One of the many things that came from the UCB BrainJams event was this great idea for setting up a P2P knowledge sharing event within a networking space. We are actually going to do this within the context of the next BrainJams event in New Orleans on Thursday May 4 as well. When combined with an initial session of one-one-one speed networking like we did @ SRI in December, I think this is the powerful one-two punch that will help define what BrainJams are and why they are different from traditional conferences. The other important, unpublished, but thoroughly discussed thought I will write about later, is focused on group to group collaboration (G2G). I continue to try to figure out how to maximize the impact of G2G, though efforts to foster it are proceeding at a snail’s pace.

Fortunately I think we are going to be doing another variation on this idea with One Web Day in the guide of what is currently just called “Web Teach-In”. I realize others have done this before (like Socrates perhaps?) but it really is an incredible way for us all to reconnect with each other as fellow humans and work together towards bettering our society.

—

I would like to extend the “show, do, teach” model through BrainJams. I really envision an event session where someone could show another person how to do something, that person could then do it themselves and then that person would teach someone else and this could go around and around like the one on one networking at previous BrainJams. Sort of a “Show and Teach Jam” where peer to peer learning is the key connector between people. This can be done in long format sessions with groups of people (ie, an internal team learning to use Drupal or Movable Type) or as ‘break through’ sessions that are focused on a given tool or type of tool.

What we will look at below can be done in an hour format with a variety of people, though the full ‘hand off’ between teacher and learner is not completed. Instead, an individual would be in charge of a station with a focused goal and have 3-4 minutes to show how to do something (like setup a Blogger account) and the learners have a few minutes more to do it themselves. Stations can be set up around the space with the Peer Leaders bringing their own laptops from which to demonstrate and teach.

Peer Leaders are requested to sign up to lead a lesson a specific set of topics for each event. We can choose to focus on a certain type of tool or we can cover multiple tools or we can even lead it up to the Peer Leaders to choose for themselves. For the first one, I recommend taking an introductory approach with the end goal being that those who don’t know much about how to work with the new technologies can leave feeling they know what to do.

The format will allow for four 10 minute sessions across an hour, with 5 minutes in between to move on to the next session, or ask important follow-up questions. These will be held in small groups of 1-5 people around a laptop screen (sitting on a podium, bar top, bar table or pedestal). Five people is really the maximum, 2-3 would be ideal. The Peer Leader will speak to the same topic for each of the four sessions so that participants can move around the room to the one’s that are most interesting. Sign up sheets will be placed at each station at the beginning of the event so participants can sign up for the sessions they want.

Each session will focus on a demonstration of how to accomplish a particular task and should include one of the Peer Learners actually doing what the Peer Leader is demonstrating. For instance, if the Peer Leader is showing how to set up a blog on LiveJournal or Blogger, one of the Peer Learners should then set up a blog for themselves.

Possible topical lessons could include:

– How to set up your blog
– How to include tags in your blog
– Social Bookmarking in Action
– Tags as conversation
– Blogrolls / OPML
– Online Calendars
– Using a Feed Reader for RSS
– Other suggestions from potential Peer Leaders

In short, these sessions will be designed to teach participants enough of how to do something to get them past initial fears or trepidations so that they can get out and really try to do it on their own. The end goal is that the Peer Learners will eventually become Peer Leaders who go off and teach other people how to do the things that they learned. Other formats can be modified from these principles to achieve deeper learning, but the core idea is to make it personal, one to one or one to few really makes this work. It may take a little longer, but the human connection makes it invaluable and in the end is exactly what the web is all about – people helping people.

—

This is another of the FreeIdeas I promised to write about back in December (which need to be tagged properly still)> Expect more to be coming over the next couple of weeks in light of nearing the end of a reflective cycle and being able to clearly see some cool solutions to many of the things I have been thinking about. I am really excited to have the chance to work this out with the One Web Day folks and look forward to doing some other similar events with other groups in the near future.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, brainjams:freeideas, brainjams:neworleans, brainjams:planning, knowledgeeconomy, net2, openspace, freeideas=chrisheuer, socialconference, The+Open+Web, unconference, Web2.1

So it looks like the judge in the DOJ vs Google case is siding with the Bush Administration and against privacy. CNN has a nice writeup on what just went down and MSNBC has similar coverage. While Google is apparently claiming victory because they did not have to give up all of the information that the DOJ requested, this is definitely not the sort of precedent we would like to see established. When I worked at the US Mint, one of my favorite people there had a saying I find particularly appropriate here.

