Example of Simple but Effective Online Community

Hi all,
I love this example of how a very simple online community can function!!  Just a simple listserv I'm on, but very active - people are putting out questions, receiving answers every day.  I was thinking that it speaks for the value of simplicity and accessibility in the Collaborative's approaches.
Delia

Boston-Area callers:

Harvard Divinity School has an annual Oktoberfest where a professor's German band plays mostly polkas for two hours. I have a dancing friend from California now attending HDS, and she's bummed that nobody knows how to polka so there's never any dancing, and is hoping to scare up somebody who can come and give a quick lesson to give people confidence to get up and dance.  (I asked if that person could maybe lead a country dance to polka music too and she says fine.)

There's no funding, so the pay is in beer, sausages, pretzels, and karma.  It's on the Harvard Campus, October 19.  The whole event is 3-5 pm, and I assume a half-hour polka lesson is most useful at the beginning.

If interested get in touch with me and I'll pass your info on to my friend.

Thanks!

-- Alan

_______________________________________________
Callers mailing list
Callers@sharedweight.net
http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers

The Great Pumpkin

Ron Wallace exulted after his pumpkin weighed in at 2,009 pounds Friday at the Topsfield Fair. (Photo: Aram Boghosian for the Boston Globe)

The 2,000-pound barrier is the giant pumpkin equivalent of the four-minute mile. It was so elusive that Topsfield offered a $10,000 bonus for the first grower to break it. ...
The 1,000-pound barrier was not broken until the year 2000, and it took all of pumpkin history to get that far. The thought of going farther, to hit the heaviest word we use in colloquial speech — a ton — seemed too much. It would mean doubling something already dangerously huge; there didn’t seem any way the pumpkin could structurally support itself. Certainly no one thought they’d be having this conversation in just 12 years. ...
The chief difference between the 1,000-pound barrier and the 2,000-pound barrier, growers say, is the Internet. With it, mistakes were shared and avoided, techniques spilled because half the fun is bragging, and the whole thing opened up to everyone. As a group, growers simply got better at it. Weights have raced forward every year. The world record almost always falls. In 2006 at Topsfield, Wallace was the first to break 1,500, and the next year nine people beat that. They pushed. They pollinated earlier and took risks. ...

Excerpt from World's largest-ever fruit dominates Super Bowl of pumpkin weigh-offs

by Billy Baker, Boston Globe, 29 September 2012 © 2012 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

Tell Me a Story (SSIR)

Tell Me a Story (SSIR)

Power of Place (Urban Parks and Health, LA)

http://www.landtrustalliance.org/about/saving-land/fall-2012/power-of-place

Placemaking Blog

Here is an active urban parks blog. (We/QLF have in the past worked with Project for Public Spaces in Central and Eastern Europe.)

http://www.pps.org/blog/

Slide Show with Still Photos & Audio Clips - Example #1

Wanted to share this example -- as we explore options for bringing stories to life in accessible and cost-effective ways. I'm sure we've all seen many similar pieces, so my thinking is to gather a few examples to analyze the pros and cons of the formats used.

http://www.uvm.edu/vq/?Page=news&storyID=14242&category=vqafocus

Innovation Is Not the Holy Grail

It is time to move from innovation as an ideology to innovation as a process.

By Christian Seelos & Johanna Mair | Fall 2012

In a recent project with the Rockefeller Foundation,¹ we explored what enables organizational capacity for continuous innovation in established social sector organizations that operate at an efficient scale delivering products and services. We undertook a literature review of the mainstream organizational and management literature on this topic, and we were amazed by both the magnitude of this research stream and the insights we gained. First, we found that both long-term evidence from studies of social sector organizations and recent empirical evidence challenge the mantra that more innovation is better. Second, we found that many of the assumptions about innovations in the social sector may be misleading. And third, we discovered that pushing innovation can stifle progress just as much as it can enable it.

Stanford Social Innovation Review

http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/innovation_is_not_the_holy_grail#When:21:11:38Z

Quit Social Media Now

9 Reasons to Quit Social Media Now

by Erik Sass, Aug 8, 2012, 1:22 PM

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/180465/9-reasons-to-quit-social-media-now.html 

1. It's a wast of time
2. It's addictive and unhealthy
3. It encourages envy/narcissism
4. It takes you away from the real world
5. It encourages superficial relationships
6. Privacy concerns/unethical business practices
7. It can be personally and professionally doangerous
8. It's expected
9. It's going to get worse

Engagement Ladder- From Jess Littlewood

I thought I would re-post the information Jesse from EchoDitto shared via email.  He provided a few links to read about the Engagement Ladder (very interesting to read about a social media ladder instead of a youth programming ladder!).


