This report covers the period of January 2009 until December 2011. It is made up of some contextual background, brief outlines about the central project elements, two key stories, some figures, and a budgeted timeline. There is much more behind this report; to dive into more detail read Ed the author’s blog, or contact him directly with questions.

It is a big thank you to our funders, Tudor Trust, for giving Transition Network £50,000 for an unspecified and unknown web platform. We feel that we have used the money sensibly to build the new platform and open up new channels for the movement, and hope that Tudor feel that they made a good investment.

Another purpose of the report is to encourage other people responsible for web projects to do it themselves; take ownership of their project, accept the unpredictable outcomes and have a more resilient, affordable web system than an external service provider could produce.

(Picture: Most of Transition Network staff and board after web project approved, June 2009)

This blog post has the introduction and the context and role sections (without the nice pictures). It does not have the other sections on:

• The central project elements (Technologist group, core information directories, webhosts, content strategy, community emergence, web survey results, the Sharing Engine)
• Two case studies (Ingredients directory and Social Reporting ‘Stories’ project)
• Budgeted timeline
• Achievements and figures
• The big last thank you

For those you need to download the documents below:

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

Introduction

Working in complex situations on multi-stakeholder systems can be like being dropped into an intimidating forest, but seeking others to do your work isn’t the answer! In this sense, the report hopes to be like a breadcrumb trail in the forest, left by a group who mapped their context, and want to support others who doing the same thing.

The big lesson from our experience is that it would not have been possible to have predicted where we would be now, then. Because so much changes as you progress.

If we had produced a detailed and fixed project plan with a product roadmap (which we could have done) it could have felt reassuring in ‘the deep in the dark forest days’ of early 2009, but it would have been wrong for late 2011.

The web project we see now has grown out of experiences and connections from all of the stakeholders, working together in a ‘constellation’ on and offline, facilitated rather than project managed, in iterative technical and social loops hung together with communications and agility, rather than control at its core.

(Picture: Transition Technologist group meets for the first time, November 2009)

This is illustrated with the two case studies which show that our two biggest products were at best just twinkles in peoples’ eyes in 2009, and the result of exploring the connections between people and ideas and technology, rather than having a big vision, then trying to predict, control and micro-manage the future and the unknown.

This is also a thank you to all the staff at Transition Network, the Transition Technologist group, and all the Transitioners who got on board with the project, all of whom worked on an un-defined project that deliberately tried not to control the future, but share responsibility for understanding and optimising the present.

“It gives a wider perspective on transition activity than the local group can achieve. I think it is important to continue showing the bigger picture and offering encouragement to local groups as it can sometimes be a struggle to remain upbeat.”

“Helps us remember that we’re not alone, because it can be hard to keep up the big effort required.”

(2011 web project survey response)

Context and role

A great deal has changed since the web project officially began. Indeed it could be argued that ‘change’ itself is accelerating in a world that seems to get more and more bizarre and challenging every day.

Amid this context, the Transition Towns movement has grown rapidly in numbers and matured broadly in concept. Every day there is something new from somewhere new. Initiatives are springing up all over the world facing different challenges with different people trying different projects in different cultures, with different needs.

Needless to say, Transition Network offers pragmatic support for the emergence of the movement; it is grassroots led so we do not seek to control it. It is a highly charged and creative environment, making for intense professional and personal challenges. There is never a moment at which things are quiet, or ‘the same as yesterday’, or something is not urgent, or brand new and requiring immediate action.

Thus the web project began in an endlessly changing context. Unlike a standard organisation, it is keeping up with a movement that is moving too fast and unpredictably to second guess. This is a challenging situation, particularly if you try to predict what ‘web product’ a movement will need in the future.

In light of this, the web team focused on three interconnected things:

1. Identify the boundaries. Build a shared view of a Transition web ‘constellation’ or ‘field’ with all the various initiative websites, social networks, blogs, etc. and the flows between them, and do not put Transition Network in the middle
2. Work with the ‘field’. Build relationships with all types of users and facilitate the emergence of supportive social groups (editorial, technical, facilitation) across the field to share roles and responsibilities as they spring up
3. Produce a robust, flexible technical platform that any reasonable developer can learn about, and work on without too much trouble. See it as a hard working shared bicycle rather than a specialised work of art!

In this plan, the platform could be extended in many directions with a facilitation model to handle the social requirements arising and share the power among the users. Then, ultimately, the Transition Network ‘website’ could move from being a highly visible, central website owned by Transition Network toward a transparent web service, moderated by Transitioners to support and promote the initiatives websites.

