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The key capacity for using tools

June 25, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration

My friend Rowan was exploring some online tools and asking the question, how do we make these tools useful and relevant.   My response, which I posted at his blog, goes like this:

In my experience what is most important is to first understand what your community needs.   For example, a small group in the organization I am currently working with wanted a tool that allowed people to work on a document, but to only have access to the most recent draft.   They set up an experimental wiki to do it, but that entailed them all learning wiki technology, which is not what they wanted to do.   I showed the Google docs, which allows people to collaborate on one version of a document and which saves revisions and everything else.   It looks and acts like a word processor.   There was no learning curve, other than just figuring out how to get in and share documents, and they were able to get right down to the work they were doing.

In English we have an expression: “If all you have is a hammer, then everything you see is a nail.”   In other words, we get so taken with our tools that we don’t see the underlying needs of the people we are working with.   In both the worlds of online collaboration and face to face collaboration I think the most important role of the facilitator is to be fluent in a vast variety of tools and to only use what is essential to the task.

Therefore, I’m fond of my own library of facilitation tools, and sites like this one, that show all the kinds of Web 2.0 tools that are available to help collaboration.   Play with them yourself so that you can discover what they can all do and then when the need arises, you’ll be familiar enough with them to propose just what is needed and not any more than necessary.

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links for 2007-06-25

June 25, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 2 Comments

  • An Earth Without People — [ environment ]: Scientific American
    A new way to examine humanity’s impact on the environment is to consider how the world would fare if all the people disappeared By Steve Mirsky
    (tags: environment nature science interesting toread)

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links for 2007-06-24

June 24, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized

  • The Art of Chaordic Leadership — Dee Hock full-text article
    Dee Hock on chaordic leadership
    (tags: leadership chaordic)

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Notes

June 22, 2007 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, First Nations, Links, Open Space, Organization 2 Comments

  • Kaliya Hamlin is getting really noticed for her work promoting Open Space in the tech community. The whole idea of unconferencing has jumped the shark, but there is still an art to doing Open Space. It’s easy but not simple, and Kaliya has been a great guardian of the essence of the process as it grows into the tech world in a big way This article from the Business 2.0 blog is another piece of good attention being thrown her way. Actually there are a rash of articles out these days on Open Space, including one in a publication called Meetings and Incentive Travel, that quotes my Canadian mates Diane Gibault, Michelle Cooper and Larry Peterson. Add to that this very useful short film on Open Space, and you could safely say that our beloved process has truly tipped.
  • And speaking of mates, Thomas Arthur comes through with a link he sent by Google chat which deepens the ida of Pattern Language, moving it into another level of “generative code” for building living neighbourhoods. This gets at something I was saying in Belgium, standing up for Pattern Language which I understand as a noticing about the world rather than a prescriptive recipe. It is very much generative code. Thomas’ link sent me running to check up on Kevin Harris’ excellent blog and I note he has been recently posting interesting things on third places, mass creativity and social interactions in public spaces. Kevin’s blog is in my “check once a month” folder, and it’s always rich.
  • Last note for this week: While I was in Belgium a couple of weeks ago, the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team held a monmumental celebration to mark the formal shift to an interim authority. What this means is that we are half way to becoming a full authority for Aboriginal child and family services on Vancouver Island. The celebration was held at the Snuneymexw longhouse near Nanaimo, and a really nice piece aired on TV about it (.wmv).

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Aboriginal Day

June 22, 2007 By Chris Corrigan First Nations

Yesterday was National Aboriginal Day in Canada, a kind of pretend holiday which kicks off the 11 day period of Canadian national holidays.   After this comes St. Jean Baptiste Day on June 24, celebrated as Quebec’s national holiday and then Canada Day on July 1.

I spent the day working at VIATT, helping design the community structures for the transfer of the child and familiy services system to Aboriginal control.     Meanwhile, up in Bella Coola, my friend Liz Hall was busy forwarding an interesting video to her friends about the disappearance of the eulachon from th Bella Coola River and the impact that has had on the Nuxalk Nation.

If you didn’t celebrate Aboriginal Day yesterday, take the time to view the video and think about helping out Liz and her community as they work at building a community house in which the culture can thrive despite what has happened the Nuxalk Natoin’s fish.

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