Message from Jesse: Some of the most interesting thinking and workshopping that I think we'll be doing is determining:
- The qualities of each "rung" of the ladder or "slice" of the pyramid
- The right hooks that move people up
- The right content and context for those hooks
- The tools we'll use, particularly the platform
- The right follow-though strategy (staff/volunteer resources, further training, a calendar of events/campaigns, etc)


Grist Engagement Strategy

5 Reasons why Corporate Social Tools Fail

Engagement Pyramid

These articles are hitting my nerd sweet spot...so much engagement theory, so much overlap. Must refrain from doing another dissertation...

Webinar Hosting Tips from AEA


The American Evaluation Association has been offering a lot of webinars (long and short) presented by members in remote locations and facilitated by AEA staff. Here is a quick sense of how they handle the prep and periodic technical glitches.


eLearning Update - The Best Laid Plans
From Stephanie Evergreen, AEA's eLearning Initiatives Director 
 
eLearning is a fickle field. If you've attended more than a handful of our Coffee Break webinars, you probably understand what I mean. Most of the time, everything moves along swimmingly. But more often than we'd like, something goes awry. For an occasional attendee, the viewing screen never displays the presenter's slides, for reasons none of us can explain. Once in a while, the presenter trips up when navigating among various open programs. As I write this, just last week the audio line completely snipped off. On those rare Coffee Breaks where something has hit a snag, we do our best to recover and learn from our mishaps. Here's what we do to take preventative care:

1. We rehearse. About two weeks prior to each Coffee Break webinar, we hold a 45-minute rehearsal, where we discuss logistics, check on audio quality, practice handing the screen back and forth, and walk through each step of the presentation.

2. We peer coach. All presenters are offered the option to invite a peer coach onto the rehearsal. Our awesome peer coaches - Nina Potter, Joe Heimlich, John Nash, and Juan Paulo Ramirez - give presentation pointers and insights about how to run the demonstration smoothly.

Even still, nerves and technology do not always cooperate with us when we go live. We're lucky enough to have very poised and graceful presenters who can easily roll through small hangups and give an effective demonstration. When things really go haywire, we have a backup plan:

1. We stop.
2. We cut off the webinar, apologize deeply, and schedule another time to rerecord the demonstration with no audience.
3. We then notify everyone who registered when the recording is available. With more apologies.

Technology is never perfect but we are grateful for an avenue to host amazing, volunteer presenters as they share their know-how with our members.

Creating Innovation in Government: 3 Lessons from Todd Park

excerpted from blog post by Pat Fiorenza on July 30, 2012 at 11:01am

Lesson 1: Team Up

 “Whenever you have an idea, go find the three people who have had the same idea as you, years ago.”

Lesson 2: Understand and Employ Principles of Lean Startup

“A single collective brain to solve a problem,”

Lesson 3: Embrace “We Government”

“Most of the smartest employees in the world, are employed by other people,”

http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/creating-innovation-in-government-3-lessons-from-todd-park

The Naked and the TED

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna
via https://twitter.com/nicco

Dowser - The Site for Solution Journalism

Another interesting example. "Who's solving what and how" Limited social functions, but note sections: news and ideas, interviews, mini case studies, and multimedia. This article originally appeared in the Harvard Business Review (presumably used with permission). We should look for material to repurpose too, and establish a routine for requesting use permission.

 http://dowser.org/opinion-why-not-everyone-should-be-a-social-entrepreneur/

Coursera

Elite University Free Online Courses

Nice model and there is a course on Social Network Analysis.

https://www.coursera.org/course/sna

Nicco Mele interview, Collaborative Innovation

Nicco Mele: The Future of Social Collaboration

by Jill Hart on July 27, 2012

Nicco Mele, 2009 Distinguished Lecturer and adjunct faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has been breaking new ground in web strategies for more than a decade.  In 2004, while webmaster for Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s run for the presidential nomination, Mele invented the landscape for integrating technology and social media into political communications.  He went on to found Echo Ditto, through which he works with Fortune 500 companies and non-profits around the globe developing effective web strategies.

Open innovation and crowdsourcing have become part of Mele’s DNA.  He co-founded Genius Rocket, an advertising agency that pioneered the framework that joins hundreds of well- respected creative professionals by crowdsourcing. The marriage of the open innovation and crowdsourcing models has proven to leverage top talent while delivering affordability and speed to market for clients.

