The map emerged from perceiving coworking spaces are next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create. (More on this note: Wayan Vota, Chris Coward, Meaghan O’Connor, Patrick Tanguay, and Christine… I’m sure you could send us more examples!).

The map is supposed to articulate how public-access venues (libraries, telecentres, cybercafes) and co-location/working/production spaces are connected. We were trying to go beyond access to technology while acknowledging its role and ubiquitousness, and to highlight the importance of access to people in innovation and development.

We’re hoping that this framework can help us think about both the theoretical and practical aspects of innovation grounds (design, support, research, policy, etc.).

Development agencies and practitioners should take a closer look at innovation grounds. Figure out how you can make them work for you — and how you can build on existing efforts. Similarly, national and local governments should seek out and leverage innovation grounds: libraries, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, community wireless groups. They’re out there. Start connecting. (And remember there are resources out there. One example is the US IMPACT Study — based on their research they prepared a wonderful toolkit to help libraries document successes and build understanding and support.)

Tell us what you think. Does this framework spark anything for you?

— Christine Prefontaine & Silvia Caicedo

(Shout outs: The term innovation grounds was inspired by Karen Fisher’s concept of “information grounds“. The term “commonspace” comes from Mark Surman. And writing this included a mental walkthrough of the facilities and approach of Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, Montreal’s Station C and Foulab, various libraries we love, and all of the wonderful people and places that we came into contact with while working at IDRC on telecentre.org.)

Okay this is very geeky. And I’m not really a geek. So I’m in territory that’s far beyond the edges of my understanding. I may have this wrong. But as of tonight I got WordPress to do what I wanted to. So there.

How do I get WordPress to display everything in my website tagged “publications” AND “employability”?

After looking for “WordPress multiple tags” allover the place I realized my novice self was not even searching for the right terms. What I should have been looking for is “WordPress taxonomy intersections unions” (e.e.: always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question). Sounds kinda kinky if you ask me. Here’s what I’ve found on this so far (see especially this, with a comment from Jeremy, nice!). The important part:

• INTERSECTION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications,employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications,employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications OR employability
• UNION
  http://www.yoursite.org/?tag=publications+employability
  http://www.yoursite.org/tag/publications+employability/
  — either of these return posts with the tags publications AND employability

Annoying thing is, it won’t tell you so at the top of the page. It will appear as if it is just returning posts with the first tag. If I understand correctly there’s a way to fix this by messing around with the wp-includes/canonical.php. But that’s waaaaay beyond my PHP skillz (!).

So… in the interim I found this nice little plugin. It’s odd but works for now displaying the union of two tags, and you can specify that it shows just what is in a particular category. Example

• All content tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/
• Just content in resources category tagged publications and employability:
  http://yoursite.org/category/resources/?tdo_tag=publications+employability/

accros within a category. It may not be scalable. But it will do for my dev site until I have everything figured out enough to hire a proper programmer.

PS. Please don’t add comments to this post asking for more details. A bunch of you did that last time I posted something I learned on WordPress. Truth is: I don’t know. I’m muddling through this stuff too!

Tips before you begin:

• The reader should be able to get the gist of your findings and their implications from reading the title and summary. Since every word counts, so you’ll need to do some careful wordsmithing, writing and re-writing these a few times. You may want to do this part last.
• Language should balance precision and accessibility. Use plain English, avoiding jargon and acronyms. Define obscure terms and explain complex concepts.
• Your research abstract (in the front matter — topic for another post) is a good place to start because you’ve already had to think through what’s most important.
• Remember the purpose: To enable independent, rigorous research to guide policy and practice.
• Briefs are also intended to promote dissemination/downloads of the full research paper and to promote our work.

Format

Two-sided 8.5×11-inch paper. Easy to print from typical black-and-white office printer. Maximum 1000 words.

Topic

Main topic. One or two words. Ideally this should map to your core research areas. Examples: Public Access, Employability, Youth, Disabilities

Country/Region

Insert geographic region

Title

A short, pithy title (8-12 words).

