Blogging from hospital

No, not me fortunately!

I have a friend whose two-years old son was admitted to hospital with a rare auto-immune disease. He needed a lot of blood transfusions. The friend asked me to open a blog for his son so that he could share all information with everyone interested. Which is what I did. I added an email subscription feature, because most readers would not be familiar with RSS readers. They did not want comments online. They posted daily, or even twice daily, and included videos too. It made it a lot easier to pick up conversations on the phone, because you already had an idea whether there had been good or bad news lately. I felt better prepared to phone while knowing the latest news. The boy is back home now and doing fine. Now and then there is still a blogpost with some news.

The blog made communication with a wider group much easier for the parents than emails, because it is not a push, but a pull medium. They would not have sent daily mails to a wide group. With the blog, even not-so-close-friends would send each other the URL, so that they could read and follow the ups and downs and decide how often to read. It was also good, to have an online space where all information could be found, and you could scroll down to compare the writings with earlier accounts.

The interesting thing about this story for me is that he knew enough about weblogs to be able to use the tool (amongst others by reading my blog I guess). Yet, he never had the urge to start his own blog. I'm the last person who thinks that everyone should blog by the way. But when a situation occurred where a blog could be useful he was able to see its application. Had he not known enough about weblogs, he would probably not have been able to see this as clearly as he did. So that's what technology introduction is about for me: making sure people know enough about the available tools so that they can design their own application for the tool when the situation calls for it.

My first self-made widget

I'm proudly presenting my first self-made widget! I have built it with Sproutbuilder, which I got to know through Beth Kanter.




I have used the example of a conference about communities of practice in the Netherlands, that we'll be organizing on June 2. I particularly liked the countdown feature. You can do much more like adding audio or video to your widget (though it already seems heavy for non-broadband internet users). If you want to know more about widgets, you can read one of my earlier blogposts.

The difference between communities of practice and action learning

Tomorrow I'm going to present the difference between the theories of communities of practice and action learning (and between the communities themselves and action-reflection groups). I haven't found any materials comparing the two, so I had to do some brainwork for myself. This table summarizes what I intend to present. (CoP = community of practice, AL = Action Learning). Any input welcome!

Characteristic	CoP	AL
Is	A theory, little information on methods	A methodology, less detailed theory
Goal	Stewarding a knowledge domain	Problem solving
Participation	Varying levels of voluntary participation	Fixed group over period of time
Activities	Mix of learning activities	Focus on reflection and questions
Expertise	Distributed Expertise Leadership	Peer-to-Peer
Period	CoP life stages	Determined period of time

How can blogs support communities of practice?

(Cartoon via tangwailing blog)

I observed that Stan Garfield blogs about questions he receives or overhears about knowledge management. That made me think that I could blog some of the questions I get (+ the answers). One of them was: how can blogs support communities of practice?

1. A community of practice can have a public teamblog. An example of a teamblog is the ecollaboration weblog . It works for the community to document face-to-face meetings, and makes it publicly known. In a discussion about the future of the community, it came up as an object of identification with the community. It is not easy to keep it going. For instance, it would be great if members would post more blogs sharing their experiences with ecollaboration and reflections, but it's not priority for people.

2. A weblog with summaries of discussions can be a repository for the community. An example is the weblog Everything you always wanted to know about capacity development . It is a weblog from ICCO capacity building advisor. The discuss cases in a password-protected environment. The cases are summarized in a depersonalized matter. Besides a repository, it is also a boundary crossing tool, as it is publicly available. In this case, the first posts were done by me as a facilitator, since this was a new way of working for the group and hard to explain. When they saw it, they were enthusiastic and were inspired enough to continue. It feels like a 'product' of discussions which may seem intangible.

3. Individual member weblogs can stimulate individual practice reflections, but can also act as means to open up practices to others. CPsquare offers an RSS feed that aggregates all blogposts by its members. This can be a way of making the weblogs more visible.

4. Blogging communities have blogs as their main means of communication. Nancy White has written an article about blogging communities called: Launching a new paradigm for online community. She distinguishes 3 types of blogging communities:
1. The single blog/blogger centric community with the power vested in the central blogger.
2. The Central connecting topic community which is a community that arises between blogs linked by a common passion or topic.
3. The boundaried communities like myspaces or multiply where members register and join and are are offered the chance to create a blog.