(diagram to explain the wide array of Transition related activity on the internet, and how the Transition Network website is not in the middle of it, preferring to see itself as part of a ‘constellation’ supported by a ‘Sharing Engine’ using web standards and services)

This worked for us. Transition Network is comfortable with navigating the unknown, and changing plans when the need arises, rather than sticking to one grand plan.

Importantly, it also promotes the concept of accepting responsibility for unknown outcomes, successful or not successful, without blame. This means that individuals carry great responsibility in the team, but not fear of blame in case of failure; indeed ‘failure’ is seen as an entity where no learnings were extracted from an unsuccessful piece of work.

This is common sense to us, but we found that it is contradictory to most organisations’ web strategies, which are there to reflect a central institution’s self-image, and indeed, many people’s expectations; we are trained to respect centralised power. Our plan had been from the start to challenge centralised power – especially our own.

(Picture: Charlotte (Stories editor) and Mike (Newsletter editor) at the 2011 Transition Network conference)

After an initial burst of work to get the platform up, technical work was handled in focused phases with small budgets, delivering required enhancements and maintenance, identified by the users and prioritised by the web team.

“… It keeps me well intentioned, to create something that the world can believe in. I am so excited when I see my project featured on the side of the projects map, after adding content to my page. This keeps my project exciting, that there is a global network which my project is connected with, despite its small size. This is good, I believe, because despite its small size, the potential is there for great ideas to spawn. thanks, so much”

(2011 web project survey response)

…

For more, please download…

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

I’m not sure I even believe in the ‘platform’ concept any more as it so loaded a word with so many centralised implications. As well as this inherited value, so much of our activity is now so widely distributed across the web and physical world that we as individuals can now behave in any way we choose and share our stuff with whichever network we fancy, on our own terms.

The diversity is astounding; which makes me think that any sustainable distributed community support platform isn’t just one thing any more. It’s a ecology of patterns that members experience in different places at different times to achieve different community goals. I’m thinking a lot about Ron Donaldson‘s ecology of web2.

When you think about it, this means that any ‘platform’ should be doing more listening than publishing, aggregating and making sense of distributed activity, than telling people how to behave and forcing them to adopt set rules of behaviour in one walled garden.

It’s the patterns that make up the networks and communities that we need to identify, not the technological platforms. And to get to the patterns, we need to develop common languages, which lead to shared mental models of the purpose of the ‘platforms’.

There is a particularly interesting post from George Oates of flickr about some of their community stuff, and this particularly jumped out at me:

Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.

Read the full article here

What an interesting thing to say.

In a corporation, or organisation with pre-existing centralised structures there remains some reason for centralised control (largely to the benefit of the organisation).

How about across a huge emergent expanding bottom-up relatively structure-less movement of people?

It covers all of our strategic planning, the tools we used, activities we pursued (and chose not to pursue), the lessons we learnt and the metrics we measured by. And there are some handy diagrams.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Here’s the intro:

“…Much has been made of the potential of web 2.0 or social media technologies to harness knowledge and network distributed communities, but how easy is it for organisations to effectively use these widgets and websites?

In November 2007, as part of the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme,  iShed set out to explore how organisations could integrate and deploy digital technologies and new facilitation methods to support collaborative research and build a Community Of Interest around a research topic…”

We set out on this trip with a mutual agreement to share our findings with others interested in the suitable application of all this web2.0 stuff in an organisation. I am proud that we got there and are publishing it.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington of iShed for being a pro-active, approriately daring, and wise collaborator.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate get in touch. The only constant is change and the learning never stops.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Other reports from this project:

• Launch event report
• Early case study
• Final event report

It was a great pleasure to meet them and see their presentations which were all very interesting indeed – there are few enough opportunities to meet one’s peers so they are greatly appreciated.

More importantly, all of the attendees got top marks for attitude as well. They had come prepared to talk openly to eachother, and bring questions and examples which made for good conversations, topical problem-solving and hopefully all-round learning.

Given the other speakers’ amazing communities, I chose to pick out some examples of smaller works I have seen in the last year which have impressed me for their bottom-up and life-supportive nature. Here is the presentation. It’s all a bit visual, but you can download it from slideshare; all the relevant links discussed during the day are in the notes sections.

As well as the presentation I did a mini-mindmap session, asking people to write 5 words that meant ‘community’ to them and stick them on the wall. This is a quick and easy technique to help people get a map of what eachother is thinking about and I highly recommend it.

Nick Booth kindly grouped them for us so we could see any similarities in our thoughts. We found that we all roughly thought similar things:

• People
• Conversations
• Social space
• Relationships

A few others emerged including mobilisation, trust, minority views, power, meritocracy, disruption. Interestingly, no-one brought up technology or money although we talked about them quite a lot as the day progressed.