Once the camel’s nose is in the tent… the camel is in the tent.

The specifics of the case are related to a request for data from Google to support the government’s position in a case dealing with pornography and filtering software’s ability to block it from children. They originally requested a month’s worth of search data, but the ruling today seemingly limits the scope to a much smaller cross-section of random samples with no personally identifiable data. This ruling just sets the stage for making it easier for them to dig deeper next time.

Still, I am perhaps more worried about Google’s fickleness than I am the DOJ’s desire to get insights into searching behaviour as it relates to pornography. With their recent capitulation to the Chinese on censoring its search results so that it can cozy up to the powers that be, the grandstanding on this important privacy issue does not bring it back in the ‘do no evil camp’ they claim to host.

In fact, Danny Sullivan laid out a great piece yesterday entitled “25 Things I I Hate About Google“. It was Google’s acquisition of Writely that took Danny over the top prompting him to exclaim [give me a break from] “Google going in yet another direction when there is so much stuff they haven’t finished, gotten right or need to fix.” He is absolutely right – they have gotten that Monopoly power all hoarded up and are no longer acting like an organization that cares deeply about surprising and delighting its users as it did in the early days. I heard Cal speaking a few weeks back with some friends and he said that Flickr once had something like 40+ releases of the site code in one day – I wonder how many Gmail or Gtalk have gone through since launching and how often they have done so?

While I am very glad that Google has stepped up to fight the DOJ on this, and I believe that many of the executives managing the China deal also fought a hard lost losing battle against censorship, I have very mixed feelings on this issue. While the reality is that they used the system as best as they could in the DOJ case by investing in the legal battle and they would have been locked out of China had they not capitulated, there comes a time where the stand we make for what is right is more important than the principle of compromise. The hard part is deciding which issues are important enough to fight to the end for without compromising too much of your principles.

We dealt with this briefly on a less important issue at the One Web Day planning dinner last week in SF when discussing the Net Neutrality issue and the involvement of the Telecoms. My initial reaction was that the celebration of the Web Susan Crawford is organizing should not involve those like AT&T Charirman Ed Whitacre who are working to destroy the very thing we are celebrating by restricting access via tarriffs. That we should take a stand on this issue by not inviting them to the party. Susan however, was adamant that the tent is big enough for everyone – while I would like to agree and do so in principle, I do wonder if this might be a place where we can take a stand and get everyone else to take a stand too.

Bottom line – polite golf clap round of applause for Google taking the stand on this issue, but let’s all hope they can apply the ‘do no evil’ policy more consistently in the future.

Technorati Tags: Google, onewebday, The Open Web, The+Open+Web

Just saw this link courtesy of Dave Taylor

Update. Turns out this video was actually developed by Microsoft. Guess it’s funny because it is true! IpodObserver reports the details and links to the file on Google Video.

Technorati Tags: graphicdesign, ipod, microsoft

Last THUR, Derek Scrugs and Dave Taylor held a Front Range BrainJam in Colorado. Looks like we missed this event, but I found a link from it in my web site referrer logs which I try to look through once per week at least to see who is linking to us or writing about what we are doing with BrainJams.

I never heard from the organizers, but really good to see these sorts of events continuing to take shape as camps, devhouses and jams continue to grow in spirit and in reach.

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams:frontrange, brainjams:associated, unconference

My friend Greg Narain has been working on a new service called Xposted (cross posted) that will play nicely with his Social Conference software called SyncPeople. I am now registered on BlogBurst as well as Xposted so it will be interesting to see how blog syndication will work out – I am particularly interested in some of the features that Greg will be adding in the near future we discussed the other day that will clearly push his service into the lead. One thing is for sure, Greg really ‘gets it’ in a big way and I hope all of our talk about working together in some way on SyncPeople comes to fruition.

