BeautyDialogues

My Brilliant God-daughter

My brilliant god-daughter Matilda made this video of herself and her mates on a cell phone!

Conversation & Business

I just read a post by blogger /consultant Chris Brogan on Cafe-Shaped Conversations, where he explores how social media allows small intimate conversations and how that might or might not be what corporations are interested in, and when they are, how that might not be such a great idea for the rest of us.

As Community Tech Steward of the World Café, I  know that conversation about things that matter is not just a marketing strategy, but one of the keys to human survival. It is in large part conversation (on a number of levels) that will carry us through the formidable global challenges that stand before us now. And online communication tools will no doubt make a key contribution to how we have those conversations.

How exciting it will be to have a President who really understands the power of the individual voice ... I can't wait to see how Obama's presidency will effect participatory citizenship and this whole area. Online interaction needs to become a cultural meme that goes beyond digital natives and "geeky types" like me if it is to fulfill its potential.

But back to business, what Brogan and the World Café are calling Café Conversations (small intimate interactions that can connect with and feed into larger collective awareness) are important to large and small companies for many reasons beyond product sales and marketing.

Conversation is now becoming recognized as a core business competency and World Cafés are hosted in corporations just as often as they are with health and educational institutions, government, neighborhood groups, and anywhere else that conversation can increase communication, address challenges or help build a sense of community. It's only a matter of time until many of these conversations are happening online.

You've probably noticed that more and more conferences are moving to an interactive model, based on small group conversation. Increasingly, conference organizers are realizing that attendees are tired of "talking heads". There is so much more to be gained by an approach that calls on the collective intelligence gathered in the room, and engages everyone in a conversation where the "experts" and those in the audience (who are often equally as knowledgeable) are on a par.

So what I'm saying is that there's an analogy here that expands the power of conversation and online communications way out beyond marketing and product sales for businesses, and it's still just beginning.

Vote for Hope

I got turned on to this great Flash video in David Sibbet's blog this morning... It's another great example of new media and creativity in the service of something that matters. And this is something that matters a lot right now, even if the recent debates have been less than electric.

Barack Obama's passionate speech in this video reminds me why I want him to be our next president.

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

Wordle Art

Have you used Wordle yet? Created by Johnathan Feinberg in his spare time while working for IBM Research, Wordle takes words (that you either generate specifically or draw from pages with RSS feeds), and creates these word art images.

You can customize them in all sorts of cool ways - this is my first one, taken from this blog's front page a few weeks ago:

Go on - I know you want to! Make one yourself...

Digital Mindfullness

As part of my recent focus on living a more balanced life (as opposed to continuing on in the over-scheduled madness of what I will now call "my past"), I'm implementing a number of practices to sustain my good intentions.

These include giving myself more time to read, one of the elemental pleasures of my “real life” (the one I've decided to claim), and what is perhaps even more exquisite, to talk about what I’m reading with other intelligent human beings (that's you! :-).

To this end, I recently caught up with several articles I’d laid aside until there was "time" for them... and I found some interesting correspondences between them.

Reading a piece on digital identity and security in the New York Times, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" by Clive Thompson, the last few paragraphs piqued my interest:

“It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves.

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?)

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.”

What a marvelous observation and an altogether different perspective on the opportunities opened up by web 2.0...

I've certainly found that writing regular blog posts increases the depth of my own self-knowledge and understanding; why not extend that mindfulness further and consciously apply the same self-awareness in some of my other digital communications? 

Then, in the latest Shambhala Sun, an article from Pema Chodron, called “Waking up to Your World”:

“One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.”

This strikes me as a distinct window for opening the opportunity inherent in Twitter's question "What am I doing?" as the ultimate mindfulness exercise.

I've mentioned my "slow work" group; one of the members has been using the practice Pema suggests throughout his day as a way to stay awake to the habitual patterns of his normal workday, and interestingly he is also just discovering the world of social media and beginning to Twitter. The other day he told me about a group of people on Ning who are using Twitter to aid them in a similar mindfulness practice, as a way to check in and support each other throughout the day. They're called Twit2Fit.

There are of course all kinds of purposes to which one can put social media, but using Twitter to develop self- awareness brings a whole new dimension to the digital evolution.

Facilitating Online Community

(photo from Jeff McNeill's Flickr photostream via his Creative Commons licensing agreement)

I'm having enormous fun, participating in a free course on facilitating online community, led by Leigh Blackall of the Kiwi-based Otago Polytechnic.

There are over 60 people in this course, which is organized through a wiki curriculum/schedule and synchronous Elluminate sessions. We've been communicating through mandatory blogs and non-required mailing list conversations, and it's been wild! The content of the course is brilliant, with an excellent reading list, and the interaction with the other students is priceless.

I've been blogging away on my dedicated new "Facilitating Online Community, aka Herding Cats" blog, if you're interested in checking out what I'm learning and how I'm reacting to it in more depth.

Social Networks

E-Learning guru Jay Cross has written a fascinating post about an Aboriginal painting (note: not the one above) that he saw during a recent trip to Australia, and his reading of the imagery - comparing it with social networks and the politics of change.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Jay's readers continued to analyze the image in their comments and some valuable insights emerged. The whole post was an excellent example of both the power of art to convey meaning and the way we evolve meaning through the power of networks.

