Dear Collaboration Colleagues,
At the beginning of the year, we told you that one of our New Year’s
resolutions was to better understand
the Web 2.0 and social media phenomenon and its impact on how people
collaborate. So in mid-April some of our team dropped by the Web
2.0 Expo in San Francisco to have a look around. Web 2.0 may not
be a dinner-table conversation topic for many of us, but most of
us have heard of
or
perhaps visited at least one of these social media sites: FaceBook (social
network), YouTube (video sharing), Second
Life (virtual
reality), Flickr (image sharing), LinkedIn (business
networking), Digg (news sharing) or Wikipedia (collaborative
reference). The idea is that
you can interact dynamically with a web page to share information
with other people using web technology like
wikis, weblogs, vlogs, podcasts and RSS feeds.
The
products we saw at the Web 2.0 Expo weren’t all that new
from a technical standpoint; but there were many more of them and
tons of free or low cost tools to start a social network, a blog
or a wiki. It’s now easy to find an online community for
anything. We observed that
an essential aspect of the philosophy behind Web 2.0 is community ownership of information. The
advantages of this are the wide ranging input contributed by
interactive members and the speed at which responses appear when
the network is active. The disadvantages lie in the uncertainty
about the accuracy of the
information that is put out and the difficulty of sifting through
the sprawl to find what is relevant to you.
It becomes challenging to maintain focus, direction and deliberation.
So how does Web 2.0 really impact collaboration? Sharing information
builds relationships around a common interest. From this “community
of interest” can emerge a collaborative solution or work
product. The possibility is there, and we think that
what makes it possible to move from community sharing to collaboration is an outcome-oriented facilitation process. And that's where facilitators come into the picture.
So
now the question becomes “how
does Web 2.0 support the facilitation process”? To
begin to shape some answers we turned to two well-respected colleagues
who have years of facilitation
expertise combined with an avid interested in Web 2.0. Read what
they have to say in this issue’s Advisor’s Corner
and then post your own comments into our interactive discussion
flip chart. Let’s explore the future together.
Cheers,
The
Intrepid Trendwatchers at Facilitate.com
Advisor's Corner
Facilitators explore the opportunities of Web 2.0
Loretta L. Donovan
Ai Consulting
www.aiconsulting.org
Web2.0 opens new avenues for gathering materials, sharing ideas and accelerating collaboration with
low cost, easy to use tools. Their application fits well within generative, participative approaches
to facilitation since they increase the transparency of the process to the larger organization,
democratically involve participants in co-creating information that documents the face-to-face
sessions, and promotes seamless collaboration as performance transitions back to the workplace.
A great example of this is currently underway at Fairleigh Dickinson University where the Student Learning Outcomes Assessment (SLOA) Forum is
using a blog to extend the conversation of the committee, archive minutes and grow a repository of resources.
This is a public blog, so anyone at FDU can see the postings that talk about the ongoing work and comment on
them as well.
Joseph McIntyre
The Akous Group
www.akous.com
As
facilitators we need to be aware of new ways to effectively bring groups
together, both when we work with them in a meeting room and when they are
spread out across the globe. Web 2.0 tools are much more than the latest
Internet buzzword. They reflect a set of attitudes captured in software
that very closely match the core values of most facilitators. For example,
facilitators are very concerned with accurately capturing the input of all
participants. Web 2.0 supports this by creating tools that allow participants
to co-create powerful information stores on their own, with only facilitative
guidelines. Wikipedia is the pre-eminent example of this. Creating meaning
from information is one of the core tasks of groups, tools like "tagging" –
applying definitional words to articles, pictures, just about anything –
creates a "folksonomie" that can accurately capture themes a group identifies.
The
term Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media. CEO Tim O'Reilly describes
what Web 2.0 means and doesn't mean in his clear essay "What is Web 2.0" that
you can find here.
