Learning Alliances

Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful.  Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective.  And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of practice are so powerful for spreading practice (whether good or bad, whether about technology or not).  Among other things seeing that others in your community are paying attention to something is proof that it’s important.

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology was relevant to the functioning of a little meditation community.

I changed ISP’s and thus web and email servers and it’s been quite an adventure in technology stewardship (supporting myself in this case)! Here are a few of the steps along the way:

• I decided to reduce costs and increase my site’s flexibility, foregoing the wonderful, bullet-proof services at Easystreet a few months ago. As I mulled the conversion process, I realized that I could use myself and my transition as a dress rehearsal for a similar, but more complex, move I have planned for CPsquare (although CPsquare’s move is not really optional, like mine was).
• There are so many themes out there, with with so many subtle differences. Wow. After a lot of browsing, I chose the Connections theme by Patricia Müller, installed it and started making modifications. Previously I’d found recommendations for Firebug — a tool that helps you with the editing process. I decided to use Firebug.
• I downloaded and installed the Firebug add-on, noting that there were different versions for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. Thinking that Firefox 3 had just been released the previous day, I decided to be conservative and stick with Firefox 2. When I fired up Firebug, I found that I was missing “DOM Inspector.” So I downloaded Firefox 3 and then un-installed Firefox completely and then got Firebug working and then, finally, set about working on my site.
  
• I decided to change the header picture on my website. I broke down and got a new copy of Snagit, version 9. Wow, that made pasting the photos together so easy!
• I used Wordpress’ nifty XML export and import feature to move all the pages over from the old site. A small problem: the site was too big to import. I looked at the import file with a text editor and found that there were tens of thousands of “post meta tag” records, all of them identical, all of them looking bogus. In retrospect this was a bit foolhardy, but I went onto the old site and deleted all of the post meta tags, operating directly on the SQL database. After that, the export and import files were a lot smaller and presto! all of the content from one site appeared on the other, including pictures! (I think I did loose the categories on postings in the new site, so I’ll have to go back in and classify everything by hand, which is probably not a bad thing to do, but is very likely to not get done, what with all the other projects I have going.)
• I figured out URLs that would remain functional before and after the domain name switch (or at least I thought I figured them out). I got to where I was ready to flip the switch (even though there are many pages that remained to be replicated on the new site). This involved telling Wordpress that the new site’s name was something ugly like http://pdxwebsitehosting/~accountname.
• With that subterfuge in place, I added content and fixed parameters on the new Wordpress-powered website. I even made the theme “Widget-aware” thinking that when it came to CPsquare’s move, one of my goals is to make it easy for other people to maintain and modify the website. That yielded little insights such as “PHP scoops up a file named ‘functions.php’ in a directory if it finds a reference to a function that has not been defined, and executes it without a whimper.” Of course, everything you learn on an expedition like this is tentative, subject to future disproof.
• When I was more or less ready, I found my password for the domain name registry and flipped the switch. Nothing seemed to happen. Except that I could no longer use the ugly name to fix the messy loose ends on the new site, since “learningalliances.net” still pointed back to the old web server on Easystreet. The hours passed. As my nerves jangled, I looked around and discovered that my new email server was already receiving email, although I could only send email via the old email server. It occurred to me to go down the street to a coffee shop and, using their wi-fi, I discovered that the switch had occurred, although Easystreet seemed to over-ride it with a local domain-name table. (This was confirmed by one of the very helpful help-desk folks at Easystreet, who also said he could not over-ride it, so I’d have to wait for the change till the expert arrived on Monday morning.) So I spent the weekend receiving email on the new site with a browser-based email client and sending email out via the old site using Outlook.
• By Monday morning at around 10 am, the new site was working, email was working, and I think I can even post to the new version of Wordpress!

What did I learn?

• Everything is connected to everything, and you change the pieces to understand how each one works with the others.
• This kind of change involves a lot of just-in-time learning and is nerve-racking.
• The tools for doing this kind of job are really impressive.
• It’s time to get my head out of the computer and start working on a long list of things that have gotten deferred in the meantime.

A dollar is not a dollar: it depends on which stash it’s kept in.

Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring the expenditure of effort and or money). By pockets, we mean helping communities have stashes of money. A Facebook example follows. We’ve got a session accepted for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen. We’ve mostly tried to look at existing communities but recently thought we might learn more if we took a design fantasy approach.