Slow Community

With all my musing lately on slow work, and slow blogging, I was very excited to hear about my friend Nancy White's extrapolating on this idea in what she calls slow community. In her inimitable capacity to identify patterns and make connections, she's been talking about how quickly the interconnectivity of the web has grown beyond our abilities to stay connected in meaningful ways. (This image is a "splat map" of the internet's growth since its beginnings in ARPANET (the green bit in the middle):

Variations on this theme are being discussed all over the media - two books among my own pile of bedtime reading focus on the topic in one way or another; Peter Block's new Community: The Structure of Belonging, and Dot Calm (I love that title) - but what I particularly like about the concept of slow community is that it offers us a context with which to negotiate this growing nexus of interactivity on our own terms.

On a personal level, I long for a slower more reflective life, and I crave the depth and reflectivity and true connection that is possible within communities - online and off - that share these values.

On a professional level, the idea of "slow community" gives a conceptual framework to the online communities I help facilitate, or steward, through which we can identify and "see" ourselves. It also gives us a sense of what we might be evolving towards, or the kind of depth we might WANT to nurture between ourselves.

Some have spoken about the depth and quality of our attention as a key to slow community. I strongly believe that it's possible - and as difficult - to be as deeply connected through our online communications as it is anywhere else. The online medium has its own challenges, of course, but it also has advantages, and one of them can be time. For all its limitations and lack of physical cues, writing is a slower medium than speaking. Writing gives us the time to reflect and consider those responses that can just "pop out" as unthinking reflexivity in real-time interaction and craft them into shapes that can more clearly carry the meanings we want to convey.

One might also ask whether the word community can be used to define all the ways we interact online. Is Twitter a community? Are the people who read my blog a community? I'm curious about what the boundaries are, or what the defining features of community are for different people.

For myself, I actually think this question of what community is and isn't refers back to my earlier point about quality or more accurately, intent. In this framework, the word might be applied to any communication where the intent is to "commune", be that on Twitter, or within our blogging readerships, online conversations, or physical neighborhoods for that matter.

Having the intent to commune with each other requires an altogether different relationship to time. There's something here about respecting time and entering into interactions with a "presence" that makes the most of it, that expands time so that there's enough for whatever is needed.

Someone left a comment on one of Nancy White's posts on this subject, bringing up the Quaker model where they moved VERY slowly as a community in discussing the challenges of slavery, and yet were still the first to stand up and call for abolition. This example shows us that slowness doesn't necessarily mean an inability to respond to the challenges of the day, but rather offers the capacity to respond in a more profound and ultimately even more timely way.

* * * * * *

Here's a video from a presentation on the subject that Nancy did at Zaadz (now the Gaia Community), which has some terrible sound production, but asks some great questions:

She's also created a page on her online facilitation wiki devoted to slow community, which in turn has links to other helpful resources.

BlogHer - Day One: Open Source

The Open Source participation session was brilliant.

The panel of three began by identifying open source as a values-based system. Open source, they went on to say, is an self-organizing developmental process for building software, with participation open to anyone brave enough to wade in, and prestige and authority given based on meritocracy or what one can contribute to a project.

One of the fundamental tenets within the open source community is that the code, which has been collaboratively produced, is free to anyone to use in whatever way they would like.

You may be surprised to learn how much of what we all use regularly is open source - Mozilla & the browser FireFox, the Linux operating system (which is the platform Google is built on), the blogging platform WordPress are all open source, as well as the more commonly-known open source CMS (content management system) platforms like Drupal & Joomla. Php as a code is open source (although it isn't always used in open source systems), as is javacript.

They also talked about how "open source" has become a meme or paradigm that can be seen in many other realms. This was particularly interesting to me because open source is a great metaphor for the way the World Café works and I'm using this analogy in my session at the BK Marketing Conference next week.

It's not just the World Café, either; the concepts behind open source are the key themes in the "gift economy" or what others have called the "culture of generosity". This is the philosophy behind a whole movement that I and many others are part of in discovering a different way of living and working.

The image I'm using in this post is a fabulous example of the open source culture of generosity. It's from a a UK Flickr user, Lynette, who created a set of images illustrating Web2.0 concepts for anyone to use. The photo-sharing site Flickr is itself another example, with thousands of photographers contributing their photographs for free use under a creative commons license.

Something else I was particularly interested in was something the presenters said about how unusual it is to see designers in the open source community. This is a terrible shame, given the state of the user interface in many open source projects, and I think it reflects something fundamental that needs to be transformed, not just in the open source community, but in the culture more broadly. But that's the subject for a whole other post! :-)

We the Media Wiki

A recent blog post by brilliant non-profit social media guru Beth Kanter points to a project she's doing with NTEN (Non-profit Technology Newtwork), We Are Media, a wiki-based handbook of aggregated knowledge for applying social media tools in non-profits.

What's beautiful about this project is not only how very helpful it is for those of us braving the complexities of helping people with mixed technological skills/interest/abilities integrate social media tools in their work, or its open invitation to be part of something creative, collaborative and exciting, or even its generosity in being offered free to all as part of the ever-growing and delightful "gift economy".

What's beautiful about this project, and one of many beautiful things about Beth herself, is how simple and clean it is. She makes the field totally accessible in a no-muss, no-fuss kind of way. She's just that kind of girl. :-)