Harvest is alive. A new voice to me, that of Stuart Scott, talks about the limitations of the metaphor and what harvesting could really be: read Bringing In the Sheaves.
Victoria BC
I love a space with a brick wall in a space. Tonight at Ferris’ Oyster Bar with a couple of friends for dinner, I kept noticing how that wall lended its presence to the space, as I enjoyed a beautiful and tasty rice bowl of vegetarian potstickers and deep friend tofu. I was noticing all day how details do more than they seem capacble of doing. The stillness permeating the inner harbour as the water stayed flat for a second day in a row, the signs on the busses that say “Sorry…I’m out of service.” Something about that “Sorry…I’m” part that makes the whole downtown core a little more friendly as the post-rush hour busses deadhead back to the bus garage.
We were locked deeply in design conversations today, and we went through six design tools from the Art of Hosting, all of which I taught and we discussed as I harvested them all on this diagram.
The tools that are elucidated here include the following:
Attention to the details of design led us into an incredibly deep conversation about the work we were doing, working at a whole different level. The quality of attention flowing from the presence lingering from good design…
[tags]ferris’ oyster bar, victoria, design[/tags]
Picture a field in which someone has planted wheat.
We imagine the harvest from that field to look lkike a farmer using equipment to cut down the wheat, thresh it, and seperate the seeds from the stalks.
Now imagine a geologist a biologist and a painter harvesting from the same field. The geologist picks through the rocks and soil gathering data about the land itself. The biologist might collect insects and worms, bits of plants and organic matter. The painter sees the patterns in the landscape and chooses a pallete and a perspective for work of art.
They all harvest differently from the field, and the results of their work go to different places and are put to different uses. But they all have a few things in common; they have a purpose for being in the field and a set of questions about that purpose, they have a pre-determined place to use the results of the harvest, and they have specific tools to use in doing their work.
What’s useful to note is that, despite the field being the same, the tools and results are specific to the purpose and the inquiry.
It is like this when we meet. There is much we can do, but a well thought through inquiry helps us to sift all that we might learn in the meeting to that which serves our purpose. When we can design questions that open up our curiosity, think through how we might use the results of our work and use the tools appropriate to the task, we can go deeper into our tasks and acheive emergent, innovative and better quality results.
So just try this for the next meeting you are a part of. Give some time before hand to create a little inquiry: “What am I curious about in this meeting?” Think in advance how the results of that inquiry will help you work better, and decide on at least one way in which you will use what you have learned. See if that doesn’t create just a little more engagement and createa little more momentum for the results.
Photo by Hector
Here is a post with five good methods for using the web to harvest collective intellegence. These may seem geeky to some but they are excellent source materials, and they have their correlates in the analog world:
1) Be The Hub of A Hard To Recreate Data Source – This is a classic Web 2.0 concept and success here often devolves to being the first entry with an above average implementation. Examples include Wikipedia, eBay, and others which are almost entirely the sum of the content their users contribute. And far from being a market short on remaining space, it’s lack of imagination that’s often the limiting factor for new players. There is so much more terrific software like digg and del.icio.us waiting to be created. So don’t wait until it’s perfect, get your collective intelligence technique out there that creates a user base virtually on its own from the innate usefulness of its data. Just be careful and avoid crowded niches, like peer production news.
2) Seek Collective Intelligence Out – This is the Google approach. There is an endless supply of existing information waiting out there on the Web to be analyzed, derived, and leveraged. In other words, you can be smart and use what already exists instead of waiting for it to be contributed. For example, Google uses hyperlink analysis to determine the relevance of a given page and builds its own database of content which it then shares through its search engine. Not only does this approach completely avoid a dependency on the ongoing kindness of strangers it also lets you build a very big content base from the outset. This ultimately has interesting intellectual property implications, as I’ve discussed before.
3) Trigger Large-Scale Network Effects – This is what Katrinalist and CivicSpace did and many others have done. This is arguably harder to do than either of the methods above but it can be great in the right circumstance. With one billion connected users on the Web, the potential network effects are theoretically almost limitless. Smaller examples can be found in things like the Million Dollar Pixel Page. That’s not to say that network effects don’t cut both ways and are probably not very repeatable, but when they happen, they can happen big.
4) Provide A Folksonomy – Self-organization by your users can be a potent force to allow the content on your site or social software to be used in a way that more befits your community. It’s the law of unintended uses again, something Web 2.0 design patterns strongly encourage. Allow users to tag the data they contribute or find and then make those tags available to others so they can discover and access things in dynamically evolving categorization schemes. Use real-time feedback to display tag clouds of the most popular tags and data; you’ll be amazed at how much better your software works. It worked for Flickr and del.icio.us and it’ll probably work for you too.
Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately. When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest. Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.
I have made all of these notes at my flickr site. When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page. Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along. Click on the photos to view the notes.
Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle:
Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning. This was based on a conversation I had with George:
From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration:
That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance:
Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording. Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest:
I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question: What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?
Why is this important? I think it matters that harvest, good harvest, moves organizations and communities forward, links leadership and action to conversation and makes the best use of the wisdom that is gathered from meetings. If you have ever wondered about meetings that seem not to go anywhere, this inquiry into harvesting, sensemaking and iterative action holds the key to avoiding those kinds of situations. It’s not enough just to have good process and a good facilitator – the results of the work must also be alive in the organization. That’s where we are going with this.