Jean Lave’s ideas about how families manage their money have been very provoking for me because they help me get my head away from an accounting view and into a more informal and intuitive view. In Cognition in Practice, she talks about how families have many different “stashes” of money with negotiated, collectively understood rules for moving money between the stashes. Expenditures of a certain sort are made from one stash and not the other. This is like fund accounting in higher education. So a dollar is not a dollar: it’s value and meaning and usability depends on which stash it’s kept in. Universities, for example, can be in dire financial straits in one fund and be quite wealthy in another fund. Funds can borrow from one another, but they have to pay it back. This diagram suggests what some of the stashes and money flows in a complex family look like:

So to develop a Facebook example. What if there were a little “Facebook app” that were tied to a group (not an individual, where most of them are now). Imagine a group that would form around Bronwyn Stuckey’s “Community Capers” project. It has a Facebook Group (it’s so easy to join) and a blog (it’s so easy to follow) and a calendar (it’s so easy to add it to your own calendar so events show up). Why not a bank account and a little money management system? Here are some things it might do:

• Gather donations from guests, members or participants. (Might want to put limits on amounts of money, so it stays informal.)
• Provide a way to send gifts (gift certificates) to speakers or others who make a significant contribution (like send a specific book to everyone who contributes to an event). (Might want to limit payments so they go through Paypal.)
• Allow the group to pay for infrastructure like domain names, elluminate costs, phone conferencing costs (for people calling from France, for example), storage (lots of audio files, etc.)
• Allow the group to throw its weight around by giving a scholarship to someone, paying for travel, or do other good deeds (according to its values and goals).

The key is to make this kind of thing as easy as setting up a group. And to make it really transparent. That might mean:

• A group has a couple of different stashes which are clearly labeled
• When you give, you designate the stash it goes into
• Moving money between stashes is rule-bound and explicit
• Different people have different levels of control over different stashes
• All the transactions are clear to everyone, showing up on a group “Wall” or something.
• Imagine the possibilities: “groups like yours spent their $5 on items like …”

– References

Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

One of the issues around participation in communities of practice is “having enough time.” We challenge people to declare that they have enough time before participating in a CPsquare workshop. But people have always experienced a lot of desire and some disappointment during the Foundations workshop. It seems like there is always more to be said, another angle to consider. It turns out that the Connected Futures workshop is the same in that regard. Nobody has as much time as they’d like.

It’s amusing to hear Clay Shirky’s response to a TV producer who asks, “Where do people find the time?” Bottom line: people have less and less time for screens that don’t have a mouse attached, where you can’t do something that’s meaningful. We are actually confronted by a surplus of time if we look at it from the right point of view.

Although in fact doing one of these CPsquare workshops (whether as a leader or a participant) involves sitting in front of a computer for many hours, in some ways its a lot of exercise. They’re designed so that you have to do a lot of stuff: you can’t just sit there. Although people going through the experience do so as individuals, it’s usually on behalf of an organization or a cause or some kind of intention that’s beyond themselves as individuals. Diabetes could be a useful metaphor to think about the consequences of spending time in a different way. This article in the April 24th 2008 issue of The Economist (”How to spend it; A region awash with oil money has one or two clouds on the horizon“), talks about how sedentary the population as a whole has become in some
middle-east countries, leading to very high rates of diabetes. But it caught
my imagination as a way to step back and think about how we spend time on a larger scale:

Diabetes is a useful metaphor for the Gulf’s present problems. The region’s economies are struggling to absorb petrodollars, accumulating like glucose in the bloodstream. The risk they face is the economic equivalent of renal failure: inflation, a hollowing-out of the non-oil sector, and a young, growing workforce in chronic need of outside labour to supplement it.

The analogy is that learning passively is like consuming too much candy, year in and year out. It gets you high, but it can have long-term, quite negative consequences. I guess it could be that with the intellectual equivalent of renal failure you get lazy about chopping wood, don’t know when you need to learn and you might be kidding yourself when you think you know. Or something.

Now if we could just get CPsquare workshops to involve heart-pounding, aerobic exercise, too!

