Media Sandbox case study
March 13, 2008 – 2:53 pm
(Most of the Media Sandbox projects)
Introduction
This is high level case study about the blended facilitation work ongoing with the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme managed by iShed. Here is the descriptive blurb:
Bringing together leading technology, artistic and media talent, Media Sandbox is a new commissioning scheme to support South West companies/organisations to research emerging possibilities in digital media.
The theme for 2007/2008 is pervasive media. By supporting a community of research around this cutting-edge theme, Media Sandbox will encourage business growth, share knowledge with the wider sector and reinforce the reputation of Bristol and the South West as a centre for cutting-edge R&D.
Traditionally, this type of commissioning involves a call for bids, distribution of cash to successful bidders, some relatively private research and development, and a ’showcase’ event at the end where the bidders tell us a few things and say thanks for the cash.
We felt that this commissioning construct could do with some spring cleaning by introducing community-type thinking and free open source software. This case study is a stab at reporting that…
This is an outline of the case study which I have worked on and co-presented with Clare Reddington and Emma Scott from iShed at an Arts Council England conference, and a Unicom conference. You can view and download the presentation from slideshare:
See the presentation on Slideshare
We wanted to open up and share the projects’ findings with a wider audience, involving more people in the actual process and research, spreading the knowledge that the projects generate, and thus hopefully broadening the learning opportunities made possible to sponsoring a small bunch of people to do R&D. So we decided to consider it from a ‘community’ perspective.
We also wanted to explore how to use free software to support wider learning in distributed communities.
There is a lot of hype, waffle and evangelism about ’social software’ but precious few case studies showing how you actually use it; how you put it together, what frameworks you need to make sense of it, what worked and what didn’t, and stuff like that. It is now possible for anyone to walk into a community centre or library, access the internet for free, and use all the tools we used to do your own thing - start a campaign for example - so how can we help with that?
All the software we are using is freely available on the web; this is a much mooted benefit of the ‘web2.0′ movement but how do you use it and what resources does that require?
The cost is in the knowledge required to stitch it together and understand how to facilitate the system - so we wanted to explore and publish that too.
In a nutshell, Media Sandbox aims to invest in local people to do cool stuff in a new area called ‘Pervasive Media’. By investing in these people, they get some time to explore the topic and thus generate and share knowledge about it, develop new products, meet others interested in it, build a base of knowledge in the region, and thus attract more people to do cool stuff the region. (For the official line, have a look at the website).
The community construct
We modelled the whole thing around a community construct in order to set everyone’s expectations of who owns the knowledge generated (everyone apart from the more secret stuff around the core IP).
Sure, the winning projects were sponsored, but the deal is that they share what they are learning with anyone. So you can consider it as a Community of Practice (where the projects are working full tilt to produce new products) within a wider Community of Interest (where anyone with an interest in this area can join in discussions etc.), all facilitated in the centre by iShed.
(Community model for Media Sandbox)
The Long term: the Community of Practice in a three year view
This phase is the first in the three years that iShed is running. So, once a year, the Media Sandbox projects are a structured short vigorous phase of doing stuff, with goals and targets and agreements to share their work. You could see them as ‘generating knowledge objects’ for wider consumption but I’m trying to avoid buzzwords, honest.
The longer term view is that these phases are ‘early seeding’ for the regional network and ultimately, people will come together to do their own ‘innovation’ projects without sponsorship. But ‘innovation’ is a risky business - most of us are busy getting our lives and businesses and services together to afford an R&D team; so we really want to extract and publish as many lessons learnt as possible to bring that risk down…
(Media Sandbox in a three year cycle)
The Community lifecycle
David Snowden said that Communities of Practice without a clear end date will become flaccid and wiffling (not his words, obviously) and thus must have their death built into their life. Totally agree; keep focused. Understand your lifecycles.