I was excited to catch up with Mele at the Vermont Digital Future Conference held at Champlain College. He graciously shared his unique blend of thinking in explaining why social collaboration continues to grow as a viable resource for innovation, and how he believes funding sources like KickStarter are opening doors previously padlocked to many start-ups.

Collaborative Innovation

Conserving the Future

This site is an example of engaging information sharing and social networking.

http://americaswildlife.org/

Creating Innovation in Government: 3 Lessons from Todd Par

”Creating Innovation in Government”
Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer

Next generation of Government Summit

Todd Park closed out the opening sessions of the Next Generation of Government Summit, reviewing his fascinating path to government. Todd Park mentioned that the most amazing experience in his career has been working for the federal government. Todd Park’s presentation, as usual, was high energy, motivating and a great way to kick off Next Generation of Government 2012. Todd started off by providing lessons for driving change within government. The theme of the presentation was that change in government is possible, it’s a rewarding experience, and a necessary step to solve the complex challenges government faces.

Lesson 1: Team Up

Todd stated, “Whenever you have an idea, go find the three people who have had the same idea as you, years ago.” Todd advises that these people will have already thought through the idea, challenges, and will give you the opportunity to push your idea. Todd mentions that it is hard to find these people, and the way to find these people is to just network the old fashioned way.  Start talking  to people, and ask “Who are two people I should talk too,” Todd stated that he started doing this when he entered into government, and his network grew exponentially.

Lesson 2: Understand and Employ Principles of Lean Startup

Todd mentioned the book, Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, Lean Startup, as a critical read for anyone in government looking to become an innovator. Todd’s first lesson was to start with a small, interdisciplinary team, operate so that the people on the team aren’t silos and they are all a single integrated team. The job of the team is to understand the problem and develop the best solution. “A single collective brain to solve a problem,” stated Todd. Next, Todd challenges innovators to really think like your consumer, and talk and engage customers to understand real issues and understand what they want. 

The third rule is to follow rapid iteration, Todd advised to iterate super rapidly. This means to iterate from knowledge of the customer, not doing this process in months or years, but to constantly keep learning. Todd states that failure is very important, and while iterating rapidly, risk is low. Todd believes that it is way better to fail early, and then get to the end of the process, and fail after investing a lot of time, money and effort.

To recap, Todd’s tips are:

• Small Agile Teams
• Get to Customers as Soon as You Can
• Rapid Iteration to organically arrive at what customer wants and solution that gives you best results

Lesson 3: Embrace “We Government”

Todd’s next tip was to embrace “We Government,” which Andrew spent some time talking through earlier in the day. “Most of the smartest employees in the world, are employed by other people,” Todd stated. Here, Todd was explaining that it is necessary to engage others, across sectors and around the United States to help solve problems.

Todd continued to explain the hope of liberating government data. Some examples he provided were NOAA and weather data, and how by releasing this data, an industry boomed. Now the hope is that open data will fuel innovation across dozens of sectors, such as health care, education, and transportation.

“It’s incredible what you can make happen in government if you leverage these three lessons,” Todd stated. I really enjoyed Todd’s presentation, his energy and his passion for public service. You can watch his entire presentation over on GovLoop, so be sure to check it out. If you’ve seen Todd present before, he is really challenging to live blog. It’s really easy to get engaged with the presentation, and challenging to keep focused on note taking/writing, so check out the video to get see the full presentation.

New (NY) Parks Conservancy

The Doris Duke Charitable and Tiffany & Co. foundations have announced challenge grants of $1 million each to the City Parks Foundation to launch the New York City Natural Areas Conservancy.

To meet the challenge, the organization, which will work with the city's Department of Parks and Recreation to protect, restore, and manage expansive natural areas already within the city's urban park system, must raise an additional $2 million by the end of 2013. Similar to existing organizations like the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the new public-private partnership will serve as a mechanism to raise additional resources for parklands in the city beyond what city government can provide.

"The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is proud to support this innovative public-private approach to making the most of nature in cities," said DDCF president Ed Henry. "It will serve as a model for how to manage urban wildlife habitat while also highlighting the ability of these areas to serve as 'green infrastructure' that helps alleviate urban environmental problems related to air quality, storm water management, and the heat-island effect."

“Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation Announce Funding to Launch New Parks Conservancy in New York City.” Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Press Release 7/16/12.http://www.ddcf.org/PageFiles/236/DDCF%20Announces%20NAC%20Grant.pdf

Everybody wants to be TED Talks

http://conservationremix.org/talks/indoor-urban-agriculture/

Imperiled Promise

"Where will that conversation unfold? In the wake of the Second Century Commission’s report, which proposed a Center for Innovation “to gather and share lessons learned quickly throughout the organization,” NPS has launched the Network for Innovation and Creativity (a pilot phase now hosted by the Conservation Study Institute in Woodstock, Vermont), a “bold and forward-thinking initiative, with the goal to rapidly share knowledge, new approaches, and insights from practical experience to solve mission-critical problems and advance organizational excellence.”60 “By supporting a higher level of peer-to-peer collaboration across the national park system,” planners hope that the “network will encourage and share innovation and improve performance.” Practitioners will harness an “internet platform of blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and other tools” as well as “video conferencing, telephone, email, and face-to-face meetings” to disseminate new ideas, insights and strategies for success.

"Although not the ambitious Center for Innovation envisioned by the Second Century Commissioners, perhaps this network will flourish and prove a resource for creative practi- tioners across the agency. And the projects featured above might provide some good starting places. To be sure, one’s peers can be a powerful source of inspiration and information, and it is critically important to transfer the knowledge gained by the agency’s most innovative practitioners to their counterparts elsewhere in NPS."

A.M. Mitchell, M.R. Miller, G.B. Nash, D. Thelen. 2011. Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service. Organization of American Historians. page 51

Rockefeller Foundation Announces 2012 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund Winners

Some creative projects here that could offer insights to true community engagement for urban parks.

Selected from a pool of nearly four hundred applicants, the sixteen New York City-based organizations will receive two-year grants ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. The winners of this year's Cultural Innovation Fund competition include Harvestworks, which will partner with the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation to turn artists' technological innovations into entrepreneurial ventures; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, which received a grant to engage traditionally underserved communities by bringing arts programming into public housing; and the Laundromat Project, which will promote civic participation through partnerships with community organizations that organize art workshops in local coin-operated laundromats.

NYC Cultural Innovation Fund

I especially like the definition of innovation:

Innovation is a new product, process or service that is discontinuous from previous practice and yields new pathways for solving acute problems or fulfilling mission. Social innovation is often recombinant: a hybridization of existing elements that are combined across boundaries in new ways to yield better solutions, also leaving healthier social relationships in their wake. *

*This definition has been compiled from different articulations by Richard Evans, Geoff Mulgan and Andrew Hargadon

Changing Education Paradigms

Though two years old, I've just seen this animated talk for the first time. I thought it worth sharing on two levels. First, though directed at educational systems there is a lot here that is relevant to the Collaborative. "Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity." "Most great learning happens in groups, and collaboration is the stuff of growth." "...it is about the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy."


Second, the talk is animated in a manner you have probably seen before, similar to Steven's graphic facilitation. According to one source, the animated presentation has been viewed over eight million times, while the original, full-length video presentation has been viewed less than 270,000 times. 

"Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence"

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

Sites we looked at...

http://number27.org/work.html

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a_vanishing_natural_world/2545/

http://www.managementexchange.com/story

http://www.orionmagazine.org/

http://www.orton.org/

http://www.plexusinstitute.org/?

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

http://www.harvard.edu/

http://www.economistconferences.co.uk/video/innovation-summit-2012/6112?video=6113

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/

http://researchblogging.org/

And of course

http://npscollaborative.blogspot.com/

Yammer description (Forrester Research)

Yammer. Yammer’s 5 million total users (1 million paid) have legitimized a freemium approach aimed at driving viral adoption. In order to accelerate viral adoption, Yammer places a huge premium on a simple, intuitive user experience. As the company has grown from a disruptive startup to one focused on becoming a strategic enterprise vendor, it continues to focus on the needs of IT. While this has traditionally meant providing the authentication, security, and administrative controls (not coincidentally, the functionality that required moving from freemium to a paid version), the new direction is more aggressive and far-reaching. For example, Yammer has invested in providing social capabilities to numerous cloud-based enterprise software offerings like Box, NetSuite, and Salesforce CRM. Yammer also recently announced integration with SAP on-premises, based on a connector developed by and licensed from Freeborders. Yammer’s investments point to a social integration strategy that includes a broad array of software solutions, in the cloud or on-premises. As a pure cloud provider, it is important for organizations to evaluate the viability of storing content and communications in a US-based cloud data center.

© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited                  May 17, 2012

The Forrester WaveTM: Activities streams, Q2 2012            

Innovation PSA

A little more inspiration for this Monday...

