Aug 13 2009
Welcome to our website and blog: it complements our book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for community. Get in touch with us, find out more about the book, about us authors, and get excerpts and additional material that complement the book. You can buy the book here.
Mar 14 2010
(This is cross-posted from my blog on Learning Alliances.)
You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, it’s not only a great tool but it’s also a handy example for illustrating some of the use and integration issues that we have to deal with and be able to talk about.
To really talk about how to use a tool we need to be able to point to specific buttons and understand the user’s context and experience. Given that we often have many tools to choose from, that we use them in tandem and that that the tools a community uses interact with each other in complex ways, how we talk about the tools and people’s experience matters. That experience affects usability, learning and collaboration. Although most people probably think of Skype as a personal or individual tool, it is complex enough to demonstrate the issues involved in understanding a community platform. This post demonstrates the language we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of the technology landscape on just one tool.
First of all, Skype is not just one tool. It’s a platform with lots of different tools on top of it. The tools tools in Skype are essential for my work as a community leader. If you follow this discussion about how all of them work together, you’ll have a good example of the approach we developed in Digital Habitats to make sense of platforms in a way that brings out the issues around tool comparison, duplication, and integration.
It looks like a phone
The most obvious thing to notice about Skype is that it works like a phone. (Another phone? I already have several! My phone call arbitrage is complicated enough: I pay a flat fee for my plain old telephone system (POTS) land line for local calls and for long-distance within the US. And I already have a pre-pay scheme for cheap international phone calls! And I have a cell phone in my pocket. Why do I need another phone?) Well, Skype is actually two phone tools that have useful features in and of themselves and are integrated with other Skype tools that I’ll talk about below. The two phone tools are different in that one is for calling a POTS phone with a number and another for calling other Skype users (with a Skype ID)
One-to-one interaction on-the-spur of the moment is ideal for reaching out to community members – to find out what’s on their minds or provide exactly the help that they happen to need at that moment. In my community work I make it a point to ask people for their POTS phone numbers or Skype IDs.
In this post I discuss several Skype tools (not all of them) in terms of how their features are useful, how they work with each other and how they work with tools on other platforms that people in my community might use. In a way this puts to work some of the analytical framework we develop in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats. The polarities discussed in Chapter 5 are a big help in organizing our thinking about these issues. So I represent each tool with a screen-shot and a diagram below it suggesting how the polarities seem to me at the moment. The phone diagram shown below indicates that I think the phone is on the participation end (unless you reify the conversation with a recording); you have to participate in real time, so it’s synchronous (exchanging voice-mails moves the red triangle toward asynchronous); and it’s a one-to-one experience, so I place it close to the individual end of the spectrum. The placements in this diagram then determine the placement of the tool in a tool landscape at the end of the post.
My impression of Skype as a phone
Each of the two phone tools has its interface: the Skype-to-POTS interface has a keypad that looks like the keypad on a regular phone. When clicking on the keypad gets tedious, you can just type in the number you’re calling in a text box labeled “Enter phone number.”
Lots to do with a contact
Notice that the two tools are really different in cost and function: it costs a small amount to call someone on a regular phone and you can’t receive a call back from them unless you buy a POTS number from Skype. A Skype-to-Skype call is free and it’s very easy for someone to call you back if they miss your call. Integration asymmetries between Skype and other platforms force different interfaces, so make me think that Skype has two different phone tools.
You make a call to another Skype user using its contacts list tool. The contacts tool partly overlaps with my Outlook, Gmail, and mobile phone contacts tools, but it things that the others don’t. One is to show who’s currently “available,” indicated by a green dot with a check-mark in it, so it works like a global “presence indicator.” Also, you can group contacts, rename them, send them to other Skype users and perform various other actions.
Your personal contacts list is available whenever you log onto Skype – from whatever machine you use. (Surprisingly, the same account can be logged on from two different machines.) When you click on a Skype contact, you have the choice of calling their regular phone, which will cost you but is more attention-getting, or calling them on Skype which only “rings” on their computer.
In my opinion the most polite way to reach someone is to first check if they are available using the text chat tool (discussed next) and then call them on Skype or by regular phone only after the other party has responded that it’s OK to call. If we’ve made an appointment to talk and the other party doesn’t respond, I may call them on their regular phone, which rings loudly (and may be a mobile phone that they carry with them).