There are not many company ideas that I hear about that I believe will be anything more substantial than a dotcom flameout – I am fortunate to be contributing in some small way to several companies that have real growth potential and staying power. SyncPeople, BuzzLogic, and D-BAM are just the tip of the new new economy from where I sit – and chances are you have never heard of them before, but that will be changing soon enough…

BTW – Greg will be presenting at DC 2.0 next Wednesday so check it out if you are in the DC area and join another emerging, cool community out in DC.

Technorati Tags: xposted, syncpeople, buzzlogic, d-bam, dc2.0

Brainjams in Berkeley was quite an exercise with ‘free radicals’! Don’t worry though, no one was the worse for wear afterwards, and the 20+ folks who joined us at Jupiter Pizza afterwards did quite well shutting their Brains Off…

As with most events we have held so far, we have tried to experiment a bit with different formats, to learn what works and what does not. Despite learning quite a bit from what did not work out as I had hoped, participants generally felt the event was a success and the value of the conversations we all had was fairly high. There was some particularly useful insytes shared on the topic of collaboration and I was fortunate to get some great advice on the future of BrainJams from David Allen, Cathryn Hrudicka, Dave Burleigh, Kristie Wells, Dan Genova, Shannon Clark, Bill Allison and Rachel Murray.

It was this discussion that lead to the idea that we should focus BrainJams on serving the needs of people who belong to multiple groups or cliques – the boundary spanners, or primary hubs of the attention economy. Dave Burleigh referenced this as becoming the SIG of SIG’s, but I really think it is more about developing the meta-layer for detailing the social fabric of group to group collaboration. Peer to peer collaboration may be the big thing today, but group to group (G2G) collaboration and networking is an area that deserves more understanding. In striving for diversity in an open community such as BrainJams, it just makes sense that we want people who are not self-identifying as only a ‘geek’ or only a ‘marketing guy’ or only an ‘artist’ – from my personal experience with several large organizations, it was these people who got the real work done inside the organization, so it follows that these are the people who can get the real work done ACROSS organizations.

At the end of the day, I was fortunate to chat with Angela Hunter and Wayne Caplinger. Angela drew a parallel between what Lee Felsenstein and the Homebrew Computer Club did for computers and what BrainJams is trying to do for ad-hoc collaboration using the best insights available. She referenced the idea of having BrainJams serve as a “Grassroots ThinkTank” which I find insightful. This directly parallels the power/access issues that was at the root of the need for Homebrew in that the people on the inside often disregarded the people on the outside as amateurs with little to contribute. But then, as now, we know this to be far from truth. The collective wisdom is much greater than that of those in the ivory towers – you and I have much to contribute, though the systems and power laws are not designed to easily enable such contributions. That is why we must take this matter into our own hands and figure out the systems and tools we really need in order to raise awareness of the most valuable insytes and knowledge, from the widest swath of experience possible.

With the enthusiasm for collaboration and sharing knowledge clearly expressed by other participants, and a desire to bring about positive social change within all areas of our lives, it would seem that “The Noble Pursuit” is more relevant than ever. Perhaps this is really what it is all about – not just people getting together for an unconference of XYZ, but really mapping out the people, tools, processes, groups and other elements in a way that truly makes it easy for people who want to create positive change within their corporations and across society to find out what they need to know to do what they have to do to.

Lots to think about for sure…

But rather than running down this road right now, I wanted to share some other posts from the BrainJams Berkeley that are worth a quick perusal.

• Ted Tagami posted some great video, which also contains some insights into some of my confusion with Paul Sas…
• …who wrote a terrific blog post analyzing the first part of the day. Paul correctly wanted to move past the ‘alpha-mouths’ to dig deeper into what people wanted to learn. He did a great job, though I was really confused by my perception of his purpose. A good lesson in establishing clarity of intentions when within a group setting. In it, he also takes issue with Lee’s opening monologue, which was really my fault on so many levels…
• Kristie Wells wrote a nice post which highlighted the all important principle of open space “Whoever comes are the right people”.
• Hong Qu wrote an incredibly valuable post from the conversation they had in the afternoon on very important aspects of building community. He also followed that up with a useful reference post on the different Silicon Valley Knowledge Exchanges.
• Arthur Law was seemingly doing some live blogging, capturing some of his thoughts on the morning sessions, his first BreakThrough group conversation, some summary notes on each of the group conversations and his thoughts on the afternoon group conversation he joined.
• I also wrote some notes in the middle of the day, shortly after we sort of lost control of the session from not having enough structure

