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 bet it hurt a lot; I mean – that much conflict and anger and finger pointing and this and that, it’s going to take it’s toll isn’t it?

As community managers, we find ourselves in an interesting position – we’re right in the middle between brands or organisations or institutions, and the people they are trying to support or service or engage with via the online platforms. This is an environment that runs enormous risk of stress and burnout; we have huge responsibility yet varying authority, we represent the movement to the organisation and vice versa.

We’re facilitating like mad in an endlessly changing context, looking for paths through this complexity, seeking a balance of power, and ‘genuine’ atmosphere, and other good things.

Asides to the workload, that’s a tough emotional challenge. Especially when it kicks off like it does sometimes, and people behave astonishingly badly and you have to maintain your cool throughout. I thought I might burst into tears if that sort of ferocity kicked off on my patch to be honest. I know I would have real problems trying to keep calm, and keep the outburst in perspective, and not take it personally and other feelings.

Of course, I’d deal with it, but I wondered if anyone had any ways of understanding our own emotional response to these situations and methods to ‘ease the pressure’. Like counsellors – who have regular counselling sessions of their own in order to help themselves handle their responses to their clients’ sessions.

So I had a question or two:

• How do you handle your emotional response to punch-ups in your spaces?
• How do support your facilitators when it kicks off?
• Do we account for the stress inherent in our roles and how that will affect us?
• Do we have mechanisms to help us stay calm, and reflective time to process the experience?

We have had two open meetings to date, several small projects under our belts, a range of new ideas and related groups emerging; it’s all good. We have learnt a lot from these events and wanted to share some suggestions; these aren’t neccesarily Transition specific, mind; nor are they meant to be comprehensive so if you have other ideas, let me know.

(A bit of ‘speed networking’ usually goes down very well)

Things we would suggest to bear in mind for holding meetings:

General:

• Network with other (Transition and not) groups and subgroups; invite other initiatives along
• Have a talk from another group
• Have a talk from an expert
• Keep ‘talks’ short and sweet
• The group’s needs will evolve: lead with content at the early stages; people need ideas and projects to get involved; aim for full Open Space style activity as the group matures; projects are underway, people know eachother
• Hold meetings regularly
• Build a sense that the attendees own the events: get them to help; moving chairs, clearing up, etc.
• A good venue is worth working for: quiet, spacious, light, airy
• If you get a good venue, respect it! Leave it tidier than you found it
• Include local characters: Councillors, GPs, Police, Landlords, Shopkeepers etc.
• Stuff you might need: flip chart paper, marker pens, blu tack, post-it notes, bicycle horn, a watch, address labels for name badges
• Shadow eachother; learn what eachother is up to in order to share the skills and roles; we’re about community focus, not individuals holding all the knowledge about their specific area

(Event plan showing planned and actual times)

Before the meeting:

• Plan the event beforehand as a group: Purpose, People, Processes
• Plan not just the event but what will happen afterwards too (write-ups, etc.)
• Agree an agenda, tasks and roles
• Leave extra time in the plan for over-runs, late starting etc
• Rotate responsibilities across events; share and swap roles

(Having and explaining a clear agenda lets all know what they’re in for)

During the meeting:

• You will start late; people show up at (and slightly after) the official start time
• Capture emails on a book on a reception table
• Introduce the event clearly and explain who is who (e.g. host, facilitator, speakers, etc.)
• Clearly display and explain the agenda
• Stick to the time as far as possible; be flexible but don’t lose the timings
• Brief speakers beforehand, and as they arrive, on how long they have and how you will manage them
• Keep the talks short
• Breakout leaders can be tough to manage; they will not want their groups to end
• Remind breakout leaders that they are looking for input, not leading one in their image
• Ask breakout leaders what they need before the event
• Ask breakout leaders to scribe their groups and write it up afterwards
• Spread breakout groups as far apart as possible in the room
• Refreshments are very popular
• Keep the event lively and informal (but not badly run); encourage chatback
• Take photos (and ask at the beginning of the event)
• Breakout groups need: Scribe, Email collection, Briefing in advance

(Having the local police kept our ambitions within do-ability)

After the meeting:

• Tidy up! Make it tidier than when you arrived. Keep the venue owners sweet and they’ll be happy to have you back
• Go to the pub
• Capture stuff from the meeting, bash out a little update, publish and send it out on email within one week

And there you go. Got any other ideas, suggestions?

