I’ll be dropping by WikiWednesday in Palo Alto tonight, but I can’t stay for long. My softball team dominated the regular season, and the playoffs are tonight (assuming it doesn’t rain). Although I’m bummed I’ll miss most of the festivities in Palo Alto, I’m really wish I could be in Montreal, home of next year’s RecentChangesCamp. Tonight’s Montreal WikiWednesday will be excellent, with Wiki celebrities such as Sunir Shah, Evan Prodromou, Seb Paquet, Alain Desilets, and Anne Goldenberg (who’s doing an awesome job organizing the next RecentChangesCamp) in attendance. If you live in Montreal, definitely drop by. Have fun, folks, and I’ll look forward to reading about it on your blogs! (LB4)
A Series of Open Conversations
What the heck is Blue Oxen Associates supposed to be about. Why the heck am I in this business? Forget about my Elevator Pitch for a moment. Forget about collaboration and collaboratories, Pattern Languages and Purple Numbers. What do I want, and why do I care? (K1V)
I haven’t been able to answer these questions to everybody’s satisfaction, but I’ve found folks of all types who get either it or me pretty quickly and who share many of my hopes, dreams, and values. Being around these people has kept me going both personally and professionally, and further catalyzing this community is a big part of what Blue Oxen Associates is about. I often think about the negativity that one of my mentors, Doug Engelbart, faced for so long early in his career, and I’m grateful at how different my world has been. (K1W)
Katrin Verclas and Seb Paquet are two of my favorite conversational partners. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Katrin (and Allen Gunn, another favorite) on the FLOSS Usability Sprints. I haven’t had the opportunity to work with Seb yet, but I’m quite certain it will happen eventually. (K1X)
Katrin is in Massachusetts, and Seb is in Montreal. My conversations with both are always incredibly rich, and I’m constantly wishing that we could talk more often and that we could capture some of those conversations. Of course, thanks to technology (and a bit of process), we can. (K1Y)
In the spirit of old school letter writing, I’ve proposed to both of them a series of conversations with a twist. Instead of emailing back and forth, we’ll post our letters on our blogs so that others can participate and hopefully join in. (K1Z)
I think the open conversations will be revealing and hopefully entertaining. Katrin has already kicked things off with a nice list of things she wants out of her career and life. I’ll respond in my next blog post. And when Seb decides to return to the blogosphere (*nudge, nudge*), we’ll have an open conversation as well. (K20)
I’d love to have conversations with many others, beyond what already occurs on our respective blogs. If you’d like to join in on this little experiment, write me a letter and post it on your blog. Don’t forget to link back here so I can find it. (K21)
Looking forward to the conversations! (K22)
On Conversations and Collaboration
Seb Paquet and I were chatting on the phone last Friday, and the conversation turned to Old Boy Networks. In particular, Seb noted that it wasn’t enough to eliminate barriers to conversation or collaboration. You need to catalyze it. The oft-noted Echo Chamber nature of the blogosphere is Exhibit A in this regard. Despite the lack of technical barriers, people tend not to interact with people of different background and views. (JJM)
This issue became the theme of the day for me. Later that afternoon, I met Nancy White for the first time, who was in town for Blogher. She was ecstatic about the expected turnout, explaining that the conference had attracted all sorts of new faces, traditionally invisible folks — mostly women, of course — on the ground doing great stuff and writing great things. Nancy, Mary Hodder, and others have been vocal about the sameness of attendees and speakers on the conference circuit, and Blogher was in many ways a reaction to that. I’m sorrry I missed it. What began as a casual conversation between Nancy, Beverly Trayner, and myself grew quite large and energetic, as random folks — Mary, Danah Boyd, Elana Centor, and several others — saw us at our table and joined the discussion. It killed me to break up that conversation, but we all had other meetings we had to go to. (JJN)
I ended my day in Campbell for SocialWave‘s one-year anniversary celebration. Sheldon Chang, SocialWave‘s driving force, has evolved the business in much the same way that I’ve evolved Blue Oxen Associates — learning by doing and refining the strategy over time. What began as a general desire to counter the Bowling Alone effect in regional communities is now focused more on bringing community back to city downtowns. I really like this strategy, and I really like how effective SocialWave has been with its flagship community, Campbell. The party was a manifestation of that. Several local stores sponsored the party, which was held in Campbell‘s beautiful downtown in conjunction with the weekly summer outdoor movie series (which has its own wonderful grassroots origins). Of course, SocialWave members — who span the entire demographic — were out in force, both as volunteers and as party-goers. (JJO)
