Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

On constructing rules of engagement

I’m thinking a lot about distributed networks at the moment, decision-making, conversations and how much community ‘platforms’ have moved on.

I’m not sure I even believe in the ‘platform’ concept any more as it so loaded a word with so many centralised implications. As well as this inherited value, so much of our activity is now so widely distributed across the web and physical world that we as individuals can now behave in any way we choose and share our stuff with whichever network we fancy, on our own terms.

The diversity is astounding; which makes me think that any sustainable distributed community support platform isn’t just one thing any more. It’s a ecology of patterns that members experience in different places at different times to achieve different community goals. I’m thinking a lot about Ron Donaldson’s ecology of web2.

When you think about it, this means that any ‘platform’ should be doing more listening than publishing, aggregating and making sense of distributed activity, than telling people how to behave and forcing them to adopt set rules of behaviour in one walled garden.

It’s the patterns that make up the networks and communities that we need to identify, not the technological platforms. And to get to the patterns, we need to develop common languages, which lead to shared mental models of the purpose of the ‘platforms’.

There is a particularly interesting post from George Oates of flickr about some of their community stuff, and this particularly jumped out at me:

Any time you construct specific rules of engagement, they are instantly open to interpretation and circumvention, and we want our members to negotiate their place with each other, not with The Authority.

Read the full article here

What an interesting thing to say.

In a corporation, or organisation with pre-existing centralised structures there remains some reason for centralised control (largely to the benefit of the organisation).

How about across a huge emergent expanding bottom-up relatively structure-less movement of people?

Posted in Facilitation, Quotes, Strategy | 3 Comments »

The Five Golden Rules for multi-platform development

On Monday 15/12 we had the ideas lab launch event for Media Sandbox 2009. I designed and facilitated the event partnered with Victoria Tillotson of iShed overseen by Clare Reddington of iShed.

It was fun. We worked hard and focused and produced some interesting stuff. David Wilcox did some fantastic social reporting, the attendees captured their work on video which is gradually appearing, and there are lots of photos on the flickr group. Expect much knowledge sharing; we work to an open innovation model.

A full event report will follow with the high level design rationale and details on the interventions and how you can do it yourself; in the meantime, one of the workshops was to identify the ‘five golden rules’ for anyone thinking of launching a new multi-platform project.

Here are the top five golden rules to consider when thinking about an ‘innovative multi-platform content’ project, as identified by the event attendees:

(the five golden rules as voted by attendees of the event)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Conference networking at Online Information 2008: report and lessons learned

This is a brief report and things we learned about the experimental ‘knowledge networking’ and ‘social reporting’ facilitation work done at Online Information 2008, co-authored between David Wilcox and Emma Wallace and me.

We worked with Lorna Candy and the team at Incisive Media to help them provide more networking opportunities for delegates and speakers before and during the conference, online and offline, using different tools.

Background:

We approached it from a ‘blended facilitation’ perspective; here is a working definition of ‘blended facilitation’ from earlier work findings:

‘Blended facilitation’ is an understanding of how to facilitate a group’s development using different tools and interventions in the two different domains (virtual and physical) in a structured framework.
(Media Sandbox report, November 2008)

A number of us have been circling this subject for some time and building an open body of experiments and lessons learned since Contactivity in 2006, Media Sandbox and Unbla in 2007 and 2gether08 and many others.

Before the event:

The first thing we did was read the lessons learned from our work at 2gether08, where David had used Crowdvine (the event social networking platform) intensively and Ed had worked on an early knowledge networking experiment called ‘tag surfing’.

As a group with the Incisive team, we defined the purpose of the event itself, and how the facilitation would fit into that. Incisive set up a free version of Crowdvine for the event and we configured the profile questions to reflect a ‘knowledge-y’ enquiry (‘What topics do you have experience in’ and ‘What topics do you want to learn more about?’).