One
tool that captures the essence of Web 2.0 that I am quite fond of
is Attendr (http://attendr.com),
which is a "mash-up" or overlay of Google Maps and a variety
of other software including Flikr and Technorati. This is specifically
designed to
help groups
learn about
their members prior to a meeting or project. Participants are invited
to a unique Attendr event for which they create a personal profile
that can
include photos, URLs, bios, and most importantly a series of tags
that capture their interests. Once all of the members have entered
their profiles, Attendr
creates a geographic map showing the spatial relationships between
people. But that is just the start, members can identify who they
already know in
the group, creating another map of connections, and who they would
like to meet. But perhaps the most useful feature is the tag cloud
that is created.
By clicking the words in the cloud, you can quickly see others who
share your interests and the overall mix of interests in the group.
Other
Web 2.0 tools that I have used include: project wikis, which are great
for document collaboration as well as documentation; blogs which
open communication lines;
and, You Tube/Flikr for sharing video and photos. Most Web 2.0
tools are "Open
Source" meaning you can use them without typical software licenses and
fees.
Web
2.0 tools are not going to save your next challenging engagement,
nor will they wash your windows. What they will do is make it easier
for groups that you work with to collaborate and have some fun!
Now over to you.
Does Web 2.0 have the potential to enhance the way we facilitate groups?
As facilitators, we are concerned with helping a group achieve its own objectives through a collaborative process
of idea generation and evaluation, problem solving and decision making.
How might Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, online communities and social networks help us accomplish our goal?
Click
here to add your thoughts to our interactive flip chart and comment
on the other ideas you find there. We’ll report back on this idea
exchange in the next issue.
top
Situation Room
All About Trust
Reporting back on last week’s interactive discussion, we asked you,
our readers, to brainstorm ideas about how to establish trust among a new
team that has to meet virtually. Click
here to view the
whole discussion on our interactive flip chart and add your own
comments.
Participants came through with some very wise approaches. One pointed out that trust is built upon
shared goals and values that everyone can respect. Beyond making sure that project objectives and
roles are clearly understood, have team members express the values that they hold with respect to
work and validate that they are heard and accepted by the group. One suggested technique
is
“Trust builders/Trust busters,” an exercise where team members write down three things that build trust
and three things that diminish trust and share these with each other. These form the basis of group norms that
build confidence in the team’s trustworthiness.
The other major theme was around building rapport by sharing a
more personal dimension. There are many ways to do this: posting
photographs, sharing stories, describing one’s surroundings,
interests or accomplishment, playing a game. As one contributor
put it: "If this is a new team, one of the first ways to build
trust is to humanize each other."
top
Have you thrown your ideas
into the hopper yet?
We’ve had several interesting discussions over the past 6 months – if you’d
like to take a look, click here to go to the agenda of topics.
Click on any link to view the whole discussion and add your own comments
to our
interactive flip chart.
Viva la collaboration! All responses are anonymous, and remember,
there’s
no such thing as a bad idea.
Click
here to participate.
top
Buzz About Collaboration
If
you are really interested in Web 2.0, social media and group
collaboration tools, you may want to bookmark
Collaboration
Loop – Collaborative Technologies in the
Enterprise. This site offers news and blogs from a variety of
industry watchers and analysts, covering the gamut from technical
to social aspects of online collaboration.
OK, it's not really for the technically faint of heart, but
if you hang in there you will begin to get a feel for the Web
2.0 landscape. And there are occasional discussions about organizational
issues that
surround any change in the way we work.
For
example, this one:
05.03.2007 What if a Mob Ruled Your Company?
Mike Gotta, a well-known analyst of the collaboration marketplace,
ponders how Web 2.0 tools like Digg might ultimately affect
the core process of management decision-making. Traditional
decision-making is typically top-down. What if there were a "digital
rebellion" on the part of the employee population, a democratic up
swelling of sorts, powered by these ground-swelling web tools? He points
out that the collective
intelligence within networks of people who are close to the
problem might be valuable and on the mark. How do you pay
attention to the "voice of the crowd" without
inviting chaos? Gotta posits that the line between "mob rule" and "collective
intelligence" is razor thin.
http://www.collaborationloop.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2103&Itemid=39