(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

I think my favourite post-it of the day was ‘Confidence-building’:
(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

It was a cracking day. I learnt a lot, had thorough conversations, met some good people and heard more real stories from the frontlines of all this online community stuff… Love it!

Many thanks to Mars, Dan and Antonio from Maverick for being our hosts.

Sharing is caring, all, keep it up.

I am suddenly inspired to write this up after enjoying Ron Donaldson‘s excellent ecological explanation of web2 and Dominic Campbell‘s admirable work for Barnet Council at Unicom’s social tools conference this week (great write ups of the sessions from Suw on Corante).

Three pieces came together for me at the conference today:

• Judith Lewis from iLevel said “… the internet taught me to be an extrovert…”
• Ron Donaldson said “… the early adopters patterned our direction…” (when describing how all these www2 tools have been adopted and the patterns of their use laid out)
• earlier conversations with Dominic Campbell (who told me to write this up in April) about twitter and personalities and public declarations as how we may be experiencing “declarative immaturity”

This is a piece about networking: past, present, and future.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

It’s meant to be delivered with a mix of semi-serious bafflement about these www2 tools which I use all the time (and the stupid things I have done with them) combined with moderate rage about how we are in the middle of some briliant changes but also a huge amount of hype and evangelism which can alienate the very people we want to enthuse.

Without a doubt, the comedy angle of it will be lost in my rambling verbiage write up, so remember it’s half curmudgeonly, half comedic observation. And I will go on a plain English course, soon.

The current setting is an industry with software providers and agencies primarily interested in shifting product or selling adverts on web services with some brilliant editorial and specific technical affordances designed to encourage ‘growth’.

Compering this situation are somewhat evangelist early adopters encouraging certain patterns of use that they have found suits them personally (see Crossing the Chasm for the risks of this in marketing speak).

On top of that is our great societal paradigm of ‘Growth’ (which was built on unfeasible debt, astoundingly greedy bonuses and the gradual transfer of state monies to the private sector).

On the growth theme, we’re also seeing a cultural tendency in these softwares and practices towards celebrating quantity in our lives as we count and publicly display our ‘value’ in terms of numbers of friends, comments on our blogs, size of our name in our friends’ tag clouds, recommendations on linkedin etc.

It’s like being a teenager obssessed with how many friends you have, but it all being laid open for all to see. Yes you can ignore it, but it’s tough.

I’m not saying that people don’t value their online interactions qualitatively, but too often I have seen inferences that people are better than others or more qualified for work because of how many contacts they have.

Think of the old addage ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ but on gnarly stimulants. People do this for themselves – they ‘game’ these social networks to see how many contacts they can get; groups are set up with the sole purpose of being the ‘biggest’ group.

The message is written (not so) implicitly all over the networking technology: ‘more friends is better’.

Dunbar’s theory on the practicalities of this aside, this all makes me feel rather uncomfortable and un-loved (ah poor me) when I foolishly compare myself to others. For some time I thought it was just me being so neurotic in a curmudgeonly response to fads, but further to sharing these feelings it seems others feel the same way.

In parallel to this, we are learning what is public, private, personal and political, and what to say in public with our social tools.

I have made some amazingly stupid (but harmless) blunders on almost every social tool; but it’s a new world and thus it’s OK to do stupid things as long as we learn from them. The boundaries between these four are blurring rapidly and different people’s ethics come into play.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

For example, an indignant and possibly righteously furious ex-employee of an organisation might be tempted to tell the world how they have been badly handled; whether this is ‘professional’ or ‘public’ or not is up for debate, let alone the discovery that the world doesn’t really like hearing this sort of thing; it discomforts people to hear of others misfortune and, frankly they would rather not know. Either way, airing your wounded pride may not necessarily be the best thing.

I am well aware that I could simply not use all this groovy new social networking stuff (as I have been told when I am also being called a neurotic curmudgeon), but I like it and I range from helpless declarer of things or total recluse.

If ‘networking is the future’, along with transparency and open-ness as we are repeatedly told, then more ‘quality’ needs to go into the design of the products and the messages sent out by early adopters.

We are also in the middle of a huge wave of new bottom-up, open, cheap, inclusive, participatory, engaging conferences, driven by the people for the people.

I’m a big fan of them. I design and run them. I’m one of the early adopter evangelist types in this instance (my blended facilitation work uses online social networking before and after the conference too), dragging people out from the quiet corners, forcing them to collaborate, waving my horn around.

Although I keenly try not terrorise the shy people, and try to include interventions that benefit all types of person. Ahem.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

Likewise, network and community facilitators may make efforts to ensure that the ‘power laws of personality’ (whereby popular confident people get more popular and thus are identified as more important etc.) are handled sensitively in order to help groups achieve their goals by including everyone’s offerings. A similar subject is seen at a recent debate around Open Space facilitation for example.