As delegates entered this information as part of their profiles, this gathered two ‘tag clouds’ which reflected the interests of the attendees and gave them a natural route to finding eachother. We printed these out and made them public at the event too:

(Topic tags from online network)

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Events, Facilitation | 6 Comments »

Storytelling as our living sap

We had a great knowledge cafe last Thursday about storytelling. The magnificent personal impact coach and storyteller Tim Sheppard gave us a swift yet thorough overview, starting and finishing with a powerful tale about ‘Truth’ and ‘Story’ with plenty to think about in between.

Storytelling and narrative analysis bounced back into fashion through knowledge management a few years ago and is increasingly popular. We hear more and more about organisations looking to ‘engage us’ with ‘it’ (usually involving social media), but ‘it’ also has great power (with related ethical considerations) as a tool for groups to understand themselves, make sense of their situation and develop apropriately.

There are hints of this in social reporting, technical stewardship, user-centred design processes, community hosting and more.

One of the things that stuck most in my head from the k-cafe was the importance of stories to communities as social objects to share, compare, think about, discuss, and build around. We all have a different perspective on these tales, especially until they are written down, yet (and perhaps because of this) they bond us in many ways.

Here’s a bit from ‘The Storyteller’ by Mario Vargas Llosa:

“… I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys; the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who - by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim - using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people interconnected and interdependent beings…”
(The Storyteller, p93)

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Wanted: real questions for digital communications innovation lab

Do you or your organization have a question about how to use digital communication technologies that you would like a room full of experts to workshop for free?

Are there people you feel you could engage with in new ways with these new technologies? A campaign you want to support? A service you wish to provide? An idea you can envisage? A change you want to encourage?

On December 15th, iShed is launching Media Sandbox 2009, its second R&D commissioning scheme supporting research into emerging technologies. As last year, I am designing and facilitating the events and mentoring the virtual facilitation.

Media Sandbox is:

“…a development scheme which offers a ‘safe space’ for collaboration between creative talent, technology companies and content commissioners. It is an entirely unique opportunity for creatives from the South West of England to collaboratively create radical new products and processes – pushing forward understanding and potential usage of  interactive digital media…”

We will have a room full of experienced programmers, designers, academics, project and business managers, artists, writers, innovation people, gamers and other digital media types.

(Media Sandbox 2008 workshop action, CC: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mediasandbox/)

We need some real issues to work on and want to apply ourselves to regional questions. That’s where you come in.

Can you think of something you would like to be ‘workshop-ed’ on December 15th? For free?

Maybe it could become a commissioned project (receiving £8,000 budget and more).

A couple of (very high level) examples:

1. How can we design a campaign to engage our target demographic with our message in an innovative way?
2. Our association needs to reach out to a wider group using a mix of technologies. What’s the best way to do it?

We are collecting questions from as wide a range of organisations as possible on our online network in advance of the event. Attendees will be able to see the questions and who they are from and will decide which ones to workshop on the day. We can’t promise your question will be chosen, but it’s worth a try. You can always turn your question into a proposal for the scheme afterwards.

You are welcome to pose a question to the group whether you come to the launch event or not – naturally you are welcome to come to the event, but we understand if you don’t have time (the event is between 2pm and 6pm on December 15th).

To pose a question for the group to work on:

1. Sign up to the Media Sandbox event network
2. Fill in your profile information – the more the better – it will help provide context for your question
3. Post a message to the group by clicking on ‘Messages’
4. Click on ‘Compose’
5. Type ‘question’ into the ‘To’ field
6. Add the question title in the ‘Subject’ field
7. Add your question in the ‘Message’ field. Please provide as much background as suitable, a clear question and desirable outcomes.

Those links again:

• Media Sandbox event network (for questions and networking)
• Media Sandbox formal registration page (for coming to the event in person)
• More information about Media Sandbox 2009 (about the scheme, proposals, etc.)

Posted in Events, Technology | 6 Comments »

Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report.

Attached is the final report about the facilitation work done with iShed for the Media Sandbox 2008 development scheme.

