The Elders are with us.
Could we do this locally? We are building Elders into the work of the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Authority for child and family services. What if the Elders sat in Council for all of us here?
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The Age of Conversation launches today. It is a collection of mostly marketing writers who have contributed some thoughts on what conversation means in the branding world. I found myself among them, contributing a short piece on open listening. The book is available at lulu.com and proceeds are going to charity. We’ve even had our first review.
Here is the list of authors for your perusal:
Gavin Heaton
Drew McLellan
CK
Valeria Maltoni
Emily Reed
Katie Chatfield
Greg Verdino
Mack Collier
Lewis Green
Sacrum
Ann Handley
Mike Sansone
Paul McEnany
Roger von Oech
Anna Farmery
David Armano
Bob Glaza
Mark Goren
Matt Dickman
Scott Monty
Richard Huntington
Cam Beck
David Reich
Luc Debaisieux
Sean Howard
Tim Jackson
Patrick Schaber
Roberta Rosenberg
Uwe Hook
Tony D. Clark
Todd Andrlik
Toby Bloomberg
Steve Woodruff
Steve Bannister
Steve Roesler
Stanley Johnson
Spike Jones
Nathan Snell
Simon Payn
Ryan Rasmussen
Ron Shevlin
Roger Anderson
Robert Hruzek
Rishi Desai
Phil Gerbyshak
Peter Corbett
Pete Deutschman
Nick Rice
Nick Wright
Michael Morton
Mark Earls
Mark Blair
Mario Vellandi
Lori Magno
Kristin Gorski
Kris Hoet
G.Kofi Annan
Kimberly Dawn Wells
Karl Long
Julie Fleischer
Jordan Behan
John La Grou
Joe Raasch
Jim Kukral
Jessica Hagy
Janet Green
Jamey Shiels
Dr. Graham Hill
Gia Facchini
Geert Desager
Gaurav Mishra
Gary Schoeniger
Gareth Kay
Faris Yakob
Emily Clasper
Ed Cotton
Dustin Jacobsen
Tom Clifford
David Polinchock
David Koopmans
David Brazeal
David Berkowitz
Carolyn Manning
Craig Wilson
Cord Silverstein
Connie Reece
Colin McKay
Chris Newlan
Chris Corrigan
Cedric Giorgi
Brian Reich
Becky Carroll
Arun Rajagopal
Andy Nulman
Amy Jussel
AJ James
Kim Klaver
Sandy Renshaw
Susan Bird
Ryan Barrett
Troy Worman
S. Neil Vineberg
Enjoy!
[tags]age of conversation, marketing, engagement[/tags]
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Ted Ernst pionts to an article on leadership in participatory culture. The artile contains the following list of capacities:
- trust others and trust in the collective ability of a group
- draw attention to commonality between participants (rather than dividing them with differences)
- demonstrate active conscious commitment to vision, values, and goals as example to others
- act responsively to feedback and help grow feedback loops among participants
- show their humanity, making them credible and proving their integrity regularly
- listen actively and deeply with distributed credit so decisions seem to come from collective
- instill a sense of togetherness, a sense of “we can do this if we each do our part”
- defend the collective to outsiders and represents their needs
- hold each participant to their greatness
- open to seeing how the pieces fit together–open to emergence
- willing and ready for new opportunities
- able to respond with compassion in times of stress and difficulty
This is a very interesting and relevant list, especially in light of the exploring some of us are doing around the Art of Governance.
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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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- 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).