I congratulated Sheldon on what he had accomplished so far, and — as it had throughout the day — the discussion turned to catalyzing conversations and collaboration. In a small downtown, the barriers to interaction are low in theory. People are physically near each other, and there seems to be big incentives to collaborate with each other, as all of these stores share goals and concerns. But in reality, it doesn’t always happen on its own. Campbell, like many of the downtowns here in the Bay Area, has had its share of economic troubles, and yet, most people have dealt with those in isolation. Sheldon noted that several store owners weren’t even aware of what stores were around the corner. (JJP)
In reality, collaboration rarely just happens. Someone has to catalyze it. This can happen from both the top and the bottom, but it almost always happens. This holds triply true when it comes to collaboration between diverse groups. If we truly want to work with people different from ourselves, we have to work proactively to bring those people together. This doesn’t happen often enough. It’s hard, but the benefits are significant. (JJQ)
People Time
Adina Levin quotes Peter Kaminski: (21Y)
“Time together in person is too important to spend working.” (21Z)
Reminds me of something Paul Visscher and Jason Cook told me when I had dinner with them a few weeks ago. I was asking about the hacker community in Dayton and whether folks ever got together to do code sprints. Paul responded, “When I get the chance to see these people in person, I’d rather just hang out with them.” Jason told a story of how he went to one local hacker gathering, where everyone was in a circle, staring at their laptops, something he found rather unappealing. (220)
To some degree, it shows how spoiled techies are in the Silicon Valley. There are so many of us here, doing code sprints doesn’t necessarily interfere with socializing. When Seb Paquet met up with me in December, he had just come from Marc Canter‘s party and was in awe of how easy it was to run into cool and interesting folks — not just techies — around here. (Hey Marc, where was my invitation?!) (221)
Advocacy Developers Convergence in San Francisco
I enjoyed the Advocacy Developers Convergence last week, where about 40 super-passionate folks — mostly developers of advocacy tools — gathered in the Presidio to discuss ways to collaborate. Among those represented were Advo Kit, CivicSpace, IndyVoter, Groundspring, Identity Commons (one of three hats I was wearing), and many, many others. Aspiration organized and facilitated the event, and Blue Oxen Associates provided the Wiki. (1JJ)
While the scope of projects represented — most of which were open source — impressed me, I was really taken by the collective energy in the room. These weren’t your average techies. These folks cared about improving the world, and their passion was palpable. Even the most hardened cynic would have walked away from that gathering with at least a smidgen of hope about our future. (1JK)
I wore three hats. First, I was there to facilitate Wiki usage during the event. In this regard, I basically did nothing. Most of the people there were already highly Wiki-literate, and the rest picked it up quickly. Second, I was there to help Fen Labalme talk about the Identity Commons system and to identify other potential early adopters. Third, as always, I was there both to share what I knew about collaboration and to observe and learn from others. I was particularly interested in watching Gunner’s (Allen Gunn) facilitation technique. Gunner, who recently took over Aspiration along with Katrin Verclas, used to work for Ruckus Society, and has facilitated a number of interesting events, including several international Open Source boot camps. (1JL)
Mapping the Space; Emergent Goals (1JM)
One of Aspiration’s stated goals for the event was to begin mapping the space of advocacy tools. That begged the question: What exactly is an advocacy tool? It was a question most of us conveniently avoided. Some tools are clearly and specifically designed for supporting the needs of grassroots advocacy, such as email campaigns, volunteer organizing, and friend-raising. Several (most?) other tools used by advocacy organizations (such as MoveOn) have multiple applications — mailing lists, contact databases, and so forth. (1JN)
We never reached a collective solution to this problem, but we seemed to be moving in the direction that Blue Oxen has already gone in determining how to map the collaborative tool space: Map functions (or patterns) rather than tools, and show how different tools can be used for different functions. (1JO)
The other goal for the event was to identify and pursue opportunities for collaboration among the participants. (1JP)
Aspiration’s stated goal for the event was to begin mapping the space of advocacy tools and to facilitate collaboration among the participants. A number of interesting projects emerged: (1JQ)
- Several people expressed interest in incorporating the Identity Commons protocols into their tools for Single Sign-On and Data Sharing (all with user privacy built-in). (1JR)
