Hiding the Agenda

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Before last weekend’s sprint, several people approached me about the agenda. I responded by offering a general overview of the weekend (Friday, meet each other and plan for Saturday; Saturday, test, analyze, and maybe implement; Sunday, wrap-up), but I did not offer anything more detailed than that. It made many people nervous, but all I could do was to ask folks to trust me. Why the secrecy? Was I being coy, or was I just disorganized?    (ICV)

For highly interactive events with large, diverse groups, I’ve found that the best processes do not share agendas with participants. There are two reasons for this. First, you want the participants to focus on the work. The facilitators (or in the case of MGTaylor, the KreW) watch the clock for you. Second, you want flexibility in the agenda, so that you can self-organize. On the one hand, participants hate meetings that waste your time. On the other hand, they tend to freak out when they see, “To be planned later.” It’s not lack of organization, it’s an acknowledgement of self-organization. You have to be really confident in your process to make it work.    (ICW)

”Leaping the Abyss”, a book about the MGTaylor process coauthored by Blue Oxen advisor, Christine Peterson, has a great story about why agendas aren’t given in advance, and what effect this can have on participants.    (ICX)

If your design and facilitation are good, it works beautifully. Several people approached me after the event saying how skeptical they were during and at the beginning of the event, and how amazed they were afterwards about how it all came together.    (ICY)

Allen Gunn (Gunner), our facilitator, is good, maybe even a little cocky. On the morning of the first day, he was constantly throwing out statements like, “We’ll make it up as we go along.” I’d laugh to myself and cringe at the same time when I heard him say this, but I knew what he was doing and kept my mouth shut. As Gunner explained to someone afterwards, in a way, he’s hustling the crowd. But, as I noted to the same person, you can only get away with hustling if you win.    (ICZ)

FLOSS Usability Sprint Redux

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

We wrapped up the FLOSS Usability Sprint last Sunday, and I’m just about recovered. It was a wonderful, wonderful event: thought-provoking, inspiring, and most importantly, productive. The key, as always, was having a great group of participants, great facilitation (thanks to my partners in this endeavour, Allen Gunn and Katrin Verclas), and a great space (thanks to Jeff Shults, environmental and listening master). Also, many thanks to our sponsors, without whom this event would not have been possible.    (ICD)

We accomplished many things. First and foremost, we helped improve the usability of the six projects that participated: AMP, Chandler, CivicSpace, Fotonotes, Identity Commons, and OpenACS. So far, the follow-through with this event has been significantly better than that of previous events with which I’ve been involved, and we’ll be able to point to some very concrete achievements that are a direct result of the sprint.    (ICE)

Second, we explored several broader issues surrounding usability and Open Source software. It was an unbelievable learning experience for everyone involved. Those of you who have heard my Blue Oxen spiel know that my ultimate goal is to foster a Learning Community around collaboration. My claim is that these collaborative learning processes are many times more effective and accelerated than traditional learning methods. They are also better suited for continuous learning. Our participants got a first-hand taste of this phenomenon this past weekend.    (ICF)

Third, we laid the groundwork for what I hope will be a burgeoning community devoted to improving the usability of Open Source software. This will not be a quick process, and it will depend on brilliant, passionate, good people. We were fortunate to have forty of them at our event, and I’m already looking forward to reconnecting with all of them.    (ICG)

I’m in the process of writing up a final report about the weekend’s accomplishments, but if you’re interested in seeing the unpolished artifacts of the event itself, check out the sprint Wiki and the photo gallery. I’ll also be speaking about the event at next month’s BayCHI (March 8 in Palo Alto), and I hope to see many of you there.    (ICH)

Steinbeck on Emergence

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

From John Steinbeck‘s Cannery Row:    (IB6)

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise — the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream — be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.    (IB7)

Pizza in Cambridge, Organic Food in Oregon

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

As the Super Bowl rapidly approaches, many of you are undoubtedly putting in your advance orders for pizza. For those of you in Boston, I recommend Beauty’s Pizza. My old college mate, Eric Silberstein, owns the joint, and if he’s as good at making pizza as he is at starting companies, you’d better get in line now.    (I95)

Speaking of techie friends and their restaurants, if you’re ever cruising I-5 in southern Oregon, stop by Summer Jo’s for dinner. My ex-DDJ colleague, Mike Swaine, owns the restaurant and organic farm with his partner, Nancy Groth, and the food there is fantastic.    (I96)

Leadership and Collaboration Across Different Fields

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Today’s Los Angeles Times sports page related a story from Houston Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy about meeting Bill Clinton. Van Gundy said:    (I8P)

He [Clinton] said, “We should get together some time and talk about leadership.” I said, “That would be great.” He said, “Yeah, I got to go to Asia for an economic summit. Then I got to go to the Middle East.” I was thinking, “I got TNT Thursday.” This guy is talking about real things. I’m talking about the Pistons.    (I8Q)

On the one hand, it’s nice to see someone in professional sports keeping things in perspective. On the other hand, leadership in politics isn’t necessarily much different than leadership in sports.    (I8R)

I was on a conference call last week with some folks who were discussing case studies of great collaboration. The bias among the group was that examples of collaboration in business were “concrete” or “practical” and that collaboration in other fields were not. The implication is that if you’re interested in collaboration in business, you need to study collaboration in business. This is certainly true. Then there’s the corollary: Collaboration in other contexts isn’t relevant. I think this attitude is crap. Unfortunately, it’s widely held.    (I8S)

If people are serious about learning more about collaboration, they need to understand it in all contexts, not just their own. Collaboration ultimately boils down to dealing with people, which is not a domain-specific problem.    (I8T)