2nd Wave Network: Distributed Experimentation

In an earlier post "Finding Time To Experiment,"  a (probably I think jet-lagged) Nancy White leaves me a comment:

Beth, our tool crack dealer. I'm going to have to blog that quote, Beth! Fair warning.

I think we DON'T all have time to experiment and it is at times an addictive behavior. For me, the only solution is to have a network and we spread the experimentation out amongst us. I am reading your stuff on 2nd Life, for example, not yet jumping in myself.

If we can't do this as a network, we'll NEVER get past early adopters, IMHO.

Exactly!

Last month, I was the Arts and Technology Conference at a session on funding technology projects.  One of the panelists spoke about the importance of peer networks to support nonprofit technology needs.  After the session, I shoved my camera in his face and asked him to repeat what he said.

 

I recently set up an affinity group over at NTEN called Nonprofits and Flickr as an experiment to see if there was an opportunity to set up a peer group not only share knowledge but  the experimentation.  Right now there 35 folks from nonprofits who are interested in sharing information about how their nonprofit uses flickr or are seeking advice as prelude to using flickr. 

There's been a great conversation about flickr and some experiences shared.   I took it one step further and setup a flickr nonprofit playshop group on flickr so we had a sandbox to actually play with it.   We're just in the early stages of the group, but I had some visions of doing nonprofit flickr experiments like the librarians have done.

So, now just looking at Nancy's post on experimentation as network where she references Ben at ODI's "What Netsworks do?"  Her question:

How does the network keep enough coherence across a diverse set of adoption (or rejection) patterns?

I also wonder how we keep the network coherence with poorous tools like blogs, tags, etc.

Also found in the 2ndwave tag stream something to explore in a bit.

Comments

[Sandra Dickinson]

WOW. This is exactly what I woke up this morning thinking about. We are cosmically connected. And so I was envisioning a MAP -- a user-friendly, transparent, coherent, nonlinear, graphic representation of the network of like-minded folks engaged in nonprofit social enterprise, web2.0 tools, and learning games.

Such a map would be useful to US - to uplift and extend our conversation.
Such a map would be useful to our USERS - to easily follow and benefit from our networked connection.

My next thought was: is there a such a thing as a (free) whiteboard widget??? WE could draw the map of ourselves together!