The Pete Paradox

Peter Kaminski has a great maxim, which those of us who know and love him commonly call The Pete Rule:    (K8N)

“Time together in person is too important to spend working.”  T    (K8O)

I think it’s a great rule, but there’s a corollary, which I’ll call The Pete Paradox:    (K8P)

Time together in person is the best time to work.    (K8Q)

I actually had a specific experience with Peter last October that led me to think about this paradox.    (K8R)

At RecentChangesCamp earlier this month, I faced this paradox first-hand. On the one hand, I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to really get to know some of the excellent folks in the Wiki community who aren’t local to the Bay Area. On the other hand, I had some specific things I wanted to work on — namely SisterSites with Ward Cunningham and other Wiki developers and a YADIS implementation with the good folks at JanRain. Working on these projects meant breaking away from the larger group, popping open the laptop, and focusing on the work at hand.    (K8S)

The paradox resolved itself to my satisfaction. I got both projects done. We implemented SisterSites in PurpleWiki and a bunch of other Wikis, and Brian Ellin and I wrote a YADIS library in Ruby. I met several interesting and cool people for the first time, including Brian, and, I got to know folks like Bayle Shanks a lot better. On the second night, after the conference party, I decided to go to the main ballroom to check my email, even though I was exhausted. The ballroom was empty at first, but about half an hour later, Bayle showed up. We had met at WikiSym, but this was the first time we had a chance to sit down and really talk, and we stayed up past 3am. That was excellent. I had already known that Bayle had done some cool stuff, but it was great to dig deeper into his ideas as well as to talk about non-Wiki stuff.    (K8T)

I even got to discuss The Pete Paradox with Pete in person. (How’s that for meta?!) And here’s how I finally resolved it in my head. Both The Pete Rule and The Pete Paradox are about maximizing engagement. When you are working closely together, you are engaging in a way that is not only more productive, but more meaningful. Face-to-face time spent working can be a waste, but face-to-face time spent truly working together usually isn’t.    (K8U)

How Hackers Collaborate

The January SDForum Collaboration SIG meeting is tomorrow (Monday), 6:30-9pm, January 23 at the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm in Palo Alto. The topic: “How Hackers Collaborate.” We’ve got an outstanding set of “panelists”: Lee Felsenstein, Jim Warren, and David Weekly. Lee is a legendary hacker from the Homebrew Computer Club days, the founder of the Community Memory Project, and the founder of the Fonly Institute. Jim founded the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference and Info World, and was the founding editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He also founded the West Coast Computer Faire, a successful series of conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was directly inspired by the Homebrew Computer Club. David is the co-creator of SuperHappyDevHouse, a Bay Area-based monthly hacker gathering.    (K3V)

I call them “panelists,” because this won’t be a traditional panel. This will be highly participatory, an opportunity to share your stories about hacking with others. It will be entertaining, engaging, and educational. So please come! (It’s free for SDForum members, $15 for everyone else.)    (K3W)

Coworking Open House, November 21

Lots of folks have envisioned a world where the future of work is like the movie industry today. People form teams to tackle a task, then break up when the task is over, only to reform in new teams later. We’re very close to this vision becoming a reality in a geographically dispersed way. In my three years at Blue Oxen Associates, I’ve worked with different folks all over the world, and I have yet to meet all of my clients face-to-face.    (K1I)

That to said, there’s something lost when you’re always working in a distributed fashion. Tools and online community prevent you from being totally isolated, but there’s a beautiful energy that usually only manifests itself in a face-to-face setting.    (K1J)

Folks generally compensate for this deficiency by creating their own local communities. Most of my work is remote, but I still manage to see lots of folks face-to-face, and the benefits are immeasurable. I’m lucky enough to be in the Bay Area where we have a disproportionate number of brilliant, passionate people doing amazing things. That said, building this local network took a lot of work and time and a bit of serendipity. I have to be proactive about maintaining face time with good folks.    (K1K)