Here is how we modelled the CoPs’ lifecycle, and what would happen at different points. Now I’m a believer in serendipity and the risks of over-engineering, but if you are planning something focused, it is very useful for everyone involved to know where they exist within a framework, and what is going on. The context, and their roles, if you like:
(Community of Practice lifecycle with related phases and activities)
Knowledge ‘assets’ at different points of the lifecycle
Another way to plan with this lifecycle in mind is to consider what knowledge could be created where and when. Again, I’m aware of the risks of over-engineering, so consider this as a framework. The current fashion is to ‘tut’ at planning in favour of ‘affording emergence’. I’m a fan of this theory but suggest it’s not entirely suitable in many contexts.
We did not prescribe this to people by way of beating them with sticks and measuring their output on a clipboard - we used this as a communication and planning tool for ourselves to assess what might come out of the process and how to handle it, nurture it across the two worlds and generally ‘afford it’:
(Sandbox knowledge assets mapped to the community lifecycle)
Blended facilitation
‘Knowledge’ lives in people’s heads but it is also a social construct. It evolves, or transforms, through moments when people come together to share what they know. These gatherings can be in the ‘physical’ world (meetings, offices, community centres, pubs, parks etc.) or ‘virtual’ world (blogs, forums, telephones, wikis, letters etc.). increasingly, we are using both worlds to help groups discover what they know and what they are going to do about stuff.
Physical meetings are expensive, but highly productive in terms of helping people meet eachother, generate new ‘knowledge’, agree high level stuff etc.. Virtual tools aren’t so great at that, but they are cheap (free in our case) and effective ways to build on what can be done physically, and prepare and follow up on physically generated stuff. The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world.
The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world. It’s called ‘blended facilitation’.
All of the launch event’s design had this built into its theory from the start. You can read the event report here. Here is our plan of how we approached the process. At the moment, we are in the ‘open innovation’ phase, largely using the virtual tools to share findings from the projects.
(Blended facilitation planning for Media Sandbox)
An example of ‘facilitating a bit of knowledge in both worlds
One of the first hurdles we encountered in the project was that there isn’t much publicly available knowledge about what ‘pervasive media’ is; no-one really has a clue. We had heard that the big corporations have been exploring this and building their understanding of it, but obviously that’s their private business. So we had to generate our own understanding of it as a group.
At the physical event, we built our own mindmap of what we thought, as a group, ‘pervasive media’ is. Everyone in the room was invited to grab some post-it notes, write words on them and stick them on a board. Two volunteers ‘grouped’ these keywords to make sense of the group’s words, producing a public model for us all to see and relate to (a representation of the knowledge in the room).During the day, everyone could come and move the words around, add new ones etc. You can see Dan and Pete doing the grouping on the left picture below.
At the end of the day, we transcribed this mindmap using a free mindmap tool on the internet, and published it online. Anyone could see it, and edit it as they wished. There it is on the right hand side of the picture.
So, we used the opportunities of a physical event to do something that is very tricky to do virtually, and then published it online to share our findings with a wider audience (anyone on the internet).
(Producing a mindmap at a group meeting, then sharing it online)
Things we are doing
We are now in the open innovation phase, using the free internet tools to share the projects findings around the world (to the Community of Interest, you could say). Naturally, all sorts of stuff is going on; here is a list of it:
(List of things we are doing)
Who is doing what?
It’s all very well having blogs and wikis and twitters and telephones and instant messengers and mailing lists and emails and carrier pigeons, but what on earth are we meant to do with them to achieve our goals? We are not all early adopting highly adaptable engineers with a passion to explore new technologies.
In fact, many of us are baffled by all this stuff; in fact, many of us are so baffled by it that it makes us worry that we don’t know enough, and if we are responsible for introducing these to our organisations/campaigns/clubs etc., we feel stressed and stupid, and I think that sucks. As well as this, people are now inundated in a tsunami of information generated from wide variety of sources, and we don’t want to add huge amounts of unnecessary noise in people’s lives, further stressing them out and distracting them from their work.
So we planned who would do what, and how that could be best afforded by the free technology we had to hand. We don’t know if this is all successful; this is part research and our intention is to produce a report later about what worked and what didn’t so others don’t have to re-invent every wheel.
Here is a rough socio-technical diagram of who is doing what:
(Diagram outlining the various activities around the projects)
How are we doing it?