Summary

One or two sentences with main takeaway message: the “so what?” — no more than 30 words.

Background

Describe the social or economic challenge. Tell us about the context. If applicable, describe the program(s). What are we trying to achieve?

Research Design

Describe the methodology, number of people in sample, limitations, etc.

Findings

Summarize your most important findings. Include at least one chart or graph to illustrate. Qualitative research can be illustrated with quotes.

So what?

Policy, program, or research implications. This is the most important section of the brief. What do these findings mean for people making policy or funding decisions? For folks designing programs targeting similar populations? For researchers investigating similar topics or considering using a similar methodology? How can your research make a difference?

Source

Insert the name of the full publication and where folks can get it.

Example:

Pal, J., Freistadt, J., Frix, M., & Neff, P. 2009. Technology for employability in Latin America: Research with at-risk youth & people with disabilities. Seattle: Technology & Social Change Group, University of Washington.

Download the full publication at tascha.washington.edu.

Sponsors

Include sponsor information. After all, it was pretty nice of them to give you all of those thousands (or millions!) of dollars to ask important questions and hang out with cool people. If research is part of a specific project include a sentence or two on that.

Example:

This research was supported by a grant from Microsoft Community Affairs under the Unlimited Potential Community Technology Skills Program.

The Technology & Social Change Group

Include your organizational boilerplate. Here’s ours:

The Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington Information School explores the design, use, and effects of information and communication technologies in communities facing social and economic challenges. With experience in 50 countries, TASCHA brings together a multidisciplinary network of social scientists, engineers, and development practitioners to conduct research, advance knowledge, create public resources, and improve policy and program design. Our purpose? To spark innovation and create more opportunities for those who need it most. To learn more visit tascha.washington.edu.

Copyright & Creative Commons

Make it easy for others to promote and build on your work. Open research rocks! We use something like this:

© The University of Washington. All rights reserved. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Let me know how this works for you and if you have any questions. Samples would also be cool — I’ll add them here. Or you can leave a comment and email me the file to add to your comment.

Groups is another awesome Identica feature. By placing an exclamation mark in front of a word you can make it part of a group. Example: Tonight I discovered !shortrecipes. Recipes in 140 characters or less. Do you need any other reason to love this app?

Oh… and I nearly forgot. Karl made this t-shirt. Made me laugh.

And think of that naughty Wii vs. PlayStation 3 video. Which, yes, I know is evil ;)

My focus here is on developing a better way to work for distributed, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural teams. More specifically research teams, international development projects, social change initiatives.

I’ll add the resources I find so far to this post. So it will get updated as I find new ones and learn which are most helpful.

If you have anything you think I should look at please let me know.

—— a crazy mix of everything for now ——

Bookmarks

Gary M. Olson & Judith S. Olson. “Distance Matters,” in Human Computer Interaction. School of Information, University of Michigan. (Download PDF)

Karen Sobel Lojeski, Richard Reilly, Peter Dominick, “Multitasking and Innovation in Virtual Teams,” hicss, pp.44b, 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’07), 2007

Tracey P. Lauriault and D. R. Fraser Taylor (2005) “Cybercartography and the New Economy: Collaborative Research in Action,” Chapter 8 in Cybercartography: Theory and Practice. Edited by D. R. F. Taylor.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) annual conferences. The 2009 conference website has a good summary of prior CHI conferences.

Facilitating online: A course leader’s guide. Tony Carr, Shaheeda Jaffer and Jeanne Smuts. 2009. Published by the Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town. (More for online educators but looks helpful for practical tips and explanations.)

Adaptive Path’s case study about developing Ashoka’s Changemakers website — with a distributed team.

I’ve not yet read the whole paper, but sharing this part because found it helpful. It’s practical information to keep in mind to develop a strategy that works.

