This morning from an #agchat tweet I spotted the word "affection." I had to click. (Thanks @USFarmerMag!) And found this from March. Take a minute and enjoy. ( I read it while listening to Rene Fleming with YoYo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile creating music with "Touch the Hand of Love." Mama mia. Great combo. I’ll embed it below so you can do the same if you wish.) For the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities which he delivered on Monday evening at the Kennedy Center, Mr. Berry, American intellectual and agrarian-minded elder, described how and why affection, yes, affection!, ought be considered the cornerstone of a new economy. Berry tells us that affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination. It’s a train of thought worth quoting at length: "For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world," says Berry, "they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy." Affection, then, takes us beyond statistics and generalizations to the immediate and the particular. It focuses our attention on the beloved things right in front of us. This field,this child, this community. Berry observes that we live in a time where affection is discounted. It’s true: rare is the public discussion where affection - or beauty, or hope, or joy - is brought forward as a good and weighty reason to do anything. But Berry believes that affection is deeply motivating. "Affection involves us entirely," he writes. If he is right, love itself could be what moves us, finally, to care for the Earth. You can read Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, or watch a video of him delivering it. via LocalHarvest News - March 30, 2012. I loved this line: "affection does not spring up fully formed; it is gotten to by way of imagination."  As I prepare to facilitate an agricultural planning meeting, this is so useful for me to have in my mind. Where are you imagining and nurturing affection in your work? Your life? Who is imagining it for you?   Tree image from Flickr, License Some rights reserved by Frodrig

Choconancy1 posted a photo:

Just back from Bhutan, my mind and heart are full, and my mind is tripping forward to the next work that is flowing towards me. One is a collaborative session on improvisation at Northern Voice in a couple of weeks. This poem speaks both to the last 16 days in Bhutan and the upcoming collaboration. A bit of kismet that it floated in front of me, courtesy of Jerry Michalski. A little Saturday morning gift. I promise a post about Bhutan in the coming week. The Real Work It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,   and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.   The mind that is not baffled is not employed.   The impeded stream is the one that sings. ~ Wendell Berry ~   (Collected Poems) via The Real Work — Wendell Berry.

Choconancy1 posted a photo: FSN Workshop Agenda

Choconancy1 posted a photo:

Choconancy1 posted a photo:

The early bird deadline is past, but we are sending out the word at a couple of F2F workshops in the next few weeks and I want this post findable on my (messy, messy) blog.  The time to commit is NOW!  I learned so many new things this year that I want to share. I want to learn from y’all. The folks who have signed up so far are fascinating and a few are far flung! So expect great, diverse interactions. We have a few more spaces available so MAKE YOUR MOVE! Once again, here are the details: Michelle Laurie and I are excited to announce the 3rd annual graphic facilitation workshop (aka Rosviz!) in beautiful Rossland, BC, Canada, July 18-20th, 2012. We had so much fun at #1 and #2, we are going for #3! (See Sylvia’s great video from #2 here.) Drawing on Walls at the 2011 Graphic Facilitation Workshop in Rossland, B.C. You are invited to this experiential workshop which takes place almost entirely at the drawing surface! We’ll start the evening of July18th by warming up our drawing muscles and silencing those pesky inner censors. The second day, we’ll build into the basic practices of graphic facilitation and recording. We will pay attention to preparation, the actual visual work, and follow up including digital capture of paper based images. Our third day will be devoted to participatory graphic approaches, practicing and giving peer feedback. You can expect to go away with icons, ideas and approaches which you can use immediately, as well as ideas about how to hone your practice. When might we use this practice? Sometimes our imaginations are sparked by a visual where words fail us. Think about when communities plan and imagine their futures, when teams consider the possible outcomes for their projects, when groups create maps to track their progress.  These are all opportunities to use visuals to engage and deepen community dialogue. You can use visual thinking to improve teamwork, communications, meetings, build engagement and to plan work. Step out of the PowerPoint rut! Who should attend? Facilitators, project managers, team leaders and members, town planners, teachers and anyone who would like to engage others beyond words. Please Note: You do NOT need previous experience or have to consider yourself an artist. At some level, we can all draw and use visuals to enhance our communications and engage diverse audiences. Quick details: Michelle will be hosting and we’ll both be co-facilitating. This 2.5 day workshop begins the evening of Wednesday, July 18th and ends mid-afternoon on Friday, July 20th.  Pricing  is  CA $840.00 thereafter. (US Friends — it is about the same in dollars! If you have/want to pay in dollars, I can take those. NW)  Email Michelle to register: michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com. via Workshop Alert - Rosviz is back! | Michelle Laurie rants and raves.

