Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: Engagement, 11 September

The next Gurteen Bristol Knowledge Cafe is going to be held in the beautiful Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, on Thursday 11 September, from 18:30. The cafe proper will begin at 19:00 prompt.

Jack Martin Leith (our local ‘now-to-new’ activist, group facilitator, and business consultant of 20 years) will be introducing us to the subject of ‘Engagement’. This a term we’ve all heard before (quite a lot now), and perhaps wondered what we all mean by it, so we’re going to give it a try, knowledge cafe style.

As usual, please come along and enjoy while meeting and deepening your understanding of this topic, and book yourself in using the event booking page below:

Event booking and venue information link

Bristol Gurteen Knowledge Cafe mailing list link

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CoP research with K.I.N.

The Knowledge And Innovation Network is looking for organisations to partner up in its ongoing Community of Practice (CoP) benchmarking research project. There are a great range of organisations associated with this network, and the first round of benchmarking was a great success. Here’s the blurb:

Networks and communities of practice (CoPs) have increasingly become referred to as the ‘killer app’ of knowledge management and one of the few genuinely value added activities.

This is the second phase a major cross-sectoral study of the performance impact of such networks. In a preliminary study (Phase I), the Knowledge and Innovation Network at Warwick Business School collaborated with some of the world’s leading organisations to benchmark the impact their networks and Communities of Practice had on organisational performance.

Phase 1 revealed some key factors that appear to be strong predictors of high performing communities and networks. Phase 2 will focus on validating these key factors and through interviews and focus groups identify good practices related to each factor.

A full guide to high performing networks and communities of practice will be produced for all participating organisations.

Sounds interesting? Drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch.

Download the KIN CoP benchmarking flyer

Posted in Facilitation, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Lessons learnt: Live Tag Surfing

This is a brief report and things we learnt while trialling our ‘live tag surfing‘ intervention at 2gether08.

It was a brilliant event with a huge range of attendee-driven workshops, excellent plenary sessions, a very pro-active crowd in a lovely venue. The Policy Unplugged team hosted the event while the Germination team ran the event organisation. Our tag surfing was in the marquee along with The School of Everything (doing 5 minute teach-ins), and the Connections board (helping with social networking). My favourite speech was a draw between the MORI poll and the Artic adventurer, the opera was surprisingly good, and the workshops were thoroughly useful. Not forgetting the excellent food and the superb venue, of course.

The ‘tag wall’ was two metaplan boards (huge thank you Jack Martin Leith for the long term loan) in the corner of the marquee, left hand side:

Live tag surfing wall in situ at the beginning of the event

Day one

We turned up early and set the boards up. We left them blank (with the ‘live tag surfing’ title) deliberately to see what happened, and one of us was always in situ to explain the wall to interested attendees. The ‘tags’ (post-it notes) were in the welcome packs, along with explanatory text on a separate card. We made a few general announcements to attendees about the wall, and asked a number of people we knew to ‘champion’ it by adding their own tags and telling others about it.

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Bristol Skillswap: When CMSes go bad: 10 July

The next Bristol Skillswap is about Content Management Systems on July 10th, in The Pervasive Media Studio. This one is led by the intrepid Nameless crew; The skillswaps are always fun and interesting, and I recommend a visit. Blurb here:

Over the last 10 years the CMS has risen from a concept that had to be explained to clients to something top of their list of requirements. It is a powerful publishing tool, but it limits design, allows clients to destroy the usefulness of their site, and makes you look bad (as the developers and designers of the site). We (Adam Millington and Stuart Gallemore of Nameless) will kick off the discussion by giving our take on all that is CMS and discuss how the industry, clients or CMS will need to evolve as our industry matures.

Format: presentation followed by discussion, so bring your argumentative hats!

Event information and booking page

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Bristol Gurteen k-cafe report: unlearning

About 15-20 of us met at The Pervasive Media Studio yesterday for our Bristol Gurteen Knowledge Cafe about ‘Unlearning’. It was great. Among the party were academics, consultants, coaches, and representatives from big and small private and public sector organisations.

Daniel Doherty (University of Bristol, Management School) gave a very stimulating 15 minute introduction to the idea (which has a range of angles, implications, avenues and uses) and then we broke out into groups of five to explore the subject in greater depth together before re-forming as a group and having a group-wide conversation. Then we went to Watershed for some ales.

Well done all!

(Bristol K-cafe crew, Pervasive Media Studio, 26/06/08)

As ever, many thanks to the Pervasive Media Studio crew for letting us gather in their space.

We will re-group in early September for another cafe; a couple of subjects have already been mooted, which will we discuss on the mailing list. Please subscribe to the mailing list or David’s site if you think this sounds fun - both will get you on the list:

Bristol Gurteen K-cafe Mailing list link

David Gurteen’s website page about the Bristol K-cafes

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Lessons Learnt: CILIP online communities

From August 2006 to July 2007 I worked with CILIP’s Department of Knowledge and Information to help them prepare for, establish and nurture their online membership communities. It was a wonderful experience; we all worked hard breaking new boundaries, and we all learnt a huge amount about all sorts of things one encounters while getting online communities up and running in a membership association.

I remain very proud of the job and am a great admirer of the communities team who pulled together magnificently in the face of a brand new challenge.

At the end of the project, we had a ‘lessons learnt’ session in order to capture as many of the findings we found as possible. I am pleased to say that the resultant document is now available to all for downloading and reading.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

The document is structured chronologically - into findings from the pre-pilot, kick-off, pilot, live, and evaluation phases. It ranges from organisational findings in a membership association context to technical findings while using Community Server (with very few adapations, and then in it’s early days). It’s the bare bones of our honest and open analysis of the situation and we all hope that it can help others in a similar situation, providing guidance, learnings, wheel non-re-invention, and whatnot.

