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)

FLOSS Usability Sprint, Feb 18-20

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Blue Oxen Associates and the good folks at Aspiration are organizing a usability sprint for open source software. The sprint will be held at Jeff Shults‘s fantastic new facility in San Francisco, February 18-20. Those who should apply:    (HTW)

  • Developers who want to improve the usability of their Open Source projects.    (HTX)
  • Usability practitioners who want to help improve the usability of Open Source software.    (HTY)

I got the idea from a breakout session at the Advocacy Developer’s Convergence last June. A few months later, I accidentally ran into Zack Rosen on the CalTrain, and our conversation pumped me up about the idea. The next step was to find a partner in this endeavour, and Aspiration was the natural choice.    (HTZ)

This event is going to be very exciting. It will be the first gathering of developers, usability practitioners, and users devoted to improving the usability of Open Source software. It’s going to be high-energy and productive, as all Aspiration workshops are. And, it’s going to have a real and immediate impact on the quality of several applications.    (HU0)

Most importantly (from Blue Oxen‘s point of view), it will showcase outstanding collaborative processes and tools, both face-to-face and online. As always with Blue Oxen projects, the goal is for this kind of event to be replicable by anyone, and the expectation is that this sprint will be the first of many.    (HU1)

Go to the web site if you’re interested in participating. Contact me if you’re interested in sponsoring the event or if you have questions or thoughts.    (HU2)

Connectivity Parties, For-Benefit Organizations, and Post-Modernism

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I spent some time today with Gerry Gleason, who was in town for the weekend. I was telling him about a Coding Sprint Blue Oxen was planning, and he asked what those were. When I explained them to him, he said, “Oh, we used to do those for NFS. We called them Connectivity Parties.” Back then, folks would gather together at conferences, set up a bunch of hardware, and code away. Yet another demonstration of the timeliness of good patterns, regardless of what they’re called. Of course, the ubiquity of high-speed wireless and four-pound laptops make it much easier these days.    (4PK)

Gerry had two other language-related insights. We spoke about the problem of non-profits getting caught up with the language of business, and thus losing sight of the importance of things like volunteerism, caring, and so forth. I pointed out that the term, “non-profit,” immediately frames these organizations in the language of business. Gerry told me that he had had this conversation with Phil Cubeta in the past, and that they had come up with the term, “for-benefit.” I like it. Even though Blue Oxen Associates is an LLC (a legal for-profit), I think I’ll start referring to it as “for-benefit,” because that captures the essence of what we’re trying to accomplish.    (4PL)

On a more scholarly note, Gerry is reading Ken Wilber‘s Integral Psychology, which has a chapter on modernism and post-modernism. Wilber says that out of modernism emerged three distinct disciplines — art, religion, and science — and that science (and by proxy, rationality) eventually trumped the other two. Postmodernism disputes the distinctions between those three fields. However, many people — both critical theorists and scientists — misinterpret postmodernism as a rejection of science. I don’t think science and postmodernism are orthogonal. You can be a good scientist and reject the notion of universal objectivity. The problem is with framing. “Postmodernism” is framed as a reaction to “modernism,” which is historically accurate, but which undermines the essence of its underlying values. I recognize, without irony, that this is a postmodernist interpretation of why postmodernism is misinterpreted. I’ll shut up now.    (4PM)

Blue Oxen and the Commons

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

There’s a fascinating discussion going on in the GivingSpace collaboratory about the commons, instigated by Phil Cubeta. Since that discussion is really focused on the Omidyar Network, I thought I’d throw in my two cents by describing how I see the Blue Oxen Collaboratories fitting into this discussion.    (2DK)

We currently host 22 alpha collaboratories, some of which are private spaces for organizations. The vast majority of them are public, however, and we encourage all of our groups to have public spaces. In fact, we will probably mandate that all of our organizational members have at least some public space in order to use our infrastructure.    (2DL)

We have not yet explicitly licensed the content of those discussions. It’s not an easy problem, although I suspect one of the Creative Commons licenses will work. However, we do know what principles we want the license to espouse:    (2DM)

  • You own your own words.    (2DN)
  • You’re speaking in public, so react accordingly.    (2DO)

Blue Oxen is interested in open discourse, the free exchange of ideas, and most importantly, collective learning. We’re not interested in demanding royalties from someone else’s idea, just because that idea was formulated in our space. We’re interested in facilitating a better ecosystem, and we’re betting that we will benefit far more from a better ecosystem than we would by making claims on other people’s IP.    (2DP)

“Facilitating the ecosystem” is something people hear me say often. It’s why all of our research is available under a Creative Commons license, and why all of our software is developed as Open Source. It’s why we emphasize interoperability with our tools, and why we’re doing our best to make it easy to export content from our collaboratories over to other sites. Our goal is to improve collaboration, and a policy of openness enables us to do that.    (2DQ)

All that said, it’s not as simple or as easy as it sounds. For example, what do you do about requests to remove content from a Wiki or one of our mailing list archives? (We discussed this issue a few months ago at the Collaboration Collaboratory.) Also, what about governance? Our collaboratories are not the commons. Although we try to be as open as possible, I’m not inclined (as of yet) to make the space entirely self-governing. That said, because our tools are Open Source and because we share our knowledge openly, people have the flexibility to create a self-governing commons using our tools and knowledge. In this way, we’re supporting the creation of commons. Again, it’s all about the ecosystem.    (2DR)

There’s also the question of sustainability. We’ve obviously closed off potential sources of revenue by being as open as we have. I strongly believe that we can not only sustain ourselves. We haven’t proven that yet, but I’m confident that we will soon enough.    (2DS)