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When the end is just the beginning

By: Justin - December 15, 2009, at 12:49 am

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I’ve just finished my class “Social Web for Social Change,” an elective at my progressive MBA program here at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. First and foremost, I am a social being (we all kinda are) and my generation’s upbringing leaves me destined to being online. This influence doesn’t not leave me. So while the class is done, the information might not be.

Things are changing. There was so much information that I could choose to digest that it became evident exactly why everyone isn’t “on board” with online stuff. Yet, it’s sheer mass also indicated the momentum behind this cultural change. As I think about my non-profit work, there is such struggle to grasp hold of online media, understandably so. The efficiency of so many individuals have grasped hold of cannot not go unused forever. It isn’t magic either. We have to work at intentionality, consistency, value-added activities, and consistent branding if we are to be successful.

Here are my summarized Social Web for Social Change key points of action:

Play - If you don’t play around with the tools a lot before you get serious about them. You of course won’t know what the heck you are trying to do. There are plenty of options to do this anonymously.
Study - The amount of articles and posts online are a-plenty. Read them. Get lost for many days on end. You can’t say you are doing anything or want to understand if you don’t.
Do - So much of this, or anything, is about practice. How do you do it? 1. SCAN through everything you’ve collected (20%). 2. FOCUS and read content (60%). 3. ACT: share, email, favorite, save, label or tag or pick content for writing on later (20%).
Connect - You must connect with others and create content. You pick where, but be consistent with it.
Brand - Create an identity. Make it complete with information and use it all of the time. If you want good content (or anything) to be attributed to you, you need to make it easy to do so. A solid brand makes you easy to talk about.
Plan - Remember the pillars of influence (here in the eyes of Robert Cialdini: 1. Rule of Reciprocity, 2. Commitment and Consistency, 3. Social Proof, 4. Liking, 5. Authority, 6. Scarcity
Organize - Start acting with intention. Most importantly, start acting with others. Be open to change, transition, and letting others take the reigns. Power in networks today isn’t just leading but organizing well enough that you can give up the power. You will be rewarded greatly for these efforts.

The biggest thing I have learned is that so much of this applies offline. In fact, it appears that much more new information is being discovered because of the measurable and massive output being produced online. Yet, humans have always been powerful offline. The emotional components of hand-to-hand action is important. I encourage everyone to carry this same amount of diligence, intention, and know how into their offline action. Here are a variety links discussing the topic:

The class was great. I appreciated how hands on it was and that in fact we practiced offline and online community pretty beautifully. In-class activities like The Braid were amazing ways to interweave us as a group. This was in conjunction with participation that was required online. The habits of proper online engagement are long-term ones. Maybe it’s just my age, but six months is a long time to see something pay off. At least in swimming, we stopped halfway through to try and cash out on our hard work. This wasn’t seamless either. Everyone is busy, which is a reality we all will face, and deep dedication would have generated much more. It was a reminder why I’m in favor of as much integration between classes (read: different aspects of your life) as possible. I still never got the practices and habits right, but I feel more grounded in my sense of purpose online. The more learning is our life, the more life will be our learning.

I see the empty section, Participatory Media: Wiki, Wikipedia, and Collaborative Editing, Designing and Maintaining Online Communities, and wish we had covered more here. Time did not permit we cover it in extensive detail. If anyone reading has some mines of resources here, I’d appreciate the share.

In the end, I would have wished that we could have gotten to work sooner. Action is where I learn best. I also see so many tools out there and so many missed opportunities of organizing them together. Maybe this is just something I need to be patient for as people make things integrated and easier. My social change project, working internally on scheduling and collaborative note taking within my school was great. But isn’t real change investing in the community aspects? I missed having coaching on engagement, resource sharing, and brand building. These skills are not natural to me.

I am reconciling my super-busy quarter with the compact lessons I learned. As most of us transition our lives offline and online. I also do so with school. We must be clear with ourselves and our personal styles on which activities work well for us where. My pendulum of clarity is swinging less intensely now. I over think what ideas to capture, how and when to use them, and who exactly I need to share it with. I freeze up with knowing what others say I’m supposed to do. But all of us, if we seek successful communities, need to grease the wheels and get them moving. I’ve been able to take a breath at the end of the semester and one key learning has settled in that might help us all:

The ideas and strategies of others are what work well for others. Take what you need and leave the rest because if it isn’t true to you, it won’t work.

