Back in 2016 and 2018, I mused about how community and organization intertwine—two different “regimes” of social participation that can support or hobble each other. I’ve been curious: does that framework still hold up? A dive into some current research suggests the answer is mostly yes, with some important refinements. The core framework has held […]

Tags: organizational context, reflections

… a case study with tips for you … Twelve members of Portland Shambhala gathered in living rooms across Portland for five weeks, transforming wonderful Shambhala Online video lectures into a much needed community experience to share. Here’s how we did it—and how you can too. The Shambhala Context: Shambhala is premised on a vision […]

I’m calling for a Birds-of-a-Feather session for faith-based organizations at the Rstudio::Conf this week. I thought I should write down some of my musings to be clearer about where I’m coming from. All of these issues come up in the context of creating a “Societal Mirror” for Shambhala that combines administrative and survey data with […]

I’ve been thinking about how community and organization are intertwined, especially when they are interdependent like they are in churches, synagogues, or mission-driven organizations like Amnesty International.  The formation of a process team that’s focused on governance in Shambhala prompts me to write some of my thoughts down. Community and organization are different social entities […]

This blog post describes the cRaggy event  at the June 2, 2018 Cascadia R Conf, its design, the logic behind its design, feedback from participants and reflections on how such an event might be better in the future. Here’s the pith of the how we learn R: The R ecosystem is a marvel made up of […]

R is not just software.  It’s actually a global organism that grows information: insights, discussions, work methods, human relationships, and open questions as well as a massive amount of software and all the resources that document or support it.  Cesar Hidalgo equates growing information with “computing”, claiming, “It is the growth of information that unifies […]

Since I did a talk at CHIFOO last May, I continue to think about situations where a community and an organization coincide or are closely intertwined.  In comparison with how community and organization interact in other circumstances, it’s the churches and meditation groups depicted on the right that highlight the differences between the two regimes most […]

Here are the topics that Portland R Users say they are interested in: I’m interested in those topics, too.  And the several other data science MeetUps have similar topic profiles.  But when people ask to join the Portland Data Science MeetUp, for example, they say they are seeking things like: Networking. Meet people with similar interests. […]

Do we ever use all the data that’s out there (and that we generate every day) for the benefit of our communities?  How could the data that we generate help our communities see themselves in new or more useful ways?  The burgeoning new industry around Big Data is built on the premise that collection is […]

One initiative I took on as part of the IFAD synthesis project got going due to a conversation with Philipp Grunewald where we were wondering how a community like KM4Dev could guide a researcher’s activities.  Philipp was willing to give 2 hours a week to the community in some kind of research effort, but wanted to find […]

Tags: km4dev, survey methods, tools