- An Open Source legislative contact database that activist groups could freely use. (1JS)
- Face-to-face code (and other) sprints. A small group is planning a VoIP sprint somewhere on the East Coast later this summer. (1JT)
- Internationalization working group, basically a support group for folks internationalizing their code. One of the great things about the attendees was that international representation was reasonably good. There were folks from Poland, Uruguay, and Canada, and people dealing with many other countries. (1JU)
- Technical outreach to organizations. Connecting these groups with the right tools, and explaining to them the virtues of open source. A group is planning to use a Wiki to generate a Nonprofit Open Source Almanac. (1JV)
The challenge with events like these is sustaining the energy afterwards. Face-to-face events that go well are often victims of their own success, because they create a level of energy that is simply impossible to match online. That said, there are certain things that can help assure continued collaboration: (1JW)
This group has all of the above. People were super action-oriented. Tasks were getting accomplished on the spot. Requests for information were often followed a few seconds later by shouts of, “It’s in the Wiki” — music to my ears. In general, folks who easily acclimate to Wiki usage — as this group did — are already inclined to share knowledge and collaborate. (1K0)
Facilitation (1K1)
Gunner is both high-energy and easy-going. He’s got a goofy, infectious grin and is quick to drop gut-busting witticisms. It would be easy to ascribe the effectiveness of his events to his personality, but that would be largely inaccurate. A well-meaning and amiable person can easily kill the energy of a group by under- or over-facilitating. Gunner has a strong fundamental understanding of self-organizing systems and very good instincts for when to sit still and when to perturb. (1K2)
Every good event I’ve attended with large groups of people followed MGTaylor’s Scan Focus Act model, and this was no exception. The beginning of these events are always about discovery and Shared Language. Discovery (or “scan”) is inherently messy and unsettling, but when done correctly, “action” naturally emerges. Most bad events I’ve attended are bad because they try to skip this first step. (1K3)
Each day consisted of several breakout sessions with groups of three to five people, followed by report-outs, yet another pattern of effective face-to-face events. The agenda for the later breakouts emerged as the event unfolded. (1K4)
The first day began with a game called A Strong Wind, which was an excellent way both to build energy and to get a sense of who was there. Following that and at the beginning of the subsequent days were In Or Out exercises, a way to get a sense of everybody’s mood and to build individual commitment to the collaboration that would follow. The first day, Gunner asked people to describe their moods in one word. The second day, he asked for colors that described their mood. The third day, he asked people to describe the most beautiful place they knew, be it a geographical location (e.g. California) or a situation (e.g. time spent with family, friends). (1K5)
As a way to accomodate a number of demos, Gunner organized a Speed Geeking session on Tuesday morning. I’m not sure yet whether I liked it or not. On the one hand, I enjoyed the interaction and the energy. On the other hand, it was incredibly draining for the people giving demos (including me), who also missed out on the demos happening simultaneously to theirs. I think the Planetwork Forum model of eight demos — four minute presentations (PowerPoint highly discouraged) and two minutes of Q&A — followed by two hours of unstructured socializing/networking is more effective, but I’m not ready to discount Speed Geeking entirely. (1K6)
Good Folks (1K7)
The most important prerequisite for good events and good collaboration is having the right mix of people. I really like MGTaylor’s strategy for achieving this: The larger the group, the more likely you are of having that mix. This group was relatively small (40 people), and I suspect that Gunner and Katrin’s people instincts played a huge role in making sure we had a good group. (1K8)
I hate to single people out, because I really liked and was very impressed by everybody there. Nevertheless, I can’t help but mention two people. First, I was glad to finally meet Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the author of Laughing Meme, in person. Time and again, I meet folks whose blogs I enjoy regularly and whose work I admire, and I constantly walk away even more impressed with their authenticity and their decency. It’s how I felt when I first met Ross Mayfield and when I met Seb Paquet, and I felt it again when I met Kellan. (1K9)
Second, I was glad to meet Mark Surman, who’s based in Toronto. Mark founded the Commons Group several years ago, which is very similar in spirit to Blue Oxen Associates. I meet a lot of like-minded people, but it’s a rare treat to meet someone doing similar work. Mark and his group are doing great stuff. They’re an organization folks should keep their eyes on. (1KA)