Jul 15 2012
In an open space conference like the Community Leadership Summit, according to Harrison Owen’s second principle of Open Space Technology, “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.” But when we don’t exactly like what happens, we always want to know, Why did it happen that way? I tried to organize a session and [...]
Jul 13 2012
I’m always on the lookout for how technology changes “being together” — especially how it can change the sense of a group and of our “place” in a group. For that, NodeXL and Twitter have real possibilities. On Saturday, July 14, I’m going to host a session at the Community Leadership Summit to play with [...]
Jan 25 2012
This is cross-posted from CPsquare.org… My fellow-conspirator Sylvia Currie posted a reflection on her blog, too. We’ve had a regular series where CPsquare members and friends go on a virtual field trip to observe something about a community of practice, it’s activities, technologies, or challenges. Today Sylvia Currie and I organized something new — a [...]
Jul 19 2010
I went to an the Community Leadership Summit un-conference on Saturday. Lots of familiar Portland faces and only one session I went to was a dud. That’s a pretty good average! A very nice practice that was not emphasized enough in the opening session was having dozens of etherpad rooms configured so that you could [...]
Jan 06 2010
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 [...]
Sep 12 2009
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 [...]
Aug 28 2009
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 [...]
Mar 15 2009
I’ve been on the “leadership team” of the Portland ODN more or less continuously for the last 10 years. I’ve found ODN to be a nice face-to-face home professionally, even though my work is very different from what most OD professionals do. But I thought that being on the leadership team would be fun and [...]
Sep 18 2008
It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together. The effect is multiplicative. For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines: “Tweets” from twitter.com that have a particular hashtag Photos from flickr.com that have the same hashtag links from delicious.com that have that same [...]
Aug 05 2008
CPsquare is having a book club event, where everyone is invited to read a book about communities of practice together. Sounds simple enough, right? Fortunately or unfortunately Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators is a book where, if you’re interested in communities of practice, you might want to read all the book chapters. [...]