Like the phones, Skype’s text chat tool is complicated: it’s the same on the front end, but different on the back end.
I'm running late
The text chat with other Skype users is a full-bore chat tool: like an instant message tool but better because it’s integrated with other Skype tools. For me it is the most frequently used of all Skype’s tools. Messages can be long and replying is easy. The interface is clean and it’s very robust: people are not dropped off a chat and they receive chat text even if their machine crashes. Skype keeps the chats on your machine since you installed it and you can search through them.
You can send a 160-character SMS text message to a mobile phone from the same window you use to call a POTS number (provided the number goes with a mobile phone). That’s handy but asymmetrical because a reply message from a mobile phone can only go back to another mobile, not to you on Skype. So it works more like an alert than a conversation tool.
Skype alert
Nancy White and I regularly use the Skype text chat as an alert – to drop notes off on each other’s desks. Often the drop-off is a URL and the message is no more than “Hey, look at this!” A direct message on Twitter or the inbox feature on http://delicious.comwould be obvious alternatives, but on a windows machine Skype blinks so it’s visible and hard to miss. No response is required but an alert can lead to extended conversations.
Chat is one of the most versatile tools we have. A chat is useful for alerts, for sharing, for conversations, for negotiating meeting times, and on and on. It’s ironic that there are so many different and incompatible chat protocols and tools. Once you have a chat connection with someone the possibilities for collaboration increase dramatically.
How many profiles have you grudgingly completed in your life, imagining that someone you really need to be in touch with will find you? One for each community tool you have ever used, perhaps. If you’re like me, you’ve completed dozens of them and probably most of them are now out of date! Our likelihood of keeping them up-to-date depends on how frequently we use a tool or how close at hand the profile tool is. I keep my Skype profile current because I consider it an interaction tool, not just a publication. Skype’s profiles are in a proprietary format and not available outside of Skype. However you can send a profile to another Skype user.
The Skype profile tool is an example of a tool that’s mostly an individual’s public description of themselves. But when you use the “mood message” to let people know where in the world you are or what you’re doing, it’s an interaction kick-off.
Hello world
Skype makes other people’s profiles useful by letting you modify or add to the information that they provide. Skype lets you edit other people’s names, which I find is handy if people haven’t completed their profile. Also, if you have a private phone number for someone that they don’t post on their profile, you can add it to your copy of their profile.
Skype would be a useful platform just for its one-to-one phone calls and text messages, but it becomes indispensable because the audio and text tools work in a many-to-many mode. Skype as a conferencing tool makes it a real community platform, especially given how all the other tools are integrated on the platform. Here again the user interface masks differences on the back end. A group chat is extremely robust, working in a point-to-point fashion: any one of those on the chat can drop out (e.g., turn of their computer) without affecting the others. And when Skype comes back up, the intervening text messages that were exchanged among the other parties to the chat magically appear on the machine that dropped out.
Chat is the workhorse
Audio conferences (not shown in a screen shot) are different: all the audio signals go through the computer of the “host” who initiates the call. If the host drops, the audio call ends for everyone. It’s important for an audio conference to be initiated by the person with the fastest and most stable Internet bandwidth: if the host is on a dial-up connection or an overloaded wi-fi network, it will impact everyone.
Another difference between audio conferences and text chats has to do with scale. A large number of people can be on a text chat, but an audio conference starts getting noisy and unstable well before running up against the Skype maximum of 9 callers.If everyone is on Skype, conference calling and group chat are nicely integrated. You have a “call Group button” to launch an audio conference from a text chat and a chat transcript appears automatically when you are on a group chat.
When a group is working on a project over a long period, for example, a long-running Skype chat is a great way to keep everybody connected and focused. Ten weeks is the record in my experience. When you turn on your computer in the morning, all the conversations between people in different time zones pop up. The flexibility of chat makes it an ideal tools for coordinating work on other platforms.
Which list are you on?
Over time you accumulate a lot of contacts in Skype and it’s very helpful that Skype lets you organize them into Groups. Skype automatically creates some groups, such as “recently contacted” or “requests from new contacts.” But you can create as many groups as you want. Adding people to or removing them from a group is easy and you can put people in multiple groups.
