My Dinner with CPSquared Colleagues and Connected Futures: New Social Strategies and Tools for Communities of Practice

Last night, I had an opportunity to meet some CPSquared colleagues face-to-face in Cambridge for dinner.   Not wanting to miss an opportunity to play with my new toy, err, learn how to use my new tool, the Nokia N95,  I did a live broadcast of our dinner.  I discovered that you can see the chats on the phone while you are live broadcasting and that I need to do some adjustments of the volume or get closer to my subjects when they are talking.  (More reflections on technique can be found on my N95 learning journal)

Since the live broadcasts are automatically referenced on witter from QIK - I started to get direct messages routed by SMS to my phone while we were broadcasting.  Ryanne and Jay even Ustreamed our live streamed - how meta. Having this connected network on Twitter and Qik - connect with the CPSquared Meet up Face-to-Face seemed so appropriate.

I got a second opportunity to spend some face-to-face time with John Smith and finally meet Bronwyn Stuckey who was in the US from Australia.  I've been lucky enough to be involved with the planning and curriculum development for   Connected Futures:  New Social Strategies and Tools for Communities of Practice workshop with John and Brownyn as well as (who along with Beverly Trayner, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, Nick Noakes, Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop.

Here's the blurb:

Are you in, leading or interested in the development and support of communities of practice who want or need to use web based tools to connect and be together?  What  role do technologies such as blogs, wikis and social book marking might play in your community’s development? If these questions intrigue you and you
are an explorer and learner, then you’ll want to check out this new learning event from CPSquare:
Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice

This online workshop is ambitious - it runs over five weeks and includes virtual field trip and an experimental lab where people will get practical experience with the new web tools and how to integrate them into an existing community of practice.   I'll facilitating week 5 along with Shawn Callahan and Susanne Nyrop that is focused on helping participants summarize their learnings and think through implementation.  I'll also be doing a field trip of the NpTech Tagging Community.

I also got to meet an amazing group of local CoP professionals.

Patti Anklam (who has written a practical guide to creating and sustaining networks at work and in the world and I just ordered from amazon.)  Her blog post is here.

Nathaniel Welch, Senior Manager from CFAR

Naava Frank, Knowledge Communities

Gian Jagai

Elayne Sheridan, Harvard Business School

Comments

[paul sanchez]

i was there live when you filmed this. saw you post it on twitter :) hope all is well.

[Beth Kanter]

Paul,

That was so cool because your chat in the QIK and your ping on twitter - I saw it while I was live broadcasting. The immediacy is compelling.

So, beyond harassing the Kenmore repairman and pointing the camera to friends at dinner, what are some serious nonprofit uses of this tool?

[paul sanchez]

I'm trying to get these guys to do it on their ride http://www.trfr.org which would be huge for them. Selfishly I hope they don't because I wanted to be the first to do it on a adventure ;) The connection you make with your reader/viewer is so fun/spontaneous/cool. I could also see it being really cool for fun runs. When people sponsor you on a fun run you could webcast part of the run live. Another thing that would be cool if you were trying to raise funds for people that just went through a disaster you could pick a family and just webcast what they are going through. If you had a non profit and you put on a conference you could do some quick interviews of speakers and show them what the missed. For activist that are marching they could cast to people who could not make the march. It will be great for blogger that is an activist. If you cross paths with an individual who you know is doing bad things you can do an instant interview and webcast it live. I'm working with http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/ and I could see this being a huge tool for webcasting illegal sweat shops. I can keep going on and on but I have a hard time writing so I will stop. Hope you are doing well and look forward to seeing more qik.com videos from. One more thing I'm going to try to use it on my next adventure.

[Gian]

Hi Beth,

It was nice to finally meet you and the rest of the CPSquare folks.

Peace,
Gian...

[joitske]

Hi Beth, fun that you are doing this, gave me the chance to see some of the people I've been talking to like Naava Frank or just reading their books like Patti! The CPsquare folks are not so much into video/webcam so I don't get to see much of them..