@speakwhen caught an image of me Friday morning when I promoted the NorthernVoice‘s Open Space — a.k.a. Moosecamp… with an improvised Uke song. My first public Uke performance. It was fitting, since later in the day Alan Levine, Rob Cottingham and I ran a session on improv. I’m still running a mile a minute with draft blog posts from the adventures of the last two months, but hey, a quick picture and a link to the audio from @felicelam will have to do for now! Nothing like jumping off the cliff of risk! (And to discover KDot does a weekly #UkeTuesday post!!) I guess this was my UkeFriday! Thank you friends and NorthernVoice!! Twitter / speakwhen: Today started with a ukule.

This past weekend I was up in Vancouver, BC, for two gatherings that I always enjoy, the BC Campus’ Online Community Enthusiasts group (led by the always wonderful Sylvia Currie) and the Canadian blogging/social media conference, Northern Voice. OCE is a place to hang with people who wisely use online interaction, mostly in the learning context. This year I was once again on the OCE hosting team and my job was to give an overview of the agenda, then facilitate the afternoon’s Open Space. I made a visual agenda, but in a circle it is rather hard to see, so I spontaneously became a human lazy susan. Alan Levine caught me in the act with a still, and later with an animated gif. We had a great time with Dave Pollard leading us in some exercises using the terrific Groupworks group process pattern cards. They really elicited some insightful stories from the group and I was so inspired, I called an Open Space session in the afternoon to think about how I could use them in a webinar I ran on Monday. Bingo! As always, hanging out with friends new and old was the highlight. Northern Voice is where I always submit weird session proposals and those crazy Canadians usually say yes to me. Silly them. My supporting role for 2012 was to co-facilitate Moosecamp, the OpenSpace of NorthernVoice, with Brian Lamb. Brian asked me to make a little announcement at the start of the conference about Moosecamp. I had decided on a whim to bring my new uke, and at the last minute decided to improvise a song about Moosecamp instead of saying it. I blogged about that already. This year my formal submission was a session with Rob Cottingham, Alan Levine and I on improvisation. I have been very inspired by Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore’s work to bring improv into facilitation.  Our session started with each of us telling a two minute story of where improvisation played an important role, while the other two mimed the story. Then we introduced the group to Viv and Johnnie’s improv cards, which I turned into flip chart images. We  invited people to go to the flip chart they felt MOST uncomfortable with. They then discussed the why’s and wherefore’s of their discomfort. THEN we invited each group to create a human sculpture that expressed that card. We had eight great, laughter inducing performances. Alan then showed us his PechaFlickr applications which draws five cards with a shared tag from Flickr and you get to tell a story to go with them. Alan had five volunteers who each added an element to a story illustrated by tug boats! Give it a try yourself here. It could be a great icebreaker! Then we segued into a classic gibberish improv and our three volunteers blew me away. They dove right in.  I was laughing so hard I was crying. For us, it was important that this was not just about the performance side of improv, but about how improv can inform our practices every day, help us be more present in every moment. Rob Cottingham gave a insightful, improvised wrap up that inspired us all. We have 1140 minutes every day. We might as well use them well. I loved Boris Mann’s recap: Next I went to Improv Me, Baby with Nancy White, Alan Levine, and Rob Cottingham. My basic rule of thumb is "go to any session that Nancy White is involved with". Of course Alan and Rob are no slouches either Lots of interactivity and group activity in getting people to participate, and to understand what improv actually means. Rob closed things out talking about how the very best improv can in fact be the result of lots of preparation and practice ahead of time, while still using a "go with the flow" approach to tailor presentations & experiences to the people and energy in the room. In the Moosecamp/Open Space giulia.forsythe ran a great hands on session about how to do sketchnoting on the iPad and I now finally understand layers. (I’m slow.) She later did a sketchnote of the improv session which I TREASURE! What a great memento/take away! via Northern Voice Retrospective [visual Notes] | Flickr - Photo Sharing!. All in all it was a great weekend - learning, play, improv, music, friends and food! Perfeito!