These things are challenging to get off the ground, but Dan Weisselberg and the other early members are putting a lot of effort and inspiration into it, having already organised a neighbourhood clean up (particularly fine thank you poster), found some excellent community space in a local (old) school, building local networks of interested neighbhours etc.

A bunch of us will all be in the old Fairfield School for both days, explaining what it’s all about, having some fun putting a community timeline together, and other stuff.

Here’s the flyer:

Come along.

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 was fun. We worked hard and focused and produced some interesting stuff. David Wilcox did some fantastic social reporting, the attendees captured their work on video which is gradually appearing, and there are lots of photos on the flickr group. Expect much knowledge sharing; we work to an open innovation model.

A full event report will follow with the high level design rationale and details on the interventions and how you can do it yourself; in the meantime, one of the workshops was to identify the ‘five golden rules’ for anyone thinking of launching a new multi-platform project.

Here are the top five golden rules to consider when thinking about an ‘innovative multi-platform content’ project, as identified by the event attendees:

(the five golden rules as voted by attendees of the event)

Here are the those that didn’t make it into the top five:

(the next golden rules that didn’t make it to the top five)

Here is the full list of all the rules (the top 16 are in order of voting):

• What’s the point?
• Know your target audience
• Know your platforms and their features and constraints
• Identify a desire/need that this product is filling
• A single/simple idea
• Innovate or improve
• Consider potentials, adaptability, flexibility, extendabiity of your concept
• Go Gonzo: create a culture of use; go out there and create the story
• Ask if it makes financial sense
• There are no rules
• Release early and often
• Innovation must involve risk
• Give it a title
• Keep communication simple
• Content must be find-able
• Is it feasible?
• Develop/have a strong idea and stick to it
• New or existing technology used in a compelling and powerful way
• Agree upon a plan
• Don’t spend more than 1/3 of the budget on technology
• Start from what the user wants, not what you want
• Keep it simple
• Ask why it is multi-platform
• Ask yourself if you have the right skills to make it
• Understand the lifecycle and stages of development
• Ensure seamless content interaction across all platforms
• Do you or we have the expertise?
• Know how to measure success
• Can it grow?
• Are you using the right platform?
• Don’t forget your audience
• Platform must be driven by idea not technology
• Platforms must have relevance and value ‘use strenghts’
• Content must appeal to audience
• Interdependence of platform, content, audience
• A clear and adaptable business model
• A clear target audience

Now, we all know that having favourites is wrong, so these aren’t my favourites, but a couple of them really touched my favourite spots:

This one made me think of Nancy White, John Smith and Etienne Wenger and their work on the emerging role of Technology Steward:

(golden rule from event)

This one just simply IS:

Good work all! Full report to follow.

Storytelling and narrative analysis bounced back into fashion through knowledge management a few years ago and is increasingly popular. We hear more and more about organisations looking to ‘engage us’ with ‘it’ (usually involving social media), but ‘it’ also has great power (with related ethical considerations) as a tool for groups to understand themselves, make sense of their situation and develop apropriately.

There are hints of this in social reporting, technical stewardship, user-centred design processes, community hosting and more.

One of the things that stuck most in my head from the k-cafe was the importance of stories to communities as social objects to share, compare, think about, discuss, and build around. We all have a different perspective on these tales, especially until they are written down, yet (and perhaps because of this) they bond us in many ways.

Here’s a bit from ‘The Storyteller’ by Mario Vargas Llosa:

“… I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys; the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who – by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim – using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people interconnected and interdependent beings…”
(The Storyteller, p93)

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

Here’s the blurb:

Bristol’s latest Skillswap considering the ins and outs of user experience, usability and accessibility.

Welcomed guest speakers to frame the subject on the night are:

Patrick Lauke
James Box
Joe Leech

Following their three position pieces, our very own venerable Skillswap members (that’s you by the way) will be discussing, sharing, learning, debating, drinking and more in another rollicking Bristol styled networked DIY learning session.

Register to attend on the event page here