Communities

communities of interest and practice

knowledge flows at the speed of trust

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Transparency

Businesses that are open, transparent, and cooperative are more resilient because they rely on people, not processes. In a transparent organization there is no way to game the system as an individual. A transparent business focuses on long-term value, not short-term profit. It can also foster innovation, as diverse ideas come to the fore when people openly share their ideas. Workers become a social network, cooperating in order to make the organization better.

Knowledge networks are similar. They function well when they are 1) based on openness, which 2) enables transparency, and 3) in turn fosters diversity — all of which reinforce the basic principle of openness. In such a transparent workplace, the role of management is to give workers a job worth doing, the tools to do it, recognition of a job well done, and then let them manage themselves.

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strategic doing through agile sensemaking

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Cormac Russell has developed Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) which I see as a complementary model for Strategic Doing, especially Skill #3 — Identify the assets at your disposal, including the hidden ones. Cormac recently shared a thread on Twitter.

Here are a few paradoxes I’ve noticed at play in the dynamics between institutions & communities:

  1. The institutional paradox: Institutions are hardest to reach when you need or want them most. And most difficult to shake off when you need or want them least.
  2. Where there’s a danger that achieving the institutional mission will jeopardise the organisation’s future: Antibodies will be produced to kill off all such progressive efforts. Their prime directive: the institution’s survival matters more than fulfilling its mission.
  3. Past a particular scale or intensity, institutions will become counterproductive: producing the opposite of their stated intention, e.g. stupefying schools; crime producing prisons. (Illich)
  4. Bureaucracies following an iron rule: those who wish to elevate, support, & practically resource community alternatives will always be junior/subordinate to those who want to feature their professional & institutional capacities above citizens and the communities they serve.
  5. The more professionals talk about “community power”, the less power communities actually have and the more disabling institutions are. While where citizens and professionals openly talk about institutional limits and the dangers of disabling professions, the more powerful communities are and the more enabling professionals can be.

—@CormacRussell 2022-03-04

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sensemaking networks

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Where have you been getting your news about the pandemic or the invasion of Ukraine? Mainstream media? Twitter?

And of course some of what I end up reading through Twitter originates with traditional news outlets like the Times or CNN. But Twitter is simply faster than any other medium at picking up the shifting momentum of a global event like the Ukrainian conflict. You see the street-level demonstrations in St. Petersburg and Moscow the second they erupt. You pick up reports about EU nations rallying around the proposition of kicking Russia off of SWIFT. You get real-time expert assessment walking through the challenges of an occupying army holding a city of Kyiv’s size, or the potential pain that the West could inflict on Putin’s inner circle of oligarchs — ideas that usually won’t make it to the op-ed pages for another day or two. —Networks Versus Tanks

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getting to a new normal

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The global pandemic has been a wake up call and an opportunity. It has shocked our market economy and society. Over the past two decades we have seen many experiments and movements toward a more equitable, sustainable way of living on this planet. We have made the rules for how we are governed and how the economy works. We can change them. We cannot change how the planet’s environment works. We cannot change the laws of physics. We cannot change how the SARS CoV-2 virus acts, as much as we would like to.

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the power of social learning

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On 26 January I will be presenting on — The Power of Social Learning: Building Knowledge, Community, and Trust — hosted by Valamis LXP. Several questions have already been submitted by some of the over 150 participants registered so far and I will not have time to address most of these. Instead, I will try to answer these here — by topic — though they mostly do not directly reflect the content of the presentation. Some of these questions would require much more contextual understanding to give an adequate response and others could make for a month-long consulting assignment.

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learning from the influenza pandemic

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In July 2018, one hundred years after the influenza pandemic began, Extra Credits started a 6 part animated series to explain what happened. Little did they know what would happen 18 months later. The series is great for all ages and does simplify many aspects of a complex situation but I think they have done a good job. This series seen in light of the current pandemic shows how human behaviour, power elites, and vested interests have not changed in the past century. We have a better understanding of the science than we did in 1918 and our tools are much more sophisticated but we are acting pretty well the same as they did then.

Episode One covers the initial cases discovered in the USA and Canada and how these were covered up by authorities. Remember, there was a global war still going on.

Episode Two examines what happened in the trench fighting in Europe and how it was only when the disease hit neutral Spain, which did not censor the press, that it became known as the Spanish Flu. If you want to give it a geographical name, the North American Flu would be more accurate, even though it may have originated in China.

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creativity needs just enough social connections

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During this pandemic and various lockdowns  there have been many discussions about the need for physical contact and how it supports creativity.

The writer and scientist, Isaac Asimov, reflected on — How do people get new ideas? — after a short stint at an MIT spinoff company in 1959. New ideas are not often received well by those in positions or power or influence Asimov noted.

It is only afterward that a new idea seems reasonable. To begin with, it usually seems unreasonable. It seems the height of unreason to suppose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them moving, and so on.

A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

Once you have the people you want, the next question is: Do you want to bring them together so that they may discuss the problem mutually, or should you inform each of the problem and allow them to work in isolation?

My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Asimov felt that isolation is required for creativity.

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masterclasses

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Several times over the past few years I have been asked to conduct online masterclasses to help organizations with their internal change initiatives, such as — digital transformation, distributed work, & online community building. These sessions are 1/2 day (±4 hours) and have from 20 to 60 participants. Each one is focused on the needs of the client which we discuss in advance. Here are the various components that we have used.

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active transportation

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This is a presentation I am giving to Sackville Town Council.

Thank you for allowing me to address council this evening. I would like to discuss active transportation in our town. I am not an expert in this field but I have cycled over 125,000 kilometres since moving here in 1998 and much of that distance has been within town limits. I know our roadways — intimately.

Bicycles are not the only form of active transportation. Town council has recently allowed skateboards on our streets. In addition, there has been a significant increase in the use of electric bikes, often by older adults. This trend will likely continue given what we are seeing elsewhere.

As you know, Sackville recently won the ParticipAction active community challenge for New Brunswick. As the town has claimed, Sackville is a different kind of small town. We have a continuing history of unique road users — horses, hay wagons, logging trucks — and we usually use the roads in harmony. Vulnerable road users — walkers, runners, cyclists, skateboarders — are fellow citizens using our public thoroughfares.

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facebook is not a trusted space

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The time has come. Facebook is in the news today and not as the tech media darling it likes to portray itself as.

“Former Facebook (FB.O) employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen will urge the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to regulate the social media giant, which she plans to liken to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.” —Reuters 2021-10-04

In 2007, I asked if we need an alternative to Facebook — As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming.

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