It seems obvious in retrospect, but how did we work out how to facilitate it? Below is a highly simplified but robust basic model:
1. The projects write fortnightly research journals (blogs in the Community of Practice). We remind them of this regularly and they do it. If they don’t, we have ways of making them talk (semi-serious threats that I will come to their offices and bug them for example, but I haven’t had to do this yet so it must be a sincere enough worry for them)
2. Once a month we write a newsletter which we send to the mailing list, reporting on the activities and drawing out the common themes which are appearing (using a free email tool sent to the free-to-join mailing list).
(Communications and facilitation plan)
That’s basically it. Anyone is welcome to post their own comments to the research journals and the projects will respond. Likewise, anyone is welcome to post mail to the mailing list.
We could ‘facilitate’ more conversation between the Community of Interest members on the mailing list, or push the projects to write more regularly, or do active reporting from other groups exploring this area, or other pro-active facilitation and editorial work, but we agreed at the beginning to take as non-intrusive an approach as possible in order to see what gets used. We are keeping a log of the number of journal entries, and website visitors etc. and will reflect on this at the end.
If we were commercial publishers, we would be much more active in order to drive up our site visits in order to sell advertising. If we were flogging a social networking platform, we would gear the whole thing towards vigorously encouraging people to ‘expand their networks’ in order to build our platform’s popularity (and thus sell advertising or premium services). If we were in an organisation, we might be actively seeking participation in order to meet organisational targets focused on success criteria.
There are other ways for the projects to work together, and to meet others who are interested (the pub for example).
A quick note about IT people
We have used free open source software. That does not mean it is all web-based; some of it we have put on the Watershed servers. You can go entirely web-based, but in this instance we are working within an organisation. This means we work with the ICT department, who get the software working. If we were entirely web-based, we would do it ourselves (a whole other blog post), but we’re not.
This is for the people in organisations who think that people in ‘IT’ are basically a painful obstruction (and for those in IT who think the same about their users): talk to eachother!
I have noted in the past few years that there has been a trend for the software vendors, agencies and consultants to cast a bad light on IT departments, and suggest that all this new social software can bypass them. I think that this is irresponsible.
It encourages expensive outsourcing. This not only costs an unpredictably large amount of cash (don’t start me on UK public sector IT outsourcing), but also generates bad vibes in the organisation, while effectively guaranteeing that no knowledge about how to use software is kept in the organisation. As well as this obvious knowledge gap and increasing dependency on external service providers, it means that those in the IT department don’t get a chance to learn about how to service their users’ needs properly. All of the applications we used are free open source ones, and anyone with some technical knowledge can sort them out.
This self-fulfilling prophecy can be avoided. Go to see the IT teams. I know they can be odd, but they are enthusiastic, and don’t forget - they actually like technology, which has to be a good thing if you are looking for someone to advise you on technical solutions. Some of their work is about protecting stuff and security, and they may say no to stuff, but this does not mean that the next step is to dash outside and get an external outfit to build a new whizzy trendy expensive solution. The next step could be to talk more and work on the problem together (you are working for the same organisation).
In light of this last paragraph rant, this is dedicated to Oliver (photographed above) and his team in the Watershed who is a great example of how things can be with IT. He does the IT stuff, and, after sometimes a bit of initial resistance (usually for very good reason) is calm and helpful. He is part of the whole gig; He does not see it as an ‘IT’ job; their department (ICT) sits in ‘Comms’ so their view is about supporting communications; he even named the beer they sell in the bar (seen behind him in the photo).
He is strategically understanding, tactically responsive, and operationally patient and pragmatic. He knows his stuff and relishes it, and when we did things that broke the technology, he sorted us out without making us feel small and dumb (although he tells me there is the occasional slip but he’s working on it). Maybe there is someone like this in your organisation?
Watershed is a great outfit who encourage their staff to think ‘out of the box’ (Oliver even has his own consultancy in his spare time: Entuplet); and as such, is not the standard. But it is vital to forge these intra-departmental connections and bridge any personality or political gaps you may see therein; avoid the silos! Break those walls down!