The groups tool is useful in combination with other tools. For example, when you select a group, you can easily see who is currently logged on to Skype. What that means depends on whether being logged on to Skype at a given point is a norm in that group of people or not. A Skype group makes it easy to start a group chat or a group audio conference. One advantage of using a group to set up a chat is that you include people whether they are logged on or not; when they do log on, the chat messages will pop up on their computer.
The point of using these polarities and the feature-tool-platform-configuration scheme are not to enable a final analysis of a technology. We developed them as a natural way to help a technology steward take a step back from the hand-on level and make sense of the experiences that enable a community to be together and to learn. This tour of Skype is not meant to prove anything: it’s more suggesting a way of making sense of a technology. Here are some further thoughts that I’ve got floating around as I try to get this post shipped off:
A provisional placing of Skype tools on the digital landscape
What do you think?
Mar 08 2010
The surprise that you want to have when your book is published is to move a conversation forward and to pick up on the conversation with new people. At least that’s what I think now, after Digital Habitats has been out for a while.
One of my big hopes is to see people actually put the diagrams and schemes to work. I struck up a conversation with Derek Moore on Twitter (http://twitter.com/weblearning) because Nancy White pointed out a diagram that he posted.
After a few exchanges via direct messages in Twitter, we resorted to email. He shared this diagram, an updated version of the Tools Landscape diagram he had posted on Twitter. His version has fewer tools on it than the version on page 60 of the book and it has some new ones. I was working on a blog post where I wanted to revise the diagram and I was struck by how elegant and clean Derek’s version was. And very pleased to see someone else put the idea to work.
I thought it was interesting that I misinterpreted “life streaming” as “live streaming” (e.g., video). And I was really surprised and delighted to realize that the .png format can have layers in it. That is, with software like Adobe’s Fireworks, you can replace layers in Derek’s version of the diagram. So the conversation keeps going – not only through Twitter, email, blog posts, but via revisions of each other’s diagrams.
But we’re not longer strangers.
Feb 18 2010
February 16, 2010
Theme: Rethinking Ourselves (KM People) as Technology Stewards
The agenda:
Resources:
Book site: http://www.technologyforcommunities.com
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/smithjd/digital-habitats-sikm-presentation
A Peek at the public back-channel: The SIKM chat in Etherpad and Twitter
To prepare for today’s call we decided to just start with what brought us to this work, since reporting on work that has spanned almost 6 years seemed a bit daunting.
Etienne Wenger: what brought me to this tech steward work? The 2001 “Tech Report” for the Federal Council of CIOs was getting out of date. proposed to write an update of it. But the more we talked, the more we focused on the role of the people who are bridging between communities and technology.
John Smith: Years ago, started noticing how, in CPsquare (http://cpsquare.org) and in other communities, people straddled different tools and technologies, like phones and Twitter or forums and face-to-face. They were frequently going back and forth between one and the other. Often without a lot of obvious cues as to why one was chosen, or why it fit. It was just “understood” where the conversation would be picked up. That seemed like a real indicator that some useful activity going on there that was worth understanding and cultivating, because it helped keep those conversations going in those communities.
Nancy White: how could I say no? it’s an individual invitation from people I like. IN the beginning I thought it was about technology. In the end I realized that it’s about “making things visible” . I realize that this morning. Tech stewardship is helping make something visible when it’s important, useful. an act of bridging between tech & people. That was echoed over last several weeks several times, so it changed what I was thinking of saying today. When people invite me to talk about KM, I say that I don’t believe it knowledge can be managed. It’s all about making knowledge visible enough to make it handle-able.
Etienne Wenger: giving something a name is important. It supports social learning. Since social learning happens everywhere, giving things names is central. It helps people talk about what they want. In fact, naming “communities of practice” and any given community of practice in particular is useful because it makes things visible, helps people talk about what they want. The concept of “community of practice” has had a career because it makes social learning as a concept accessible. If communities of practice make social learning visible, then some people think that technology is a way to make them visible. Tech stewardship seems important today because communities are jumping across technologies. Someone has to care about tech in the name of the community – and that’s technology stewardship
We worked with client who had worked so hard to make a place on their intranet for their CoPs. But for us it became apparent that the platform was just not usable. We blew their minds by bringing in other technologies that were not part of their platform. There are very few communities that are confined to a single platform
Nancy White: Tech stewardship is so complex, difficult and subtle because there are so many tools and it’s so easy to find exceptions to most rules. It’s easy to find many different ways of using any given tool.
