Unconferencing collaboration (and public policy)

I was just reading on the Doors of Perception blog that Collaborative Innovation is this year’s theme at the World Economic Forum. Maybe this is a good thing (Jimmy Wales got to talk), and maybe it’s not (Don Tapscott got to talk). In either case, the really sad thing is the continued trend events about mass collaboration that are as uncollaborative as possible. Davos is just one long-lecture-fest, with most people zoned out in the audience in passive listening mode. It’s not collaboration, it’s television.

Unconferencers and openspacers of the world have be running real collaborative events for years. However, trying to roll participation into conferences ranging from WEF (big and showy) to the iSummit (small and groovy) almost always meets with heavy push back. Even when talking about collaboration, most event organizers seem to think TV-style lectures are the only viable format. Strange, and maddening.

Happily, today saw a small victory for the unconference crowd, with an article on Toronto’s TransitCamp appearing in the Harvard Business Review’s 2008 Breakthrough Ideas section. My friend Mark Kuznicki describes it here:

… [the HBR] piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp.

Put simply, TransitCamp was an unconference to gather input on the redesign of the Toronto Transit Commission’s web site. What’s amazing is that the chair of the TTC attended and that many of the new and creative ideas from the event actually got fed into the site design process. Vancouver and San Francisco have ripped off the idea by holding their own TransitCamps.

My hope (and the hope of the TransitCamp ringleaders) is that the HBR article will give some legitimacy to the unconference idea, especially as a way to engage in both public policy dialogues and big conferency conferences (a participatory unDavos? … okay, maybe not). Here’s to hoping.

PS. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page
for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the
design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations
and the influence of TransitCamp.

Shuttleworth Foundation ‘how we work’ club

On this trip, I’ve started doing my open philanthropy work at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The biggest piece of this is developing the Foundation’s theory of change and an accompanying open philanthropy manifesto (will post on this soon). The other bit is developing a series of ‘how we work’ papers.

The idea with the ‘how we work’ series is to show what open philanthropy means in practice and to encourage other people to rip off / emulate our ideas. Hopefully, the writing process will also help with internal reflection and learning. Maybe we’re on to something with all this ‘open’ stuff, or maybe it’s boohucky. The only way to find out is to look closely at how we are actually working.

In the spirit of transparency and openness (open philanthropy rule #6), I am posting my notes on the ‘how we work’ series below. Please comment, criticize and suggest additional topics.

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Open philanthropy ‘under the hood’
article series

Series of papers that explain how we
work and why. The series both gives us a chance to reflect on our
practices (lunch time chats) and share open philanthropy practices
we’re proud of with others (the papers).

Who?

While this is an opt-in activity,
everyone in the Foundation is invited to get involved. Some people
will write these short articles. Others will simply participate in
bookclubesque chats where we reflect on the topic to be covered in an
upcoming article.

What?

Series of 10 – 12 papers on how we do
things. Each paper is written by a staff member or a fellow based on
a team wide lunch time discussion on the topic at hand.

The papers should be lightweight,
practical and easy to read. The target length is 2 – 3 pages. At this
stage, we’re assuming each article will cover five questions:

• what we do (describe the practice)
• why do it (connects to open
  philanthropy idea)
• what’s working
• what’s hard / broken / ineffective
• steal this idea (step by step / tips
  / example materials)

Possible topics for the series include:

• Grant contracts, CC licensing and
  keeping stuff ‘free’ ”(Mark w/Karen)”
• How our fellowship program works, and
  why ”(Jason and Karien)”
• Theory of Change, what is and how we
  built it ”(Mark S)”
• Book club: being serious can be fun
  ”(Andrew)”
• Cape Town Declaration as network
  building ”(Mark S)”
• Freedom Toaster as spin off example,
  warts and all ”(??)”
• Wikifying your foundation ”(??)”
• Blogging your foundation inside out
  ”(Mark)”
• Using and promoting open document
  ”(??)”

Mark Surman will start with
the ‘CC licensing topic’ in February. More topics will probably make
themselves evident as we go along.

Why?

One of the open philanthropy principles in our Theory of Change is: listen, learn and evolve, constantly. That’s why we are doing this. Specific goals include:

• reflect on how we work (lunch chats)
• use reflection to become more nimble,
  open and effective (better practices)
• document how we work so others will
  emulate (papers + podiums)
• spark a conversation on ‘open’ with
  other foundations (parties)
• get feedback and ideas from other
  foundations to help us improve
  (better practices)

There is also a piece in here about ’share, leverage and share again’ which is another of the principles in our theory of change.

When?

