mtl3p

This guy left a comment that I think is really interesting. I want it to be an entry. Is this bad blogging etiquette? I figure I can get away with it because I am the small fry of the blogosphere.

It’s about the “organizational storytelling” (the narratives of orgs). How cool is that? Definitely my new favorite term.

———-
“You’re right on the mark…story is the fabric of our lives. Every relationship, every object, every experience is stored in the mind as a story. Story is the oldest most proven way we humans learning information, make sense and meaning of our world. Now…we have the choice to choose the right stories for whatever reality we want to create. Memory (past), dreams (future), and identity (present) are three dimensions of story that one can consciously work with, at both the individual and organizational levels.

If interested, check out the 4th annual Smithsonian conference on organizational storytelling going on this weekend April 16-18th in Washington DC (which I’m helping to organize)
http://www.stevedenning.com/Smithsonian04.html.

Also launching on Thursday, April 15th with be http://www.storyatwork.com - a web site for our community of practice on organizational storytelling (GoldenFleece) with a compendium of resources, tools, examples, consultants, etc…relevant for the fields of story-based approaches to knowledge management, branding, marketing, strategic planning, fundraising, social change, etc…

Also check out “The Story Factor” by Annette Simmons - one of my favorite recent books on org story.

Story is indeed a social connector and the juice by which we connect, exchange, transact, belong, inspire, and ultimately transform our world.”
———

What’s also funny about this is the way that he found about my post. He probably found it via this guy who rights about nonprofit orgs who found it via Seb’s post (and I’m positive that Seb only read my blog because I commented on his one of his blog entries the day before).

Someone else checked out Seb’s post, and wrote an entry about it. I found out about it randomly while I was checking out the stats on my weblog. (And yes, if your wondering, I will check out a site if I get more than 2 hits from it. That’s how you act when you’re a mini-blogger). Anyways, so I responded to it. That’s probably the last thing he was expecting. Especially because he disagrees with what I said in the entry and then says “Simplistic? Of course. But since no one reads this except the ëbots, Iím sticking to it :-)”. (I can’t link to his entry with my comment - the permalink doesn’t include a link to see comments. Annoying).

It’s all kinda silly, but it also makes you realize how much the blogging system sucks. You lose control of and relation to your information way too easily.

The whole thing makes me wish I’d written the original post a lot better.

I’m submitting a bunch of posts in my blog as homework for one of my classes. The assignment was to write about community (either reactions to news articles, class readings, or other).

Professor A. , thanks for being open-minded.

I know I said I wouldn’t be blogging, but it turns out I have to write a few more entries as part of a homework assignment. And I got some things I want to say.

I was at Cafe Utopik tonight with my trusty laptop. During the time that I was there I saw 4-5 other people with laptops. Two of them used the network (three if you include the guy that surreptitiously snaked an ethernet cable to the router). It made me so mad that we were all using the internet in exactly the same way that we do at home / office. I know that we‘re going to get there, but the ridiculousness of it was so apparent. It felt like such a waste.

Then a table full of clients took out instruments of their bags and started jamming, Celtic-style. I realized that if I had brought my (admittedly geeky-looking) headset I could have used the mike (which works very well) and skype to share the acoustic environment with any of my friends or (or acquaintances if they were especially bored). Especially with the the conference calling feature (up to 4 people) in the latest version.

[The next bit stems from a blog entry I read reviewing skype. The guy used it with a friend, talked a bit and then just . . . left it on. Didn’t hang up. They both did work for the next hour, overhearing what was happening in the others space. The author commented that he never would have thought of this kind of thing with long-distance, no matter how cheap it becomes.]

A friend contacted me on IM from Japan. I would have loved to used skype with him. Not to talk to him, I was happy conversing with him via text, but to let him share where I was, and maybe get off on a little bit of Canada (In fact said friend probably would have regarded this as annoying). We’ve all heard cyberspace described as the place you are with a friend during a long-distance phone call. I wonder if using p2p telephony programs in the way described above shifts cyberspace from this kind of “other” third space (not as in third place) to more of a superimposition of the two environments of the participants, taking aspects from each.

Similarly I met someone at Utopik who wanted to do an event of videoconferencing between Utopik and some people he knew from some university south of Bamako, Mali that had high-speed. I suggested having a regular afternoon or evening each month where the connection is “left on”. Set it up so that it is possible for two people to have a relatively private conversation, but have mike picking up the general sounds and setup the webcam with a wide view of the cafe. If people choose to interact spontaneously, great. If not, it’s still a fascinating, if potentially awkward (and frustrating?), glimspe into another culture.

Interesting links I found while googling during this post.
Media spaces(pdf), Uses for video walls, Narrative Spaces: bridging architecture and entertainment via interactive technology(pdf)

And I read in the Economist about a public, free, outdoor videoconferencing wall that are being setup in two cities in Europe for just such random interaction. If anybody can find a link for that, let me know.

I sent emails to two people I don’t know yesterday. I found out about these people through YulBlog.