This week kicks off e/merge 12, a mostly-online gathering of people who are interested in elearning in Africa. I’m pleased to be moderating a workshop this week exploring changes in online facilitation with four great facilitators. Here is the description. But read on below the quote  for a sneak listen to one of our guests, Maggy Beukes-Amiss from the University of Namibia. Facilitation of online learning is now into its fifth decade. The familiar web based online  learning environments have only existed since the mid 1990s. Since then we’ve seen radical changes in the technology, pedagogy and range of practices. The boundaries are shifting from closed classrooms, communities and password protected learning management systems to open and networked configurations. So where are we now? We’ll engage in conversation with four experienced facilitators of online learning to hear what they are thinking, and then engage everyone in reflecting on your practices. Joining us are Maggy Beukes-Amiss, a veteran Namibian online facilitator and trainer of online and blended educators,  Nellie Deutsch, who is an English teacher and an expert in online facilitation, blended online learning, social networking and open education, Gerrit Wissing, a highly experienced instructional designer and trainer of online facilitators, Tony Carr who is an educational technologist and periodic organiser of online conferences, and moderator Nancy White, one of the early explorers of online facilitation. Maggy Beukes-Amiss: Maggy has been teaching ICT related subjects at the U. of Namibia for over 17 years, including in leadership positions. She has a passion for open source software packages and elearning activities. As a champion for capacity building, we’ll be asking Maggy what her key insights and learnings have been. Dr. Nellie Deutsch :  Nellie has been teaching English to speakers of other languages since the mid 70s and integrating technology into her classes since the mid 90s. She uses relationship-based, collaborative action learning in facilitating online learning. We’ll be asking Nellie to tell us more about HOW she does this! Gerrit Wissing: Gerrit is a Senior Instructional Designer at Tshwane University of Technology but also has lived experience in the corporate world as well. He knows the software, he knows the social process side. More importantly, he’s been co facilitating UCT’s Facilitating Online course and e/merge itself, so Gerrit is in the trenches. We’ll be asking Gerrit to share a bit about what he’s learned across all these contexts. Tony Carr: Tony is an educational technologist, online facilitator and online conference organiser at the Centre for Educational Technology,University of Cape Town. Most of his day to day work is in staff development for teaching with technology. We’ll be asking Tony to share about the opportunities for online communities of practice. Nancy White: Nancy was one of those people who fell into online interaction in the early days of the web and sought to understand how it related to her offline experiences. She wrote some of the early guidance so we’ll be interested to find out what she thinks is the same today, and what has changed. Our ending… or really our beginning question will be "what’s next for us as online facilitators?" Have you thought about that? We hope you have and will join us! Maggy Beukes-Amiss  is on leave this week so I was able to interview here in advance. It was terrific to hear about her practice at the University of Namibia. Her passion is infectious. Her main thrust was that our attitudes are an incredibly important part of our practice. Take a listen: Part 1 and Part 2 Podsafe music courtesy of Tchakare Kanyembe  - Thanks!

A fabulous capture from the wonderful day with the BC Campus Online Community Enthusiasts. It was so great to be able to be on the planning and facilitation team. Thanks, Sylvia and Paul! Online Community Enthusiasts Gathering 2012 | BCcampus on Blip.

While the quote below may look unusual, it is not. My blog is not about politics. It is not about insurance. But for years it has been, under the cover of "collaboration," and "work," about doing what matters, about living life to use our talents and blessings. For some, that means working for themselves. For some it means being an artist. I’m lucky - I have a husband who has health insurance that covers us. But so many I know (even my online, "imaginary" friends) don’t. People who should retire but don’t because of a lack of insurance. Probably working themselves to death. Literally. Why? Because in my country we have a system that is set up for business, my friends, not health. So read the paragraphy below. Follow the link back. Give a little. Hold me accountable to give. And lets figure out how we can stop people from finding that, when the bad news about health arrives, they know care is right behind them. This is from writer Patti Digh: While I believe that writing is my calling, it is not as secure a life choice as working in a job with benefits. And recently, that has meant not paying our $1400/month insurance premium-like so, so many other Americans. It is a broken, broken system. So John is uninsured for this journey. Dear friends are launching a fundraising page, and it will be online in a few days. If you can help in this effort by giving or sharing the information with your networks, please let Amy McCracken know at forjohnfptak@gmail.com. It is a source of shame that we are uninsured, and it is a shame we must overcome for John’s sake. It is a reality we share with so many. And my writing is a choice I would not change for anything, not even health insurance. We will figure this out because there is simply no other option. xoxo via 37days - Home of Patti Digh. Oh, and caring is a community indicator. For sure.   UPDATE: Here is the link to the Indigogo fundraising site for John. And some more information.