Descriptive Characteristics of University-based Research Groups

1. The reliance on short-term support from students thus causing turnover issues.
2. Students hired into these projects are given the ‘‘unfaculty’’ title as they do not adhere to a particular discipline and are of a different status than professors.
3. The limitations of funding often impedes travel and face-to-face interaction at conferences and thus time and resources allocated to networking is often scarce for smaller projects.
4. Balancing size and innovation; often the smaller the group the lesser the innovation; while a very large group requires too much structure.
5. Time pressures are significant since in academia the quantity of publications at times is considered more important than their quality.
6. Campus location and space is often an issue, in particular access to meeting space
7. Teaching tends to take priority over project demands
8. Researchers often do not like to disassociate themselves from their disciplinary institutions for fear of ‘‘out of mind out of sight’’ issues.
9. The advantage of a university setting, however, is access to a wide array of intellectual and infrastructure resources.
10. Organizational culture is a factor for these groups since, in a university setting, people choose to work on problems they like since there is no incentive to do otherwise, which increases the level of commitment
11. Often, but not always, a university setting is generally considered egalitarian — reducing the friction between the disciplines.

Adapted from Epton et al. (1983), Managing Interdisciplinary Research.

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.

• 7:00-16:30 — What works? What sucked? Learning so far
• 22:00 -28:00 — Summary of Montreal events (+me ranting a bit, sorry video folks)
• 42:30-45:42 — Monthly meetings in Germany, how they get folks from design, theatre, medicine (this part was especially cool for me because Patrick is in Berlin this month and he spoke about Station C at the monthly OpenEverything meetup)

My takeaways:

• A mix of pre-planned and open sessions is best. Generates more interest. Start online with a wiki ahead of time so people can propose topics and sessions and you can start to see trends. Choose themes.
• Take the time to curate — to seed events with knowledgeable folks.
• Make sure you get diverse takes on “open” — reach out to those who don’t even know they need to be there and give them an opportunity to go onstage (example: give them a speed geek session).
• Three-day offsite retreat very hard. Would not repeat. One-day events best, capturing local energy important.
• Figure out the venue first.
• Don’t make it too long, scares folks off. Even if you start at 9AM most people will only show up at around 11AM.
• Take time to explain unconference practices. Put them online first. Take the best learning from BarCamp (see Crystal Williams, Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp).
• Need to develop a template for future organizers.
• Documentation (photo, video, blog) needs to be a job. Someone needs to own it. Commit to packaging the outcome afterward. (For ideas on this see Social Reporting.)
• WEAK: Post-event summaries and followup.
• BEST PRACTICE: Only video the speed geeks and the report-out/synthesis pieces. That way you don’t need to edit; video can go directly online (this is what they did in Toronto).

We decided to explore holding OpenEverything in many cities worldwide on September 26, 2009. This way we build momentum and can support each other as we organize. If you want to help out with the Montreal event you can get on the MontrealOuvert mailing list, hosted by our dear friends at Koumbit.

But it seems that donors, sponsors, shareholders, or whatever you call those lovely folks you depend on, love them. Or at least they demand them. Sorta like Rumpelstiltskin. He provides what you need to get your work done and demands a steep payment in return: the output of your lifeforce. But he hasn’t really thought through what he’s going to do with that payment once he collects it. Can you picture Rumpelstiltskin changing diapers? Do donors actually read these long, mind-numbingly boring documents? But, as usual, I digress.

The catch: there’s some important critical info in those reports. It’s good to know what you’ve achieved. Documenting your accomplishments and failures matters. Your organization’s stories matter. Knowing where you’ve been and where you’re going and all that. Trick is to make sure you’re gathering and sharing the info that will work for you.

But there is a way. Call it out. Admit that annual reports are boring. Have some fun. That’s what the brilliant folks at the Amazon Conservation Association did. Enrique Ortiz, co-founder of the ACA, awesome Peruvian biologist, and one of my mostfavorite people ever, shared with me their masterpiece: The Los Amigos Moore Project Final Report, NON-BORING VERSION (download PDF, 5.5MB).

