Online tools to say goodbye to a colleague

I was invited by WASTE to introduce some new web2.0 tools at the occasion of saying farewell to a colleague who had worked there more than 5 years. They had thought of learning to arrange a bouquet of flowers, but decided this might be more interesting. We decided to focus on 3 tools, weblogs, wikis and photo sharing. After a short introduction everyone got to experience how easy it is to become a blogger, wiki-er or photo sharer.

For each tool, I had prepared 3 exercises, the first one was to contribute to a virtual farewell present for the colleague who left the organisation, the second one to set up your own blog, wiki, or photogroup. The last one was to experiment with some additions like images, feeds, or cartoons.

What worked well is the fact that I set up a dummy account for all to use. By setting up one dummy account, you avoid the hassle of helping each one to set up an account. The boring part of the experience in my opinion, and if this would go wrong you get people discouraged by the 'IT stuff' . When I set up the dummy account I discovered that you are now forced to open a google account to use blogger. And to open a yahoo account to use Flickr. That's definitely much less user-friendly then it was in the past.

What also worked well is that in every group there were one or several people who were handy enough to insert images, and play around. I also learned that you might as well upload images directly from your camera, without uploading them first to your computer (as used to be my habit somehow).

One thing that I would do differently is that I had put up personal pages in the wiki to write anecdotes for the colleague who left. I noticed it would be more fun to do that as a group and to write a group story. So next time I would set up pages for groups rather than individual pages.

The brilliant thing about combining the introduction of new tools with a farewell party is that you get people in a mood to play around with tool and see that it can be easy and fun.

I'm setting up a twitter experiment

I'm preparing an experiment with Twitter for 10 people, most unfamiliar with Twitter. Twitter is: A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Basically you update your information continuously with short messages (max. 140 characters) and you can follow/be followed by others who read those messages.

For some, this seems an 'old tool' but for most of the people I work with it is unknown. On the one hand I encounter people who think that putting your information on internet is quite dangerous and feel that we should reduce the number of emails, on the other hand, there those who don't care whether you reply on facebook, twitter or their blog. How to find the middle ground when a group is a mix of those people?

A nice Twitter guide for beginners is written by Robin Good.

Nancy White is compiling stories how Twitter can foster collaboration. Some examples (but there are lots of other examples- check it out):

• Using a twitter network - project twitter on screen in face-to-face event. Ask a question out to the network. See the (FAST) response.
• Find job candidates through Twitter
• During a power outage, use mobile Twitter to coordinate information about the nature of the outage and the availability of internet cafes in the area with power for the team to reassemble.
• Using twitter as a virtual water cooler.I work from home, and my colleagues are my collaboration buddies, clients, colleagues. Twitter is a great way to keep up with what is happening, so face-to-face meetings get up to speed much quicker. Blogs work the same way, though they tend to contain a different set of content.

Andy Carvin sees a lot of potential in Twitter, because of the combination with mobile phone. Read his post how Twitter can save lives.

For the real fans: there is the twitterfan wiki.

Connecting and collecting (and being lazy)

On the Knowledge Management for Development a discussion took place about 'knowlege products' to which I posted a remark about the importance of striving for a balance between connecting and collecting. I forgot where I read about it, but since then it the concepts have stuck with me. Every now and then, I have the impression a community of practice is either leaning completely on the side of connecting, nor producing anything tangible, or is going to the extreme of collecting a lot of information without making sure people re-connect to the information collected. I'm convinced this balance is very important to get right.

I was too lazy to search for documents where I picked it up, but Stan Garfield read my question and was so kind to make it into the Knowledge Management Question of the Week. It's a good idea to read the full post with references, but in short he cites two sources. Thomas Stewart, writes:

"Connection, not collection: That's the essence of knowledge management. The
purpose of projects, therefore, is to get knowledge moving, not to freeze it; to
distribute it, not to shelve it."

David Snowden writes:
"Many years ago I formulated three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management:

1. 
   Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted


2. 
   We only know what we know when we need to know it


3. 
   We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down

Unfortunately neither of them writes about the balance between connection and collection. I would like to know more about what makes people inclined to focus on one or the other. So maybe I have to search back in my files after all...

The other aspect I've been thinking about is whether connecting and collecting is the same as participation and reification in the theory about communities of practice. I reread some of the explanations from the book 'Beyond Communities of Practice'. I think these concepts are more subtlely described. Reification can also be in terms of a new concept, and is not necessarily something tangible. I guess the connecting and collecting may be concepts that 'speak' to a wide range of people more easily than participation and reification.

Prinsjesdag as example of local knowledge

Today is 'prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands, the day that the queen reads the 'troonrede' with the governmental plans for year to come. There's a ceremony that a golden carriage takes her through part of the Hague to the place where she reads the plans.

I didn't know that all schools in the Hague have a holiday on that day! Something which is common knowledge for the habitants of the Hague. Not a big disaster, but you have to arrange child care or be at home etc. I learned about it through the schoolcalendar.

It made me think about the enormous importance of being able to access relevant explicit, local knowledge when professionals are more and more working on a variety of jobs and change jobs. When I lived in Den Bosch, it wasn't very important to know that schools in the Hague are closed. But when you move here, it's part of the necessary brain-luggage of a parent with school going children. So rather than knowing a lot, it's better to become good at accessing the most relevant information - and distinguishing between relevant and less relevant information.

Working room with a view

Since we moved to the Hague I have my own working room/office at home. I used to work from the kitchen table at home. The difference is huge: it's now very easy to make a conscious decision whether to work/not to work and that leads to reading the newspaper more frequently, not checking my mail during lunchtime while talking to the kids, etc.

As a point of reflection, it makes me think about the importance of living through something. When I was working from the kitchen table, I could reason that it was not an ideal situation, but I could not image the enormous difference. Secondly, it's also an example of learning through comparison. It's only after the situation changed, that I can really see the difference in retrospect. In my old situation, working from the kitchen table was such a habit, that I could no longer see how it influenced my time and working/checking mails etc was such a constant thing that it influenced my ability to quietly read the newspaper.

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate

We produced a booklet with stories of how people and organisations in the development sector in the Netherlands have experimented with new e-tools to improve collaboration and communication. We have distributed hardcopies, but you can also download the booklet called 'I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate from this page. Furthermore, you can find more stories on the blog with the same name.