Patti Anklam: I think the complexity of the job also has a lot to do with the fact that the steward is constantly interacting in the context of human relationships.
Etienne Wenger: that makes the function of tech stewardship so important.
Nancy White: what if there is no “community”? Look at groups on twitter, like the one at “kmchat” that gathers around a hashtag. They get together for an hour each week. I know it took a while to gather around a question, to get someone to facilitate it. But the platform has enabled a new kind of conversation. The tag is something that people follow. It’s interesting how technology has blurred the lines around conversations. It raises the question about what is a community.
Etienne Wenger: The idea of a technology steward is to support a community-centric focus rather than a platform-centric one.
John Smith: It used to be that the conversation about technologies for communities focused on web forums and email lists, which are platforms with sharp boundaries. (Or at least on those platforms the cross-community blurring just wasn’t so visible.) That has changed. We now have many platforms for interaction where the boundaries between communities are more obviously blurred.
Nancy White: in the past we conceptualized communities as people who aggregated around people. Have had that assumption and belief challenged when people are attracted by and gather around content. Trust forms around “interesting content”, and “let’s make friends” comes after that.
Etienne Wenger: it’s always been that people connect for lots of different reasons. reading a book, interest in a novel (?). The web has made an explosion of alternatives. Yes… and, the attractor factor is emphasized now, and our past social process models were heavily relationship centric. (I.e. trust models)
Peter West: With so many technologies in use, how do you 1) *merge* the threads of conversations/interactions and facilitate the broadest access to the *nuggets* that emerge and facilitate the greatest opportunities for impact? 2) capture the material in an intelligible archive?
John Smith: First you have to do it manually. You can only do that when you are an insider. You know the different places where people are gathering. Then you weave it and connect it. Eventually some of it can be automated. Brings out the idea that tech stewardship has different phases or levels of activity. At one level maybe as technology stewards we’re helping plan the selection and use of new tool/platform. But at the ground level we’re trouble-shooting, debugging, spreading the word about the use of a tool. Just because a tool is there to be used doesn’t mean people know how to use it. It includes the level at which Nancy and John negotiate how we to take notes in Etherpad during this call – at the bottom or the top. (“Or the middle!” says Nancy) That is the spectrum of tech stewardship but the metric for effort and success is always sense making. Are we learning together?
Peter West: Tech illiteracy may put certain members at a disadvantage.
Etienne Wenger: This is where TS is a form of community leadership as well. It includes that kind of awareness. A tech steward has to also be aware that technology itself can be a source of boundary – by excluding some people. Tech stewards have to be aware of the new conversations that tech enables, but also of the way that it can create divisions and separation. It’s a form of caring for social learning. It always cuts both ways.
Nancy White: tolerance for ambiguity (a value that comes from online facilitation) applies to tech stewardship, as well. We assume that if a tech applies or works for me, it must work for you. It’s hard to get around that assumption Even when technologies are designed for a group, they are always experienced individually. In a face-to-face setting we can see when people are “out” but that’s much harder in a tech mediated environment. So we can’t really assume we know what’s going on. That’s the job we’re doing when we say: “we haven’t heard from you, what’s going on?” There are many possible answers: Internet access is down, I don’t know how to use it, I’m feeling left out by the conversation, etc.
Patti Anklam: what is the relationship between the TS and a community facilitator?
Nancy White: facilitators find themselves as TS’s. they are accidental technology stewards.
Etienne Wenger: We need crossover from both ends to happen. to the extent that tech and communities are influencing each other, it’s important for facilitators to think like tech stewards but it’s also important for tech stewards to think like facilitators.
All: tech & communication converge and then diverge one after another. “which community are you speaking for?” roles as a way of making things visible.
Etienne Wenger: it used to be that the IT department was the one that introduced technology. Now many members introduce tools. that distributes the community facilitation process.
Susan (?): how do you handle it when people want to know exactly how to use the tool? In advance. There are limits as to how much time I can spend explaining it.
Patti Anklam: I’m working with a client now. serving as a TS. they are asking “how do we use this tool?” I talk about the tool a bit at each staff meeting.