I have been heads-down with work, leaving my WordPress backend full of half drafted blog posts. I only seem able to get the quick ones out. This is one of those. I have been working to build both improvisation and "art" (however you want to define that  - for me it has been bringing drawing into the meeting room) into my work. There is something about both that reenergizes people and elivens their brains. @courosa  (Alec Couros) tweeted this link today and I had to share.  Not only are these guys phenomenal, but look at the audience. Look and learn! via The Human Jukebox | cdza Opus No. 9 - YouTube.

Earlier this year some of my online friends (Val Cortes, Lisa Endersby and Ian Simmie) invited me to be part of a panel they were preparing for  Canadian Association of Colleges and Universities Student Services Conference: Engaging Digital Citizens <http://www.cacuss2012.ca> in Vancouver BC, Canada.  The topic was on communities and learning, building off of some lessons learned from the project the three of them had been doign.  Abstract What does it mean to be a member of a community in the digital age? In this session you will begin to explore how student affairs professionals can use available technologies to create vibrant and engaging online communities. Through discussing the SASA Leadership Educators Resource Network (LEARN) online community as a case study and the lessons from the LEARN membership survey, we will explore the creation and facilitation of this and other distributed work, learning, and community groups. Summary Developing and maintaining a vibrant and meaningful online community requires purposeful care and nurturing. Many of the tools that student affairs professionals use in their daily practice can be applied to the digital world. In this session, we will review the theory of online community facilitation and we will provide specific group facilitation tools, strategic-planning models and engagement strategies that participants can implement in their own contexts. Finally, we will share the lessons that we have learned as LEARN facilitators and creators. The session will feature a remote presentation with a colleague in Victoria and, potentially, with a Seattle-based consultant and international online group facilitator of distributed work, learning and community groups. To warm things up, Lisa Endersby wrote this blog post. My job was to add something about this ecosystem of group forms that address the diversity of small groups, individuals, bounded communities and networks. I’m particularly interested in the interplay between communities and the broader networks they live in and "by." This was all well and good, except due to my not paying close attention to dates, I was not available to do something live online with them as I was going to be, ironically, driving to Vancouver for Northern Voice and the Online Community Enthusiasts gathering.  So we decided that I’d record a short piece for them to weave into their presentation. This makes life easy for me in terms of preparation, but dang, I sure missed the interaction! Then the F2F team was going to ask the participants some questions. I’m reposting them here because they continue to be useful questions. Every time I engage in a conversation about communities, communities of practice, networks, groups — whatever form — we run into a lack of clarity of what we are talking about. What is your definition of community? How do you know when/if you are a part of a community? How do you know when/if you aren’t part of one? Can you join an online community (‘obtain a membership’)? What does this look like? What is your first reason/goal for entering an online community? Are there any risks to being part of an online community? What are the benefits of online communities? Which one(s) resonate(s) most with you? As I prep for some presentations and workshops at KMSingapore next week, these questions remain alive, along with the question "how do we useful work with profusion of networks, groups and communities we MIGHT belong to?" What are the strategic choices and practices? Stay tuned for more…

It makes no sense to fly all the way to Singapore just for a keynote, so the good folks at Straits Knowledge and IKMS set me up to offer a graphic facilitation pre-conference workshop prior to KMSingapore (#KMSG). 12 folks joined me to explore how we productively use visuals as we facilitate in our work. After some visual introductions, we did the classic "I Can Draw" exercises, then worked on basic visual vocabularies. With that under our belts, we explored how we can use these visual skills in a variety of facilitation settings. You can see the full agenda here. Below are some images from the workshop, including our use of the visual practice "river of life" as a workshop evaluation tool. KM Singapore Graphic Facilitation Workshop Artifacts from Nancy White Resources https://onlinefacilitation.wikispaces.com/Visual+Work+and+Thinking

