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

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

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.

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

We are also interested in flattening the power laws relating to personalities. While social networking is a very liberating opportunity for people to relate to eachother on their own terms, we have observed that some personality types use it more ‘effectively’ than others, and this can skew practice and dicussions in those directions. Shy people need support at big social events.

Some of us are great networkers, some of us aren’t, and many conversations revolve around magnetic personalities rather than ideas. Live Tag Surfing will help conversations revolve around ideas and knowledge; help attendees find others who want to discuss similar topics.

When people come out of event sessions, there will be stuff in their heads that they want to share with others, connect over, deepen their understanding of, turn into actions and more.

Workbook scan: memes radiating from speeches

Live Tag Surfing provides an open platform to facilitate this desire by hosting a huge ‘tag wall’ at the event on which anyone can add one of their (limited number of) tags. By adding a tag, you are saying ‘I want to talk about this - does anyone else?’.

Gradually as the event progresses, more tags will appear. Patterns will emerge; bubbles will begin to surface. The tag wall doubles as a dynamic mindmap of the event, enabling anyone (at the event or not) to gain a high level map of what attendees are thinking about.

The wall will be nurtured and navigated by Dan and I with the noble support of some special invited guests in order to help make sense of it all.

Workbook scan: physical layout

As the patterns emerge in the tags, and the bubbles begin to rise, so the topical conversations can begin - the wall is now a springboard to help attendees self-organise their own breakout conversations based on the patterns in the tags. Attendees will be given bamboo poles with labels on them and let loose to take those ideas forward in any way they chose.

Conversations can bubble up serendipitously, and there will be specific ‘bubble bursting’ moments when we facilitate the breakouts.

Then what? Ah well, that would be telling… the rest is the future…

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?

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!

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

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

Welcome, introduction, background and refresh

We had a lot to do, so the temptation was to dive straight into action, but this had to be resisted! It was vital to allow attendees a bit of time to catch up with previous work, set the context, and provide a grounding for the ensuing conversations.

After a project introduction and welcome from Clare Reddington, I ran everyone through the agenda, and then asked Dan Dixon and Peter Ferne to talk about the Pervasive Media domain mindmap (.pdf) we had co-created with their help at the launch event. Following this, I ran everyone through the selection criteria we had also co-created at the launch event. Hopefully, this whirlwind update brought everyone’s attention back to the domain in question, and the community at large.

Judges panel: projects showcase

This was the traditional, formal method for communicating (broadcasting) the work done by the projects along with potential benefits for the future. Although the projects have been collaborating admirably during the last six months, only one gets further funding, so the showcase (to a panel of external judges) added a fringe of competitive-ness to the whole affair. The balance of collaboration/competition is very interesting, and an invaluable asset for motivating action, but that’s another blog post.

Each project presented for six minutes and had three minutes question time from the judges (Simon Ingleby, Dan Sutch, Paul Appleby). All the presentations were unique and stimulating, and the judges produced some sticky questions to keep them on their toes. After the presentations, the judges stepped out to talk among themselves while we took a short break and introduced the knowledge cafe

Nuts and Bolts Knowledge Cafe

The term and technique ‘Knowledge cafe‘ was coined by Knowledge networker and all round good guy David Gurteen, who was fed up of ‘chalk and talk’ gatherings where one person stood and told all the others how things were. David’s intention with the knowledge cafe model was to help all participants reach a deeper understanding of a subject through intimate conversation rather than other forms of learning. In this model, all participants are equal and can reach a shared understanding of a subject very effectively.

We chose this technique to compliment the previous presentation model with a conversational approach in order to offer the participants a chance to get upfront and personal with the projects and really explore the issues they confronted. The projects spread themselves around all the tables in order for all the participants to have projects at their tables, and we discussed the following question for 30 minutes:

“What challenges did the projects’ encounter during their R&D, and how did they go about resolving them?”

(knowledge cafe-ing in action)

In true peer to peer style (ie no managers around to get in the way of honest discusions) there were no judges at the tables, but we didn’t think it would have hurt to have th judges on the tables, as this would have offered them another lens through which to observe the projects.

After a surprised silence (I think everyone was expecting me to boss them around more (I mean direct them)), people just got on with it, and had thirty minutes of good honest conversation. Following that, we opened the conversation up to the whole floor and found that there were a number of shared themes at different tables, and issues that surfaced.

Tea, exhibition, gameplay

(I just put this slide here as I like the photo but do have a clearly viewable agenda at all times)

The exhibition was a chance for the projects to have one to one conversations with attendees, and explore their questions directly. All of the projects manned their stalls effectively and politely. One of the projects, Swarm, was a game, which is quite hard to explain, so they ran a short version of it outside during the break. Likewise, the Happy Packages crew felt that people needed to actually try their product rather than discuss it, so they ran their products for people to try out.

The events team laid on some fantastic grub for us too; in true English style, we had a selection of teas, finger sandwiches and cake. Best event food I’ve had for ages.

Open pitching

As part of the Media Sandbox project was to open as much opportunity to as wide a range of people as possible, the Media Sandbox team openly invited anyone to pitch for some micro-investment and network support. Three pitches were selected for the ‘final’ showcase at the event: Adam Nieman, Vicky Brophy, Ben Gannaway.

In order to mix up the community roles and make the most of the practical learning the Media Sandbox projects had experienced, we asked them to the be the judges, and sat them at different tables with the other participants so that they could discuss the pitches with the participants in order to influence their decisions.

In Pecha Kucha style, the pitches were given 6 minutes 40 seconds to present their ideas. Following their presentations, we encouraged discussions at the tables before some questions from the floor. It was poignant to note that the judges (Media Sandbox projects) had some really sticky questions (from experience), so I think we now have a ready made set of judges for next year.

The open pitches judges retreated to heatedly debate the winner, and the rest of us headed to the bar as all that was left was announcing the competition winners and doing the thank-yous.

Final announcements

To be honest, it was all a bit emotional actually. I know that, as a facilitator, one goes through some wild ups and downs with the ‘facilitatees’, and feels a strong emotional overdraft after a gig because of the energy one has to put into it (never trust a facilitator who says it’s no big deal; every word and gesture from all participants counts), but as the final announcements were made I felt all a bit choked up because it meant that the gig was coming to an end - the whole thing. Anyway.

Happy Packages won the projects competition, giving them a further £8,000 and office space and stuff.

SSTV (website to come soon I’m sure) won the open pitches competition with a proposal to build street sport communities around Bristol using CCTV and locative media.

Following this, Clare Reddington and Mark Lever from SouthwestScreen said their dues, flowers for Clare appeared in true arty style, and the projects manned their exhibition stands over wine and beer until 8pm when we moved on to Start the bus, where it became more casual…

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.

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