I was at the Office 2.0 pre-conference reception this evening…another very .com experience… EVERYONE was given an 2G ipod nano. It was sort of unbelievable (I thought initially I just got one because I am a speaker). I already have one (I bought it the first week they were out a year ago). I was thinking since I lost my camera at DIDW and I am really missing it (A Cannon Elph SD600) that I would trade the nano with someone who had a digital camera (perhaps if they are upgrading to something else). Just e-mail me if you are up for it.
From an OpenID/iname perspective people really liked to hear that there was an SSO solution. Ramana Rao who is on one of the closing panels said they were musing about the what where the things that if they didn’t happen would mean that this office 2.0 stuff would not succeed…Single-Sign-On was one of the things they had already thought of.
I met Robert Mao from UUZone a Social Network site in China with 6 million users. He is going to be giving them all OpenID’s and has convinced the ‘flickr of china’ to also adopt OpenID. They will both accept and issue OpenID’s. He also tole me about about OpenID.cn (they have a fun logo). I encouraged him to let people know about the Internet Identity Workshop in December – so who knows maybe we will have some more people from Asia there.
It was fun to see Mark Finnern along with his wife Marie and their baby Nina..yes a baby at a cocktail party it was really nice to see.
Facilitation Topics
Heading to SuperNova
I am writing this whole post on the lovely highway style bus that runs a block from my house and takes 1/2 an hour to get into San Francisco. It is free today cause it is a ‘spare the air day.’ I am going to SuperNova and will be blogging on their site today.
I flew back from Boston yesterday even detouring through Long Beach so I could get a 11:30 flight but still be back by 4:45 to make the SuperNova party last night. I went with Brad Topliff from ooTao and we made some great connections. The lightbulbs are going on that tapping into a functioning identity layer and user-centricity would make a lot of sense for there business models. Today at the conference there will be a session called ‘Who owns you” similar to where I just came from – “Who controls and protects the digital me?”
We had a great time on the third day of open space. the venue was not totally ideal. We got to hold sessions outside and we had sessions around tables and in corners of the main lower atrium of MIT media lab. It would have been good to have breakout rooms and I know at the Identity Open Space in Vancouver there will be.
All reports are that launch for i-names went really well.
Citizen Action Team – distributed disaster help matching
One of the most impressive things that I saw at the Organizers Collaborative Conference was the Citizen Action Team. In the wake of Katrina they build a Ruby on Rails Database to match donors offerings of help to groups and institutions who need help. The demoed the database and it was really impressive.
We are a politically unaffiliated, independent group of volunteers that have come together to provide supplies to folks of the hurricane ravaged Gulf coastline. We are serving the least served areas. We are working directly with shelter relief teams in areas such as Lafayette and Baton Rouge, LA, Gulfport and Hattiesburg, MS .
This list will grow as we pin-point and identify needs of other under-served, under-supplied pop-up shelters in the most needy areas. Our campaign begins by establishing need, supplying the basics and then gauging what next will most aid “our” shelters. With efficiency tempered by compassion, we stay in close contact, following donations from collection to distribution. We have established warehouse operations in Lafayette, Gulfport and are now developing other locations.
Hopefully in the next big disaster there will be a real digital addressing infrastructure working to make it even more efficient.
New Newsreader Needed -Help
I have been using NetNewsWire since I began reading blogs. The trouble is that it is WAY SLOW. Does anyone have a not slow client side mac RSS reader they like?
I can’t stand what I have now it takes like 5 seconds to move from one post to the next. I know I have a lot of posts – cause I am keeping way more posts then I actually read. I do this cause so far there are not good engines that let me search small slices of the blogosphere well. So saving them on my computer seems like the way through.
Creating Spaces for Innovation and Conversation
I have just gotten back into the swing of things – reading all the blogs I should be etc. I am starting off where I put things down about two months ago (I have 4000+ posts to scan/read in my identity streams folder).
Reading this post by Mary I remember the citizens jouranlism day that was less then ideal. The whole event got me thinking about the art and skill involved in creating good containers for people to gather in. The day was a disaster on a bunch of levels.
- First of all there was no clear map to get to the location. After we arrived Mary and I made a sign out of a paper bag to make sure others coming after us would actually know where to turn in.
- It was summer in SF at the Precido – for those of you who don’t know that means it will likely be very cold, windy and foggy. People were not warmed of this and so basically everyone was freezing.
- This was a meeting about internet citizen journalism – I had assumed we would be meeting in a building with wifi – not the case.
- When one calls an event and it has a start time – it is good for the host to actually show up prior to that time to welcome folks. Our host that day arrived an hour late and got to saying hello to everyone at 1.5 hours after the stated start time.
- It is good to feed people at events – so there was some effort made in this direction – hotdogs and hambergers. No one was really organized to actually cook the food. Two of the women who were just there to participate ended up taking the lead in preparing food. They had not volunteered for this role before hand but no one was doing it so they stepped in and cooked.
- After introductions concluded we all moved down to the internet archive – this was a packed room and 30+ people were trying to have one conversation. We were all looking to the organizers for some structure to the conversation – none was really provided.
- I am told that after I left the conversation did get better.
I am not writing this to be purely critical but to highlight some real world examples of the challenges that aries when organizing in person event. Consciousness about how to bring people together could be further cultivated in this community. 40 amazing people were asked to and willingly volunteered 6 hours of their time on a SUNDAY to join this discussion. More attention and for thought could have been given to the container created.
This metaphor of the container is one that comes from my work in spiritual activism. How are you going to honor peoples time and the gifts they are bringing to what ever purpose you have. This container involves the whole of the event:
- the initial intention
- who is included in manifesting the intention
- who is invited
- choice of process and facilitation
- proposed goals outcomes
- the physical aspects of the event –
- Location – inside/outside – bigroom/lots of small rooms – bathrooms or not
- nourishment needs (food and drink)
The creation of a strong community container is one of the keys to success for online worlds too. Claire from SUN has this post referencing Caterina Fake about how they (FLICKR) focused (and continue to focus) very strongly on the container of community. This positive field of feedback has drawn energy towards them.
People are more likely to work well together well not only when they have a common interest or shared set of goals – but also when there is a personal connection. I try to work well with most people, but I’m much more motivated to to cut people slack when I know a little bit about who they are, when I can tease them about their taste in a band called FloggingMolly, when I know that they like to delve into 1337 5p34k on occasion, or if I know that her talented brother went to RISD and is friends with the infamous creator of of Andre The Giant Has A Posse.
Caterina Fake of Flickr fame recently blogged about building a flickricious sense of community (gotta love that word) – and the importance of personal connections caught my eye. One relevant quote from Caterina – the part about personal – and authentic – communication is at the end of the paragraph:
“In the beginning, the creators of the community space have to create the tone and attitude of the place, set the parameters of what is and what is not allowed, and participate heavily, engaging directly with other people, mercilessly kicking/banning trolls, creating a real sense of there being a there there. Friendster, and the banning of “Fakesters” is often used as an example of a misunderstanding of online community — but I think this misunderstanding went back further, to the beginning. I was an early member of Friendster and, the first message I got was from the founder. “How do you like the service?” he asked, and not — and this is really the crux of it — “Pynchon! Man, how can you read that stuff! DeLillo is 10X better.” or “ZEPPELIN ROX! Zoso is my favorite album!!!” I’d filled out a profile. See what I mean?”
What’s the conclusion? Growing the OpenSolaris community is going to involve building lots of these personal connections. Personal and authentic, not stiff and corporate. Cool.
Technorati Tags: containers, community