I read it. Twice. And so did the people at the Moore Foundation (yes, that Moore — a huge donor to things Amazon, as well as to Conservation International). Rumor has it one of the first reports read widely cover to cover. Ever ever.

The comic was produced with an application that turns photos into illustrations. Will ask Enrique and post name of it in the comments. Yes, I’m sure it took a lot of time to produce. But I bet you the team felt energized after creating it. It’s a wonderful example for the rest of us. Thanks ACA!

The guide was very hard to write. Kept getting blocked. It’s so much easier to write here. And I noticed that when I moved it from the document to a series of blog posts I felt freer to insert my voice and my ideas flowed better. Maybe I should write blogs first. I also found that I did not like writing for paper (it’s meant to be published in the Telecentre Magazine). I love books and newspapers and magazines but I kept wanting to put in links and was annoyed when I could not.

For now the guide exists as a document and a series of blogs, so people can post comments that I can use to keep improving it. But I actually think it should be a wiki. Project for another day.

Rules
1. When you first arrive start by listening
2. Write the topics that interest you on a sticky
3. If someone has already suggested the same topic put a heart on it [stickers were made available]
4. Enter into the conversation by following the flow

Non-Rules
1. We discuss ideas, not business
2. Everyone has the right to express their opinion and to disagree politely
3. The moderator is the prince, not the king
4. Follow the flow!

Warning: I have a spotty attention span. So what follows is a list of the shiny stuff.

We discussed the face-to-face versus online communication and communities. The points that stuck with me are what you’d expect.

Face-to-face

• so much more bandwidth
• million times richer
• get instant feedback via non-verbal cues, animal instincts
• silence means something
• synchronous: can move together faster
• can build a common territory quickly
• allows serendipity
• enriches subsequent online connections

Online

• can create communities not bounded by geography
• reduced inhibitions can facilitate self-expression and connecting with others
• easier then to follow up f2f
• negative side: always in your bubble of people who think like you
• online: packets with beginnings and endings

Mike: It’s all one community. No distinction between online and offline. Increasingly people have a foot in both.

Sylvain: Une augmentation qui nous diminue. Increased dependence on technology can diminish us. It may be that online does not augment does not augment each other. People are less with you when they’ve got their laptop open. Not totally focused.

Twitter as ambient intimacy. Later I was talking to Mitch that sometimes I feel badly about reading people’s tweets, like I’m stalking them. He mentioned that he wrote a post a while back where he called it “permission-based stalking”) see his recent post and the original post.

Mitch: Loss of serendipity. Not much of a conversation anymore. Each blog posts destroys the previous one and ends the prior conversation. Twitter is only PR. There’s just content and more content. Serendipity is important because allows you to find wonderful things you were not looking for. To expand your circle.

I disagreed with Mitch on loss of conversation and using comments as a metric. That’s only one way to tell. Conversations are the sharing and exchange of ideas and opinions, which can happen in many ways and over time. Just because I don’t leave a comment on your blog doesn’t mean that what you wrote did not touch me or that I won’t respond later. Also I may read something you wrote and then share or discuss it with someone else. It’s like trying to document the result of events. You can try but you’ll always miss a lot unless folks report back to you. Bringing people together matters and it’s critical and you’ll just never know if a year or ten later a connection made at the event you through resulted in wondrous change.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

Non-profits and social-change initiatives should look closely at how micro-sharing can work for them, as well as folks interested in knowledge sharing and communications (idea here is to create conversations among a community that you can eavesdrop on and then pull out the good bits to feed back in or broadcast). I’ve already posted on uses of Twitter at the end of my Blogging for Good Governance article. And been thinking about how Identica (an open-source alternative to Twitter) and SMS can be used to create a real-time support network in places with limited connectivity.