All in all it was a very good day, but I must admit being surprised that more people who attended did not write up something to share. This is in stark contrast to what Grace Davis pulled off at WoolfCamp where participants are still contributing to a very vibrant conversation. Perhaps that is the difference between a community of people and an event of attendees. I don’t know for sure, but I hope we figure it out…

Technorati Tags: brainjams, brainjams25feb2006, thenoblepursuit, Web2.1

Been noticing a recurring problem that I have been struggling against – it may be tied tied to my mood and varying levels of certainty/uncertainty, but that could just be ancillary or more effect instead of cause. I have always had this problem with writing (waiting for the right mood to strike), so I suppose that blogging is just making me deal with it more often and more directly. The past 10 days since BrainJams Berkeley have seen only a handful of blog posts that I published, along with a dozen others that are still sitting here in various embryonic states (a few simple notes, a nearly complete post, a hand full of open tabs awaiting commentary, a stream of consciousness over 7 pages of a word doc that needs to be ripped apart and rebuilt and even a bunch of thoughts that should be made into blog posts but I have not even written anything on because I am so behind with the others)

Sometimes I am so in the flow of an idea that I just need to get it out right away, so I sit down, put fingers to keyboard, and an hour or so later some really long blog post with deep insights has been published. Other times, I go back and forth on a wide array of thoughts that are related in some complex manner and never reach any degree of what could be called understandable by regular humans, so the posts just sit there. It is hugely frustrating for me and at various points in my past has overwhelmed me so much that I pretty much shut down. Thankfully, I have not reached that point and probably won’t again, but it certainly ‘feels’ like one of those times again so I am here being reflective, trying to work this out intellectually and emotionally.

The reality is that to blog or not to blog is really a function of my available time, and lately there has not bee all that much time left after the top priorities get handled. Or at least, I am still trying to keep my life in balance as best as I can and trying to working less than 80 hours hours each week eventhough there is always something more that needs my attention. Perhaps I need to shift my balance a bit, but I hope not. I generally like the way things have been going lately personally and professionally and hope it continues in the same direction. Of course, there is the little matter of making some big decisions about the future of BrainJams as well as my professional consulting life, but I don’t feel put off by those decisions, just still uncertain as to which course of action I should take, and which of the great possibilities deserve my complete focus.

Then of course there is the matter of the blog feeling as if it is the equivalent of ‘one hand clapping’. As a firmly entrenched member of the M-List Blogger Core, I don’t write to get juiced by how popular the blog is, though I do monitor the traffic to see who if anyone might be linking to me. I write the blog hoping that what I have to say is considered as part of the broader conversation – or more specifically, that some of my ideas seeking feedback directly, do get that feedback from whoever might be reading. So when I post on the future of BrainJams, I hope that someone other than my fiance might have something meaningful to contribute. Then again, I might be too concerned with what other people think at this point and should perhaps just invest more time and energy as the leader of an organization rather than thinking like a participant of a community. Hmmmmmmm

So what to do with the blog posts that are in process? Well, I guess I can always edit them later, so I might as well start kicking them out this afternoon/evening and see where they take us…

Well, we have heard enough of the “so when are you going to get married?” bit and after sleeping on the idea for several months it seems that Saturday July 7, 2007 is going to be the date of Chris & Kristie’s wedding – So save the date!

For me, the push over the edge was realizing that my grandmother’s engagement ring had two rows of seven diamonds – it reminded me of how superstitious my Irish grandmother was and how happy she would be about getting married on such a good date. Now I just need to check with the astrologers and feng shui experts to let us know if it is really an auspicious day for us – JK!