In a simpler setting, when we’re launching the Foundations Workshop, for example, I have developed a whole set of heuristics for figuring out when people are engaged and the degree to which they are connecting with the group. Some of the tell-tales I use include:

• Have they logged on?
• Have they sent me their picture (avatar) or uploaded it themselves?
• Have they posted something?
• Is there evidence that they are navigating in different places and have some sense of what it means to post in different places?

During the first few weeks of a workshop, I have found a lot of different ways to model useful online behaviors, including:

• Expressing enthusiasm
• Disclosing essential information in a conversational way (rather than in an instruction page)
• Acknowledging and correcting mishaps
• Using the technology-mediated environment for contracting and engagement (rather than just information storage and retrieval)

But what is being presented in the Foundations Workshop is how to collaborate and be together in a community. That seems rather simpler than modeling or presenting technology stewardship. (I guess I’m thinking out loud here about what I find challenging so far about this workshop.)

In this workshop we’re establishing presence and making a lot of connections. People are asked to get access to:

• a wiki
• Web Crossing
• a blog
• del.icio.us
• Skype
• Flickr
• an RSS reader
• Twitter

And then we’re trying to connect all of these tools together. So needless to say, people establish themselves on these tools incrementally and as one of the workshop’s technology stewards, I try to connect them all. There are some ways in which the process I’m following seems unique:

• Trying to get everyone up and running at the same time — as opposed to a gradual gathering of people and technologies
• Trying to establish both a private face and a public one for a group
• Trying to support everyone more or less equally (obviously some technologies are old hat to some people and others are struggling with several new tools all at once)

Trying to compress a process in a workshop has all kinds of implications that are surprising. And I know that I don’t even see all of the issues yet. What am I missing?

Our connected futures workshop is off to a good start, I think. The launch phone call went well. For some of us, having a telephone call is very comforting. You feel like there’s a real person on the other end of the line (or in that other corner of the telephone bridge cloud, perhaps?).

But for an “advanced” workshop on technology stewardship it is fiendishly difficult to assess exactly what competence and comfort people have with one, let alone the many, many, technologies that are now available for a community to use. In fact it’s difficult to self-assess, without some extended collaboration and meaning-making episodes with other people.

We’ve come up with one light-hearted attempt at getting an inkling of workshop participant’s “state of technology.” (Analogies with “state of mind” come flooding in.) We’ve asked people to make a little snapshot of their desktop, giving everyone else an indication of what software they have on their screens most of the time. Here’s mine:

It may not go far enough… In many organizational settings the simplifying strategy has been to mandate a standard. A community setting thrives on diversity and raises the issue, “how do you know what others see, or what they feel comfortable with?”  I think one part of the answer is that it takes time.  Which is something that we try to compress, at our peril, in a project like a workshop.

The communities I work with seem to be using telephone bridges more and more. Those phone bridges are acquiring more features (so I think of them more like a platform with several tools on them rather than simple tools). For example, phone bridge platforms can send email announcements scheduling a call and make a recording of a call and serve up the recording to people who didn’t make it to the call. Phone bridges are also integrating (or not) with other platforms. Here are some reflections on recent experiences and observations.

Freeconference.com has a sophisticated conference call scheduling set-up, together with an email list management tool. I just noticed that they’ve designed a sophisticated application to do your conference scheduling from Outlook. For example, if you can look at other people’s schedules in Outlook, that might be very important. With some groups, it could be very helpful to have a voice come on the line and say, “Your call ends in 5 minutes.” I’ve found that to be intrusive and irritating. Worse, the bridge hangs up on you when your time is up. I think it’s important to let people decide when the call is over.

It used to be that joining a call on Freeconference or Freeconferencecall.com via Skype-out was clumsy or impossible because it was hard to enter the passcode. I just tried doing it and it does work if you go slowly. One thing that Freeconferencecall has over Freeconference is that the bridge has an important extra tool: it can record your conference call.

Recently, I’ve been on several calls using Iotum’s bridge. It has a very nice interface with Facebook, so that you can invite people using Facebook and the host can control the call from Facebook. During the call participants can see who’s on it, who’s muted, and click on their picture to see their profile. Very nice.

You can also see who’s been invited to a call and who’s said they will attend. Iotum’s facebook application provides “a Wall” that can be used for note-taking during the call. It’s like a primitive chat room. Very nice.