For more about blogging communities you can watch Nancy White presenting on this topic (she is talking through webcam!) in this video

Second life secondary experiences

I've never spent time to understand or experiment with Second Life. Somehow it seems more part of gaming than general online interaction and that seems like a whole different specialization. When I was checking feebs (Dutch site with videos for quote "ICT-ers and professionals" - so ICT-ers are NOT professionals :) I found this tutorial for Second Life by Thorley Linden. Besides using it as tutorial you can use it to get some feel of how it is to walk in second life with an avatar. It feels a little like walking in a fairytale.



I also read a book by the writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer about his experiences in Second Life. He wondered around for half a year. He has chosen to be a woman in Second Life as a kind of sociological or antropological experiment. He/she earns some money with Pole Dancing (?) = paaldansen. One of the big attractions for him is the fact that you can fly and don't need a house in Second Life. However, most of the avatars in Second Life do build a house and some even sit on their couches in Second Life. Since there is no crime (you can't bleed, and your property can be taken- in the code of property the owner is written) he (or she rather) had to get used to the absence of danger. After a while, he was seeing the normal world through Second Life eyes, being amazed about the details and searching for the minimap where you can spot other avatars.

I think this could be a way of using Second Life in the context of learning- to have people experience a different culture and see how it makes them creative and look at their real life with other eyes.

Video to explain Twitter

There's a new short video by CommonCraft, this time explaining Twitter. Since we organized a twitter experiment I've continued twittering. I'm not doing it fulltime though and may forget about it for even a few days. But sometimes I think it's fun to see what people are doing, and sometimes I find interesting new meeting rooms like Seats2meet or new wiks that are of interest to me like the etoolkit wiki. It's an amazingly new type of communication that reminds me of overhearing short conversations in the train (something I like too). It also ressembles the short conversations with friends and family in which you pick up an idea for a movie to see or a book to read. But this time you can broaden it to a larger group. I notice that the kind of activities I report are influenced by what I read from others, but that's very diverse from people reporting every step to people reporting their mood, or only their blogposts/what they read online (almost like a surflog). I've never liked the name microblogging, because it is so radically different from blogging, it has nothing to do with writing short blogposts!

I met Elmine Wijnia yesterday for the first time and she said she preferred Jaiku. Later I thought it is hard to change from twitter to Jaiku because it's dependent on where the people you are following are. It's as if everyone is going to the same pub and you are going to another. But it might be nice to try with a new group.

Jay Cross about informal learning

I just finished reading informal learning, the book by Jay Cross

If you want to see two more videos where Jay Cross continues his explanation, you can go to his blog. In youtube the second video has half the amount of viewers as the first one, which can be an indication that it wasn't interesting enough for half of the people, or it can be explained by the fact that people like to watch a video for 3-4 minutes, but not longer. Personally I dislike watching long videos, it takes up too long, then I'd rather have the text to scan through.

In the video and his book, he explains that 80% of learning budgets in companies are spend on training, whereas most of the learning (also 80%) takes place outside training rooms. He sees human conversations as the mail technology for learning and estimates that training will become obsolete. Though later he adds that formal training can be good for novices, comparing it to driving on a buss, where you the buss driver is determining the direction for you. Informal learning, though, works better for experienced workers. This is compared to biclyces, riding a bike you can decide where to go. It makes me curious why he hasn't chosen a car, which goes as fast as a buss at least... A bicycles is much slower than a buss.

To be honest, the book did not give me a lot of new insights, but maybe my expectations were too high. I had hoped to find more detail about levels of learning. I'm a little frustrated that we use the word learning for someone who asks for whether you want coffee with milk and learns that you like milk in your coffee. But we also use it for the results of deep personal reflections that make you decide that you want a major shift in your life. You learn what to do with your life.
It's a different level of impact.

The positive side is that the book explains informal learning in very simple, convincing ways, and gives lots of examples methods to stimulate informal learning like World Cafe, Bar camps, etc. I've come to realize informal learning may be a good term in itself. And he has very good account of the developments in the field of elearning since he was one of the first people coining the term.

I feel that Jay is using a definition of training in a somehow sterotype way. The way I know training is much more participatory and experience-based and may therefore not be diametrically opposed to informal learning. For instance, a training may even use a World Cafe method, a method that Jay labels as perfect for informal learning. Therefore it seems too black and white to me to talk about formal and informal learning and labelling training as formal learning. I will try to capture my ideas about informal/formal in a diagram in a next post. (I'm just realizing that this is the second blogpost with a cliffhanger, maybe the example of Jay about a waiter who only remembers something while unfinished and forgets everything when it's finished has influenced me after all :).

Dilbert discusses web2.0 or web1.0

Via Miles to go a cartoon from Dilbert (it was actually placed in the Intermediair magazine in Dutch). It's actually more about diverting attention in organizations.. It reminds me of two things: experts in eg. Netsquared talk about 'social media' rather than web2.0 (to avoid the dichotomy between web1.0 and web2.0?). And the eternal discussion about: is this a community of practice or not (or a learning community).

I've been asked to explain the difference between action learning and communities of practice, so as soon as I have a draft, I will put it up here.

Power Point 20th Anniversary Cinderella

This presentation is too good not to reblog! Via a blogpost on Northern Voices by miss604

A powerpoint presentation about Cinderella. Explains directly the difference between a story and a powerpoint bullet presentation... Now that I have a look at it again, I do like the graph with displaying Cinderella's beauty and happiness over time.

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Can web2.0 improve decision-making processes?

This is my first cross-post from my Dutch blog. Deciding whether a topic should go to my Dutch blog or this one has been quite smooth. Generally speaking, it's been easy to start the Dutch blog, building on the experience with this blog. I'm not insecure about topics, and confident that the audience will grow.

The Dutch blogpost 'Can I blog a visum?' might be interest to a wider audience I believe. In short: I invited an Ethiopian friend to come and visit me in the Netherlands. For the second time, her visa request has been declined by the Dutch embassy in Addis Abeba. The reason is that she has no property and no fixed job, (and no children) and therefore they think it is not proven that she will return to Ethiopia after the holidays. The risk is too high. I understand the Dutch embassy, but think they are flawed in their decision-making process. I think property, job papers etc can not reduce the risk of that Ethiopians with a tourist visa stay in the Netherlands. (might be the contrary??) I think it has much more to do with the context of the visa request and the invitation.

So I started wondering whether in this flawed decision-making process, web2.0 tools could be of help to improve decision-making. After all, it would be better if Ethiopians with the right intentions would be allowed to make a trip to our country -another friend who worked for Ethiopian Airlines and had a free ticket had the same problem-.

I see a lot of potential in blogging. For instance if Addisalem had blogged the two year process, with high hopes and huge disappointments, it would be a great testimonial of how a person with good intentions would suffer from the Dutch policy. And blogs are prone to be authentic stories, it is hard to fake two years. But how to get the right audience? Therefore it might be necessary to have a central space where people with similar problems blog. This could give a lot more insights to the decision-makers involved. But are those decision-makers ready to read? This is not obvious, and therefore a change process may be needed to raise the awareness of the decision-makers and raise their appetite to read. Would this be very different from listening to the stories or formal evaluations? I think blogging has the potential to be different because of the low threshold of putting this information out there on the internet. So blogs make a huge, previously hidden world more accessible. But the change has to go hand in hand with an attitude of learning by reading and searching for pertinent information. RSS feeds and tags will be important to that purpose.

The organization is there to stay, but the manager is not

In an earlier blogpost I proposed to experiment with a blog debate and Josien and Andy were into to trying this. Josien kicked off a debate about The end of the organization? Based on an essay by Michael Gilbert.

A quote:

Is this the end of the organization? Probably not by name and certainly not in the broadest sense of the term. But the traditional, tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change. The
organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today. Whether the organization as we know it survives or not, it is by studying the changing patterns of communication that we will discover the new
shape of civil society. Our methods of analysis - and possibly our methods of regulation, funding, and participation - will shift from those that reflect managerial thinking to those that reflect ecosystem thinking.

Josien responded by agreeing that organizations are shaped by communication patterns, communication patterns are changing, therefore organizations are changing. Communication channels have determined organigrams. The social web is a revolution which has really changed the principles of communication. Secondly, she argues that it is already happening, the future is now. For instance in the music, travel industries etc. New business models emerge. Best is the read the full post.

So I will argue that the organization is here to stay. I think both are putting too much emphasis on communication. The basis of organizations is their mission, aim, goal, whatever you name it. In the commercial sector it is about products and services, in the government is it about legislation, in the nonprofit sector is it about a societal goal.. The function of an organization is to deliver that product or to achieve that mission by integrating the work of its employees. So the organization is there to stay, because its basis it collaborating to produce a product or service of value for society. Communication is a means to an end.

But I do think there are changes underway, since more and more organizations thrive on knowledge workers, professionals. I would like to point to Stephen Collin's presentation Power to the People. Stephen points to the fact that knowledge workers (people working primarily with information and developing and using knowledge) are often demotivated and restrictred by their organizations. The manager's wish to control the outputs of the organizations leads to overly controlling behaviour towards knowledge workers who feel withheld in their practice by the managers. This is a core conflict between managers and knowledge workers who don't want to be managed. So the organizations of the future will have found ways of dealing with this conflict and are smart in leveraging the power of the knowledge workers. Possible contributions to dealing with this conflict may be found in the following 3 areas:

1. Communities of practice - whereby value created is measured and effectiveness closely monitored- this needs much more attention.
2. Online communication and collaboration tools- which make help reducing the tension between managers and knowledge workers because it makes the work of knowledge workers more accessible and transparent. (after all, online communication leaves visible traces, face-to-face communication doesn't)
3. Disappearance of the division between knowledge worker and managers, managers will increasingly be knowledge workers and be parttime managers - hence the disappearance of the full-time manager.

Transformation of communities of practice

This is the young swan swimming in the waters near our house (there is a lot of water in our area, something which made a Malian friend exclaim that this is a very dangerous place!). The swan is slowly transforming from a grey into a white swan. I'm interested in the transformation phase in communities of practice. The first reason is that I looked around for materials about transformation/transition for a Dutch course, and couldn't find any good materials. Most materials deal with the start-up phase of communities of practice. A second reason for my interest in the topic is that I have handed over the facilitation of the ecollaboration community to another team, at the same time as my co-facilitator Sibrenne Wagenaar. That made me wonder whether a shift in facilitatorship would automatically mean a transformation? And what are conditions for a smooth, positive transformation?


I posted a question in the com-prac yahoo group. Besides replies, I got a pointer to the book Net Work by Patti Anklam, which I just finished reading. The book deals with various networks, and hence with a wider topic than communities of practice. I found it quite useful to look at communities as networks, as that is what they are in the basis.


Patti Anklam makes a distinction between planned triggers, discovered triggers, dynamic triggers and asymmetric triggers for change in a network. Whether planned or emergent, a resilient network will be able to manage the context of transformation by leveraging its core strength. So it depends on each network, whether it can deal with change. This necessary resilience can be built by:

• Commitment to a common purpose, but that purpose is also subject to reflection and generative dialogue
• A structure that is appropriate to its purpose and monitored
• Support for energetic and trusted interactions
• Clarity about stakeholders, investments and outcomes

Changes within a network can involve the structure, style or value-creating processes (finding the right balance between tangible and intangible exchanges) of the network.

Many replies came from Miguel Cornejo, in one case an ex-leader/moderator became a common user of the online community. He disagreed with changes in public. I take this as an important lesson that former leaders should welcome changes and not stick to the past. In another situation, they took care to do induction of a new team one by one, to allow for a gentle transition and this worked. John Smith thought that it's important to keep two out of three elements stable. (the elements being community, domain, practice). So when you change leadership you try to keep community practice and topics the same.

A quote of Miguel I liked: " But always, a moderator/facilitator/convenor lends part of his/her character to the way the community does things. They make part of the CoP "personality"so when they depart it's bound to affect the CoP, in bigger or smaller things, sooner or later."

Miguel got inspired to write a blogpost with a metaphore with sandcastles, you are encouraged to check it out here. Any fixed structure that doesn't evolve with its environment gets washed away. Communities too, need continuous tending and rebuilding.

When I look at the ecollaboration community, it continues to flourish and grow, and we are comfortable with smaller changes that are underway. So it has withstood the test of being resilient enough to manage this transition. Though it took a bit of letting go to step out of the facilitator role, it is very rewarding to see it continue like this.

Vary your style in blogging

There is a Dutch saying 'verandering van spijs doet eten' - change of diet makes hungry. So a bit of variation in blogpost styles may make people read? Via Tim's blog, I found a wiki developed by Michelle Martin with all kind of blogpost styles and examples! A great resource for bloggers.

An example of a style I never tried:

Debate Posts. In a debate post you argue the pros and cons of a particular position, idea or approach. You can do this either with another blogger or you can debate with yourself, writing both a pro and a con post.

Might be useful for starting bloggers, but maybe even more for longer time bloggers like myself who'd like to try and flex with some new styles. Might lead to new results. Anybody wants to debate with me?

Co-creation with Johnnie Moore

I like the word co-creation, more than collaboration. It points to the fact that you create something new, and there is a part of several people in it. It sounds very equal in the sense that there's equal space for people to contribute to the creation.

I picked up the following video when I participated in Nancy White's online workshop 'Facilitation of online Interactions'. I was reminded about the video because of some collaborative efforts I'm in that feel like the co-creation in the video. Of course collaboration is not always that smooth that it feels like real co-creation. I once did the 'towerbuilding' teambuilding game (it was the egg tower exercise, without the egg). Very revealing that due to speed and excitement, we actually left one person out, who did not speak the language very well.

Maybe co-creation is the ideal state of collaboration? I thought I'd search for the video on youtube, and there is was: Co-creation with Johnnie Moore.

Attributing emotions to actions

Via Jay Cross' Informal Learning Blog I found a nice video from work by Heider and Simmel. You can watch it on his blog or if you click here. You will see some figures, circles and squares moving. What story do imagine?

In the mid 1940s, Heider and Simmel constructed this animation. Most observers developed elaborate stories about the circle and the little triangle being in love etc. Personally I didn't think they were in love, but thought about a person chasing and intimidating the other two, probably due to the situation in Kenya. More explanations can be found on the Hakank blog:

"Humans spontaneously imbue the world with social meaning: we see not only emotions and intentional behaviors in humans and other animals, but also anger in the movements of thunderstorms and willful sabotage in crashing computers."

It is a nice animation that can be linking to lessons about online interaction. People make lots of attributions about emotions behind actions (or lack of actions) online. Often the emotions behind the actions are interpreted. But they may be wrongly interpreted (when someone doesn't reply, is he angry or maybe he didn't receive the mail?). You have to learn to make less attributions and to check more frequently whether your interpretation is right.

What can development organizations do with Web2.0 tools?

Some time ago, I compiled some examples of what you can do with web2.0 tools for communication within a development project. In this case, a large project in several countries. I'd like to share my ideas about the different ways of engaging with the wide range of web2.0 tools. After all, web2.0 are designed for participation, and what is more core business for development organizations?

I tried to separate four different options:

1. You can use available web2.0 tools (free or at low cost)
2. You can integrating web2.0 tools in another website
3. You can design a new website using web2.0 principles and technologies
4. You can leveraging popular web2.0 sites where crowds of people are interacting

I can provide some examples of each of these options, though there are probably lots of other examples:

1. Using available web2.0 tools

Why not make use of all these wonderful tools out there? ICCO is very innovative in trying to foster an open information sharing system, use a 'Learning Alliance wiki ' (a pbwiki) as the main basis, with other thematic wikis attached to it. In the wiki there are links to Dgroups, as a discussion forum, Blogger weblogs and google calendars for event planning. And I'd almost forget the feeds from the social bookmarking site delicious. Maarten Boers explains more in this blogpost. You can see a presentation by Peter Ballantyne here.

Another example is the Knowledgecafe wiki by CARE.

2. Integrate web2.0 tools into an existing website

The web2fordevelopment conference last year in Rome had to experiment with web2.0 tools of course. In their website, they integrated flickr photo sets, Youtube videos, and a link to the weblog and wiki. Nowadays, most webservices allow you to embed content from another site.

A special technology which is helpful in integrating web2.0 tools in another site is RSS feeds. By using a Feed to JavaScript like feedostyle you can have information or news published on one web sites- displayed on another site. So when the information or news changes, your web site will be automatically changed too. A good example can be found on the site of EUFORIC, a European network. They display various feeds on their site using feedburner.

3. Design a completely new website using web2.0 principles and technologies

Ofcourse you can also design a completely customized site for your own purpose, and use web2.0 principles like working in beta. Examples I can think of are the CIARIS website on social inclusion. There is a screencast of the design fase.

Helpalot is an example of building a site using social networking site ideas. Helpalot is specifically focused on charities. VSO build a bloggers interface expecially for their volunteer stories. The World Bank has set up a site called Isimulate for performing economic simulations.

4. Leverage popular web2.0 sites where large numbers of people are interacting

Examples of popular web2.0 sites are Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, and many others. You might also leverage the crowd of people hanging out there by going there yourself. An example of this is the World Bank channel on Youtube. Even though the World Bank has enough video capacity on their own site, they added a channel on youtube to reach out to a different audience.

Web usage amongst nonprofit workers

Tech soup published a report of a survey in 2007 about Web Usage. (I found it through a blogpost by Britt Bravo). The survey was amongst tech soup users, mostly nonprofits (in the survey 81% reported to be tech soupers). I'd expect their web usage is more advanced than the average non-profit employee. Though less people took the survey (562 respondents) than last year, the conclusion is that there is an increase in the usage of Web 2.0 tools in general. The respondents were quite old, only 11.5% was below 29 years.

• 63.7% of users reported sharing their photos online which represents a 7% increase.
• 55.4% of respondents reported that they read an online journal or blog which represents a 7% increase over last year.
• 17.3% reported that they create their own online blog which is 3% higher than last year.
• 26.3% of users reported that they are using online social or professional networking tools which represents a 13% increase.
• 26.1% of users reported that they subscribe to RSS feed which represents a 19% increase over last year.

Interestingly, Lifehacker, a Dutch weblog, reports that in their Dutch audiences, typically only 2% uses RSS feeds, so that may be an indication indeed that either Dutch audiences or non- techsoup audiences use web tools much less than these respondents.

I also wondered about the 55 % reading blogs, but only 26% use RSS feeds. Does that mean they use email subscriptions or visit the blog every now and then? Or that they click on a blog when it shows up in an online search?

Another remarkable thing to me was that 80% watch/listen to video or audio files for personal purposes, and 49% for professional purposes. This is quite high I believe!

Their favourite nonprofit websites were:

• Techsoup (they didn't dare to respond otherwise :)
• Guidestar (seems UK oriented)
• Foundation center

Building a website with Wordpress: a do it yourself guide

I'm very proud that I built a website on my own domain name with an integrated weblog using Wordpress. You can visit it at www.joitskehulsebosch.nl. I'm meeting more people who want to set up their own Wordpress blog, so it might be useful for them if I blog the process. And there are some nice lessons about learning by doing (and the importance of some background support). Starting a Wordpress blog on their site is much easier by the way!

OK. I actually started with the idea of building a website to explain my freelance work with NVU. I wanted it to be bilangual, English en Dutch. I looked at websites I enjoy and admire and wrote down what I liked about them. In september I decided that I'd like to incorporate this blog in my website. Because it generates traffic, but most of all also because it allows you to show more about your ideas and work. People get to know you. Much better than describing your work.

John Smith was the first to advise me to start with Wordpress. But I wasn't ready to give up my blogger blog or to migrate from blogger to Wordpress. So I thought about either integrating my blogger blog via a feed or as a subpage of my website. But I started rethinking the purpose of my site. I actually wanted to make my work more known in the Netherlands and connect to the Dutch blogosphere and thought of focusing on Dutch speakers only. After all, I don't really want to travel anymore. So I asked the group of freelancers on our Ning forum. Elmine Wijnia again advised me to try Wordpress, but now I was more open to the suggestion. The huge advantage of Wordpress over Blogger is that you can set up additional pages. In blogger your blog is just one page. Suddenly it clicked that I could have two blogs, one Dutch and one English... And I would have the opportunity to learn about Wordpress and Blogger and compare them.

So far the decisions. Then the real tech work started. I postponed diving into the technicalities, which seemed huge (and were huge). With Miny, another freelancer from the ning group, we decided to set ourselves and each other a deadline January 31,2008.

I started found some great resources on the internet.
1. How to start/setup your own blog using Wordpress
2. How to upload a file to your website using the Fillezilla FTP client

The steps are clear. Unfortunately it didn't work! My webhost helped out. My blog loaded to www.joitskehulsebosch.nl/wordpress in stead of straight to the domain, I hadn't thought of that. So I did not have to ask free support for Wordpress installation which is available too. One hurdle taken. Then I started to select a Wordpress theme. Downloading it and installing it was smooth. Every step that went well without set-backs was energizing. Like setting up the pages. (though I forgot to click on publish!) Again there are good resources on the web that really helped me. But to change the main image was hard. I couldn't find the code! And wow, Wordpress is very different from blogger. So I was very happy that Christian would help me out with a few things. I ended my journey with installing Google analytics to measure visitors statistics.

Concluding I might say that it is feasible to install a wordpress blog and add pages on your own domain yourself. Use and read various webresources (and you should have a bit of perseverance), but it's great to have some people you can run to when things are not working out. I'm amazed that with every succesfull online task that I figure out myself, I become more courageous to try and do things myself. (I used to call my husband for everything!). I think that's the habit that people who start their online interaction journey have to develop too.

Global Voices in the top 200 blogs

I've been a fan of Global Voices, since I discovered it. Via Ethan Zuckerman's blogpost I learned that it's now in the top 200 blogs of Technorati, the blog search engine. The slogan of Global Voices is: "The World is talking, are you listening?" and they hope to make information available via blogs all over the world, but particularly in the south more accessible. You can search and subscribe per country or per theme. Via Beth Kanter, and Emmanuel K Bensah, who are both bridgebloggers for Global Voices (Cambodja and Ghana respectively) I learned what a bridgeblogger is. A bridgeblogger is a person who reads blogs from a particular country and reposts information that may have value to a wider audience. For local bloggers, it's a great way not to drown in the ocean of blogs and become more visible. Reuters , the news agency, places a feeds from Global Voices. See above for the example of Global Voices of Ghana on the Ghanaian page. So if you are a new Ghanaian blogger, and you write a good post, you may appear on the Reuters page!

From Ethan:

22.4% of our visitors come from the US, 3.6% from the UK, and the other 74%
are spread around the world, including substantial userbases in China, India,
the Phillipines, Brazil, and Qatar. Compare that to the New York Times, with
over 50% of users in the US, or BBC, with over 30% in the UK, and it’s clear
that we’ve got something of an unusual audience pattern.

The fact that only a minority of visitors are from the north (though Ethan doesn't talk about Europe), shows that you cannot 'push' information to people who aren't interested, in the north. I believe that it's hard to evoke changes in development by websites alone, but it can be a good supportive strategy. And ofcourse, it is a great resource for people in the south, and the people who ARE already interested in what's happening in the south

Serious Creativity

I read Edward de Bono's Serious Creativity after someone was raving about it when we asked people to mention their favorite literature. Some time later, another person said she started reading it too and I became curious. Though I heard about his the six thinking hats before, it seemed a little simple to me.

What I enjoyed about this book was the thorough explanation of the theoretical basis of creative or lateral thinking. Creative thinking as in 'unexpected' and 'change'. Our patterns of perception guide what we see and what we think. Creative thinking is walking 'off the beaten track'. I became very enthousiastic when he linked creativity to humour; in a joke we are also taken on a surprising track. But creative thinking is not yet about crazy ideas, there must be a 'logical link-back' to our beaten track, to make it valuable.

Some misperceptions tackled:
1. Creativity is a natural talent and cannot be taught
2. Creativity comes from the rebels
3. Right brain/left brain concept
4. Art, artists and creativity
etc.

I think that happens too when you work across cultures, your 'beaten track' way of thinking gets challenged. If you manage to make the link back to your own way of thinking, you'll have enriched your ideas and you'll have widened your number of thinking tracks for other situations. You'll be able to see more alternatives and will have enlarged your imagination.

The second part of the book deals with tools and techniques. Some sound funny - take a word from the dictonary - but I tried and it works! Some well throught through session are presented mixing individual and group effort for optimum result.

The last part with creativity in organizations. I'm not sure I'd advise an organisation to have a 'concept manager' but I definitely thinking organizations can look at their processes critically and see where some more creative thinking may help move general thinking forward.