Communities

communities of interest and practice

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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ITA Jay Cross Award 2021

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internet time allianceThe 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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Budge Wilson 1927-2021

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budge wilson dalhousie university
Budge Wilson — Dalhousie University

I rarely write personal posts here but I want to collect some of what has been shared online by the extended community following the death of acclaimed writer, Budge Wilson, on 19 March 2021. We will miss her.

Nova Scotia

Best known as a children’s author, she wrote more than 30 books for all ages.

“She isn’t entirely gone,” Andrea Wilson, Budge’s daughter, said Sunday. “She’s left a legacy through her writing, and through the people she’s inspired.”

Wilson began her writing career later in life, publishing her first book in 1984 when she was 56, according to a biography from Dalhousie University, her alma mater and the home to her personal archives. —CBC Nova Scotia

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platforms and the precariat

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Is it possible to be a musician today and earn a middle class income?

The music industry is fundamentally broken up into three separate arms: recorded music, music licensing and live music. Where recorded music — physical album sales — was once the bread-and-butter for musicians, first the advent of piracy platforms like Napster, and then the gradual shift to streaming services like Spotify, Amazon and Apple Music made that framework unsustainable.

“In order for me to earn a minimum wage, an annual minimum wage of $30,000, I need to gain six million streams at the average royalty rate of half a cent per listen,” [musician] Sainas said. “That’s unattainable.” —CBC 2021-03-11

In 2005, the oft-quoted business guru, Seth Godin suggested that the long tail would provide for middle class entrepreneurs and musicians.

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What is the Zollman effect?

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In a series of three posts, Jonathan Weisberg explains the Zollman effect. Here are some highlights.

What is the Zollman effect?

“More information generally means a better chance at discovering the truth, at least from an individual perspective. But not as a community, Zollman finds, at least not always. Sharing all our information with one another can make us less likely to reach the correct answer to a question we’re all investigating.”

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stories for the network age

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The TIMN model [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] developed by David Ronfeldt has influenced much of my own work in looking at how we are moving toward a network society and must create organizational forms that are beyond national governments and beyond markets. Even combining the efforts of civil society, governments, and markets will not be enough to address our greatest challenges — climate change and environmental degradation.

These have been my assumptions to date.

  1. The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
  2. Each form builds on the other and changes it.
  3. The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (witness the emerging pandemic-induced recession and its influence on national governance)
  4. A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
  5. This form has also been called the noosphere.
  6. I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
  7. I believe we are currently in 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.
  8. This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.

David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla have recently published an update of their original 1999 work on the ‘Noosphere’ — Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft.

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non-violence + 3.5%

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How many people does it take to change an organization or a society?

Minority groups need 25% to influence the majority in a society. But it only takes 10% if the group is committed with unshakeable belief. Inside an organization, the right mix of people requires only 3% to influence 85% of their colleagues. There is more information about these figures here — 25-10-3

Harvard University Professor Erica Chenoweth’s research is influencing protest movements with her findings — in first being non-violent, and secondly understanding how many people have to get involved with the movement. In the USA this would be just over 11 million people. In Canada it would be 1.3 million.

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ITA Jay Cross Award 2020

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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.

Read more