Communities

communities of interest and practice

communities are the new conference

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Are communities the new conference?

I asked this question in our monthly video call of the perpetual beta coffee club [PBCC] which I facilitate. There was almost universal agreement that people prefer to engage in communities, both online and in-person, rather than a conference, particularly ones that have a lot of vendors. The PBCC was a significant sanity check for many of us during the lock-downs of the early stages of the SARS-2 pandemic. For the first few months we switched to weekly video calls so we could stay in touch and find out what was happening around the world.

Asynchronous, continuous online communities like ours provide something that most conference do not — time for reflection and deep conversations.

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better stories

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I watched and thoroughly enjoyed Ari Melber’s interview with author Yuval Noah Harari on MSNBC — Yuval Noah Harari on GOP losses, conspiracies, AI, religion & history. A few quotes stood out.

  1. “the most successful fiction ever created is not God, it’s money”
  2. “human beings think in stories, and the only thing that can defeat or displace a story is a better story”
  3. “the super-power of our species is not individual genius, it’s the ability to cooperate in large numbers. So if you really want to change something, join an organization or start an organization. But 50 people who cooperate as part of a community … can make a much bigger change than 500 isolated individuals.”

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the dying social bookmark

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I have been publicly promoting social bookmarks since 2005, when I was using a defunct tool called FURL. Since then I have used Magnolia, Delicious, Diigo, and Pinboard. The first two are gone and the last two seem to be waning. For example, I cannot access my account settings when logged-in to Pinboard. Others are having no luck getting support from Diigo.

What are social bookmarks? They are like bookmarks on your browser except they are available online from any device, they are searchable, and you can add metadata like hashtags and categories. They can be public or private. The most important aspect is that they are shareable. Here are my Diigo bookmarks and Pinboard pins, as examples.

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Meet me on Mastodon

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Last November, I started shifting my online networking from Twitter to Mastodon — Whither Twitter? Mastodon has now become my social network of choice. I’m starting to have better conversations though it’s not as active as my Twitter feed used to be, but that’s to be expected with 20 times fewer followers and I only follow about one fifth as many people as I did on Twitter. I will continue to invest in better conversations and knowledge sharing on Mastodon because it’s a platform I can trust.

For 15 years Twitter had been my go-to professional social network. The hell-scape that is now Twitter should be a wake-up call to take better control of our social networks. I have not deleted my account there because I do not want someone else to take my identity @hjarche. It’s now just a place I check every few days and post notices like my upcoming PKM workshop.

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new governance capabilities

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This is a follow-up from my post — diversity > learning > trust — where I said that these become the key elements in building better organizational structures that can help us differentiate between stark reality and blatant lies. These elements are how we should connect because it’s in the connections that we can make sense. The lack of diversity, the unwillingness to learn, and the lack of trust are what is dumbing so many people down.

I used the following model to show where we are in terms dominant organizational societal forms — based on Tribes, Institutions, Markets, or Networks — showing that we are currently in a phase-shift between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.

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ITA Jay Cross Award 2023

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The Internet Time Alliance Award — in memory of Jay Cross — is presented to a workplace learning professional who has contributed in positive ways to the field of Informal Learning and is reflective of Jay’s lifetime of work.

Recipients champion workplace and social learning practices inside their organization and/or on the wider stage. They share their work in public and often challenge conventional wisdom. The Award is given to professionals who continuously welcome challenges at the cutting edge of their expertise and are convincing and effective advocates of a humanistic approach to workplace learning and performance.

We announce the award on 5 July, Jay’s birthday

Following his death in November 2015, the partners of the Internet Time Alliance — Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and myself — resolved to continue Jay’s work. Jay Cross was a deep thinker and a man of many talents, never resting on his past accomplishments, and this award is one way to keep pushing our professional fields and industries to find new and better ways to learn and work.

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diversity > learning > trust

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“What is dumbing so many people down?” asks Henry Mintzberg. His explanations 1 and 2 [quote below with my emphasis added] resonate with me, as I have promoted the idea that we need to connect our work, our communities, and our networks to make sense by engaging with people and ideas. The core of this is curiosity, especially about other people, as well as ourselves.
Be a curious learner — about ideas, people, and oneself

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nineteen years of blogging

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“A knowledge worker is someone who’s job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto [and that’s what blogging lets you do, from anywhere]

Today marks my 19th anniversary of blogging here. This post is #3,566. I note that on my 5th anniversary I mentioned that I had started ‘micro-blogging’ on Twitter. Fast forward to November 2022 and I asked in whither Twitter if it will survive its new owner and CEO. I am still on Twitter though having more and often better conversations on Mastodon. The train wreck that Twitter has become reinforces the value of this blog and the open covenants on which it is based.

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the tragedy of stories

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What is the Tragedy of the Commons?

In economics and in an ecological context, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources. —Wikipedia

But the idea of the tragedy of the commons was disproved by Elinor Ostrom even before it was published by Garrett Hardin in 1968.

The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions. —The miracle of the commons

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there is a crack in everything

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As the pandemic emerged in 2020 I sought credible information and advice first from institutions and authorities and later from a network of expertise — encouraged to do-your-own-research — in view of growing misinformation and disinformation, even from authorities like the CDC and WHO. I am not the only person to turn to a networked solution — Twitter pandemic list — for my sensemaking in this pandemic.

The People’s CDC is a networked alternative source of credible information that bypasses the corridors of institutional power.

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