Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

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.

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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?

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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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Media Sandbox final event report

This is a brief event report from the Media Sandbox final event on Tuesday 6 May, in Watershed, Bristol.

While we were designing the launch event for the Media Sandbox project (November 2007) we had the end event in mind (seeing the project as a Community of Practice with a clear lifecycle), so there was a clear logic to the event design from the beginning. This took into account group work done at the launch event, during the project itself, and all the potential future outcomes from the project.

In the bigger picture, I would call this blended facilitation: seeing the project as a whole as a group knowledge transformation opportunity, using different tools and techniques to suit the purpose and context, and using both on and offline worlds to get things done. Thus the final event was complimentary to the launch event, and all related activity in between.

Our main goal was to provide as many learning and sharing opportunities between the projects and community members in as many different ways as possible. In this way, the different nuances could emerge, and people’s communication preferences could be afforded.

Thus, as well as asking the projects to do short presentations to a panel, we offered them exhibition space for one to one conversations, introduced a knowledge cafe to afford group exploration of the challenges encountered during the projects, and encouraged event attendees to actually play one of the games invented, and try out the applications wherever possible.

A key part of the day was a group of external judges onsite to award one of the projects further funding. In this vein, we also invited anyone else to pitch for some separate micro-investment in a Pecha Kucha style; although this time the judges were the projects themselves.

It was a fascinatingly different event to the launch event, and a lot less noisy; in its reflective nature, it offered the group some form of closure, a sense of knowledge transformation, a network maturing and reflecting on its work and shared experience, and asking itself questions for the future.

The Agenda:

1. Welcome, introduction, background and refresh
2. Judges panel: projects showcase
3. Nuts and bolts knowledge cafe
4. Tea, exhibition, game play
5. Open pitching
6. Drinks and final announcements
7. Exhibition

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Community members opinions and how to handle them

As you might know, I find equal inspiration for group facilitation from the online and offline worlds. As well as this, I find inspiration from books and blogs etc. just as much as it exists in pubs, parties, festivals and life on the streets around me - there are lessons to be learnt all over the place, and one just popped up in my street.

Our local pub, The Cadbury, is something of an institution in Bristol. It is raucous, bawdy and fun, has good ales, a great garden, and attracts plenty of controversy. There is a cigarette lighter on the wall that apparently dispenses cigarette lighters, but not according to a local who stuck the following on it:

So you’re the new landlord, Wayne. Do you:

• Remove the sign in a huff and admonish the complainant?
• Check the machine and sort it out?
• Ignore it or laugh at it?
• Poll the locals to see if they actually want it?
• Something else

This made me think of a few questions around supporting or launching virtual communities, the relationship between community members, facilitators, and the tools they are given to do their thing, and issues around the ownership of space:

• If the members don’t like a tool, do you keep it?
• If a tool doesn’t work, who is responsible for deciding whether to keep it or not?
• If members want different tools, how do you extract this information and sort it out?
• Do the members have the tools they actuall want and need, or are they the tools you installed as part of a platform?
• If the members make their opinions felt in a manner that isn’t strictly ‘polite’, how do you respond?
• If the members don’t like some activity or tool, but the group sponsor needs it, what do you do to resolve the difference?

Like I say, only questions; revolving around technology stewardship, online facilitation, and that all important balance of power in shared group spaces.

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Supporting physical communities with virtual tools presentation

I presented a short story at Steve Moore’s ‘All Together Now’ gathering, hosted by Sport England at Channel Four yesterday; it was fun. Also speaking were Gi Fernando, Antony Mayfield, Mark McGuiness, and it was all chaired by Rebecca Caroe.

It was great as I got to talk about sport stuff, and communities, and virtual tools, and facilitation - almost a perfect triangle for me.

Watch the presentation here

The aim was to show how virtual technologies can support actual existing real communities (as opposed to building them online) in different ways, in order to give Sport England and the other people there an idea of the range of options ahead of them as they roll onward into the social media world.

I identified and discussed one very real community I know and love (Bristol Climbing Centre), and had a look at all the disparate communications/collaboration tools we use to co-ordinate ourselves, then considered the new activmob model (currently in pilot down in Kent) as a contrast, and drew a few benefits/key points out of the comparison.

Watch the presentation here

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