All: Taking a developmental approach – the path to tool usage as important as destination. There’s always more to learn, so best not to try to front-load all the learning. And things change over time.
John Smith: If you think of regular face-to-face conversations such as staff meetings as platforms for “next tool to be adopted” – then after some time maybe another technology than face-to-face can be the platform for the tool after that. There’s a process for building one layer on top of another. The more reliable older, familiar tools are as a platform for what is being experimented with, the better. For thinking about these things, it’s useful to use the polarities that we discuss in the book. They can be challenging at first, but once you have mastered them, they are a platform for handling tool adoption.
Nancy White: talking about polarities — in slide # 7. The polarities embody many of the issues we’re talking about. If we think of a developmental path for tools rather than an on-off switch. I like Chris Collison et al.’s model of technology adoptions: starts with awareness and eventually leads to “that’s just the way we do it.” People want to jump from one to another with no pain, no intermediate learning, playing, experiments. It’s more effective to say, “Let’s do a lot of little experiments”.
Etienne Wenger: I see two different paths into tool adoption. one is the sandbox path (playing with the tool in a no pressure environment). The other is an activity-directed path. where the tool makes an activity possible. (Nancy agrees. 
heee hee) [John does, too :]
John Smith: Peter West’s questions in the chat focuses us on what is NOT being said. That’s very sophisticated listening. TS involves a lot of planning, doing, and acting, but it is all based on listening. Listening for what is not being said, what can’t be said because of tools, or because of some people are excluded. Listening is the key activity. (Nancy nodding vigorously)
Thomas Blumer How to you balance best of breed products with enterprise standardized products?
Etienne Wenger: that’s a real tension for IT departments that they will have to answer. It’s always a tension.
Thomas Blumer: When we try to launch a discussion forum, people will say “we have this other tool that has this other important feature.” That creates little pockets of people who are advocates for the use of different tools. From a KM point of view, the technology is less important than people knowing about each other. Isolated pockets of technology are less useful. But that’s what IT delivers - especially in R&D organizations that are keen on technology. They will say, “We really need this feature.”
John Smith: The dynamic between an IT department and the organization it is supposed to serve deserves attention. From the outside an IT department can look like a monolithic gatekeeper. But in my experience and observation within in IT there is diversity in terms of tastes, learning styles, history, generational preferences, technology styles, and advocacy for different ways of doing things. Part of the shift that TS can bring is to humanize, open up, and make available that diversity of experience and capacity that does exist within any given department – including the IT department.
Nancy White: building on the “features” point: when we were first working on the book, we were looking at “feature shoot-out” comparisons. We realized there was a great deal of diversity around features and even around the awareness of features. That led us to think about how tech stewards need to focus on understanding the practice of using a tool more than on discrete features.
Etienne Wenger: Diff communities have different configurations of tools and platforms. To keep building on Thomas’ question, the issue is not so much standardization of tools and platforms as it is of integration. How do we integrate the tools and platforms that one community uses (or integrate the outputs that are generated)? How do we make it all searchable? We have more and more technologies to create connections like a Twitter feed – that can connect things happening in different places. Integration is not just standardization. It’s a human practice as well as a process of technological integration.
John Smith: Although you can’t really automate “listening for exclusion” we can get better at it as we gain experience. And it’s really important. We gain experience as we listen to what is being said, in paying attention to small details like note taking. It’s important to ask, “What am I missing?” That’s important to think about individually and collectively, for ourselves and for others. What are they missing that they need to participate in?
Etienne Wenger: Tech can create exclusion. This idea of integration is not just a matter of connecting to APIs. It involves looking more deeply at how technology creates exclusion and inclusion and working from there.
John (caller): How and when to integrate across conversations and tools has to include focus on business intent. How does this work support achieving business objectives in a quantifiable manner?
John Smith: The way we’ve been talking about that issue has been to ask whether and how a tech steward is “serving the conversation.” Does the conversation serve the business is an important question. You can’t answer it unless the conversation exists with some integrity.
Etienne Wenger: We are facing an evolution here. It’s difficult for organizations to enter this space without having some level of trust that the participants are actually caring about the business of the organization.
John (caller): That is the starting point: business intent, strategic imperatives. Then how can KM help achieve that?
Etienne Wenger: In a K based organization you cannot pursue that unless the people you are working with also are pursing that. It is the way they engage with each other. Can’t do this in a top down manner any more. People have to carry this.
