I’m continuing to use High Speed Conferencing as a phone bridge because it combines Skype and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) as I described here. The economics of communication shape how communities get together: many of the groups I work with include some people who can’t participate without Skype and others who can’t participate unless […]

Tags: skype

I’m noticing that because setting up a blog is so easy, rather than having one blog that serves all purposes, people set up many special-purpose blogs. Here are the blogs I’ve posted to within the last week, each having a special purposes: CPsquare News CPsquare Education News Technology for Communities Prato Dialog Coaching community leaders […]

An important question that frames many others in evaluating an event is “How long is our collective ‘now’?” or, in other words, are we evaluating a one-off event that’s over and done with or are we evaluating a moment in the course of a longer relationship? There are risks when you assume that the context […]

Finally, Nancy White, Etienne Wenger and I agreed on a simple definition of the term “technology steward”: Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as […]

Lilia Efimova and Nancy White were talking about some of the ideas in our technology for communities project and Lilia comments on how “community” seems like a problematic term to some people because it’s ambiguous – it gets used in many different ways and at different scales. I like the argument that King and Frost […]

In his article about “How to use del.icio.us to foster collaboration” Shawn Callahan talks about social bookmarking as a way to distribute work across a team, community or network. I do notice myself using the bookmarks that people in my community store in del.icio.us as he describes (in the sense of copying their bookmarks, referring […]

Although the whole technology for communities project comes out of our practice with specific communities, during gestation and birthing it’s easy to start worrying about how our thinking may have gotten far removed from actual practice. It’s easy to wonder, “Maybe we’re just talking to each other… (Maybe we’re having too much fun.) Maybe it’s […]

I used to use The Economist as a measure of how busy I was. Ever since I began reading it in 1989, I’ve always read it from front to back, one issue after another. I’ve chuckled at myself, comparing myself to the Joseph Conrad character who lived in the Congo and opened up an issue […]

The view outside my window this week reminds me of the Klauder style of architecture at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I worked as an intern after finishing a masters degree in architecture. The Prato Dialog is over and I’m now at the CIRN Conference, which is held within the electronic boundaries of […]

I’m sitting in the Portland Airport enjoying the calm between storms: all the packing and harried traversal of to-do lists is behind me. The Portland Airport has free wi-fi, which seems very civilized and changes waiting for a late departure into a chance to slow down and do some more electronic catching up. During the […]