It covers all of our strategic planning, the tools we used, activities we pursued (and chose not to pursue), the lessons we learnt and the metrics we measured by. And there are some handy diagrams.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Here’s the intro:

“…Much has been made of the potential of web 2.0 or social media technologies to harness knowledge and network distributed communities, but how easy is it for organisations to effectively use these widgets and websites?

In November 2007, as part of the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme,  iShed set out to explore how organisations could integrate and deploy digital technologies and new facilitation methods to support collaborative research and build a Community Of Interest around a research topic…”

We set out on this trip with a mutual agreement to share our findings with others interested in the suitable application of all this web2.0 stuff in an organisation. I am proud that we got there and are publishing it.

Many thanks to Clare Reddington of iShed for being a pro-active, approriately daring, and wise collaborator.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate get in touch. The only constant is change and the learning never stops.

Download the full report here:
Which Widget for What? Media Sandbox 2008 Report

Other reports from this project:

• Launch event report
• Early case study
• Final event report

Posted in Events, Facilitation, Strategy, Technology | 2 Comments »

Bristol Skillswap: User Experience

The next Bristol Skillswap is about user experience, and is in The Pervasive Media Studio on Tuesday 11th November. As well as our very own Joe (the uncle of usability) Leech, we have some experts from further afield as the gig is partnered in with Dan Dixon and Alex Older’s Web Developers Conference.

Here’s the blurb:

Bristol’s latest Skillswap considering the ins and outs of user experience, usability and accessibility.

Welcomed guest speakers to frame the subject on the night are:

Patrick Lauke
James Box
Joe Leech

Following their three position pieces, our very own venerable Skillswap members (that’s you by the way) will be discussing, sharing, learning, debating, drinking and more in another rollicking Bristol styled networked DIY learning session.

Register to attend on the event page here

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Questions and answers

“… But be warned, first of all, that a man gets an answer to his questions in accordance with his fitness to understand and his own preparation…”

From ‘The Food of Paradise’, approx 17th Century Persian tale

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4talent community workshop report

This is a brief report about 4talent’s inspiration session about online communities held in Birmingham, 26/10/08. I gave a short presentation alongside Emma Monks (Sulake), Ally Branley (Channel 4) and Heather Champ (flickr).

It was a great pleasure to meet them and see their presentations which were all very interesting indeed - there are few enough opportunities to meet one’s peers so they are greatly appreciated.

More importantly, all of the attendees got top marks for attitude as well. They had come prepared to talk openly to eachother, and bring questions and examples which made for good conversations, topical problem-solving and hopefully all-round learning.

Given the other speakers’ amazing communities, I chose to pick out some examples of smaller works I have seen in the last year which have impressed me for their bottom-up and life-supportive nature. Here is the presentation. It’s all a bit visual, but you can download it from slideshare; all the relevant links discussed during the day are in the notes sections.

As well as the presentation I did a mini-mindmap session, asking people to write 5 words that meant ‘community’ to them and stick them on the wall. This is a quick and easy technique to help people get a map of what eachother is thinking about and I highly recommend it.

Nick Booth kindly grouped them for us so we could see any similarities in our thoughts. We found that we all roughly thought similar things:

• People
• Conversations
• Social space
• Relationships

A few others emerged including mobilisation, trust, minority views, power, meritocracy, disruption. Interestingly, no-one brought up technology or money although we talked about them quite a lot as the day progressed.

(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

I think my favourite post-it of the day was ‘Confidence-building’:
(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

It was a cracking day. I learnt a lot, had thorough conversations, met some good people and heard more real stories from the frontlines of all this online community stuff… Love it!

Many thanks to Mars, Dan and Antonio from Maverick for being our hosts.

Sharing is caring, all, keep it up.

Posted in Events, Facilitation, Strategy | 8 Comments »

Lessons not learnt

“What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

(Georg Wilhem Freidrich Hegel, Lectures On The Philosophy Of History, seen in The Guardian Weekend magazine, 11/10/08)

Or as my friend Gary said recently while we were setting the world to rights over an ale or two:

“The only lesson learnt… is that no lessons have been learnt”

Posted in Quotes | 2 Comments »