The Future is Ours

"Innovating Innovation"

"One thing I’ve noticed is that the people in organizations who are the most responsible for innovation are frequently working alone–and they’re lonely. When you’re the person who walks the tightrope between risk and results day in and day out, you need colleagues to bounce ideas off and peers to give a simple reality check: to tell you whether an idea is awesome–or simply crazy."        - MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito (1 July 2012)
http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/07/innovating-innovation.html

Socialtext vs. Yammer

Looking into the features of Yammer reminds me why we chose Socialtext for the pilot: the latter is just a bit more feature-rich. That said, none of the missing features are a deal-breaker, and may well be added by Microsoft. (That said, I will miss the customizable dashboard of Socialtext.)

Yammer vs. Socialtext

I had hoped to set the CSI team up for a trial run of the free version of Yammer. Unfortunately, because it is so tied to corporate communications, I cannot add addresses outside of my own (QLF.org) domain. To invite any of you we would have to purchase licenses for the Enterprise version.  I have registered and played around with Yammer a bit, and find it could fit the needs of the Collaborative and the FOS (Friends of Sharepoint). While organized a bit differently, it offers much the same functionality as Socialtext.

From Leadership Development to Vibrant Network: Five Things to Consider

While the content isn't new, I thought it was interesting to consider the contrast of typical organizational leadership with network leadership side-by-side. In particular, it raises an interesting question we might want to consider down the road re: how best to connect the development of network leadership skills with ongoing leadership programs in the Service. Not that we're trying to turn everything into a network, but to introduce key concepts/skills and explore the contrasting leadership approaches that may be needed in different situations. I don't know what L&D may already be doing in this regard. I think it would be an interesting conversation to have with Kathy and her team at some point.

Example blog post with short audio clips .......

This is the sort of format I was attempting to describe at the tail end of our meeting at the Woodstock Inn. I like the opening "hook" followed by brief segments of text & selected short audio clips ... along with links for further/background info.

Example of 1-pager with short audio clips

Yammer and Sharepoint: A match made in tech heaven?

This video shows some of the ways that Yammer can be integrated into Sharepoint- making the Sharepoint experience more social and collaborative.

http://vimeo.com/yammer/yammersharepoint

Youth in the Great Outdoors

The Next Generation of Conservation Leaders

Outside and Involved

The Department of the Interior is uniquely positioned to help millions of young Americans reconnect with our natural and cultural heritage, put thousands of young people to work in the great outdoors, and inspire the next generation of conservation leaders.

The Youth in the Great Outdoors Initiative will help us achieve the vital goal of connecting young people with America’s natural and cultural heritage. By expanding youth programs throughout the Department and reaching out to audiences who have never visited their public lands, we will help tackle some of the many challenges facing young people today, from high unemployment rates to declining health. It is startling, from a public health perspective, that a young person spends six hours a day in front of a computer or television and less than 4 minutes playing outdoors. Young people from under-served communities are even less likely to be engaged in outdoor programs and activities.

https://youthgo.gov/about

http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&oppId=180653

[Note feature length film on Aldo Leopold]

Groundwork Youth Summit

Regarding youth engagement:

GWUSA Assembly & Youth Summit in New York this year

Please save the dates: October 10-14, 2012. We have an exciting event planned for you all! More news to come soon…

http://groundworkusa.org/2012/05/12/gwusa-assembly-youth-summit-in-yonkers-ny/

Center for Ecoliteracy

This site was recommended by Meg Wheatley as an excellent example of quality environmental storytelling. Center for Ecoliteracy, http://www.ecoliteracy.org/

Well, hello there!

Thanks Brent for setting up this collaborative space for us to share resources and have conversation about the Collaborative.

I look forward to posting interesting and thought provoking items in the future!

Managing Natural World Heritage

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 8:15 PM, S. Stolton  wrote:

Dear All,

I cannot believe how long it has taken to send you this email. ...But this morning the Resource Manual on Natural World Heritage was finally loaded onto the WH website (http://whc.unesco.org/en/activities/703/). The manual is only being produced as a PDF due to UNESCO funding problems I think.

(I had a bit part in the production of this manual. - Brent)

Video example

National Park Service rangers at work. Just an example of video option.

Enterprise social networking at Enterprise 2.0

Good insights here (though you can have "gamification.")

"Bricklin was one of several enterprise social networking practitioners featured as keynote speakers Tuesday at the opening session of Enterprise 2.0 Boston, a UBM TechWeb event."

http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_private_platforms/240002350

Intro to blog

Hi everyone,
Based on our discussion of needs, I set up a quick blog site we could try to use to share information and reduce email loads. We can post information to share here that is not time sensitive. You can check the blog when your time allows, or set up a newsfeed so that you can more easily see changes.
I don't know if this will fit our needs, but thought we could give it a try.
Brent