It also has a page from which to download MP3 recordings to which you have access. (Not sure whether the nice list has the calls I was invited to or the calls that I attended. Controlling access and managing storage becomes important.) Very nice, provided it gives you adequate control.

When you have people calling into a phone bridge from regular phones, cell phones, Skype, from all over the world, noise reduction matters a lot. Because so many of the calls that I’m on involve just such a messy mix, I’m still finding that the noise reduction features of High Speed Conferencing make it worth paying money for the service. Having two people on a conference call that can’t hear each other makes all the other features and tools irrelevant. I never use the scheduling tools on any of the phone bridges I use. There are tools to do that on the other platforms that my communities use that are preferable, so for me the conference scheduling tools on all of these phone bridges are irrelevant. I just recently noticed that I could label the recordings that the phone bridge makes and serves up (via Skype or by phone or for downloading). Very nice.

It would be nice if you could label callers (especially those calling from a phone number or using an obscure Skype name) so that you could take a guess as to who to mute when there’s noise. Although the high definition audio quality that High Speed Conferencing provides mostly means you don’t need the web interface to mute people I do need to occasionally. Their web interface is available only to the conference host, not to the participants.

There’s a pattern that’s developed in CPsquare and that I’ve been purposeful in developing elsewhere. I think it has lots of good learning practice built into it.  I put it on a public Google doc for a while, but since I haven’t received any comments about it for a while, I decided it was stable enough to post as a page in its own right on our tools wiki.  I recommend this practice, especially for coaching conversations.

For some reason it’s sometimes hard to find the “mute” button on a Skype call. It’s not one of those things you usually pay attention to. But it can suddenly be very important to find it when someone is calling via a poor quality Internet connection that introduces clicks, echoes, and other extraneous sounds into the call. Actually the noise is usually something someone else notices — and they tell you to find the mute button and use it. Kind of like, “Hey, you need a breath-freshening mint,” but you have to find the mint yourself!

When you can’t find the breath-freshening mint, it’s doubly irritating that someone says you need one.That’s it, in the picture on the left.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Skype detected the noise and highlighted the mute button?  In the meantime, we need to rely on our friends to tell us.

I was listening to a client deal with the increasing utility and popularity of ClearSpace as a platform for several of their communities of practice that are in formation. The good news is that people are sharing and learning from each other using their new tool. The challenge (and I was accused of being a “glass is 120% full” kind of guy is that page loads take too long for low-bandwidth users.

I decided to compare the size of several arbitrary pages. I chose 5 platforms: ClearSpace, two tools that participants in the Foundations of Communities of Practice are currently comparing to each other, Moodle (because I’m doing a project on it) and Web Crossing (which is where the Foundations workshop is held). I saved 5 pages and added up the bytes according to the several different types of files that made up a page. A quick and dirty way of making the comparison:

Some data is better than none

The html file for ClearSpace contained a lot of java script code, so the comparisons within categories are rough. ClearSpace clearly produces a big page. Ning and Facebook have large pages and they can be even larger if you add more graphics, RSS feeds, videos, and auxiliary applications. Web Crossing was so small, I thought I should go back and try to find a bigger page, but I was too lazy. All of these pages were the page you might typically land on if you were going to go find or do something in a community space, so they were roughly equivalent from a functional perspective.

And a picture is worth more

It looks to me like ClearSpace falls right in the middle of these 5 in terms of page size. Of course a community member’s experience depends on a lot of other factors, including navigation (which with ClearSpace is partly the result of site structure that will be constantly evolving), how long the server takes to put together a page, and the amount of data that makes up a page. And different kinds of pages will have different sizes.

In the conversation there seemed to be several leading proposals about what to do:

• Get more bandwidth for community members who needed it
• Ask Jive to consider whether ClearSpace has a performance issue

I kept arguing that there was more concurrent stuff to be done than waiting for these, which sounded like somebody else’s job. Ideas that came up:

• Work on making the member’s trajectory through the site more direct
• Create a separate directory of some sort (e.g., del.icio.us links into it) so that fewer page loads are needed
• Provide some kind of intermediary person or service who can retrieve stuff that low-bandwidth people request
• Automate the production of a CD image of appropriate sections of the site and send it to people by snail mail every month or two

What else?