John (caller): Yes, and how can we help them do that easier, better, cheaper, faster.
Feb 16 2010
Today Etienne, John and I will be guests on Stan Garfield’s terrific monthly telecon for knowledge management professionals, SIKM. Our focus is on knowledge management folks as technology stewards.
We are going to “interview” each other to save from falling into talking AT instead of talking WITH, but we have a few slides with definitions and URLs to pull out as needed. We’ll also be playing with Twitter using the #SIKM tag. As a back up, we also have an Etherpad because John and I like having a back channel!
Jan 21 2010
Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me. How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?
My days of passive participation are over and done with:
I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat. During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream. And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference. And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.
Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect. The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences. The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations. A little technology stewardship on behalf of your small group comes to the rescue!
Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes. It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).
Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.
Photo by Bev Trayner.
Jan 13 2010
Roy Christopher on Culture, Computers, and Communities: Two Recent Books
Jan 06 2010
(Cross posted from Nancy’s Full Circle Blog)
Yesterday I woke up and checked my email. It was clear that the email lull of the holidays was over. I was taken by a post on one of my core community lists, KM4Dev, from one of my colleagues. You can see the full thread here:
Dear colleagues
A few weeks ago, I posted a query on IT-tools for virtual projects and got very useful recommendations. One colleague pointed out to me that, for an organization like SDC (big, Government), one of the main elements to consider would be the IT department. This proved to be very true. Our ministry’s IT department over the past few years developed one major collaboration application (consultation tool to develop consolidated Swiss statements for UN), based on MS Sharepoint. This application has a fantastic track record: it is used, it is appreciated by ist users, it produces good results and it saves time. Our IT department therefore concludes that MS Sharepoint is the basis on which to build SDC’s collaboration platform.
We are not quite sure they are right, but for the time being they definitely got more and better arguments than we do. This is why I would like to tap into the km4dev collective experience again: what do we as a group know about MS Sharepoint as basis for building a community collaboration platform?
Some of the questions turning in my mind are:
* What was MS Sharepoint initially conceived to be? What is its development history? What are the core functions it is really good at?
* I got somewhat alarmed when seeing that MS Sharepoint is not mentioned at all in “Digital Habitat” (book by Etienne Wenger et al on Technology Stewardship for communities). Nancy, why don’t you mention it?
* What are “make it or break it” features we should ask for, which would guarantee that a useful community collaboration platform can be built on MS Sharepoint?
Wishing you all a great start into the new year. Thanks for helping us along
Adrian
Adrian Gnägi
Knowledge and Learning Processes
Being on the US West Coast, my other KM4Dev colleagues had already provided some great responses (again, see the thread!) But since Adrian had asked me specifically about why SharePoint was not in our book, Digital Habitats, I wanted to answer. My friend Jon Lebkowsky suggested that I blog my response. Considering the number of page views on my last SharePoint post I figured that might be a good idea. SharePoint and other collaborative platforms are also not new topics for the community as you can see from this summary on the community wiki: http://wiki.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/SharePoint. The topic stays alive, so I chimed in:
Adrian, by the time I woke up, my peers pretty much summed up what I would have said. I found all the messages really resonated with my experience and research.
We did not include it in the Digital Habitats book because in the community we have seen more failures in the use of SharePoint than successes and our goal was to tell stories of usefulness, not frustration.
Others have already well articulated the core strengths and weaknesses of SP. From my personal experience with older versions of SharePoint (I have VERY little with 2007) is that it is built p from the metaphor of one’s hard drive. My folders. Your folders. Each community “ready to go with a click” but siloed in the very design of the software. Have you ever noticed that out of the box you can’t easily cross link once you are deep into a community space? You have to go back “up” to the top of the system, find the other space, and drill down. In essence, there is no fundamental network structure to the platform. In today’s world, that represents a significant problem for me. It actually creates more division, rather than facilitates connections.
There is also a distinction for all products that is important to consider. The differences between the tools a platform offers, how it does or does not integrate them with and without, and the features that make them usable all matter. (Quick definition: platform is the integration of a number of tools. Integration can be incredibly important and is probably the biggest “sales pitch” for any platform. Tool is a piece of code designed to do a particular thing. A feature is something that makes a tool usable. ) For example, a wiki is a tool. The wysiwyg feature, makes it easier for non-geeks to use. If a group makes a lot of tables in their wiki, they probably don’t want a wiki that requires wiki syntax to make the tables. These are examples of features.
