{"id":3629,"date":"2012-06-14T09:53:16","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=3629"},"modified":"2012-06-14T09:53:16","modified_gmt":"2012-06-14T17:53:16","slug":"just-about-the-most-fun-you-can-have-getting-paid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/just-about-the-most-fun-you-can-have-getting-paid\/","title":{"rendered":"Just about the most fun you can have getting paid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"@geoffbrown3231<\/a><\/p>\n

SItting here with Geoff Brown<\/a> and Steven Wright<\/a> at the World Indigenous Housing Conference<\/a> here in Vancouver. \u00a0We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig.<\/p>\n

We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC<\/a> to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. \u00a0The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. \u00a0The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how to build capacity to support success and the third was focused on institutional development. \u00a0each one built on the last.<\/p>\n

The theme of the conference was “Sharing our Stories, Sharing our Successes.” \u00a0With that theme to play with, we knew the cafes needed to be about connecting people and ensuring that stories were central to the work. \u00a0Our first challenge was to think about how to harvest stories and connections quickly from 800 people. \u00a0We looked at several tech solutions and realized that we needed something simple, unobtrusive and accessible. \u00a0The ubiquitous tool at hand was the text equipped smart phone. \u00a0Almost everyone has one, and almost everyone can text. \u00a0Our basic problem was first how to gather text messages and second how to make meaning from them quickly. \u00a0Geoff, Steven and I were familiar with Wordle.net<\/a> which makes a word cloud out of blocks of text, and which I have used in the past to get a visual and intuitive sense of what concepts and words are weighted highly.<\/p>\n

So our question became, how can we combine smart phones, text messages and wordle?<\/p>\n

Through our networks we found Luke Closs<\/a>, a local developer\/hackerwho put together a simple solution that he called “Text to Cloud<\/a>.” \u00a0At the back end he connected Twillio to world using an interface that we could control with commands sent by text message. \u00a0groups of texts that come in can be tagged and sorted and then sent straight to Wordle for processing. \u00a0We also enabled the software to produce a CSV output that we can use for other purposes. \u00a0Luke was great, developing the tool right up to the moment that his daughter was born on Tuesday. \u00a0Of course, the tool is open source and you can find it on Gith<\/a>ub<\/a>, download and install it and use it for yourself.<\/p>\n

Armed with Text to Cloud, we began our first cafe by inviting people to text in the name of their tribe of origin. \u00a0We created an instant wordle that showed who was in the room. \u00a0That immediately connected people together (and showed we were blessed with Crees!).\/ \u00a0Following that we had people enter into the cafe to start telling stories of successes with listeners paying attention to the factors that made those successes possible. \u00a0People gathered information on tablecloths and texted in wisdom and insights and by the end of the cafe we had 438 text messages to make meaning from. \u00a0We had a half hour to do something with all this.<\/p>\n

So we sent it all to Wordle and discovered a theme: Building Homes, Building Communities and Building Nations. \u00a0There were six key areas we needed to think about for capacity building: governance, building, partnerships, community, education and ownership. \u00a0Steven whipped up a digital mind map which we projected on our screens. \u00a0We invited people at each table to choose one of the topics and dive into stories of capacity building. \u00a0In our third cafe, we thought about how institutions can support sustained capacity building.<\/p>\n

By the end of the day we were soaking in flip chart paper, but we had some great high level meaning through the Text to Cloud output, the wordles and the developmental nature of the conversation. \u00a0We retreated to Steven’s room and started trying to figure out how to share what we had learned. \u00a0We realized early on that there was absolute gold on the flip charts, so we decided to create a presentation that combined what Geoff calls “vox pops” – short pithy and insightful comments – along with longer stories. \u00a0While Steven created a map to chart the highlights, Geoff and I prepared a slideshow <\/a>that touches on the headlines. \u00a0Our plan this afternoon is to call the storytellers up to the stage to share their stories with the audience. \u00a0They are the true key notes.<\/p>\n

This gig has been fun. \u00a0Our client has been fantastic, we’ve created new tools, connected people doing important work, pushed our own edges and done stuff we’ve never done before, and that we could never have done alone. \u00a0It was a superb co-creative experience and a great way to spend time with good friends.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SItting here with Geoff Brown and Steven Wright at the World Indigenous Housing Conference here in Vancouver. \u00a0We are on the back end of what has been a terrific gig. We were hired by the Aboriginal Housing Management Association of BC to facilitate dialogue at this 800 person international gathering. \u00a0The sponsor made dialogue a clear priority and after talking about intentions, we arrived on the design of three World Cafes: one in the plenary with everyone present and two in more focused breakout sessions. \u00a0The first cafe would look at stories of success, the second would think about how …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[28,22,44,6,12,4,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-of-harvesting","category-collaboration","category-design","category-facilitation","category-first-nations","category-stories","category-world-cafe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-Wx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3632,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions\/3632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}