Rather than be individually proactive about working with folks, many people have created communal spaces for the like-minded and like-spirited. This is a long-standing practice among many communities. Brad Neuberg recently started such a space in San Francisco, which he calls coworking. He’s holding a free open house next Monday, November 21, 2005. I met Brad at one of Chris Messina and Andy Smith‘s barbecues this past summer. He’s doing interesting work, and he seems to be in the center of an interesting community. If you’re a free-lancer or remote worker looking to spend some quality time with other good people, I encourage you to check it out.    (K1L)

Why I Love Compendium And You Should Too

I just spent two outstanding days at the Compendium Institute workshop in Washington, D.C. Folks, if you are interested in collaboration, you must learn about Compendium.    (JZU)

Compendium is a conversation mapping (or Dialogue Mapping) tool that, simply put, makes meetings better. When paired with a relatively straightforward methodology, Compendium can make a huge difference on the quality of your meetings.    (JZV)

But Compendium is about much, much more than meeting facilitation. If you scratch below the surface, you’ll discover deep thinking about collaboration, hypertext modeling, visual languages, Collective Memory, Shared Understanding, and the art of listening.    (JZW)

Simon Buckingham Shum had a great line at the workshop: “Compendium is like Excel for knowledge.” He’s absolutely right. Just as mortals can build sohisticated number crunching applications with spreadsheets, mortals can easily build useful knowledge applications with Compendium.    (JZX)

But Compendium is about even more than that! Compendium, to me, represents an incredibly rich community of practitioners, deep thinkers, and overall good people. I talk a lot about the importance of bridges — folks who speak the languages of multiple cultures or disciplines. Almost everyone in the Compendium community is a bridge of some sort. To be a Compendium guru, you need to have a knack for facilitation, a brain for visual modeling, and comfort with computers. Everyone in the community has at least two of these traits, and some folks even have all three.    (JZY)

Of course, the best measure of the quality of this community is that several members of the extended Blue Oxen family — Simon, Jeff Conklin, Al Selvin, Mark Aakhus, and Karl Hebenstreit — were at the workshop, and I fully expect others who attended to become part of the family.    (JZZ)

I first learned about all this at a two-day workshop on Dialogue Mapping in 2001 from the supreme guru himself, Jeff Conklin. Since then, I’ve blogged a bit and written a few papers about Dialogue Mapping and Compendium. The workshop this past week has motivated me to dump even more thoughts into the blogosphere. But my writing hasn’t and won’t do proper justice to the topic.    (K00)

The best way to learn about Compendium is to experience it for yourself, and then just do it. Fortunately, there are easy ways you can do this:    (K01)

Al Selvin, who along with Maarten Sierhuis, is responsible for Compendium, likens the art of facilitating with Compendium to playing jazz. A great way to learn how to play is to jam with others. How do you find folks to jam with? There are practitioners all over the world. In the Bay Area, there are lots of practitioners (of course) — myself, Jeff, Maarten (who’s doing crazy stuff with Compendium and the Mars project at NASA), Nick Papadopoulos, and others. In D.C., the good folks at Touchstone Consulting use Compendium every day with their clients, and they’ve built an active Community of Practice there.    (K05)

The best way to find folks is to join the mailing list and ask questions there. One outcome of the workshop is that we will probably convene an online jam session, so that folks anywhere can participate. I’m happy to jam with anyone who wants to learn — either face-to-face in the Bay Area or online. Contact me if interested.    (K06)

Finally, if you’re in the Bay Area, you should register for Jeff Conklin‘s upcoming workshop in Redwood City, November 29-30. If you’re a project manager, facilitator, or consultant, or if you deal with groups regularly (who doesn’t?), don’t wait. Sign up and go.    (K07)

Web Montag, November 7, Cologne, Germany

I met Tim Bonneman at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in New York last June. He had just moved to the Bay Area, and had experienced only a taste of the energy and passion of the area. Almost half a year later, that taste is now total immersion.    (JZI)

In the spirit of WikiWednesday, Bar Camp, and all the other impromptu gatherings that have been cropping up like fruit flies, Tim Bonneman has organized WebMontag in Cologne, Germany, next Monday, November 7. Already, over 50 people have signed up. Looks like it will be a great gathering.    (JZJ)