• html2wiki – Convert HTML text to wiki markup
  Speaks a dozen different wiki dialects! 🙂
  (tags: wiki html converter tools)
• Reinventing the conference, blogger and new media style
  (tags: conference interesting2007)

We live in an interconnected world where machines log on to other machines to do work on our behalf. That’s what del.icio.us now does every night: it gathers up all the tagging I did during the previous day and posts it on this blog. It’s part of a mashed-up, service-oriented world. I’m writing this posting using ScribeFire, another mashup, which also posts to the blog on my behalf.

Some of my discomfort with IntroNetworks: it seems like more of “an application” than “a service” (in the mashup sense of the term). I’m really enthusiastic about IntroNetworks, and really impressed with what Chuck Steinfield did with it. It’s accurate, in uncanny ways, but it feels so separate. That separateness is probably both the result of technical limits and the culture around conferences the company serves. It certainly is a world where there is no profile standard that everyone adheres to and everyone would rather keep their profile information private, isn’t it?

The morning I left for the airport, after the Communities and Technologies conference, I bumped into a grad student in the lobby, who was waiting for a taxi to take her to the bus stop. We decided to run for it instead and struck up quite the conversation as she struggled with two bags, one with a handle that was way too short, and with one shoe strap that kept falling off. Afterwards, I found that she was “standing right beside me” in the IntroNeworks “me display.” Too late for an intro, but useful for a follow-up, better than the business card she’d given me. We got to the bus just in time and she sat a row behind me on the other side of the aisle (the bus had wifi!) and we looked each other up. “Oh, that’s you.”

A few days later, Jerry Michalski’s Yi-tan call about “exhaust data” and Facebook turned up an interesting connection. Grant McCracken observed that Facebook does a pretty good job of keeping a connection going after it’s been established, say, at a conference. He wrote about it later. Facebook certainly does a good job of drawing you back in and creating a sense of social activity — of life on the net. Someone on that Yi-tan call said something like “every venture capitalist these days will ask you what kind of a Facebook application strategy you have.” Facebook’s very openness is compelling. Online, there is no meaningful distinction between “business” and “social” And it’s certainly persistent.

Tags: intronetworks

• TaskStream – Tools of Engagement
  (tags: eportfolios education software)
• NEJM — The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years
  (tags: socialNetworkAnalysis health research obesity)
• Kevin Kelly — Street Use
  (tags: technology hacks)
• del.icio.us/settings/smithjd/blogging/posting
  (tags: blogging widget)
• Community Leader Survey
  The “most valuable” option was a world-wide face to face meeting, with a world-wide conference call placing second. When asked which option had the highest ROI, the order was reversed, with the world-wide con call taking first place and the world-wide fac
  (tags: communitiesofpractice+business survey metacommunity)
• Beth Kanter’s Google Analytics wiki
  (tags: google analytics wiki screencast)
• Social bookmarking as a knowledge management strategy
  introductory article, contains a matrix on social bookmark software that includes “inside the firewall” columns.
  (tags: socialsoftware tagging communitiesofpractice+business)
• onlinefacilitation » Tendrils of Learning >> Communities of practice resources in Spanish
  (tags: communitiesofpractice spanish)

Shirley Williams and I heard about the book at the same time, but she read it right away and I’m still wending my way through it.

Andy Mulholland, Chris S. Thomas, Paul Kurchina with Dan Woods, Mashup Corporations; the End of Business as Usual; A chronicle of Service-Oriented Business Transformation (New York, NY: Evolved Media Network, 2006). A lot of the issues in the book revolve around the business opportunities that result from reducing some of the barriers that are embedded in traditional IT — between departments and between the “inside” and “outside” of an organization. Here’s what I think is their key diagram (with my annotations in red):

XML and service oriented architectures, according to the authors, now allow organizations to bridge across all of those boundaries. Data can flow and so can value. The organization opens up and allows an ecosystem of value creation to form around the services it provides. And that process requires that “shadow IT” be recognized as a valuable contribution to the organization’s functioning.

It’s all told in an engaging story about a company that sells pop corn poppers. The characters have humorous names like CEO Jane Moneymaker, Marketing Manager Hugo Wunderkind, and CIO Josh Lovecraft.

It seems to me that it’s communities of practice (CoP) that make sense of boundaries, whether within a company, on the boundary and outside the company. The technologies by themselves won’t do it and the authors recognize that (if only to comment on the fact that “online communities need to be kept under control”). There’s no mention of the semi-formal technology stewardship that bridges between formal IT, shadow IT, the formal organization, and informal communities of practice. Now it may be that the communities that form in such a company using Web 2.0 technologies are less cohesive or more dispersed than those we see in gated communities (somehow they “look different” than what we’ve recognized), but communities have a critical role to play.

A very good book! You should read it, too!

