question leads to a little time-saving solution that several people have asked for. Somewhere in CPsquare, Bill Bruck asked:

Is there a way to write and bookmark a URL that will allow signgle sign-on to this space? For instance, it might look like:http://conversations.cpsquare.com/?userid=myname&password=mypassword

I realized that Etienne Wenger and Beverly Trayner had asked the same question before. Probably others had a similar use pattern but hadn’t actually articulated the question in quite that way.

A little digging around in documentation that end users do not normally bother with suggests that it’s pretty easy. The first step is to use your browser to book-mark an entry page on your Web Crossing site. As illustrated below, that could be the entry page or it could be the Web Crossing own internal bookmark page. Currently I use the bookmark page, because when a workshop or other event is running at CPsquare, I’m in and out of Web Crossing many times a day and in many different areas of the site. In that case you’d bookmark something like this:

http://your.webcrossing.com/WebX?bookmarks@@/

To automate the log-in, you edit the bookmark in your browser, inserting “23@@” after the first “?” and replacing the final “@@/” with “@!username=your%20name&password=yourpassword“, so that it looks this:

http://your.webcrossing.com/WebX?23@@bookmarks@/!username=your%20name&password=something

Save it, so that it shows in a convenient place. When you click on it, you’re automatically logged on to Web Crossing. Notice that blanks in your name are represented as “%20“. Also, consider that this will let anyone with access to your browser log on as you to Web Crossing.

If you don’t want to enter Web Crossing with by looking at the Web Crossing bookmarks page, use soemthing like this:

http://your.webcrossing.com/WebX?8@@/!username=your%20name&password=something

I just ran into one of those old chestnuts of facilitation and design on the net: what you see is not the same as what others see.

I’m juggling a lot of things (launching the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a “dissertation fest” series in CPsquare and the Prato Dialog) while trying to read everything everybody in CPsquare posts on their blog. There’s so much to read that even the feed aggregator has complained about the volume. And I’m still trying to get my bearings in the blogosphere. That means, among other things, I jump back and forth between several views of CPsquare members’ blogs:

• I read all their individual blog feeds in Bloglines
  
• I look at their blogs on their websites when a posting or picture doesn’t show up in a feed
• I occasionally check the collective feed for CPsquare members (a very big page!)

I noticed that the feed from Nancy White’s blog only contained a few sentences. I switched feeds to get the entire posts. Checking back in my Bloglines reader I noticed that in her post about Amazing Flickr Stream from World Cafe Gathering the photo gets resized automatically on Nancy’s website but in the feed it displays so that the text is very wide — you need to use a slide-bar to move the text back and forth enough to read it all.

So what? Our experience of participation is shaped by all those little things like the kind of browser used, the size of photos, the width of the text, etc. There’s no shortcut for finding out how it looks from the perspective of the user, your community member, your audience, or your fan base.

What’s a leader to do? Here are a few ideas:

• Pay attention to the difference between “what is” and “what should be” in your own setup. I recently spent a whole week working on my laptop because I was getting more disk space added to my desk-top machine and was working with Nancy White and Etienne Wenger on our Tech Study. Being forced to work in on a different machine sensitized me to all kinds of diversity that I normally can (and need to) ignore.
• Make space in one-to-one conversations with colleagues and community members for conversations about what it is they see. Comparing notes about what you see is a key strategy for seeing more of your own and of other people’s world.
• Bring up the subject in community meetings: it’s very useful to have the underlying technology that supports a group be an occasional topic of conversation. A community that doesn’t talk about how it is that it’s able to be together (location or technology or schedule or sponsorship or whatever) is much more fragile when those conditions change as they always do.
• Surface your stream-of-consciousness observations about what it is you’re seeing when you speak to the group. For example, when you talk in a community setting, it’s helpful to say, “and then I see this or that,” (just like I’m doing in this post) as a way of contextualizing what you’re saying.

Beth Kantor writes about collaborative note capture at conferences using Web2.0 tools, emphasizing that it’s all about the learning. She gives a great example, where several people collaborate to produce a remix of Nancy White’s Northern Voice 2006 Canadian Blogger Conference presentation. I think it’s really great what connected, technically adept people can do to change how we think of conferences.

I’m wondering about what these same tools can do to connect people in advance, to build up the collaborative capacity. I suppose you don’t need that much collaborative capacity when all the conference is all about sitting and listening passively. But when appropriately connected people get together, it’s a great experience!
Beverly Trayner and I have been thinking with others about this issue of how to jump start a community-oriented meeting. I think she’s pointing toward a new practice with a blog specifically for our “Prato Dialog” — a community oriented conference. One thing that a blog can do is create a public image of the kinds of energy mixes that go into making an engaging conference. In the past, we’ve emphasized the private side of this kind of development of collaborative capacity. But getting meaningful involvement of new people with new ideas and new problems is a key element to moving a conversation forward. And for that we need a public view of the conference launch process.