Many platforms (not just SP) started bending their base structure (often built off of discussion threads) to “act like” newer tools such as IMs, wikis, blogs, etc. These re-purposed bits of code often lack the features we come to know (and depend upon) so they don’t feel right nor are they as useful. This is where examination of technology at all three levels: platform, tool and feature — can really matter.
As Matt says, who knows what 2010 version will bring. If it doesn’t bring a network sensibility, then MSFT will lose the game of both collaboration and cooperation because we are in a networked world and we need both. Simply having spaces for teams to collaborate won’t work for most of us, particularly in international development.
The key is always to start thinking about what ACTIVITIES you want to support in your collaboration platform, then assess the tools in the context of those uses and the environment of the user. The comments so far have really done a good job exploring some of those aspects:
- What are people already using (start where they are)?
- What are the connectivity issues (SP has a problem with this internationally, even when people have built “low bandwidth friendly add-ons)?
- What tasks do people have to do individually and together (yes, consider the range from individual, to defined group, to network, which includes internal and external folks many times! So often we only look from the organization’s perspective if what it mandates)
- Where is the locus of control of the software? we find that communities that have control of their environment tend to “bend” it to their needs more easily, more intelligently, than if they have to keep asking IT, who may or may not understand the context of their community. This is at the heart of the idea of “community technology stewardship” — in, from and for the community)
- How can the tool allow a community to face in the directions it wants to face – in other words, if it is totally inward facing (private in all ways), a mix of inward and outward, or very outward facing (meaning it wants to connect outside itself with other individuals, communities and networks)
- What is the simplest possible thing you can use now that will support your purpose and how can it grow, vs having every possible thing now and none of it is used (this is probably one of the biggest traps we all fall into)
- How can the tool connect with, integrate, grow , evolve with outside tools and services (no community is an island!)?
If SP can support the activities you want, in your context, fabulous. If not, try and open a dialog that shows why not. Use the Spidergram (http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2009/03/31/digital-habitats-community-orientation-spidergram-activity/) as a talking tool, and then, if their arguments are verbally convincing, try USING different tools. The FEATURES of the tools, what makes them useful (not just thef fact that there is a wiki or an IM tool in Sharepoint), is the difference that makes a difference. SP locks everything down to its specs. It is one way, or no way. If that works, fine. It has rarely worked for me.
You may also want to see this wiki http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Technology_for_Communities_project
And this chapter from the book, the Technology Steward’s Action NotebookNancy
Photo Credit: ‘Dereliction Splendor‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/71038389@N00/2218657600
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vermininc/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Nov 30 2009
It is so lovely having a fabulous network – including people I just barely know, but who then hook in with a moment of insight, a remix or ready to augment a forming idea or practice. Gabriele Sani from World Vision in Italy has recently done this with the Community Orientations Spidergram from our Digital Habitats book. He saw a post I put on KM4Dev and immediately took it further! He has taken the spidergram and put it into an Excel spreadsheet. You simply put in the values in the table on tab 1 on the spreadsheet, and voila, a lovely spidergram image is produced (see tab 2 of the spreadsheet).
This is a great tool to help people visualize the diagram at a distance – when you don’t have the comfy proximity of a white board and a bunch of post it notes. I also love the visual background Gabriele put in – lovely. You can find the spreadsheet here.
Others have been sharing their spidergrams. I’ve been tagging them on Delicious. You can find my spidergram tags here: http://delicious.com/choconancy/spidergram. Here is one from Sylvia Currie that she did with Gliffy – another way to do the activity:
So why are seeing and sharing these practices useful? Gabriele’s spreadsheet is useful not just because he created the it, but because he tried the work within his organization, saw the need for a “tweak,” the need to “tinker” and improve — and DID IT! Then he shared it back. Sylvia’s gave us another way to “crack the nut.” This is the value of working in the open, of iterating both internally and externally.
THANK YOU, Gabriele and Sylvia. And to the rest of you, do you have a Spidergram story to share?