I realize that I’ve known myself longer than anyone else. I must put my own spin on things if I am to start moving in any direction at all. I wonder why that isn’t emphasized more?

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Managing my head - context, learning, and emotion

By: Justin - December 10, 2009, at 3:00 pm

Today I realized something obvious, or I assume obvious, that how my head seems to feel like it is functioning is very related to the things I’m doing in my life.

Intention takes time
I mean this more deeply and probably structurally as well. As I close out my semester, I begin to think about how I’ve learned and how I’ve felt. Admittedly behind, I am diving into some aspects of my classes with intention that wasn’t there before. The added, not distracted, focus is solidifying a bunch of learnings for me. Resources and information that had been at my fingertips all semester now feel increasingly accessible. I’ve gone from overwhelmed to sensing nuances in my learning as I read, summarize, and connect thoughts.

I know I’ve always known that multi-tasking is essentially less productive. Yet, except for avoiding the extreme, I do terribly at finding space and time to organize in a less scattered way.

Emotion feels more and more like intention. Not that I can control what emotion I feel, but that I can intentionally structure my life (and potentially those around me) in ways that direct and focus me.

This is tough. Something societal must hold us back. I’m well aware that my active participation in class or contributions to my communities create shared learning. Yet, much like I fail, you constantly run into people who are not taking the time to formulate and dedicate their intentions.

Something to chew on. Give yourself, your brand, your community, and your projects the time to develop intention.

Below are two fabulous articles that discuss intention in some different contexts:
The Art of Coversation – It’s About Listening Not Marketing - Brian Solis
“Influential conversations are taking place with or without you. If you’re not part of the conversation, then you’re leaving it to others, and possibly competitors, to answer questions and provide information, whether it’s accurate or incorrect.”
The Laws of Simplicity - John Maeda
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”

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Community by the Numbers, Summary

By: Justin - December 10, 2009, at 9:17 am

Christopher Allen over at Life With Alacrity, who also happens to be my instructor, wrote a great series called “Community by the Numbers” which I’ve summarized here. I thought the information was a perfect fit.

If a community is too small you’ll often have insufficient critical mass to sustain it. Conversely, if it’s too large you can end up with a community that’s too noisy, too cliquey, or otherwise problematic. These optimal and sub-optimal community sizes appear in strata, like discrete layers of rock. For a community to advance from one strata to the next often takes immense energy.
~Christopher Allen, Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds

Each strata is study supported, but that isn’t the point. The point is that we must break free of our traditional notions and plan ways to accommodate community growth. This specifically includes the resources necessary to provide the energy necessary. Too often I’ve assumed steady community growth and health. Pay attention, sweet spot 7 people falls apart at 13. 50 people begins to fall apart at 90, 150 is a strongly passionate and connected group. Communities don’t just grow, they require division into smaller groups to create intimacy. Are you facilitating that? The greatest opportunity here is that as we organize and promote ourselves online, the offline world is a great arena to create smaller more successful and intimate groups.

With this bifurcation of personal and group community limits, we have to briefly stop and ask a few questions. How do they relate? What can personal limits tell us about efficient community creation? Does founding a group upon a personal circle make its growth easier or harder? Conversely, what type of communities lead naturally to the creation of intimate circles?
~Christopher Allen, Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles

Christopher speaks of personal circles of support (3-5), sympathy (10-15), trust (40-200), emotional (”just short of 300″), and familiarity (depends on willingness to take risks). First off, this brings the personal reflective awareness of my social capabilities and capacities. I am not superhuman, I have limits. The maintenance and aspirations of my personal circles should be humbled by the realities of their/my capacities.

To me the differences between personal limits and group limits point out two opportunities:

If we can harness true personal attributes in traditional group settings, we begin to open more diverse opportunities and roles for different successful group sizes.
We against must challenge the strength in numbers assumption. It is truly strength in connections and defined layers.

You first measure whether it’s an all-participant community or one that matches an existing power law, and then you use the corrected community number to truly measure which of the group thresholds may apply to it.
~Christopher Allen, Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws

I’m sure I’ve mentioned the 90-9-1 power law before. If I haven’t, I am now I love thinking about this law. It gives such a quick read on any community. Click the numbers for more information. This means concerns about group size applies to the more active participants in a community the 10% or even 1% depending on your goals.

Shifts in thinking:

You must know the nature of your community and a sense of who the participants actually are. It is no longer just a community.
Focus on identifying and organizing the active members of your community.