Organisation 2.0

I'm preparing myself for a meeting with Agri-profocus. They want some advice for their website and database and communication between the partners. As far as I can see they don't use any web2.0 tools (yet). So how about the organisation2.0?

In his blogpost about enterprise2.0 Nic Brisbourne talks about enterprise2.0 as being about emergent structures rather than imposed ones. A sort of democratization of the workplace, which fits well with the trends of self-managing workteams and more horizontal structures in organisations. What he writes:

"The notion of “emergent structures” is a complicated and slightly counter intuitive one, yet I am thinking it will be very important in understanding the importance and power of enterprise2.0 apps. Emergent structures are patterns of intelligent behaviour which emerge bottom up from the independent actions of agents with no central control. They are common in nature - ant colonies are an oft cited example. This notion is counter intuitive because it is hard to see how the agents know what to do. The slightly unsatisfactory answer is that this knowledge somehow forms by natural processes of evolution and the agents somehow learn their role. I guess you could make an analogy to the roles people play in teams."

Peter Shelton pointed to this blogpost of Andrew McAfee with an example of a 1000-employee firm in Seattle helping clients with digital advertising and marketing, including intra-and extranets. Their own traditional static intranet has been overtaken by web2.0 tools with built in interfaces using social bookmarking site delicious, voting news site digg and photo sharing site flickr.

"AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to
let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free;
these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no
permissions. I find this simply brilliant." ..."The rightmost section of the page shows the most recent blog posts. At AARF, these include emails to group mailing lists, which are automatically posted to a bloglike page."

Check out the full blogpost for screenshots and more examples. It wasn't hard for the employees to get used to this way of working but he adds that AARF is not a typical workplace, being full of people who slap together mashups in their spare time. Nevertheless, I think web2.0 tools offer an opportunity to have more relevant content with less effort. Now how to introduce this is the big challenge....

Handwritten letters are moving again

We are going to move to the Hague soon. I decided to clean the attic and throw away stuff, when I found old letters my husband wrote me when he was in Tanzania and I was in the Netherlands (must have been 1989 or so). It is very funny to read the details of things you have forgotten. He had earpain and went to the hospital where the doctor took one hour to find the key to the cupboard where the ear-inspection-device was stored.

It struck me that I hardly receive letters now, and that I don't keep an archive of my mails (though with gmail you have a large archive, I doubt I will ever go back). And then you hardly write a long and intense mail as you used to write letters.

The letters was number 11 and he mentions that he needs to start keeping a diary with numbered letters, so that we can track the arrival of the letters... He is commenting on a job interview I had and I probably had to wait 3-4 weeks to get an answer, the difference is just so big with internet and mobile phones nowadays! When I started emailing (this started roughly in 1997 for me) I remember for a long time I still used to send hand-written letters to my friends, as emails felt so public, with a letter at least you knew that it would only end up in the hand of the person you write to. When I finally took to mailing girlfriends, we wrote less about our boyfriends, as we were not sure they would read it at some point. So technology does bring its own codes and changes your communication patterns.

Some bloggers meet

Yesterday I went out with the GINKS secretariat to meet Emmanuel K. Bensah, one of the most fanatic bloggers in Ghana. I met Emmanuel through his blog. When we connected on facebook he had stated (ticking a box by mistake) that we met in school, but actually the category 'met through their blogs' is missing...

It was very nice to exchange blog and vlog tips, and discuss the Ghanaian blogosphere which is too quiet according to Emmanuel. He is an author for the globalvoices for Ghana. This means that he reads about 15-20 blogs and when he thinks something is interesting for a global audience that doesn't know much about Ghana he writes a review to the editor, who then edits and puts it up the globalvoices site. See an example of a review here. This is a huge opportunity for bloggers to get known (this is how I found Emmanuel's blog) and to be crossposted to a wider audience. He told us globalvoices now has a feed into the Reuter's Africa site. On each country page there is a feed with blogposts, see the example for Ghana. We discussed ways of leveraging the GINKS vlog with ICT4D stories, a possible blogmentoring project and tried to start a Ghanaian vloggers group (so far with 3 members :). I forgot to ask whether the Ghanaian bloggers ever meet.

We had a good brainstorm about the developing of ICT uses in Ghana. Emmanuel was very enthousiastic about his GPRS phone which allows him to connect to the internet by mobile phone. It is not extremely expensive and you can set it to see what you used. When he's offline, he uses his onetouch (onetouch is a Ghanaian telecom service) pay-as-you-go subscription to check and reply to mails and even to go to facebook. I still have my video-ipod dream (in combination with videoblogs) . Mobile television is coming through ghana telecom/onetouch. So enough work for GINKS...

Zentation to combine videos with powerpoint presentations on the web

Via Erwin Blom I discovered Zentation, you can upload a powerpoint presentation and link it to a google video presentation! Very useful. though some of the slides on slideshare are quite self-explanatory, it can be more powerful in combination with a video. (or would be video with the slides be enough?)

Blogger integrates feedburner feeds

A short blogpost to alert all blogger-bloggers to the fact that feedburner and blogger have apparently collaborated to make the integrating of a feedburner feed into your blogger blog easy. You go to settings, then site feed and add the URL of your feedburner feed. Having a feedburner feed is very useful if you want to monitor the subscriptions to your blog. You can read more here.

The news: no news

In Ghana, the Volta River Authority (VRA)'s main function is to generate and supply electrical energy in Ghana. For some time now, there is an energy crises in Ghana and every other day, you'll be 12 hours off electricity (alternating day and night shifts). This includes ministries and business areas, so you can imagine it affects work seriously, let alone the domestic troubles it gives. Yesterday one of the news items on the Ghanaian television was that there is no news on the energy crises. There was a briefing for journalists by officials of VRA planned on the energy crises yesterday by 9.00. By 12.00 someone came to explain that the briefing would not take place... So this became the news item.

I'm not blogging this to ridiculize the VRA officials, but I do think it shows how they continue to think and act according to a pre-media model, where officials can arrive as late as they want, and can even cancel meetings after letting people wait for hours. Yet, currently with the new media like television and internet, this will become the news itself. Strikingly, the meeting was called 'briefing for journalists' and not a press conference.

Great resource on communities of practice in a development context!

Dorine had a blogpost on their work on communities of practice in the development sector. I planned to reblog it, but didn't find the time, till here in Ghana (as the saying goes, in Europe we have clocks, but here we have time). Dorine participated in the online community of practice workshop and did a project with Bill Williams and Patricia Mantey. They made their small project quite big, as it resulted in a large and resourceful document with all kind of references that you can find online here. They had 5 main topics:
1. Life after funding
2. Gaps in technology
3. Differences in communities
4. Multiple cultures and languages
5. Donor pressure and expectations

They looked for cases and interviewed people. I was amongst the people they interviewed by mail, not know that these answers would be posted integrally in the report (I assumed they'd use it to inform their own opinion and write something condenses). It felt very ackward to be quoted as an 'expert' on all these big questions I don't really have an answer to, and then amongst the responses of other experts, sometimes completely contradicting. Would have been more fun to have an exchange! The biggest difference in opinion as I recall was my opinion that funding can be helpful (but tricky ofcourse) compared to Ueli's answers which go into the direction of banning funding for effective communities of practice. (I'm lazy to search for quotes, but if it's interesting to you, you can find it in the document). They are hopefully going to organize on online exchange still (the intention is there at least).

What I personally learned from it, is that I can see the parallel between funders and communities of practice and the manager's paradox. Both funders and managers should refrain from too much trying to control the domain discussions, but engaging in it in the right way can be energizing.

The tech forum in Ghana meets face-to-face

Today I co-facilitated a meeting of the 'tech forum' a group of ICT technicians who are active in ICT4D. We started last year with a meeting, and had a year of online exchange, which never took off full speed. Nevertheless, more than half of the people present had participated in the previous meeting and were still 'in the mood' and enjoyed their connection. I found out a lot of invisible connections had continued either by mail or meeting people.

It's always encouraging to see how energizing it is for people to engage in practice-related discussions, also today. Even though I'm not a practitioner myself, you see it from the body language, and the break discussions. We had a peer assist session where 4 people could bring in their cases, and I had worried about the others (the non-caseholders), but I noticed that it was as energizing for the others to think along the questions of the 4 case holders. For instance, one question of the delay in seeing the content on a website after uploading it to a CMS was a real puzzle, and we got all intrigued by it. Another very practical exchange was how to load your cell phone battery while travelling (by connecting the poles of your phone battery to a normal battery)...

Something I learned myself is how to use flickr images in blogger. It never worked, and when someone asked me, I felt encouraged to try and find out and I managed (click on other sizes and you can grab the flickr URL).

People thought it was really participatory and peer learning, but what was missing is some thought leaders, and some inspiring new ideas. A reminder that it is not easy to get those people engaged for a long period of their time. That's a process in itself. Secondly, we had done all our best to get the online forum going, but it never really took off. Now, through the face-to-face connections, there are new topic leaders emerging, and there is a plan to have a new topic every month, with a topic leader and monthly online chats, Fridays at 17.00 (without voice because people might not be able to talk outloud in their offices). This is really a breakthrough in energy level that would have been hard to achieve online.

Commoncraft video on social networking

Here's the new video in the series by commoncraft explaining social networking. Ofcourse I'm eagerly waiting for the social bookmarking one after our own attempt.. But you watch it differently after you tried to produce one!

As for social networking site, I've become a member of linkln and facebook, but I don't invest in it and it doesn't work for me. For my case, the video doesn't help in explaining the principle, or do I miss the clue because I'm not looking for a new love neither for a new job?

blip.tv for development

By recommendation from Jay Dedman I moved from Youtube to blip.tv to host my videos (almost forgot I started with castpost). I thought blip had roughly the same features as youtube, but I liked the fact that when you embed videos, you don't have a large triangle and YOUTUBE on your video. Just looks better with blip.tv.

But yesterday I discovered an important reason why blip.tv is better for use in a development context. Namely, it is very hard to download videos from youtube! It's quite easy from blip.tv. This feature is helpful if you want to put the video on a server or on a CDrom to play it back to an audience with unreliable or low bandwidth connectivity. Though it is not impossible on youtube, it is not as easy as on blip.tv

Argyris and intercultural settings

Last Friday I attended a the M&O conference 'samenwerking in allianties en netwerken' (=collaboration in alliances and networks). I think it was my first real conference, you're never too old to attend your first conference... and immediately I can join the unconferencing movement. Can't say I was impressed by the general level of presentations and sessions. BUT a real treat was the presentation by Chris Argyris. And it was really cute that he was using a good old overhead projector with slides (see picture). That did not diminish the power of his presentation. It was impressive how he told a story and explained both theory in use versus espoused theory as well as model 1 and model 2 thinking and behaviour, and I felt like he had explained the book I read (knowledge for action) in less than 30 minutes. He stressed that model 1 behaviour is universal behaviour.

One question I have is whether working in intercultural situations helps to move towards model 2 thinking and behaviour. Model 2 is behaviour where you try to make your assumptions explicit, check them and ask for feedback. Unfortunately I didn't dare to ask him (even though I spotted him in the corridor)..

Beginners and experts

The advantage of a more general blogfocus is that I can more easily show off my children! So here's my youngest daughter (5 years) who has taught herself how to read. She currently reads even during lunch and dinner time. She is reading in Dutch in the video. Though there is a system for children's books (avi 1, avi 2, etc) to indicate the level of beginning readers, she actually reads anything she likes. In the video a children's book that parents are supposed to read for their children. As a result, it contains some pretty hard words like 'vliegtuig'.

Click To Play

I've always wondered what makes for a real expert. At times, people who I consider as real beginners are tasked by their organisation to do something I would reserve for an expert, and still they manage to do an impressive job. From Sil's example, you can see that she reads really slowly and has to look at the individual letters first (v-l-ie-g-t-ui-g)before she can recognise the words. In a similar way, experts are probably much faster in doing something, and can recognise pattern much more easily than beginners.

Social bookmarking - the next steps for the NPK4DEV tagging experiment

During the knowledge management for development workshop participants engaged daily in projects which made it possible for participants to work on something together. We decided to do a project about our tagging experiment. We are using the unique tag NPK4dev (non-profit knowledge management for development) to tag resources on knowledge management in a development context (you can see the tagcloud here). We worked for one afternoon, after which everyone disappeared except Christian, George and myself. The three of us then continued to produce this video to explain the usefulness of social bookmarking for individuals and groups with a common interest. We used the commoncraft videos about RSS and wikis for our inspiration! We had to make it in roughly 1,5 hours, so we didn't have time to make more drawings. We had to do it three times (the first two times we made major mistakes). The first time we had placed the drawings neatly in a row, so our task of putting the images was easy. The third time, though, every thing was a mess, so we were crazily searching for the relevant images.

Click To Play

Christian was so nice to make a timeline of the NPK4Dev tag that we are using to tag resources about knowledge management in a development setting. (here's the blogpost) The timeline is brilliant, you can see blogging and 'howto' are big hits topic and recently agriculture scored high. If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests.

Some new ideas I gained:

• The way Christian is able to digest flows of information and pick up interesting stuff amazed me as compared to other people who complaint about information overload when a list produces more than 3 mails per week. I guess the keeping track of RSS feeds and scanning information is a new skill. - let alone reading it. It also depends on how you define your professional need for keeping up with information and recent developments.

• We can make a next step with our tag by offering several subfeeds by combining tags. For instance npk4dev+blogging can make for a feed on blogging for development. npk4dev+news can generate a news feed.
  

• If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests and it can help you in the preparation of events etc.
  

• You can combine the feed with a customized search engine eg. google coop to make searching in the links easier.
  

• It'd help to make sense of the flow if you could highlight excellent resources, either by rating, or by adding a tag like top10. Then you could highlight the top resources in another space (wiki, newsletter, whatever) for people for whom following the feed doesn't work.

• Generally speaking, you help the users (especially for people without broadband connections) by working on the information, by printing lists, printing top information, adding top resources in websites or wikis, sharing summaries in discussion lists, etc. (you'd have to work out what works for people).
  

• Magnolia seem to offer more and better features than delicious, like taggers profiles and community spaces and better tagcloud options. (hmm, should we all shift??)

Corneille's painting again

I read in the Volkskrant that Corneille is painting again. I'm curious how painters work and learn and become masters. Corneille says he detests inspiration and just starts working, in the same way a child would paint. Starting with a stroke of paint and adding new ones. When he was 20 years, he formed a three-manship with Appel and Constant, as he explains, this followed from forming the group of the 'experimentelen' of painters and poets. The three-manship lasted only 3 years, as they prefered to continue as individuals. When they met, they did not talk about each others work, but they did talk about paint and women. Nevertheless, they did monitor the developments in each others work.

I think what intrigues me is that in the end, the basis of their development process is very individualistic. They do observe each others works, but don't discuss it. I wonder what this means for communities of practice, whether individual development trajectories are not the core of communities of practice. So we should maybe be more modest about the community part, and recognise that the basis for practice is very individualistic.

Pimping and renaming my blog

I gave my blog a new style (the new blogger templates are definitely easier than the old ones, in terms of adjusting your sidebar features!). In the old blogger you could not click on the title of a blogpost to get the link, which was quite annoying too. I decided on a new name: Lasagna and chips. Thanks to Beth and Nancy for brainstorming with me.

When I started blogging, I did not want to have a personal blog, but rather a thematic blog- about communities of practice for development. After 1,5 years, I feel this theme is rather limiting me, I prefer to make this my personal blog - to blog about innovation and creativity, stimulated by either communities of practice, new ways of working, or exposure to new ideas. And anything else I'm thinking about.

The name lasagna and chips came up become while I was in a restaurant where we ordered lasagna and the waiter asked whether we wanted chips with our lasagna. Being brought up with the idea that you have only one starch item in every meal, this made us laugh. But when you are not brought up with that idea, why not? So interacting with people who think differently, you are more exposed to the way you are actually thinking.

Introduction to delicious: lots of resources

For a session next week about our npk4dev tagging experiment, I compiled a short introduction to del.icio.us, thanks for an easy start-up due to a blogpost by Dorine Ruter. I thought I might as well crosspost it here, will be easier for myself too to find it.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that we are using to collectively gather websites, wikis, blogs and other online resources with interesting content about knowledge management in the context of development cooperation. We have chosen delicious because it is used by a large number of people, but have found out it is not so intuitive for everyone, so if you are new to delicious, it may take some time to get used to it.

But what is social bookmarking in the first place? Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and 'tagging' them with keywords, meaning you add information about the content. The tagging allows you to find your resources lateron, but also to follow other people's resources with the same tag. If you like to know more: here are some good starter resources.

Del.icio.us basics

• http://del.icio.us – The del.icio.us website


• http://del.icio.us/help/ – Useful start-up information


• Del.icio.us cheat sheet – Explanation of del.icio.us by Beth Kanter


• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking – Introduction on social bookmarking in general


• http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html - the several habits of wildly successful delicious users with good tips for starting delicious users


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5508.cfm- 13 tips for effective tagging

Examples of del.icio.us users

• http://del.icio.us/joitske – Joitske Hulsebosch’s links on Communities of Practice, ICT4DEV / KM4DEV and online interaction


• http://del.icio.us/choconancy – Nancy White on online interaction and facilitation (tools and processes)


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter – My own links on KM4DEV and online interaction

Examples of how del.icio.us is used by other development organisations or individuals

• http://del.icio.us/euforic – Use of del.icio.us within an organization / network


• http://euforic.org (click on RSS feeds) – Example of tag display (at bottom of page)


• http://www.iaald.org – Example of most recent bookmarks displayed elsewhere via an RSS feed


• http://www.km4dev.suprglu.com – Combined feeds of 6 people joining in a KM4DEV tagging experiment


• http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com –my own example of npk4dev resources via the feed in the sidebar - just here on the right side


• http://www.r-mail.org/ – Tool (one of many) to keep track of new items via e-mail


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter/bookmarking – Some of Dorine's bookmarks of del.icio.us related tools, to use once you have gotten to know del.icio.us

Learning more about delicious

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/ - A yahoo group about delicious


• http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/show/67/support - for more links about delicious


• http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/- to explore your own delicious network


• http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/index.html - for visual representations of tags


• http://tagcrowd.com/ - to create a tagcloud
• http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations - more visualizations including per tagger


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5719.cfmm - tips for tidying tags


• http://www.econsultant.com/delicious-by-function/index.html - delicious from A to Z
• http://www.unthinkingly.com/experiments/nptech/understanding_nptech.php - the amazing tagcloud of nptech

And here's a great and attractive presentation from Beth Kanter about tagging for collaboration and knowledge sharing:

Ira Glass on video-storytelling

Via Beth Kanter, we got in touch with Steve Bridger who did a presentation on online fundraising. I missed it, but I'll definitely go through his presentation! It was nice to meet up, but even more surprising is that I only found out back home that he is the blogger of the npf2 blog, which I already followed via my bloglines. I realise it's more fun to read a blog when you know something about the blogger. And realize I had never shown any interest in the writers of some of the blogs I read.

On his blog I read the blogpost Bring the love back which links to a microsoft video with a short scene in a restaurant between a guy with 'the advertiser' on his t-shirt and a woman with 'the consumer' on her t-shirt. It funny and a sort of metaphore story. I'm thinking this should be a next step for my vlogging process. I've experimented a lot with interviews, which are straightforward, but I would like to experiment with new forms too. Via the yahoo-group on videoblogging I found this - longish- video with Ira Glass (There's one with Dave Eggers too!). He explains that a good story is composed of three building blocks:
1. an anecdote (with a sequence of events)
2. the bait (constantly raised question)
3. the point of the story (the moment of reflection, should not be predictable)

He also stresses that you have to record a lot of crap before getting to high quality work. (heard that before with regard to painting!).

Blogging and vlogging till your food gets cold

(picture by Alec)
I've been working hard for two days (actually three, the next day there was still a lot of uploading and blogging to do) to blog/vlog part of the EUFORIC/CONCORD meeting in Brussels. The idea behind blogging/vlogging the event was to make sure that other members or interested persons who can not make it to the event for whatever reason, can also engage with what happened and what was discussed, and be part of it or learn from it. This is a group that are for the majority not yet 'web2.0' users, so it would also be a way of showing what you can do with the tools. By the way, is a blog which combines 'normal' blogposts with 'vlogposts' a bvlog or a vblog? Anyhow you can see the result here.

How did we go about it? We had a team of 6 people and did not have a chance to meet for a long time beforehand. 4 people had a lot of time to devote to the process, 2 people less. That worked well, since there were many parallel sessions and we had a strict way of dividing up the tasks of trying to get some interesting posts out of a session. Basically we had several mail exchanges, skype and telephone talks and a wiki page with the team to prepare ourselves, and know what we were going to do, talk through the division of tasks, logistics and purpose of the blog (not to cover everything, but to share interesting remarks and conversations). We created a variety of free accounts for the event, to produce materials in different formats:

• A flickr group , to which anyone can post pictures


• We had a wiki already and added a category for this event


• A blip.tv account


• We set up the special blog in advance too, with various posters, and a guest blogger account and the blog was feeding into the main EUFORIC site


• Slideshare to be able to upload and possible share all presentations

One of my favorite videos, filmed by Martin, is this one. Francois has over 20 years experience in development and expresses his opinion about the lack of appreciation for southern contributions and research.

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The funniest one, because you have to turn your computer 90 degrees is this one:

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Which brings me to the lessons learned from the process.. I guess for a new team, you have to go through a learning process, making these kind of mistakes (we also missed one of the interviews, it was not recorded..). Hard to avoid, but it might help to do more testing beforehand, and looking at a few videos together and see what you like/dislike about them. The workload would have been more evenly spread, if we had all learned to upload videos, edit them, upload them to blip.tv and embed them into the blog (that was now done by two people). On a positive note, with a dedicated team of 4; you can capture a conference in a multi-medial way using free online tools.

What really worked well is that we grew more confident and managed to drag people in. Nancy White, one of the presentors, shared her pictures immediately with the group account, and so did Alec later spontaneously. The second day we asked various people to blog directly using our computers. Fortunately we had a web2.0 training session, in which we could both teach people more about the tools as well as explain what we were doing. So we were really happy that in the closing session after the open space, various participants said they would 'put in on the blog'. As the central online space for the conference. Next time, more advertisement could be done beforehand, but I guess we waited for something to show and were shy to point to an empty blog.

How does it make a difference?: it would be interesting to do a short survey amongst members attending/non-attending to ask them how the appreciated it. I noticed some videos got almost immediately 25 views on blip.tv but suspect the viewers may be regular blip.tv users rather than the members or participants. So in my most cynical mood I could think the team let their food go cold for a blog that may not really be read. On the other hand (looking at it from a more optimistic angle!) it makes the conversations in such a conference suddenly publicly available! And hence create a huge enlargement of the impact what was said and done within the walls and gardens of the chant d'oiseau enormously. What I would hope for is that it creates space for other voices to be heard, maybe from the people who would normally not talk in a plenary session. That's something we could be more conscious about next time, as we were now too busy running around and missing our lunches.

Training to introduce new e-tools

Today a little bit of a blogging day, catching up with my bloglines and blog ideas.. This is blogpost number 301! It starts to function as my memory, my brains are already getting lazy after I blogged something. So in future I will probably need the search function on my blog more than my memory...

With Steven Scheer and Simon Koolwijk I co-facilitated a training to introduce various tools for e-collaboration at kontakt der kontinenten. Though I had become a little allergic to training throughout my career, seeing little application of all that was learned -and more and more attracted to supporting learning through communities of practice- this day made me realize training can be powerful for learning new things and especially for lowering the threshold for people to experiment with various new tools. We did a virtual team assignment, using a NING platform as an example of a web-based discussion forum, skype as VoIP and Unyte as an example of a screen sharing tool.

It was interesting to see that people got a chance to talk about their use of tools (and that there were a couple of previously unidentified champions) and their anxieties. An important aspect of such a day may be to make use of technology a topic for discussion. One of those anxieties was whether working online would make everything 'faster' again. Another one was about security, fear of spam, viruses etc., but also fear for undesired contacts with the negative connotation of the word chat (the fact that one participant was immediately invited by two unknown men after signing up for skype did not help).

What I personally learned is:

• The reconfirmation of differing individual learning styles. During preparation and testing, noone used the handouts, and I thought they were obsolete. But during the training one participant read the handout completely before doing anything else.
• There are always technical set-backs, so you have to be creative and have plan B. In our case, the ning invitations were never received, probably filtered out somewhere. One champion helped to send it through another address.
• In such a training where online collaboration beyond e-mail is new to the participants, it is important to create a positive experience and help them with the hard parts eg. uploading pictures. Working on a real life case made it interesting, people could see what they achieved in terms of project results, supported by the technology rather than seeing the technology as a hurdle.

Wikis in plain English

Another great video from Commoncraft: this time explaining wikis. It's just brilliant how they explain it without using computer screens. The video takes 3 and a half minutes, and explains wikis taking the example of a group of four people who go camping. When I saw it explained, it made me realise that I could use wikis much more often than I do now. When we prepared a training as a team of three persons, it was just at the day of training that we realised how much we had used a flurry of e-mails and that it would have been easier to have a wiki or online environment for ourselves too. On the other hand, I have just used google docs for our (lengthy) article and when we coincidentally worked on it at the same time, some lines disappeared so we went back to good old word documents (just feels safer at times!)



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Pictogame to discover my blog view

Via Julius Huijnk of Helpalot I found pictogame, a site where you can make your own online game in 1 minute.

Put this game on your blog Create your own More games

So you can puzzle to find out my view from behind my laptop...
I think it can be a nice online icebreaker for an online workshop. Though I wonder if you'd give everyone the same puzzle (it could become a sort of competition who is fast in solving the puzzle) or ask them to make their own puzzle about themselves and let others guess what it is. Probably the second option.

Technology finds us a house

We are planning to move to the Hague in summer (no, that's not the capital of the Netherlands). I wonder how people searched for a house 10 years ago (probably using newspapers and brokers), but it's amazing how our search is a seamless experience using on-and offline strategies.

We use housing sites like Funda and Jaap and get e-mail alert about new houses meeting our search criteria. Especially the 360 degrees photos are helpful to get a sense of the area when you don't know these places. After finding a few online, we have gone to the areas physically to get an idea of how it looks and feels like. The physical experience is very important. When we had identified houses that could be interesting we rushed back home to look online for the details of the inside of the houses. Together this would give a fairly good picture of where to make an appointment to see the house inside. I'm sure we are making a really well informed choice, knowing what's available. For prices, you request the price of sales in the same areas or street.

For the mortgage advice we had one webcam advice and several face-to-face advices. Though the technology for the online webcam advice didn't work very well (we couldn't hear him, so had to use the phone), the advantage was that he could show the calculations immediately and share them with us. Another advisor who visited us at home created a lot less trust, so the myth that face-to-face creates trust more easily can be dismantled, at least for our case. For trust in this case, it is more important that the responses to your questions make sense, and the speed of giving solid information does a lot to add to trust too.

Practical examples of web2.0 in the development sector

I did a presentation during a Euforic training in Maastricht about web2.0 tools, especially blogs wikis and RSS feeds. During the presentation I showed some practical examples of the way people or organisations use these tools for learning, networking, advocacy, fundraising etc. with the aim of stimulating the imagination of the participants who had just learned about the technical part of the tools. I had not uploaded the powerpoint presentation on slideshare, as it is not one of those presentations that make a lot of sense without the actual presentation. But yesterday at work I discovered slideshare is also a very good helping you to access your own powerpoint presentations when you are away from your own computer! I must say there are some great presentations shared, but I'd still feel guilty about using someone else's presentation slides... So I decided to upload it and see whether the embedding works.... (I don't think it does, what mistake do I make?)

David Weinberger's messy cupboard

Here's a video with David Weinberger talking for roughly an hour about the topic of his book : everything is miscellaneous. I got alerted to the video by the knowledge management for development list.



He is expanding on the idea that digital possibilities are changing the ordering of things which has implications for knowledge creation and decision-making on categories. It kind of democratises categorisation and ordering (my words). I had heard this metaphore before about tagging: books can be stored in just one cupboard, but online you can store a book on as many shelfs as you like (he used the metaphore of branches on a tree).

First order: books on the shelf
Second order: meta data about books on cards (library science)
Third order: all digital data and meta data

Messiness on the internet is hence a virtue rather than a problem, with the miscellaneous drawer of the cupboard getting larger and larger online. He provides the example of a speech delivered by Bush, which attracts 2400 blogposts within a short period of time. This is a new public negotiation of knowledge on a scale that had never before been possible. No one appears to be authoritative, and hence this is a much better reflection of what we're interested in than any controlled source.

I liked the video and I agree with this idea that the negotiation of knowledge is changed by all the recent interaction possibilities on the web, but I find it a little superficial and surprising that everyone's raving about this. I regret that he doesn't go on to analyze how current power relations and cultural assumptions do get reproduced. For instance, it's no coincidence that google posted David Weinberger on the net, rather than for instance Nana Nketsia, a professor at Cape Coast university, who may be an equally important thought leader. But I haven't read his book, so maybe I should do this first.

Happy end of ramadan!

A friend told me the following story. It is funny but a nice example of intercultural communication (and how easy it is to create misunderstandings) too. Fortunately, she allowed me to blog it:

I work in a large, international development organisation with thousands of staff in various countries all over the world. We have a corporate e-mail system whereby it is possible to send a mail to all employees at once. One day, towards the end of ramadan, a person from a country in West Africa send a message to all to wish every one a happy end of ramadan celebration. Others started replying thank you, etc. The IT persons at the headquarters were panicking because a lot of mail traffic may bring the system down, so he sent a message warning people not to send these kind of messages around. But that aroused very bad sentiments within the West African employees, and they started reacting to his message by challenging their right to wish everyone a happy end of ramadan, as they would wish for Christian holidays. So the whole discussion became even more heated on the issue of muslims versus christians (everyone sending mails to thousands of staff) and the IT department panicking even more.

You see how easily the intentions of the IT department staff get misinterpreted. Probably the West African staff may not be aware of the implications of sending messages all over the globe, both for the system as well as for using the staff time. There is a dimension of people from different backgrounds giving different levels of importance to these kind of messages too (they may think this is not wasting time). I can also imagine there may be more general frustrations about unbalanced attention for Christian holidays over Muslim holidays leading to this interpretation by the West African staff...

Why organizations should not blog

I found this Dilbert cartoon via this blogpost by knowledgecafe. The title of the Dutch blogpost is "why most organisations should not blog"

They give 3 arguments why corporate organisations should not blog:
1. Every post need to be checked by legal departments etc. which inhibits authenticity.
2. Organisations are not well prepared for negative comments. Turning off the comments function takes away an important feature of blogs.
3. The purpose of the blog may be to control PR about your brand. But this is an illusion anyhow (the idea that you can control your image/branding).

I think corporate blogging is a very different category from personal blogging. An individual blog takes on the personality of the blogger. My experiences with a group blog is that a group blog is quite different too, as the blog doesn't take on any personality either. I think a group blog can work well with a clear common purpose/theme and long-term interaction within the team. Then the blog can take on the colour of the team. (and probably without colour a blog isn't very interesting to anyone). This process takes time (and probably more interaction than we have currently).

From a US report of last year (the Makovsky state of corporate blogging survey), the fortune 1000 senior executives are slow to react to the credibility of corporate blogs. Only a minority have someone writing a blog related to the company (15%). This figure is much lower than the figure of another study which predicts 70% of corporations will blog by 2007.

Talking about blogging, there is a good blogpost with a powerpoint presentation about 25 styles of blogging by the 360 digital influence blog. When I went through it, it made me think about my prefered blogstyles. Maybe I should try out some new styles.

RSS in Plain English

I'm at time hesitant in crossposting, as I have the impression most people who read my blog, read almost the same blogs I do. Only when I read an interesting Dutch blogpost, I'm confident of the value of crossposting in English, as I'm assuming your Dutch is terrible.

I found this video from Common craft via Nancy White's blog. It's explaining what RSS is and what RSS readers can do to make you faster in keeping up with your favourite websites and blogs. It's really simple and good, and can be used for training and introductory purposes. I'm happy to crosspost it because I also liked the refreshing way the video was made. Instead of using a computer screen, print outs and drawings were used. The vingers make it lively. It's a nice way of making an instruction video without having to show up with your own face (something I like to avoidO. It's a good habit to point to the code of the video in your blogpost for crossposting too (since I have an account on blip.tv, it was clicking a matter of clicking on share, my blogname was already known to blip.tv and within two seconds I could repost it).

Common craft explains: There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start. They intend to make a commoncraft show so there's more coming and I'm going to subscribe to it.

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How to vlog a meeting or presentation?

I developed a 12-step vlogging process to help a network in Ghana (GINKS) produce an ICT4D stories blog. They were amazed that it is so easy to do, easier than maintaining a website for instance. We did two videos in the office together for fun, then did two video interviews jointly. The last two videos were published on their own. You can see them all on the GINKS blog. We are still figuring out how to link the blog to the website as a page of the website. Thanks to Jay Dedman and Beth Kanter for their tips along the way! there is an IBM podcast too on how to get started with online video. In it, they also make the point that it is very easy to get started with video editing software which is already may be on your computer (like windows moviemaker) which is of reasonably good quality. In combination with the easiness of uploading it to various site, and the possibility of tagging and blogging these video productions, it is a powerful way of bringing people closer together.

Step 1: Attend the meeting or listen to the presentation you want to vlog
Don’t video the whole meeting or the whole presentation. It could become boring and it will be time-consuming for people who were not around to watch it. Hence you have to attend the meeting and listen carefully to what is said. After knowing the details of the meeting or presentation, you can formulate 1-3 interview questions. The questions should lead the interviewee to expland on the core of the meeting, or rather to zoom in on one interesting detail. The interview question can either capture the core of the presentation, or one aspect of the discussions that take place.

Step 2: Choose your person(s) to interview and formulate your interview questions
If you vlog a presentation, it is clear whom you are going to interview, but if the meeting is attended by various people you have to make a decision whom to interview. Choose a person with an interesting opinion or controversial view, who can explain his/her view passionately. Basically the way this person talks will determine the quality of your video. If you have a lively meeting, you might also try and interview several people with the same question. You can have one or several questions. When you try and cover a presentation, you might need 3-4 questions and your video might end up in 3-5 minutes. When you have a specific topic, one question might do, and you may have a video of less than 1 minute. Western people are often more to the point and can talk about a topic without introduction. With people in the south, you might need to plan slightly more time and it may work better to ask introductory questions. You will learn what works by making lots of videos.

Step 3: Ask the interviewee(s) for 5 minutes of their time for a video interview and brief them about the process
It is unlikely people will say no, when you ask them for an interview of 5 minutes. You may brief him/her about the procedure (we will go to a quiet place, I will ask you the following two questions, etc) so that it is clear what is expected of them.

Step 4: Decide on the place of the interview and go there
If you do the interview straight away on the spot immediately after the meeting, it will be more spontaneous than if you do it later and the person will have the topics of the meeting or presentation fresh in mind. But you may have to find a relatively quiet place and good background. It is important to have light on the spot or on your back- so you are not experiencing backlight. Some rumour on the background is OK, as long as the interviewee is clearly audible. It might even give a bit of ‘colour locale’. If this doesn’t work, you may have to make another appointment. When you make an appointment, you can influence the place of interview more and you can choose a light and quiet place. Think about the light too. You can open curtains and put on the light.

Step 5: Do the actual interview and video it
You can do ask another person to ask the questions, or you can do it yourself. If you ask the questions yourself, the interviewee is more likely to look into the camera, which gives the feeling of direct contact. Be clear to the interviewee when to start, and be clear to yourself about the procedure. Are you going to include your questions in the video or will you add them later as text? You might tell tell the interviewee to begin with their name/affiliation and rephrase the question too. If you are not using an external microphone you have to be really close to the interviewee. Andy Carvin has developed some interview tips.

Step 6: Upload the video to your computer
You have to transfer the video to your computer using a cable. A wizard will help you to select the videos from your camera. Make it a habit to delete ‘old videos from your camera, and to upload and process the video as soon as possible after shooting it, otherwise you risk to copy a lot of videos which you don’t need. Make sure you know where you copy the video file (eg. under my videos) and give a logical name.

Step 7: Edit the video
Even if you don’t need to edit the video itself (eg cut part of it), and you don’t want to add any titles to it, you still have to convert the video into the right format. (if you use windows moviemaker from .mswmm to .wmv extension)

You can use one the following free programs for editing:
Windows movie maker
Virtual Dub
Jumanne
Cinelerra
Wax
Avid Free DV

Step 8: Host your video on the web and post it to your blog
There are lots of video sites where you can open an account and host your videos. The advantage of hosting your video on the web is that you don’t use space on your computer, you can access it from anywhere. But also important, from these sites, it is easy to crosspost it to a blog (making it into a vlog when you upload videos regularly). When you use a popular site, you may have lots of viewers too. Some of the site where you can host your video are:

• Blip.tv
• Youtube
• Google video
  (apparently with larger hosting capacity)
• Our media
• Yahoo video

I don’t know about the last 2, but in blip.tv, youtube, and google you have the option to add your blogaddress to your account, so that you can post your video on your blog with one click. In blip.tv you can even upload the video to your blog at the same time that you upload it to blip.tv. It will show the video ‘embedded’ in your blog. Embedded means that you see the picture of the video and start button so that readers and start the video from your blog, without having to go to the site where the video is hosted. It will look like this:

Step 9: Write a summary of the interview on your blog (and indicate how long the video is)
When readers see the video on your blog, they may not know how long it is and whether it is interesting enough for them to watch the whole video. You can edit the blogpost and write a summary of the video content. This will help readers to decide whether it is worth to watch the video. It will also help people with lowbandwidth who might not be able to watch the video to access the information by simply reading the text.

Step 10: Advertise the video if possible
You might announce a specific video to people who might be interested. Untill you have the idea that most people are subscribed to your vlog, you may post it to relevant Dgroups or send it to individual people. Don’t announce every video in the same Dgroup though, but if you have a special one, you might announce it and explain why it is special.

Step 11: Send the link to the interviewee and ask for feedback
This is important, because the interviewee has given you his/her time, and might be curious to see the result (and proud!). He/she can also help you to send the link to other interested people. When there are comments on the blog you might alert the interviewee again.

Step 12: Wait for compliments
(or ask for feedback if you don’t get any)
You can use the references to your blog to see whether other site have referred to your video. You can see the number of times the video has been viewed on the site where you host your videos (blip.tv, youtube or any other host).

Read my blog in chinese and french language!

Since I couldn't read my own blog in China, I'm happy to discover that some people are reading my blog in Chinese language! I found the french and chinese translations of my blog when I looked through the referals to my blog. Both persons used google translations. I can't say anything about the quality of the chinese translation. The french translation of the heading is quite good, but the quote has become really hard to understand because I used a Dutch text...

Meeting Chris Lunch on participatory video

Last month, I was too busy to blog some of the meeting sI attended and it seems late to blog them now. So let me be a good blogger today and blog the meeting I attended today with Chris Lunch from Insight on participatory video organised by CTA in Wageningen. (and yes, in Wageningen you always meet some old faces from the good old days like Huub from World Report who still has the same sense of humour so that was fun!).

I have been busy with vlogging, but had not explored the link with participatory video, hence I was looking forward to this meeting. My assumption about participatory video was that you give the camera to farmers and other people at community level so that they produce their own video. Though that was Chris' definition too, others used a much wider definition of participatory video in which you let people participate in the choices filmers make like topics, subjects, storyboard editing, etc.

The process of Insight's participatory video process can be summarized as follows:

• Participants learn video skills
• Facilitators help groups identify and analyze important issues
• Short video messages are directed and filmed
• Footage is shared and watched
• Learning and exchange is facilitated
• Communities have full editorial control

More in the training book developed by them which can be downloaded from their site.

The advantages of participatory video mentioned (between the lines) were that it can help people to focus and articulate their opinions, you have a concrete product, which can be shared. It can foster consensus building, and it helps identity building, people can be seen more easily as an expert. I would have liked to articulate better how it can work to enhance learning and shift power relations. In some of the examples, farmers were listened too because they had a video. Otherwise they would have been ignored. In that sense, it can work to increase inclusiveness of development processes- but that has to be facilitated in a skilled manner. I suspect Chris is first and foremost a good facilitator who happens to use video as an instrument. I would like to become more skilled in knowing when to use participatory video, when an online discussion or any other means to stimulate creativity in a group process. I do believe participatory video can open up people's minds because it introduces variety in means of communication (as you could use other channels).

Various filmmakers shared stories of how they used to carry kilos of equipment, and that the new camcorders have made participatory video possible. I shortly presented my vlogging process (will blog this in my next post). I am convinced that this can be a next step in video technology, which can also work to empower the 'hard to reach' as they were called.

Jay Ded works on an interesting video project from India, which he announces here. He believes there is a great hunger to learn more about lives in other countries (especially in the south). Amazing how some of the world are disconnected; the vloggers, the participatory video people, the filmmakers. So thanks to CTA for connecting some of us today!

How do I write for my blog?

I was tagged again for a meme by Beth. Beth is a crazy blogger (in terms of number of posts, not content) and I think I would have missed the tag, had I not traced it through the references to my blog on my sitemeter. The meme is 'how do you write for your blog'? It's the first meme I participate in with full enthusiasm. I was once asked the question how I could write so casually in a public blog, and I replied that I'm actually writing for a small group of people (Beth being one of them) and kind of forget that it's public. With the immense multitude of blogs I have no illusion that too many people are going to read it anyway.

One in a web2.0 call we were asked to summarize blogging in 3 words and I said: very public learning. Later I thought it is more thinking outloud (though that's only two words). I think the blog has become my place for thinking in text and pictures (and sometimes video), which is open to be read by others. But first at foremost, it is for myself. When I blog about an idea, it creates room in my head because I have it in my blog. Writing it down also forces me to formulate my ideas more clearly and sometimes I force myself to write some kind of conclusion. In that sense, it helps my learning process by forcing me to think through the ideas I have. I do use my blog a lot as my personal archive using the search function!

So how do my blog ideas start? It may that I read an article which has some interesting point of view which rings a bell, it may be something I experience, or a conversation I have. Always it is somehow a new insight or connection I make. Somehow blogging an article is safe. I do feel at times that I am not blogging my most important thoughts because you don't want to expose someone, or you can't write directly about clients/colleagues. I do want to move this a little as I think it will improve the relevance for others and myself at the same time. For instance, I asked a friend whether I could blog a story she told me and she agreed (coming to you soon). I'm also thinking of changing the title of this blog. I started with the idea of a topical blog, because I didn't want a personal blog and I wanted to learn more about CoPs for development. In the meantime, this topic starts to limit me in my writing as some posts seem too irrelevant for the topic (like this one).

People I would like to tag include Denise Clarke (as we discussed exactly this topic in Accra), The knowledgecafe guys, Wouter Rijneveld (I'm curious about his blogging process) and Anecdote (I'm curious how they are dealing with a corporate groupblog). And let me tag Bicyclemark (my latest blog discovery).