March Conferences

This weekend, we’re having our fourth FLOSS Usability Sprint, once again sponsored by the good folks at Google. Participating projects will include Mozilla, WiserEarth, Social Source Commons, and Drupal! It should be a fantastic event, and we still have some slots for usability folks, so if you’d like to participate, please apply by the end of the day today.    (LYO)

Tonight is another installment of WikiWednesday at Socialtext‘s offices in Palo Alto. Bryan Pendleton of Xerox PARC will be discussing his research on conflict resolution and coordination on Wikipedia. I had a chance to talk briefly with him about his work last month, and his talk should be absolutely fascinating.    (LYP)

Finally, there’s going to be an unprecedented gathering of folks in the facilitation, Organizational Design, and collaboration community on March 21-23 called Nexus for Change. It will be held at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio (near Detroit). If you’re interested in catalyzing transformation in your organization and in society via collaboration, this is the place to be. I am tremendously bummed that I’m going to have to miss it. I did everything I could to rearrange my schedule, and it just wasn’t to be. Many of my colleagues and friends will be there, as well as some of the deepest thinkers and practitioners in the business. I highly recommend it to everyone, but I’d like to make a special pitch to those of you in the Collaborative Tools business to attend. Should be a tremendous event.    (LYQ)

FLOSS Usability Sprint III

This weekend, Aspiration and Blue Oxen Associates are once again co-hosting FLOSS Usability Sprint III, the pre-eminent event for bringing usability to Open Source projects. This year, we’ve moved venues from San Francisco to Mountain View. Thanks to Google and especially Rick Boardman for sponsoring the event!    (LET)

As always, we have a great set of participants, and it should be both productive and fun. What’s even cooler for me this year is that one of my projects, HyperScope, will be a participant. I love it when things converge! The other projects are Drupal, Social Source Commons, Socialtext Open, and Sustainable Civil Society. Really looking forward to it!    (LEU)

Making Change Safe

My buddy, Justin Lin, has a company that recently migrated from J2EE to Ruby On Rails, and he’s been thrilled by the results. This morning, we were IMing about Agile Programming, and something he said about Unit Tests really struck a chord. He said that their tests softened their fear of change, which changed the team’s entire attitude about change in general.    (KJX)

I’ve written about Unit Tests before in a coding context, and of course, their importance is well understood in the Agile Programming community. What struck me about Justin’s comments was that he was describing how a tool in a very specific context was catalyzing a cultural shift within his company. While he didn’t say this explicitly, I can imagine that shift extending beyond the technical component of the company.    (KJY)

The lesson: Tools that make change safe facilitate a culture of adaptation. An adaptive organization is a strong, effective organization.    (KJZ)

What are some other tools that make change safe? I saw Kellan Elliott-McCrea yesterday (welcome back to California, Kellan!), who reminded me of a suggestion I had made for Social Source Commons a while back: Wiki-style editing works because the revision history is visible. A visible revision history encourages change in the form of Permission To Participate, and that in turn can lead to a larger cultural shift within your team and even your organization as a whole.    (KK0)