In the land of online communities, the KPIs are still focused largely on numbers of people, numbers of comments, ratio of readers to commenters etc. In the ‘knowledge’ world, assessing ‘knowledge’ transfer or transformation still eludes beleaguered knowledge management professionals, so the temptation is to place value on quantity (docs, contacts etc.). Hmm…

People who don’t make endless comments in online communities are called ‘lurkers’, and community managers are told to drag them out into the open and ‘convert’ them – success being seen as them making comments, which can be counted and presented in a fancy report to management.

It’s wrapped up in nice talk about engagement, but if not handled sensitively, rather whiffs of centralised community dictatorship. I’ve been there and know that when you obssess over this as the facilitator, you make a rod for your own back when you have other routes to ‘success’.

For example, when we decided to publish the first community book on KnowledgeBoard, we found that many of the people who stepped forward to voluntarily write whole chapters (not ‘metoo’ comments in a forum or empty nice comments to blogs) had not made any comments onsite ever – it just wasn’t their thing.

Who are we to (albeit non-directly) tell people to behave in a way that suits us?

(See the presentation on slideshare)

We are in a time when it is considered very important to behave in a highly extroverted manner with a public display of how many people we know.

What about the shy people? Those less confident than the highly literate www2-ers? They who aren’t attracted to shiney new gadgets? Those who just don’t get ‘technology’. How about the busy people? Those who feel uncomfortable in big groups? People with no small talk?

It breaks my heart that people using social networking technology can be made to ‘feel small’ by a friend of theirs’ tag cloud (and before you snort derisively, they do). That is not good design; that is blunt and myopic. And the business logic behind it? If you convince people they have to make more friends, they will see more pages, which means more advertising.

Do we all have to learn to be extroverted? That would be a new tyranny – the tyranny of ‘social’.

I referred to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to express the point about how we are all different. I know it attracts disparate opinions but dont’ get hung up on it.

(See the presentation on slideshare)

My point being that networks, communities, events, pubs, offices, squats etc. are composed of people who are different. Being that they are different, I bet that they would want different approaches to their social interactions, not this new tyranny.

Odds on, some of them won’t be good at having millions of friends, and might prefer to have deeper relationships with fewer people. Yes, they can still use the technology, but all the messages in and around it are implicitly discouraging this, which makes them feel bad.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to feed the cats and worry that I’m publicly declaring nonsense…

So – some ideas about the future of networking:

• People will tire of the relentless networking ‘growth’ paradigm just as most bloggers eventually tire of relentless blogging (links from one google search ‘taking a break from blogging), and others learn to turn their mobile phones off
• We’ll start seeing the networkers being network-ed out and taking a break and telling us how great occasional solitude is.
• The software providers will adjust their packages’ design to afford deeper relationships between users
• ‘Networking’ will move from ‘growth’ to take more purposeful ‘knowledge-y’ stuff into account, and services like twine will focus on groups congregating around activities and objects rather than random chat and endless expansion, while other services like the Cynefin software will finally bring qualitative analysis to the fore
• ‘Unconferences‘ will increasingly focus on specific issues and become more ‘constructivist‘
• Community and network facilitators will learn to know their members better and focus on network optimisation based on qualitative interaction analysis rather than ‘number of members’
• ‘Engagement planning’ will consider people in their context long before processes and technology appear on the agenda
• Those who say that ‘Community’ has gone from being local to being interest-based and global will find that the ‘local’never went away, it just didn’t need any sell-able technology (beyond door knockers on your neighbours’ doors)

Here’s the blurb:

The questionnaire takes five minutes to complete, including questions on:

• Customer engagement strategy
• Tactics and initiatives
• Customer engagement and the economic climate

In return for your efforts, we will send you a link to a free full copy of the in-depth report just before it is published on the E-consultancy website in November.

Customer Engagement survey link

While all the news from the financial world is hair-raising, now is most definitely the time to buckle down and take your stakeholders seriously. If you don’t, they are bound to find someone else who will…

This sign is on the street down the road from where I live. It was put there by the amazingly admirable People’s Republic of Stoke’s Croft‘.

The street is called Stoke’s Croft and is in the middle of a tug of war between a range of ‘redevelopment’ forces – council, property developers, bottom up community folk, house owners, renters, anonymous private equity property holders, winos, homeless people, squatters, shop keepers, artists and more.

The sign makes me think about communities and our perspective on them every time I pass it.

I have worked with communities ‘being developed’, communities that ‘develop themselves’, and communities that do a bit of both. Each is very different, and require different approaches and activities. On the whole, it’s probably best to have a bit of both.

That’s it.

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

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.

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