It will be a destination wedding, so if you need to, start saving up now as all friends will be invited. Exactly where is still up in the air – I would really like Big Sur or Napa or The Greek Isles, but I really want my grandfather there so we might end up doing it in Miami Beach, Napes, Key West or maybe even some other Florida beach town. After the last time I brought my grandfather out to California in 2001 (the month before 9/11) he refuses to fly and since he is my only family left, I really need to have him there. His 90th Birthday is coming up next month on April 30th, so it would be really amazing for him to be there for me – he is not only my grandfather, but growing up in his house, he is like a father to me, and since my Mom and Grandmother have passed, he is also a close best friend – in fact, I am probably the only person he really confides in now, though he is pretty much an open book just like me…

Anyways, thanks to my lovely fiance for understanding the importance of this to me and thanks to those of you who were not overly pushy about setting the wedding date. As for the rest of you bridezilla’s… well, I hope you are finally as happy as we are.

Love you baby – thanks for being you and loving me as much as I love you.

Technorati Tags: chrisandkristie, 070707

Well, it has been a long and somewhat silent week for me – or at least for my blog because my voice is hoarse from talking to everyone so much. Last week’s BrainJams in Berkeley gave me a lot to think about, but it was the right stuff to think about because the vision for BrainJams is getting clearer and so is the story around it. From the feedback I have been getting, it feels as if BrainJams is the early manifestation of a community of people who break through traditional boundaries and participate in open collaboration in the public commons.

This is good. The audience for the message is identified. The purpose is becoming clear. The message is getting simpler (though watch out for the buzzwords that follow). The format for the events is evolving in a great way. The discussions of the past few months are leading to action.

While I am driving the organization, I still feel like I am in the backseat and the participants behind the wheel, so let me put this idea to you as YAPMS (Yet Another Proposed Mission Statement):

BrainJams is a community of people who span traditional boundaries within and across organizations for the purpose of populating, organizing and enhancing the “Public Knowledge Commons” while teaching other’s to make the best use of the appropriate tools for their situation to connect, communicate and collaborate within their communities.

From initial discussions this week, it would seem that this resonates, is somewhat unique, matches my original intentions and just feels right, though admittedly it could use some ‘wordsmithing’.

While this includes the idea of unconferences as a primary venue for peer to peer learning, it encompasses more then this singular idea for real time human gatherings. In a very real sense, the name brought forth a format and the format developed the purpose as it was within those open space conversations where this idea really grew. Yes it is still about Web 2.1 and the people within it (or as I am fond of calling it now, the Human Centered Web) but it is also about much more.

It is about freedom of expression. It is about standing up and being heard. It is about making things right – because WE can, even when the system can not. It is about the simple fact that the knowledge I need to know, to do what I have to do, is out there somewhere. It is about the fact that technology alone can not get me that information reliably – but smart people like you can with the aid of technology, particularly with the technology of the Human Centered Web. It is about learning from one another. It is about the computer being good with information and people being the source of the wisdom of how to use that information. It is about tolerance for differences and embracing commonalities between us. It is about diversity of perspective and culture. It is about doing what is best for our communities because it is also best for ourselves. it is about seeking out the truth rather than pushing an agenda. It is about taking action as much as it is about discussing which actions need to be taken.

So where do we start? or rather, where do we go from here?

I could really use some help is with the following items:

1. Hire a grant writer to help us get a grant from a foundation
2. Build out the community web site completely to align with the vision above
3. With that grant, to hire a small full time staff to handle the operational aspects of the BrainJams organization (Executive Director, Administrative Assistant, Event Logistics Coordinator and Community Content Editor)
4. Begin a research project into mapping the history of groups, formats and tools to determine what works in which situations
5. Begin to map out which groups exist today, what their purposes are and who the members are. This will allow more people to easily find people who are passionate about the same noble pursuit that they share so they can more easily tap into that community for conversation and the knowledge they need to take action themselves directly. This also addresses the fact that many groups exist for the same purpose, but have not aligned in action or understanding yet – in effect to become a “Meta-Group” that helps them span their organizational boundaries.
6. Planning BrainJams New Orleans for May 4, 2006
7. Refine all this thinking into a clear plan for the organization

Wish there was more time to dive deeper into all of this, as there are still about 5 or 6 blog posts I need to get out to explain the thinking behind this, but work calls, so I must close for now. Please do let me know what you think about these ideas, whether or not this is too expansive or too restrictive, and how we might improve upon this concept even further…

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, ad-hoc+collaboration, amateurevents, brainjams, brainjams:planning, net2, thetruthtellers, unconference, Web2.0, Web2.1

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…