How have you changed your thinking about communities?

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Organizing Your Own Social Web - Mindmap Etc

By: Justin - December 10, 2009, at 2:29 am

A while back I mentioned that I would share a map or something describing how I’ve organized myself online. Part of the reason why I never got to completing the post was that I never got around to completing the process.

There is a lot of information to manage out there. One thing is for sure, we have to try. Another thing is for sure, it might be a continually adapting and impossible task to actually complete.

Before we lose context, I want to remind all of us how much information is important to our growth and social effectiveness. Organize it and maximize your exposure, the more and event more we open ourselves to opportunity.

So check it out. Hopefully you can gain some useful resources and insight as you tackle information overload while trying to change the world. Lets face it, it’s complicated. Yet you are doing yourself or your organization and those you serve a disservice if you don’t recognize and plan around that very fact.

This is where I started (click it to view):

I first took account of everything I was working with and used it as a platform to think about how everything interacted. While I never got around to finishing the map above, as you can see, I did get a little further in actually connecting things together. This is outlined below.

The organizers:

ReQall - I recently switched from Remember the Milk (RTM) for one reason. ReQall has a mission to continuously collect information and figure out what to do with it for you. With little prompting and a little practice, it consistently picks up on details in the text you send it. This means I get reminders on things I need to do, it suggests what I may have forgotten, it creates shopping lists, and is genius with my iPhone. With my iPhone I can get GPS sensitive reminders and recording as well as it scours my Evernote account for any related notes or information to whatever I’m pulling up. While organizationally it doesn’t feel as robust as RTM, if you put the information in there (tags can just go as words at the end of a task) it does most of the heavy lifting for you.
Evernote - This has served as my ambiguous catch all. Its most intriguing feature is that it recognizes text (and makes it searchable) in images, including handwritten text. While a little digging in the .xml base file shows that it does such a good job by including all possible words in the search results, I don’t mind as long as I find what I am looking for. Plug-ins allow me to choose at any moment to say hey, put it in Evernote. Still ambiguous, I need it to grow with me but I still don’t depend on it. ReQall connection makes it more useful
Mindmeister - This is a collaborative mind mapping tool that has been great for team based/personal ideas. Additionally, its project management features have led me to experiment with new ways to look over the projects in my life. Reminders of tasks can be emailed or imported into a calendar. So far, it has not worked well as a continual project management tool, but has served well to check back on original concepts and ideas along the way to make sure feet are still on the ground.
Instapaper/Read It Later - While I’ve only used Instapaper, Read It Later is a good alternative. Instapaper can live on my phone, computer, and it’s RSS feed makes it versatile. I still can’t break my too many tabs habit of saving things to read later. Until then (the browser crashes still not discouraging enough), I’ve not done well at building this habit.
Delicious - This social bookmarking tool was one of the foundations to the class I’m just finishing. Despite being forced to use it, this still isn’t a habit for me either. Probably this is because I’ve been terrible at bookmarking always (it’s my version of a blackhole). Tabs, see above, have always been my solution. Two unique things that did excite me. Sharing bookmarks was easier, made me feel special when someone shared with me, and helped build community. A few times I thought, “why don’t I search Delicious,” and did. I always found some really unique and relevant resources that Google would have never showed me.

The consolidator:

Google Reader - This beast can collect everything. Not only will it suck in the blogs you read into Categories (that really function like tags now) but it can pull most anything else thanks to standardized feeds. Currently it pulls the following: Dropbox, Gmail, Instapaper, ReQall, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With that, especially catching the email in there, basically anything and everything could end up in my Google Reader. Nice. But…since I still am trained to follow the stick of my email inbox, I’m experimenting with a plug-in that brings Reader to my Gmail, Integrated Gmail. Check it out.

The communicators: I use your communicators as conduits to transmit information between all of them. Twitter works with many web apps and the filtering features in Gmail help a ton in passing information around.

On the periphery: These serve organizational purposes but tie together the periphery storage, sharing, scheduling, and information issues. Also, changes or sharing in one area can be spread across your whole network.

What I hope to integrate in the near future: These tools begin to solve ways to sort through information, reorganize it, and spit it out in ways possibly more useful. It is a conceptual and organizational nightmare. I’d start with Automator if you have a Mac and then Tarpipe if you are ambitious. Yahoo Pipes is a big picture systems thinking web app with huge potential, proceed at your own risk.

