“Citizen Activists around the globe turn parking spaces into mini-parks for a day to demonstrate the need for more urban green space. The annual event is organized online, but staged offline in dozens of cities on every continent around the world. It’s a demonstration of the power of social media and international collaborative activism… and a great way to have fun and relax.”

2010 was my first ever park(ing) day. So glad to benefit from this global, shared collaboration to create intentional green space in the urban context. I met my neighbors and ate delicious cookies from friends at WalkSF. I’d say the greatest benefit to all these parks was getting people socializing in public! I know we Americans can be quite scared to talk with strangers - but perhaps the most important thing we ever do is just talk with each other - especially those we dont know or from different social contexts. This cross fertilization increases our ability to thrive in diverse groups and trust our neighbors. Of course diversity, trust, communication are all clutch for successful collaborations (duh!), so thanks Park(ing)ers for not only pulling off an awesome global collaboration, but increasing all of our collaborative capacity.

ZOTERO for groups

Finally its here - a group library function on Zotero! http://www.zotero.org/groups/

Zotero is great for collaborative working - I’ve been using it to…

  • Store, tag and categorise anything interesting I find online from inside my browser
  • which I can then use to produce chicago style references for my research (fantastic).

I use it more than Delicious to store my finds as I prefer the way its presented and reckon it has more functionality.

…and now I can share it with my project collaborators - I am totally stoked right now…

8 Things you should know about collaboration

Here are 8 points to consider when talking collaboration. Don’t miss #3. From one collaboration ninja to another, I couldn’t agree more.

Sound the trumpets! Finally- a project management site that works. I’m a new adopter, but instinct tells me zoho could become the #1 tool to help support distributed collaborators around the globe (especially with its google integration). And the price is right. Free for one project, 12 US dollars a month for more sophisticated features and multi-project capabilities. Consider me sold. I wish you could see the grin on my face right now. Boy I do love collaboration, and sleek tools to help support it.

-Rapetzel

tripped on my timeline…

Just a heads up for those wanting to find a way to make a decent timeline with special thanks to the simile project at MIT.

I’ve been desperately looking for a way to present my project’s ‘work’, that enables me to draw in relationships between things going on. For example, Deliverable 11 - a Synthesis report on sustainability literacy is due in February, yet is reliant on other deliverables coming in. Who’s working on those other deliverables and when do they need to submit them in order for the D11 to be possible… Yes that’s right I want it all presented clearly and visibly for my team, then I want to email / link to it so they can access it whenever they want.

I’m not sure this is the timeline for me, as I haven’t on first glance worked out if it is capable of drawing relationships between events. Then again, having spent about 2 hours googling the damn things, this one impressed me the most. The major downside is that its not available in a content managed form - you have to go in at html & Java level and do some copy and pasting, but no rocket science, I promise.

My biggest issue is that I don’t have time to use this timeline. It could help my team’s work but…(clearly I have time for a moan): I’m a not a programmer, I’m an environmental scientist (or whatever I’ve decided my job is this week), I don’t have time to learn how to use this, or the know how to debug any errors I inadvertently create.

Still, for those of you with a little more programming savvy, you may be pleased to have tracked this one down.

In any case, well done David Francois Huynh for developing the prettiest and most useable open source timeline I could find- from a viewer’s perspective. Please come and make me a timelining CMS so I can crack out timelines like this in minutes ;p

to wiki or not to wiki

To date- the universally agreed upon gold standard for collaborative, web-enabled technology is the wiki. This is largely due to its successful role powering Wikipedia. Consequentially, whenever someone hopes to harness the wisdom of distributed individuals to develop an idea or resource, they think “I know- let’s set up a wiki!”

However I’m not sure I buy it. I’ve seen very few successful engagement projects utilizing the basic wiki format (and you could argue that Wikipedia engages very few of us. Most of us never edit or write, we just use it). This seems particularly true within the field of social change; I have yet to see a wiki site for social or environmental issues that really takes off and unites the globe and the movement. Just look at this extensive list of wikis all aimed at improving our green/social/sustainability knowledge.

So my question is: should us sustainability nuts continue in our attempts to use wiki type technology to share ideas, knowledge, and develop the resources we need to work towards a better world? Or is it time to throw our hats into a new ring.

I could write my opinions on this for hours, so I’ll spare you and let you share your feedback. I just want to leave you with one thought.

I recently heard a very important/interesting fact about the primary administrators and editors of Wikipedia, ie the people whom Wikipedia successfully engages to collaborate. Most Wikipedia editors partook in a curious recreation as children: reading encyclopedias. Yes that’s right, for fun they liked to read encyclopedias. If this was your favorite past time as a young one, it might be difficult to find an outlet for that passion. Can you imagine the joy these lone children across the globe felt when they had the opportunity to work with others, with similar passion, to write their own encyclopedia? I can see how wiki was a wonderful technology to allow these individuals to collaboratively create encyclopedia articles. These are WORD people- they love the written text. So a technology devoted to collaborative text for knowledge collection is their dream come true.

However most of us collaboration ninjas working towards social change are not quite that word oriented. There is something else that uniquely brings us together. Some intangible hope, belief, emotion, passion. For that- is a text heavy collaborative medium the best way to engage and unify? Or is there something else out there that better suits our core….