I wanted to bookmark some of the blogs that I’ve checked through YulBlog so I went through about 1/2 of yulblog yesterday. It made me wonder if it constitutes a community. I know that there are clear boundaries (whether you blog, live in montreal, and/or go to YulBlog meetings). However, I’m not sure if the people that constitute Yulblog imagine (1)the community in similar ways.

A few articles in Friday’s Globe and Mail that reminded me why I do what I do. Quote from the article In a skeptical, urbanized country, volunteers are an endangered species”.

“a sense of community seems in decline and the reasons are varied and complicated” . . . “There is also the matter of urbanization. People in a small community feel a link to others in the community, even those they do not know, whereas there might be no such empathy felt in a city with those barely a block away. And with 80 per cent of the country now urbanized - with 55 per cent of the population found within the four big city centers of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and the Edmonton-Calgary corridor - the detachment is only going to increase.”

Then a story on last week’s ruling on p2p sharing: “Are we surfers or serfs?”

“All communications and a great deal of commerce, not just listening to music , are going to be completely digitized, and sooner rather than later. Unless we are watchful and outspoken, a few big corporate and government forces will get even more scary powers to control on-line activity for their own benefit and profit”.

Neither of the stories are exactly news-breaking, but they are important and I’m glad that they are getting space next to the more “exciting” news.

Interesting couple of days. On Wednesday I had coffee with Prof Leslie Regan Shade. Professor Shade is a Communications prof and a researcher with CRACIN(Canadian Research Alliance For Community Innovation And Networking). Ile Sans Fil is just the latest generation of community networks, so I’m eager to find out what lessons we can learn through her about our predecessors. She invited Steve Pariso, a student of hers, somebody I’ve wanted to meet for a couple of months now.

The we went to hear Dr. Julian Sefton-Green speak about children creating content online. After I snuck along to the pub with him, two professors from the Digital Girls research group and someone from GameCODE.

Talking with the lead of Digital Girls group (Dep. of Education), they are embarking on the same discussion we are having at GameCODE. What kind of website do we need, what communication tools do we use, how much of our workings do we keep private vs public? Since we’ve already done a lot of looking around I’m interested in helping them set up their system.

Thursday I met with Karen, a law student who is giving us a hand at IleSansFil. Then we had a GameCODE meeting. So far the wiki has been adopted very partially. About half the group doesn’t even know how to use it.

After class I walked by three of our hotspots to see if they had put up the signs and instruction sheets that Daniel had handed out. I ran into Alex using the connection at Cafe Utopik and Benoit working at Cafe Tribune. I dragged them both to respond to a request from Miriam for extra hands making cables to redo the network at StudioXX. That was pretty fun and we got some free Thai food out of the deal.

All of this is almost exciting enough to forget that I’m poor and have a late assignment to hand in. Almost.

That’s interesting - when I look at the two posts that have been more “personal” on this blog they are both about the same thing, one’s ability to change narrative. The first post concerned a person’s ability to change narrative in terms of adopting a new religion. I doubted (and still doubt) the ability to do because it seemed too arbitrary and self-conscious.

Then, yesterdays post reasserted ones ability to conciously “construct a story that better helps them live their lives”. To better represent myself, I’m not sure whether one has the power to choose one’s narrative - the story according to which one lives one’s life. But then I look at my encounter with feminist theory, and how I have taken that and used it to shift my version of the world. Also, the best thing about being diagnosed with ADD in my late teens was that it allowed me to re-create my own personal narrative. I re-ordered and re-valued many events of my life according to that diagnosis. Both of those things allowed me to shift, paradigmatically, my version of my life and of the world (ie. my narrative).

This is all stuff that I’m very still much in the process of figuring out. I’m very aware that I’m not well-read in the stuff that I’m talking about. If anybody wants to suggest books which could help me fill in the gaps, I’m all ears.

I killed my Friendster self two days ago. Not even a pang. Sorry,John. That probably dropped your # of friends from 103,457 to 78,283.

Reflecting on where to go with my blog. I’ve definitly passed the Blogger’s high that all newbies seem to go through. Now I’m kinda waiting to see what I do with this - I’m not going to force it.

Related - I was a factor into getting someone to join the blogverse. I think that it would be cool to see a section on each blog telling who the main influence to get one started blogging. This person, a friend at Concordia, might link to me (or to someone else, I didn’t ask her), I would link to Boris, Boris would link to someone. Do a little perl programing (know how to do that part), stick it into a flash accessible database (don’t know that part), and you would have a much more interesting social map then friendster. We would get to see the blogging “grampa’s” (or possibly “gramma’s”?).

We just finished a meeting of University of the Streets Cafe. The theme was kind of a meta-conversation about the future of the organization sp. in regarding to extending it’s very successfull methodology to other groups interested in hosting their own cafes. There were 10-12 of us, including people from groups like Heads-and-Hands. I’m here because I’m interested in helping them find out what communication tools allow participants to capitalize on the energy from each event. This post is mainly to show to Eric and Janice the suitability of a Content Management System (blog) for their organization.