Guy Nadivi of http://www.intronetworks.com made some interesting comments on my post about his company’s software in an email. It’s really messy to take comments out of an email in MS Outlook at put them into a posting in Word Press, but I thought they were so interesting I’d quote them here with his permission. His comments are in red, and my original statements are in black:

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? Yes, in fact we do it all the time. However, there was no registration database to integrate with this time, so attendees were left with no option but to manually input their profile information. And after the conference, is there anyway to carry the profile forward? Yes, but only if the destination you want to carry it forward to is willing to accept the data. And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? If by “rest of the world” you mean other social networks, unfortunately that’s not feasible at this time as there is no“profile standard” everyone adheres to. BTW – the vast majority of our deployments are for private communities where almost everyone would prefer to keep their profile information just that, private. Yours might be the first request we’ve ever gotten for sharing profile data. I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially. Our business model favors deploying as many instances of introNetworks as possible. Whether the data is private or public has no impact on our bottom line.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). Maybe Trillian should have been added during the configuration phase of the deployment. Nevertheless, a Trillian user would still know whether they’re connecting to someone on AOL, Yahoo, or MSN, right? As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement. We appreciate constructive feedback of any type.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. Actually, that is the case. We are providing you with what we call an “ego-centric” perspective of this community. The pins represent a view of that community with you as THE central reference point. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. “Lies” is not only inaccurate, but a bit harsh. Again, we’re showing you an ego-centric perspective of this community as you relate to it, or as it relates to you if you prefer. When someone else logs in, they see the same thing as it pertains to them. We’re not “lying”. We’re simply showing a “you-driven” view of things. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? Please note that the legend in the lower right is “active” and allows you to quickly narrow down to any of the constituencies with one-click. Additionally, the Search, Build Advanced Search, and Filter Search Results panels on the left offer a number of ways to find and show whoever you want to see in the community with the greatest of ease. I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

Tags: intronetworks

I’ve been thinking about how the use of technology can change events for a long time. Participating in distributed communities like CPsquare has caused me to travel more than ever before, but the design of events such as conferences and dialogs themselves seems resistant to the use of technology.

Especially since the first two International Communities and Technologies conferences have been mostly innocent of technology (apart from PowerPoint and wi-fi access if you’re willing to hike), it’s great that C&T2007 is using an application like IntroNetworks. Provided that wi-fi access is stable and available throughout the conference space, I think this application can change how you meet and interact with people at a conference. It may be because I am prone to shyness attacks at conferences, but helping people visualize who’s going to be there and actually get in touch before and afterwards helps position a conference as one event in a larger conversation (or at least a longer-term one).

So it’s hard to tell the difference between the platform as designed and the service as provided (e.g., by the conference organizers, who I think put lots of work into using the platform) and the experience at my desktop. (That’s one of the things motivated us to keep working on the Technology for Communities book for the last three years.) So my comments may be “about the software” or about its use or about me. The only way out of that conundrum is to keep observing and writing about it. Let’s see.

When I first logged on I was somewhat put off by having to complete yet another profile. Isn’t there a way to bring profile stuff in from somewhere else? And after the conference, is there any way to carry the profile forward? And what about sharing my profile with the rest of the world? I wonder whether the business model for the software company favors captive content and hermetic boundaries where openness may be more useful socially.

Part of creating your profile is to choose from a set of tags that are then used for matching you up with other conference participants. The first two sets are “discipline” and “research interests,” reminding us that this conference is aimed at academic researchers. (It’s an accident of history that I keep going to it, I swear.) The third category of tags is called “Services/Sites”. It’s funny to think that whether someone uses Skype or Flickr not says something about them, rather than whether it’s easy to reach them or not.

Each of the main Instant Messenger types are listed separately (AOL IM is separate from Yahoo IM which is also separate from MSN): what about Trillian users, who can speak to all three?). As I’ve thought about the tag categories it seems to me that push-back and complaints such as this one are an indicator of engagement

.

So the result of all this is a diagram with clickable pins representing people. You can mark them as contacts, send them a message, and look at their profiles. And it does work. Standing right next to me in the diagram is Aldo de Moor, a fellow I met at the Prato Conference last fall. I wrote him. He wrote back with an invitation to submit a book chapter proposal. The conversation has started already.

Although it’s conventional to put “me” at the center, I know that in reality it’s not the case. There are others who are at the center of this particular conference, but IntroNetworks lies and tells me that it’s “me” that’s at the center. I wonder whether it would be more productive to find and show some “us” and “them”? I guess that’s what the “Discipline” and “research interests” tags are really trying to do: get at personal history and participation in specific, learned communities.

Tags: intronetworks

Information technologies and a community of practice perspective can change how we design events, making them more productive and more fun. Beverly Trayner and I wrote about earlier projects and holding another dialog in Setúbal was an opportunity to observe, practice and design. For this dialog we had a public blog, a private wiki, weekly planning calls for the organizers, several group phone calls, and lots and lots of email. We didn’t use a web board as much as we had on previous occasions.

