Chris Heuer's Insytes

The fire hose has been turned on for the last 48 hours – both for a client and for BrainJams. So far I have about 7 pages of a word document that needs to be edited and remixed for easier consumption – once I get some rest anyway. Still, I wanted to put this out right away as it is important.

The vision for BrainJams has finally become clear for me – I am fortunate to have the input of some fairly sharp people on this and look forward to further insightful analysis from Shannon Clark and Paul Sas – Christoper Allen and Dave Buerlind – and much thanks to Lee for sticking with my loose experiment – am looking forward to more of his input on these issues as they come into the realm of online conversation.

So the key insyte so far is based on some of what David was referencing as the “SIG of SIGs” concept – but more so by applying an understanding of Paramedia as Cathryn Hrudicka referenced via Web Content Day. Still, it is the more generic pattern that is really at play here – the most important value that BrainJams can deliver is in the meta layer, the mapping of knowledge to situations through collective effort the contextual vision is much wider than Wikipedia, though it certainly benefits from their work thus far. An effort to bring together all the differnet projects and communities out there working on putting knowledge into the public commons. This is much bigger than unconferences, though it does incorporate them and leverage its learnings. It would seem that there is a need for an organization to work in the metalayer across all orgnaizations, tools companies and individual knowledge workers – connecting the dots across organizations and communities of practice with the ultimate goal of seeding the situationally aware knowledge commons.

We discussed the idea of having multiple events in the future for different purposes – this is highly likely to happen and is also so, so ‘meta’.

I need to hire a killer ‘grant writer’ – does anyone have any reccomendations?

The format of the next brainjams is seemingly known now that we have learned what we did from the Berkeley event. The next one we do here will be using a format similar to the one below.

10am – BrainJamming one-on-one)
Noon – Lunch
1PM – User Demos “My Favorite Tool/Tools” – 5 minutes each
2PM – Review Breaktrhough Sessions (more open space)
230PM – Breakthrough Session 1
3PM – Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
315PM – Breakthrough Session 2
345PM – Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
4PM – Breakthrough Session 3
430PM – Write and reflect for 15 Minutes
445PM – Wrap up the day

It is amazing to think that this might be the beginning of something along the lines of what I wrote about with The Noble Pursuit as a real possibility.

Thanks again to everyone who came out on SAT, it was very worthwhile for us, I hope the same was true for you despite the problems with trying the new format I had proposed – mea culpa… Thankfully something wonderful came out of it. Goes to show that the most difficult, crazy processes can still yield excellent insytes and real value when the intentions are in the right place.

Will put more links in tomorrow – off to bed for now…