Facilitating Change

I’ve been thinking about how to better document events for a while now. This came up again today during the OpenEverything organizing call. Documentation falls into a sad communication grey zone. The poor cousin of Event Design and Faciliation. Too many times an after-thought left to one or few people.

Example: At the 2007 Telelcentre Leaders Forum, before the Global Knowledge Partnership meeting in Kuala Lumpur, my team of telecentre.org Community Facilitators worked for many hours after a long day of sessions to capture everything. They never complained but it was hard for them to both participate in the Forum and document it. I was also concerned that they were missing out on valuable networking time. After the event, I spent days pulling everything together into a report. Not something I would have been able to do if not my full-time job. Here’s a video of them. (Karim, I don’t know what you’re saying in Arabic but it better be nice!)

OK, enough ranting. (BTW telecentre.org has seriously grown its team of Community Facilitators. Yay!)

The solution? Social Reporting. A way to think ahead and be clear about who owns the the documentation and followup task and what they need to do, while at the same time distributing it to event participants already using social media. Think of it as a mix of better documentation and crowdsourcing.

Make it easy for folks to share — figure out the tag for your event beforehand and publicize it like crazy. You’d be amazed how much information you can get from aggregating microblogs — add in some good blogposts and photos and you’re in business.

I learned about Social Reporting practices from Dave Wilcox. He and Bev Trayner have done some great thinking on this. They’ve created a wiki and a  Social Reporting Toolkit — one of the best-written guides I’ve read. Ever. (Yes, I actually read the whole thing. Can’t wait to use it.) And I see looking through Bev’s site that she’s been busy creating another guide: Learning activities: some communication tools for communities of practice events. Makes me think of some of Bellanet‘s wonderful work.

Final note: As the person who has had to dig though many a folder of unmarked photos (although less now, thanks Flickr + Creative Commons), I think it is important to extend empathy forward. This is the core principle of knowledge sharing; if you don’t document then your event does not exist for those who were not able to attend. And no one can learn from you. So I encourage the people I work with to add basic information to their artifacts — the outputs of documentation — that will enable others to contribute to the conversation and create materials about similar topics or issues. Explaining who or what is in the picture, why it’s important, and giving a sense of the context helps others immensely. This also means reccomending that participants use a Creative Commons license so others can build on their work.