Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

The indubitable Matt Moore and infinitely inspiring Nancy White and I had a three way conversation about ‘Blended facilitation’ recently. It was great fun, a privilege to share some time with them both, and gave me lots to think about.

Download the podcast from Matt’s site

Things I am ruminating upon since:

• My matrix of Public/Private/Personal/Political could be Public/Private/Personal/Professional
• A good word for ‘blended facilitation’ could be ‘amphibious’ (Mr Moore)
• It is OK to make mistakes and discuss them (just as well if you are as relentlessly declarative as me)
• Blended facilitation is not just a linear online/offline group knowledge transformation model – it is also to understand the modalities – video/audio/touch and how to switch between them so it’s almost becoming a design issue
• Personalities do play a big role in all this (I must write my personalities post soon)
• I still love the concept of group technology being “designed for the group, but experienced individually” (Nancy)
• Given this idea of individual experience, we must ensure that there is significant overlap (between a flickr fan and a blogger) so that the core group activities and communications are maintained
• The proliferation of new technologies is great for early adopters, but we as facilitators need to remember that our groups feel overwhelmed by it all and simply may not have the time to interact like early adopters
• We all agreed that the core community data (posting figures, behavioural stuff, reputation indicators) belong to the community and should be made available to them
• More reflective practice could be introduced into community facilitation – rather than saying ‘what do you think of X’ (moderation), perhaps we should ask ‘what do you think of my activity?’…

And more. Thanks to Matt for sorting it out, and Nancy for sharing her time with us. Again, again!