Since I spent a day working with Shirley Williams and her students at Reading University, and Shirley was also going to the dialog, we contrived to get on the same plane as Alasdair Honeyman from London to Lisbon. We had a great conversation from the moment we met at Heathrow to the moment our conversation was subsumed in the larger dialog. The conversation brought out what our separate conversations had been, what projects we had going, what books we were reading (Alasdair recommended “Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual” and I see Shirley has already read it), and what we wanted to discuss in Setúbal. So the idea is to start the conversation before the event actually starts. There are many ways to get that to happen, and I find it always pays off.

The second example of a getting there was what we came to call “van planning.” We had received a small grant from a project that was putting on an event in Porto. It was important for us to spend some time, but not too much, designing our part of the event. Since our group required two cars and a van, we set up the seating according to our roles in the project and spent the four hours in the car designing the event. I was in the backseat and Alasdair took notes:

We communicated by phone as elements of our plan emerged and as we thought about how the different elements would interact. And at a rest stop we met to iron out the interactions between the different parts:

Participating in a design process together – on our way to the event – was a little scary but also exhilarating.

But the way we meet is “fixed” in many ways and hard to change. Yesterday I spent the day with Shirley Williams’ research group (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/) at Reading University’s Computer Science department. When we were planning the afternoon session with Karsten Lundqvist, I asked, “What if we take notes during our meeting – in an IRC channel or a Skype chat session?” I’ve become very dependent on collective note-taking because so much of my work is distributed, collaborating with people who are many time-zones away.

Well, we tried it in the “Cybernetics Seminar Room” and the note-taking and use of technology in face-to-face settings itself became a subject of our conversation. A bit of a debate, it being a university research
setting and all. I guess it confirmed my conviction, however, about changing the form of our conversation – it so often is a practical thing to do. We didn’t actually specify what technologies to include in their project planning about MeAggregator (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/1448.html) which was one of the meeting goals,
but we did talk about longer-term strategies for listening to the intended users. It strikes me that this kind of project can, over time, really change students’ experience of being in a university.

The last time I’d spent any time with Shirley was in a bridge-building exercise in Second Life (http://elgg.sse.rdg.ac.uk/ssswills/weblog/1268.html). It’s very interesting to see how people change (or don’t) when they’re home, going on favorite walks after dinner, or whipping out a delicious pasta dish with prosciutto and asparagus.

In a chat with Mark Kuznicki about his recent work with BarCamps and other open space, wiki-style events, we resonated around the idea that in our observation, Open Space meetings are great at beginning but once people know each other and have a history together, things veer off in other directions, towards other social forms.

That got me to thinking about really old communities of practice and what social practices they use to hand down wisdom and views over hundreds of generations. As I thought about it, I realized that I’ve run across several recently:

• One community I know of is considering the idea of beginning every meeting with a D’var Torah (a “word from the Torah”) which involves a short talk that brings the group together around its essence, its core text. Depending on length, a D’var Torah (or a variant based of it) could be part of a regular telephone conference call.
• Another practice I recently heard of in the Jewish tradition is Hevrutah, where two people commit to meeting regularly to read, contemplate and interpret scripture together. It strikes me that this practice is a great way to support ongoing learning and of keeping a text alive. There’s no reason that distributed communities can’t set up Hevrutah, using phone, chat or even email.
  
• Another example that I observed recently was a group of Buddhist administrators, struggling with all the details of keeping their meditation centers alive, relatively harmonious, and with all the bills paid. A relatively virtuous group, it ended its conference call (which included people from a half dozen time zones around the world) with the dedication of merit, which is a very traditional way of acknowledging “the rest of the world” at the end of a practice or work session. It was striking to me how people mix and re-mix traditions with a little bit of noise from the ether to make it happen on a global level.

If such elements are part of your tradition, be sure to include them in your community’s repertoire. If not, it might be useful to think about what it is that makes these practices so powerful and try to adapt them to the learning in your community.

What other practices can you think of that have really been proven by the test of time?

Yesterday we invited all of the people we’ve interviewed in our coaching study to meet for a conference call to talk about what we’d learned from them about community leadership and coaching. As a broadcast of our “findings” it wasn’t too successful because we didn’t even get through our slide set, much less get much feedback. But as a kind of community call where we got down to an important discussion about learning and leadership it was great! I hope to more details soon. One of the people who showed up on the call was Matthew Simpson, who I met at the Coconut Grove CoP conference in 1999 and has been working at IBM helping communities function, stay connected, and stay visible all along. Hearing Matthew talk about his work always reminds me that insuring that communities are able to surprise us and invigorate our practice depends on a kind of persistence and longevity that he himself exemplifies.

As a surprising aside, Matthew mentioned a story he’d heard recently on the radio and he circulated the URL for it. It has a lot of relevance to professional associations and personal connections from a communities of practice perspective. In “81 Words” Alix Spiegel tells a story about her grandfather and his accomplishments. Gradually it becomes clear that it’s also the story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. Listen to it here. (It was broadcast on “This American Life” on May 11, 2007 — a replay of the original broadcast from 2002.) From a CoP perspective, it’s interesting to see how the judgments (or “knowledge”) of a learned society like the APA was actually reversed, what events and conversations played a role, and just how personal it all was. The story has it all: learning, meaning and identity. And they all change.