Facilitating Change

Thanks to Patrick (all my blogs will now start with this phrase!) today I attended Webcamp Montreal.
Since I’m a practical girl, interested in facilitation and open space meetings, and think it’s important to document and share HOW we can work better together I’m starting out by sharing the meeting rules and non-rules.

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…