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…

Digital networks and computer systems remain obscure to most people until something goes wrong. What if everyone had a role in designing them and deciding how society used its digital technologies? This one-day workshop shares methods taken from performance and drama developed to engage people in thinking about technology and what they want from the designers of the systems that will surround us in The Not Quite Yet.
Link to event page

… And please tell me all about it.

This ties in with a long held passion of mine which is that we still don’t understand enough about what we mean when we start designing systems, and we aren’t involving the right people in the design process, or dropping them into unsuitable spaces and expecting them to behave. And when we wave the word ‘engagement’ around, it’s getting serious. And when we try to facilitate people in unsuitable spaces, of course it leads to issues…

We have inherited ‘social’ software from a history of people who tell us it is ‘social’ so there (at least it’s not big centralised enterprise systems, or heavily monitored communities we are told), but is it really that ‘social’? What does it mean? For whom? For what purpose?
Aren’t we now just throwing all the new widgets at a social requirement and hoping some of them stick? Shouldn’t we be understanding the requirements much more fully?

Are we sure that we aren’t still stuffing humans into communication technology frameworks from the top down that don’t give them what they need or want? Even if we adopt agile, get busy with UCD, drum up many use cases, throw personas around like billy-ho, watch punters through one way mirrors, and whatever new process is going, isn’t that still a bit abstract and top down?

It still doesn’t sound democratic and co-design to me. Still sounds like people being given stuff and told to use it – not necessarily for their benefit.
Where are the people in this process?

How can we connect with them in order to explain to them the implications of their decisions?

The gap remains and I think this workshop is part of the facilitation meets strategy puzzle.

Other people thinking about this include David Wilcox who has an excellent series of workshops designed to flatten the power laws of supplier-punter by cascading the right questions at the right times, and Nancy White with the Technology Steward idea, which takes online facilitation into this realm, and I’m sure others (hello!).

I’m working with Dan Dixon on a workshop applying Pattern Design principles to a new system before we even use the ‘community’ word, which we will be writing about in due course…

Umm. Yes, well. Err. There you go. Soap box moment over. Go to the workshop, and let me know.