Download the document here (approx 61k, MS Word document)

Other CILIP related learning materials on this site:

• Membership engagement story (presentation for Online Information)
• Membership communities story (Social tools conference presentation)

Enormous thanks to the CILIP communities team for agreeing to sharing their learnings.

All too often we chose not to share the ups and downs of our work, preferring instead to keep quiet about stuff in the name of ‘private-ness’ or ‘professional-ness’ or whatnot. But how can we all learn together if we don’t offer eachother the fruits of our experiences? So well done to CILIP I say.

My main point of contact was Lyndsay Rees-Jones (Senior Advisor, Membership Support Unit), who was working closely with Patricia McHugo (Web Officer), Stephanie Baxter (Web Editor), Alan Cooper (Web Manager), Hilary Morris (Deputy Information Manager), Kari Channell (Head of Corporate Marketing and Membership), and Mark Taylor (Marketing Executive), who were all admirably managed by Jill Martin (Head of Knowledge). The technology (Community Server) was provided by cSCape and I was subcontracted to do the consultancy work by Sift.

Posted in Facilitation, Strategy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Live Tag Surfing at 2gether08

Live Tag Surfing is a shared idea created between myself and Dan Dixon.

We are both very excited about bringing it to 2gether08 and hosting it throughout the two days. I love it because it’s an honest and fun knowledge focused facilitation technique with a heart of gold. Dan loves it because it’s part of his phd research into pervasive media and technology, and one day, sock puppets will be involved.

Here is a picture from when we designed LTS in The Duke of York, Bristol, February 2008

We first experimented with Live Tag Surfing at a gathering of Bristol’s Grumpy Man collective in 2007. Our aim was to explore how to existentially invert tag clouds and bring them back into the physical world; while they are debatably useful online, we felt that they could be more powerful physically as a group intervention method.

The core aim is to give event attendees an open platform to express their ambient knowledge and enquiry as a group, thus surfacing relevant group memes, turning them into useful conversations focused on people deepening their understanding of a topic of their own choice.

Simply - it’s a way to help people find others who are interested in similar things and assist them to talk about them. Facilitation-y - it’s a meeting between mindmapping, knowledge networking, open space and knowledge cafes.

Workbook scan: words and pictures at the high level

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Whiteboard looking for a home

I am looking for a charitable home for a truly magnificent whiteboard. It’s huge and wonderful and on wheels, but it’s much too big for me to store anywhere so I reckoned that there must be a community centre who could use it and love it on a long term loan basis.

Update: 13/06/08: The whiteboard has been taken - and thanks for your interest

Look - isn’t it wonderful?

The ladies from The Pervasive Media Studio have given it to me and I reckon there must be a place it can live and be shared for good whiteboard action. The dump is too awful a place for this wondrous beastie.

It would be a great tool for my live tag surfing work at the forthcoming 2gether08 festival, but it really needs a home. I’m offering it to Knowle West Media Centre and trying to get in touch with Saint Werburgh’s community centre, but can anyone else think of a suitable home for this whiteboard in need of love?

Posted in Events, Facilitation | 4 Comments »

Paper: A Proven Unconferencing Approach in Search of Its Theoretical Foundations

My good friends ‘the knowledgeboard doctors’ (Wolf, Troxler and Kazi) have written a paper digging into the unconference construct and looking around for some good solid theoretical foundations from social science. They have done good; the paper is readable, interesting, quite heavyweight (if you ask me), and, most importantly, firmly rooted in practical experience.

It’s free and I recommend you read it. Here’s the blurb:

This article outlines how unconferencing contributes to the vision of a performative social science that aims at stimulating social change. The authors argue that conference participation is an integral part of research and has the potential to support social change by enabling learning processes. They then develop an unconferencing model from the theoretical reflection of different theories from social science which reveals that unconferences support individual and social learning processes through enabling knowledge transformation as well as through creating structural links between societal sub systems.

Link to the paper here

This is a subject close to all of our hearts and one we continue to drive very keenly. All of our events have this theory their core, but we try not to go on too much about it in case we bore people who just want a gig that works.

We did a fair amount of doing and learning around conference theory with the ‘Contactivity‘ events during our KnowledgeBoard days:

As a research body, KnowledgeBoard had a strong desire to create an event environment which we could study in order to generate knowledge about this new meeting format. It was a natural evolution of our thoughts during 2005; to host a gathering which would provide us with the data for our research. It was loaded with risk, but it’s not research if you know the outcome, is it?
(From the Contactivity event report)

Since then, we have used many of our separate event design jobs to explore the themes we found back in 2004/5/6 - the European doctors with their devilishly exploratory Unbla model, and well, me (with great support from my friends and colleagues) with ongoing event design and facilitation work (PM Studio, Connecting Bristol, DC10 plus, 2gether08, BBC Learning etc.).

A thoroughly exciting thing is that I am currently co-designing an epic event with the unbla team in Zurich in the autumn to generate do-able answers to carbon reduction problems, but more on that another day; suffice to say it feels like coming home (albeit a bit of a weird Euro-warm and loving but infinitely challenging home).

Well done all! I knew you could make sense of it!

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Gurteen Knowledge Cafe: Unlearning, 26 June

The next Gurteen Bristol Knowledge Cafe is going to be held in the beautiful Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, on Thursday 26 June, from 18:30.

Daniel Doherty from The University of Bristol has kindly agreed to lead us into the subject of ‘Unlearning’, and then we will discuss it in true K-cafe style, before a visit to a local pub.

Please come along and enjoy while meeting and learning (about unlearning), and book yourself in using the event booking page:

Event booking link

Bristol Gurteen Knowledge Cafe mailing list link

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