Here in Montreal the people in the community that I’m a part of on Twitter and Identica regularly ask each other questions and get quick responses via text. Topics range from the best iPhone plan to new vegetarian recipes. I also like how micro-blogging or micro-sharing is fun — no need to write too much. Less thinking, more flow.

As I write this I think that “micro” is the word of the week. At the new Montreal NetSquared meetup last week (hosted by Station C) Peter Deitz told us about his “micro-philanthropy” project, Social Actions, that makes it easier to share and connect to actions: work, donate, sign, meet.

This is what I love about the web — we can break seemingly insurmountable and complex tasks into fun, manageable pieces and work on them together. We haven’t yet solved the tragedy of the commons, but I see great hope in the “creativity of the commons”.

• Brian Solis, The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases and Steve Kayser’s comment on it.
• Jeremiah Owyang, How Brands Will Use FriendFeed
• Richard MacManus,  Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who’s Doing It?
• Sarah Perez, The Future of Blogging Revealed (on lifestreaming)

Was just able to skim through… but lots to ponder.

Reading an ebooks is just “another way” to be reading, it’s not necessarily a replacement of a hard copy of a book. After all, I prefer to talk to people face-to-face, but I recognize the utility of the telephone. One does not replace the other. In fact, they are complimentary. I’d suggest the same could be said of ebooks and books.

And, if I haven’t convinced you about ebooks, consider this: you could spread the entire corpus of written human knowledge (pre-1923) everywhere in the world, essentially for free, using ubiquitous ebook readers already in the hands of just about every teacher in even the poorest countries in the world: that is, the mobile phone.

More…

While you’re at it, check out the Book Oven Blog, a great place for lovers of books, making books, and our relationship with text.

(B)log on to Some Ideas is part of the CCA’s Journées de la culture and will include video, music, and free access to the Some Ideas on Living and Will Alsop: OCAD, An Urban Manifesto exhibits.

The CCA has a new wifi network, so you can bring your laptop join in on the conversation, in person and online. (On that note, check out Tips for Conference Bloggers — a great resource.)

Both recommended:

• Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples

Joost’s list:

• Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
• Orlando Figes, A Peoples Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
• Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai Shek: Chinas Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost
• Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game
• Anthony Beevor, Stalingrad
• Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
• Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa

Patrick’s list:

• Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August & A Distant Mirror
• Simon Schama, Citizens
• Ron Chernows, Biography of Hamilton
• Antonia Frasers, Biography of Mary Queen of Scot
• Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War & The Cash Nexus
• Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club
• Matther Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic
• David Fromkin, The War to End All Peace
• David Lewis, The Race to Fashoda
• Riczard Kapuchinski, Imperium
• Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople
• Robert Man, Genghis Khan: Life, Death, Resurrection
• Roy Jenkins, Churchill
• Richard Winston, Charlemagne
• John Keegan, A History of Warfare
• Don Cook, Charles De Gaulle
• Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan
• Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason
• Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization

Now I just have to find the time to read…

The article gives a great overview, but it does not provide any practical links. So here they are:

• Anonymous Blogging Guide: A step-by-step way to protecting your privacy and your safety
• Blog for a Cause: How to use blogs as advocacy tools for political and social change (in English, Spanish, Arabic)

Beyond using blogs, people are also using cell phones (see FrontlineSMS and Mobile Active) and Twitter for similar types of work (see Andy Carvin’s Can Twitter Save Lives?, Ethan Zuckerman’s Never thought of using it that way…, and the KM4Dev’s community’s Twitter knowledgebase).

Let me know if you come across any other ideas or resources. These technologies can also be used in other sectors. Environmental activists, for example, can use them to alert authorities and mobilize people to combat illegal logging or poaching.

PS. You can also use Twitter to take care of your plants while you’re away saving the world. Check out Botanicalls.com.

Hyperwords is one of the next-generation tools that may change the way we browse the net. The Economist recently wrote about these, see Rummaging through the internet (June 5, 2008). Will it make the flow of information less overwhelming? Or more? Not sure yet.