I’m finally sharing this workshop report. It’s a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard.
Create an open access repository
Joe and I are overhauling the Technology & Social Change Group website. I took a step back this week to think about what’s most important for this first version, and how we’re going to transfer over our existing content. I’ve dubbed TASCHA website 1.0 the “does-not-suck version” in order to keep us focused on the basics, pull together all of our content, and push discussions about feature requests to the point in time where we have something up that works and something concrete to react to.
Research Briefs: Simple tools to link research to practice
Briefs are important communication tools for linking research findings to policy and practice — and ultimately affecting change. Because face it: in the attention economy no one has time to read the full report. Here’s the format we’ve developed at the Technology & Social Change Group for writing a research brief.
Communications: Thinking about a better way
“We do so much but no one knows about it. We have to do a better job of telling our story.” I’ve heard this again and again. So, why’s it so hard? I’ve come to suspect that part of it has to do with the structure of communications within organizations. The centralized structure is a problem. We need to figure out how to make a distributed model work.
Extending empathy forward
I got this expression from the first One Giant Leap film. From the section on time and the 10,000-year clock. I use it in my knowledge sharing work — when trying to explain why it’s important to document, tag, give context. The idea is to make it easier to build on each other’s work.
Unmanaging knowledge
Unmanaging Knowledge, an article by Charles Ehin, has a few nuggets I found helpful. He’s describing characteristics of an open organization. I don’t believe in open all the time. I actually get along quite well with rules and structure. They’re important. (Well, as long as they’re smart and don’t get in my way. Then time [...]
Social Reporting
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. Too many times an after-thought, with little resources or planning, left to a small group of people. The solution? Social Reporting.