Last week I had my first trip to Singapore and was a keynote speaker and workshop presenter at KM Singapore. My talk was entitled "The Heaven and Hell of Communities!" If you want the short version, a 2 minute recap can be found here. (I just blogged about the Graphic Facilitation workshop as well.) I want to thank the fabulous Edgar Tan, Wai Kong and Patrick Lambe of Strait’s Knowledge for hosting me. You guys ROCK! I spent quite a bit of time thinking about this presentation, so I thought I’d share some of that process, acknowledge and thank those who helped me, and then share the slide set. Process My first instict was to use my communities and networks to "think out loud" about the tensions that are mounting in the productive and strategic use of communities and networks. Little did I realize that I was actually setting myself up for the very challenges I was trying to talk about. Filter failure. Lack of discrimination and strategy in how I tapped my networks. Too much on my plate. Mama mia. It was all in front of me, and I wasn’t even seeing it. My first round was asking on Twitter for "radical ideas" about knowledge collaboration. Then I set up a Google Doc to start sharing my ideas and solicit comments. THEN I added one more mechanism, Google Moderator (which it turns out, I’m not so fond of) which gave me more diverse input. Then I started scanning more generally on my network and the "kismet" factor kept turning up more and more interesting and relevant links. These are still a disorganized mish mash on the Google doc. I think I’m not such a great Curator! (Robin, now you know why I was massively inarticulate on this topic when we last talked in Rome!) Thanks Jennifer, Dave, Eugene and Christopher and the rest of my network! I was pretty darn well overwhelmed, so I let it all sit. Then a week before I was due to travel, I started with my "post it note" presentation planning, pulling out three main thoughts, supporting information, key anecdotes and at least 2 actionable suggestions for each main point. I begin to feel urgent, so I started dumping things into PowerPoint, with the intention of drawing the visuals for the slides once I had them set. But they just would NOT SETTLE in my mind or on the screen. So I decided to travel with things "unfinished." Sometimes at the event, in the PLACE things fall into place. But I could not chase away some niggling worries. I got a bit nervous as things had not fallen into place. Then the night before the keynote they did. David Weinberger’s keynote on day one totally resonated with what I wanted to talk about. Patrick Lambe’s talk analyzing the incident review of a major breakdown in Singapore’s public transit system told the perfect story validating the three points. In fact, almost every talk had a resonate point or reference. And somehow the language around the points got clearer as I reread some of my favorite work of friends. The idea of resilience instead of mitigation, of creative destruction to make room for strategic participation in communities and networks, and of conversations that matter all  felt right. As an aside, here are my Sketchnotes from some of the other presenters! KM Singapore 2012 Sketchnotes from Nancy White Slides The room at the Swissotel was pretty bright and images on previous slide sets were washing out. I usually use visually oriented slides - either photos or my own drawings. I realized a simple, bold text strategy might be better in this room, so that actually saved me some prep time. I rarely use text, but I think this worked out OK. I was surprised how popular the slides were on Slideshare, even without any notes or narration. I was featured on Slideshare one day! Now I need to get the  audio/video so there can be a bit more sense making. The Heaven and Hell of Communities & Networks from Nancy White Feedback The room seemed to feel some resonance with the messages.  The group was fairly quiet through the whole two days of the event, so one would not expect whooping and shouting, but the follow up questions were very thoughtful and we continued some of these in the afternoon "Knowledge Market." The three time horizons from Steve Waddell, the ideas I borrowed from the sustainability field around resilience instead of just mitigation and the chance to STOP doing something resonated. Patrick and I now want to work more on practices for creative destruction! Stay tuned for a workshop series. All in all it was great fun. Related Links and Event Artifacts KM Singapore blog with lots of social reporting artifacts from the event.

As I just posted today about resilience in terms of the strategic applications of communities and networks (the people kind), it was a lovely bit of kismet that today’s OLDaily had a link that again brings this idea to the fore. Infrastructure Resilience ~ Stephen’s Web. One thing that Stephen brings up is the importance of redundancy for resilience and how that may be counter to efficiency, the beast that seems to rule everything these days. The key is looking at the bigger, longer term context. The direct link to the article he is referencing is Infrastructure Resilience, from Valdis Krebs.

Weeks ago when I started my KM Singapore prep, Jennifer Dalby offered me some great inspiration for my talk. She also pointed me to her great new, inspired Experience | Portfolio. There is so much to learn here about sharing and digital identity, but I wanted to point out one particular thing. The "Connections" section where Jennifer invited her connections to make themselves a bit more visible as part of her portfolio. In a beautiful world, our network connections speak volumes about us. Brava, Jennifer! The responses you received sure are a great community indicator!  

Choconancy1 posted a photo:

Choconancy1 posted a photo: Nancy White nancyw@fullcirc.com

Choconancy1 posted a photo: Nancy White nancyw@fullcirc.com

Choconancy1 posted a photo: Nancy White nancyw@fullcirc.com

In our week three of the Project Community course, we are talking about group size. While I was at the fabulous Applied Improvisation Network World Conference this last week, I got to ask the fabulous Chris Corrigan for his insights to share with the class. The fabulous payoff is in the last 2 minutes or so! via Chris Corrigan on Group Size in Innovation and Open Design - YouTube.

Choconancy1 posted a photo: