Mon, Dec 22, 2003
December GivingSpace Workshop
#
There were several interesting presentations at TomMunnecke's December
11 GivingSpace workshop, as well as some worthwhile discussion. Some quick thoughts
and tidbits: (NA)
The workshop began with one of PaulAndrews's ImprobablePairs videos.
This one told the story of Yitzhak Frankenthal, an Israeli whose son
was killed by Palestinians, and Jawad Tibi, a Palestinian whose
brothers were killed by the Israeli military. Their tales are
gutwrenching, but rather than respond with hatred, the two formed a
group called the Parents Bereavement Forum, a support group for both
Israeli and Palestinian families personally affected by the violence.
Paul filmed and edited their stories masterfully. The video was only
about ten minutes, but there was not a dry eye in the audience. (NB)
HeatherWoodIon gave a marvelous talk on transformation. An analogy
she made that stood out for me was that the mythology in nonprofits
centers around martyrdom. Words like "sacrifice" and "suffering" are
bandied about. The mythology in forprofits centers around heroes.
There, people talk about building legacies. These attitudes explain
why nonprofits are so poor at collaborating with each other. There is
a sense that martyrdom and collaboration are mutually exclusive.
People want to share their stories of suffering, not of what went
right and why. (There was some
followup
discussion about this at the BlueOxen CollaborationCollaboratory.) (NC)
MeganSmith?, one of the founders of PlanetOut? and currently a
Reuters Digital Visions Fellow at
Stanford and an employee at
Google, explained the 2/3 rule: Two-thirds of
every successful community on the Internet consists of conversations.
Successful sites, she said, are good at gardening those conversations.
Megan also described a giant LCD map of the world at the Google
offices. When someone in the world queries Google, a light blinks at
that location on the map. What strikes Megan is that there are entire
regions of the world that are always dark, a vivid visual reminder of
the digital divide. In addition to being a clear thinker and a
dynamic storyteller, Megan also demonstrated a diplomat's touch, when
she very skillfully and transparently defused an exchange between
participants that had gotten very heated. (ND)
JerryMichalski explained his acronym du jour: MADA (Memory, Analysis,
Discourse, Action). MADA struck me as an excellent (better?)
synthesis for what DougEngelbart calls CoDIAK (Collective Development,
Integration, and Application of Knowledge). Jerry had the line of the
workshop, when he pointed to the conversation map that Megan had drawn
on the white board, and said, "All that discussion without memory and
analysis is like going around in a giant circle jerk." Jerry also
suggested that business are partially to blame for why we don't have
better tools for group memory. Business of culture, he observed,
don't want us to have a memory. They want us to buy what they're
currently telling us we need. (See also my
previous notes on
group memory.) (NE)
RichardGabriel talked about the HillsideGroup and PatternLanguages.
He said that the HillsideGroup "practices an aggressive disregard for
novelty." Jerry, incidentally, called PatternLanguages "deglazed
wisdom." Jerry was on fire that day. (NF)
We participated in a ConversationCafe? for the latter part of the
workshop. The topic was, "What can we do to create self-organizing
systems that discover and replicate positive, scalable, small things?"
We broke into several small groups, sat at different tables in the
"cafe," and drew on butcher paper as we talked. Here's an excerpt
from a previous blog entry about one of those conversations: (NG)
Another great example of the challenges of SharedLanguage cropped up
at the GivingSpace
workshop in
SanFrancisco last Thursday. Six of us were discussing small, concrete
steps that lead to transformation, and HeatherNewbold described how
MattGonzalez? for Mayor campaign buttons had galvanized the progressive
community in SanFrancisco. Four of us knew exactly what Heather was
describing, because we lived in the Bay Area and followed local
politics. All she had to do was mention the buttons, and we
understood what she meant. The other two people at our table,
however, had no idea what we were talking about. One was from
SanDiego, and the other simply didn't follow politics. T (NH)
Here are the
two
products of the conversations at our table, courtesy of FenLabalme. (NI)
Every time I participate in one of these workshops, I find myself
paying close attention to the facilitation itself, inevitably
comparing it to other experiences. ShelleyHamilton?'s technique shared
some similarities with the MGTaylor process, and at one point, she
cited StuartKaufman?'s work, which also inspired MattTaylor and
GailTaylor. Overall, Shelley did a good job. I especially liked the
ConversationCafe?. The one thing I didn't like was that there was no
ReportOut? session following the cafe. It would have been nice to have
had a group session where we summarized our conversations and sought
connections between those summaries. (NJ)
/events |
Posted at 2:28pm
Comments
Comments disabled until future notice. If you'd like to contact me, use my i-name (=eekim).