Round of applause for my mobile office

Lets hear it for my office! I work (for love or money depending) from Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and the UK. I’m sat now in  Canteen in Bristol enjoying a fab lunch, using their free wifi and toasting my flexible, enjoyable and freeing way to ‘work’. So what are the bare essentials of my mobile office?

Google mail for one has saved my bacon allowing me to view my mail everywhere, even offline, and with a user friendly calender that means I can even manage my team automatically, pre-arranging to send reminders of impeding events or deadlines. Dropbox has been storing files for my whole team (18 people, 5 coutries) to access remotely and offline. yousendit.com is how I pass around big files. I’m running the free version (one file at a time and size limits) which has been perfect so far. Skype, enables me to talk for free to my global team and by and large it goes as well as any normal phone conversation. How much has does living the foot-loose lifestyle cost? all the above solutions are free-of-monetary charge. Cheers to that!

Laptop land isn’t my entire WorId. I appreciate being part of team whereby my data is spread across many computers protecting it from coffee-related doom, and its luxurious to have the safe haven of a real desk in a real office with real colleagues to visit in occasion.

My one wish today would be improved mobile phone service and costing. I don’t want to worry about where I’m calling from and to where. When are the mobile providers going to catch up with this new market of floating office workers?

Right back to my lunch…

We talk a lot about vision when we talk collaboration, as a shared, compelling vision is perhaps THE critical success factor for any collaboration. However it can be quite tricky to establish a shared sense of purpose, especially when dealing with virtual groups that cross cultural boundaries.

This video reminds us not to forget the power of multi-media in the task of communicating a clear and compelling vision that translates across culture and space to unify a movement. I mean really, aren’t you just dying to be part of 350 after watching this video?

Collective Intelligence for Blog Action Day

Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day. This is a global effort to raise awareness around climate change. Coincidentally, it falls just days before October 24th- a collective day of action organized by 350.org to bring awareness to the supreme importance of the number 350. These are both examples of large, loosely connected groups distributed across the globe, coordinating their efforts over the network of the web to try and collectively address a global challenge.

Exciting right?

Well there are quite a few of us who are more than a little bit excited about such web-enabled networks. So excited, in fact, that we dedicated a whole weekend in Savannah, GA to discussing the science behind and potential of web-enabled collaborative innovation networks, or COINs. COINs fall under the larger umbrella of Collective Intelligence, a term that refers to any time a group of individuals exhibits intelligent behavior. Sounds simple, but unfortunately throughout history us humans have had a tendency to act a bit, well, bad when we all gather together in groups (beware the angry mob!).

Those of us at the COINs conference see the potential of the collaborative web to break that nasty pattern, and help us tap into our species innovative potential on a scale never seen before.

Courtesy Takashi Iba

(photo courtesy Takashi Iba)

This rag tag gang of collaboration aficionados was led by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Thomas Malone provided the keynote address, in which he revealed some very exciting news…

It’s official, the Climate Collaboratorium is operational!

See the folks at MIT, including Mark Klein, Robert Laubacher, Josh Introne and Hal Abelson think Wikipedia, google, all those other really smart web-based collaboration tools are smart, but not smart enough. For one thing, they tend to break down when dealing with issues of intense complexity or controversy. Just look what happens to a controversial page on Wikipedia. Can you imagine if we tried to get everyone together to decide a climate change policy on a wikipedia page or google group? It would probably resemble what actually happens when politicians get together in real life- which results in very little useful, actionable outcomes.

But what if we had a piece of technology to help us sort through our arguments, logic, and deliberations in a productive manner? Well that’s exactly what the climate collaboratorium does. While this technology is now in its ‘beta’ phase, this deliberation tool could help our global society make a decision as a group far more effectively than our politicians could do alone in Copenhagen or our citizens alone on Wikipedia.

“In short, it could become a combination of a kind of simulation game for climate change, a Wikipedia for controversial topics, and an electronic democracy on steroids.” -MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Working Paper

To keep abreast of this exciting news, keep an eye here.

Tell me a story

and I’ll show you collaboration at its best! I’m sure we’ve all experienced in our off-line lives (gasp!) just how collaborative an experience story telling can be. I was particularly struck by the collaborative power of stories this past year when I gathered with 18 of my peers to share tales of the economic crisis (as part of the We20 movement ). We each listened, we each contributed. We had whiteboards and the ever important dry erase markers. We used projectors and pictures to draw the connections- and in the end all our individual narratives became one emergent story that helped us to decide a path forward.

Image from StoryGarden

We all agreed that this act of shared storytelling is essential for sustainability. However is our society too large and too dispersed to collaborate with the intensity needed to tell stories as a group? Well perhaps not any longer. StoryGarden is bringing the collaborative power of storytelling to the on-line world. It’s an amazing new initiative, which through a really thoughtfully designed piece of software as well as intelligent administration of that software, allows us to find the connections and patterns between our individual narratives on a grand scale. StoryGarden is just in its infancy, but if it lives up to its potential this could TRANSFORM our ability to collaborate across grand distances to really create a new, sustainable path forward.

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Themed by: Hunson