Oct 27 2009
November I’m heading back to Australia. I’ll be blogging about it on a dedicated blog, but I also wanted to cross post a few things here as a “heads up ”as much of what I’ll be doing revolves around the ideas and learnings from the book.
Below is a location by location, chronological listing of the events I’m involved in during my trip. There are links for more information and registration. I’ve highlighted the “Digital Habitats” stuff. You may notice there are some openings if you want to propose something!
November 9th
9-12 am – Stewarding Technology for Communities
This workshop will directly come from the book! There are still a few places left. Join us!
1-4pm – Introduction to Graphic Facililtation
6-9pm – Sydney Facilitator’s Network Evening Tweetup – Drawing on Walls
November 10th
9-12:30 – Introduction to Online Communities
1:30 – 4:30 pm – Advanced Online Communities
This workshop will use the Spidergram and Polarities work from the book.
November 11th
Open in the morning. Want to do something?
Transit to Canberra via train in the afternoon
November 12th
Private workshop 1-3pm
Transit to Adelaide 5:30 pm
November 13th
E-Dayz Conference Keynote “Why should we “do” community (or why not) for learning?” (9:20 am as part of larger 3 day event!)
November 14th
Play day in Adelaide!
November 15th
Transit to Melbourne
November 16th
Private events in the morning and afternoon.
6 – 8 pm KMLF Public Event – This will touch on Digital Habitats!
RMIT Graduate School of Business, 300 Queen Street. Melbourne, Lecture room 158.1.2B (Ground level – just behind reception).
Ample metered street parking nearby in Queen Street (between La Trobe and Little Lonsdale). RSVP: by email to melbournekmlf@gmail.com
November 17th
8:45-12:00 Introduction to Online Communities
1:00 – 4:00 pm Advanced Online Communities
This workshop will use the Spidergram and Polarities work from the book.
Evening transit to Mooloolaba
Mooloolaba
November 18th
1 – 4:30 pm Stewarding Technology for Communities
This workshop will directly come from the book! There are still a few places left. Join us!
November 19th
Keynote at Learning Technologies Conference (Which WILL involve Digital Habitats!)
November 20-22
Play days
November 23
Return home
Oct 14 2009
Last week at the KM4Dev conference in Brussels, I struck up a conversation with Joseph Sikeku, who talked about community leadership and technology stewardship in a radically different setting: a radio station in Tanzania. Sikeku’s project uses an interesting mix of technologies:
Of course the key to making all of this work is the network of people around his project in terms of friends and collaborators, farmers who participate via recorded interviews or mobile phones. (A lot of stories about innovation in Africa were floating around my head from the special report on telecoms in emerging markets in the September 24th 2009 issue of The Economist: Mobile marvels). One thing that was striking about Sikeku’s project is that it’s sustainable because it’s so local, so passion-driven, and has a long time horizon. Not that external help wouldn’t make a difference, but it’s important that his project that’s not donor-controlled. Its beginning and end is not timed by an external donor. Here’s a 7 minute interview:
Sikeku’s story got me to thinking about the polarities that we discuss in Chapter 5 of Digital Habitats:
It seemed to me that the technologies that Sikeku mentioned all balance each other nicely when you consider that we developed these polarities studying communities that are quite different from his. That’s one of the exciting things about this project: finding out whether the ideas we’ve developed apply (or can be extended to) very different settings. And the final question: will these ideas be useful?
I captured the interview on a little Flip camera, since I’ve been exploring video and social reporting for the last several months. I used the interview the very next day in a “huddle session” about technologies and local development, gathering a small group around my laptop to look at the video, without editing or uploading it anywhere (there wasn’t really enough reliable bandwidth to upload a video file at the conference). The huddle conversation had been difficult because of all the different meanings and instances of “technology,” of “local,” and of “development.” But having one instance to focus on helped the conversation get much more concrete and much more productive. A conference on the role of media in the agricultural and rural development that’s running right now suggests just how much is going on out there in this area, so the benefits of being able to focus on Sikeku’s specific case make sense.
The next day we had an open space session on business models for learning communities. Sikeku participated in the discussion, which tied some of the issues from his experience to other examples where donor funding for a community had turned out to be quite problematic. At the end of that, Sikeku remarked to me, “As a result of these conversations, I don’t feel so isolated.” That was very gratifying.
(Cross posted from my blog at Learning Alliances.)