Yahoo Pipes - Abandoned projects and ideas at step one each time. Too much to handle at this point.
Tarpipe - Similar to Pipes, Tarpipe helps organize new web information and transmit it between different online apps. While mostly it seems to cover social sites (Flickr to TwitPic to Twitter) type of auto-transactions, it does have a few others. I’ve only set up one to mixed results. Emailed uploads to Evernote send back an email with the text recognition data. Tarpipe is impatient and unless the image is small, I was getting an empty email back. Oh well…
Mac OSX Automator - Ever since its upgrade, I’ve tried its feature that follows and repeats my actions on the computer. Too finicky for any solid results so far. Still rely on the older drag and drop “commands.”

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The old (new) messy history (present) of change offline (online)

By: Justin - December 10, 2009, at 2:25 am

This past summer started (and nearly finished) an anthology called “Tribal and Peasant Economies: Reading in Economic Anthropology” (Edited by George Dalton). It’s from the late 60’s, the examples all seemed very male-centric, and there is a clear anthropological misstep in perspective. “Primitive” seems to be the term used most to describe these other economies and while they get an even handed criticism it is only in comparison to the positives of our economic structure. Long story short, I found this book on a professor’s “free books” shelf in undergrad and now I’m digging deeper for economic and community alternatives.

First, I love the whole trash–>treasure thing going on here. It also makes me think about the social web class I am in. Here is something new, observed in the present. Whereas this book was observing something that had been around for a while for the first time (new) from a particular lens of anthropology and modernization (present). This raises two important questions that we must ask of ourselves:

What biases do we bring into our communities online and off, especially as they grow into things we’ve not seen before?
What lessons can we learn from tribal nations that have stood the test of time more than current dominating cultures? How can we insure that all of this innovation and interaction isn’t just reinventing the wheel?

When we look at psychological science as it develops around change and action…

Based on a core-motives analysis, I identify four necessary components for designing interventions to protect the environment: (a) information, (b) identity, (c) institutions, and (d) incentives, and discuss their utility and the feasibility of incorporating them.
~van Vught, Mark “Averting the Tragedy of the Commons Using Social Psychological Science to Protect the Environment” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol 18, p 169

…we have to be keenly aware that good ideas centered around core concepts that feel really good, like the four above, might have been tried before. Additionally, change and development, environmental or social, is psychological. A mechanical or non-human approach cannot work.

To give you a sense of those four in tension, observe these quotes from the book mentioned above:

“Redistributive exchange keeps a political and status system operating with out great gaps in wealth between the different classes of status groups” (8)
“The effects of entering a wage-labor force often start conflicts between generations, raise problems about the control of income, and sometimes depopulate the society so that its social structure collapses” (10)
~Manning Nash, The Organization of Economic Life

“Agriculture appeared late in human history, and afforded a means of greatly increased production. But the food-gatherers do not necessarily all live at a lower level of subsistence than cultivators.” (13)
“Insecurity, then, is frequently the mark of a primitive economy” (15)
“The crucial difference between gift and sale is that the first object of gift exchange is the building of a social relationship, whereas in buying and selling, any continuous social relation between the parties is merely incidental.” (23)
“The obligation to share with neighbors any private windfall or surplus may have a deterrent effect on production. In the rural economy of Java, if a man wishes to become rich, it may be necessary for him to leave his home and settle in another village, as a stranger on whom the usual obligations of village membership do not fall.” (26)
~Daryll Forde and Mary Douglas, Primitive Economics

While admittedly out of context, you can hear the psychological undertones and tensions. The 60’s was a point in history where many tribal societies still had yet to be fully impacted by the global economy. You hear the needs, struggles, and retained successes from these past observations. You might even catch the hints of bias towards the emerging economic models.

As we go forward, especially in an interconnected social world, we must remember basic needs, the tensions, and struggles of transition. Most importantly, this journey is not old to human history. We have a tendency to repeat ourselves.

Think differently. Is it new now? Was it new then? Does new now work differently than new worked then? How do you harness new?

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JustinFenwick.net

MBA Sustainable Business Candidate

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Why creativity?

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Share a song, track or music set:

When the end is just the beginning

Managing my head - context, learning, and emotion

Community by the Numbers, Summary

Organizing Your Own Social Web - Mindmap Etc

The old (new) messy history (present) of change offline (online)