The papers would be released monthly,
probably with some sort of fanfare. We could also do a brief seminar
on each paper. This could in turn be podcast.

PS. Full disclosure: anything thing that prompted the ‘put this stuff up totally openly on my blog’ approach is that I can’t access either of the Foundation wikis right now. However, ‘as public as possible’ is probably the right attitude here, so I think I’ll keep posting stuff like this here.

Old leftists are so boring

David Wiley came back with a Cape Town Declaration Spoof Both Funny and Depressing retort last night. Making the Linux / open content comparison, he writes:

If you’re having trouble imagining what Linux would look like without
the involvement and support of these companies, let me help you out -
just think about where open education is today.

He is right, of course. The underlying ‘keep free content (or
software or whatever) pure and non-commercial’  arguments behind the spoof are boohucky. We live if a hybridized-overlapping-all-the-models-and-boundaries-you-grew-up-with-are-gone kinda world. That’s a good and creative thing.

Personally, I try to steer clear of arguments on this topic. They’re old and they’re tired. Laughing is easier and nicer.

Of course, I am happy to engage in what I see as the bigger underlying question here: how to we rebuild our political imagination now that 19th century notions of left vs. right / commercial vs. social / owner vs. worker are totally broken? We desperately need new political lenses. Digging into ‘open’ and imagining what these new lenses might look like is a very interesting topic indeed.

Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment

While imitation is truly the form of flattery, mockery is also right up there. So, it was with a huge smile that I read the Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment on the iCommons list. This spoof of the Cape Town Declaration press release includes humdingers like:

Open edutainment makes the link between teaching, learning and the capitalist culture of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching  as well as new private-sector approaches to learning where people create and shape “knowledge” together. These new practices promise to provide students with edutainment materials that are individually tailored to their learning style encouraging the growth of an individualist and consumerist notion of education. There  are already over 100,000 such open edutainment resources available on the Internet. Of course, the rich people will still continue to get first class “traditional” education at expensive private schools and Ivy-League universities, these open edutainent resources are meant for the plebs who, let’s face it can’t concentrate for more than five seconds and so find it easier to have their teaching delivered via shoot-em-up video-game, or in super-small bite-sized chunks that don’t challenge them. This also handily makes them into the ideal 21st Century consumers of web-content, downloadable iPod-games and shiny and sparkly facebook applications.

and

“Open sourcing edutainment doesn’t just make learning more accessible, it makes more money and people do it for free so we don’t need to pay employees or pesky teachers,” said really rich Linux Entrepreneur Mack  Shuttletree,  “Linux is succeeding and generating huge profits exactly because of this sort of adaptability. The same kind of success is possible for open edutainment.”

Looks like this was written by David Berry at Swansea University. Thanks, David. While I don’t agree with your take on the commons (papers and spoofs alike), I love that you made me laugh.

Open education revolution picks up steam

The conversation about open education picked up some steam yesterday with the official launch of the Cape Town Declaration yesterday. There was lots of good coverage including a nice piece on ZDNet UK and an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jimmy and Rich. I just posted the following to Slashdot:

"ZDNet is running a story on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which is "… designed to echo the disruptive effect that open source had on the proprietary software world by opening up the development and distribution of educational materials." The declaration calls for more educational materials to be open sourced and freely shared (like MIT did), and says that "all taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open". Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), Larry Lessig (CC), musician Peter Gabriel and hundreds of teachers have already signed the Declaration."

… to try to build buzz further. If you want to help out, you can click here to vote for this article and get it on the Slashdot editors’ radar.

There was some criticism of the Declaration before it launched. Philipp Schmidt did a great job of summarizing and countering the key criticisms in a post yesterday.My guess is that there will be more debate as the buzz builds. Of course, that’s partly the point of the Declaration in the first place: to amp up the conversation about open education.

If you want to keep track of the Cape Town Declaration buzz, watch David Wiley’s blog and track the ‘capetowndeclaration‘ tag on del.icio.us.

As my friend Maureen says: wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. This is fun.

Creative (and open?) philanthropy

Over the holidays, Tonya, the boys and I felt a huge debt of gratitude to Helen Carmichael and John Dash who let us use their house while they rode the rails in Wales. This gratitude was in part for the warm and beautiful nest from which we could explore Hackney (loved it soooo much) and enjoy a London Christmas (truly as romantic as it sounds). But we also felt grateful for the ideas and inspiration that inspiration that Helen and John shared through their wonderful collection of books.

Especially notable was Creative Philanthropy (PDF summary) by Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat, which Helen had very kindly left on the bedside table (on purpose, I’m guessing). Released in 2006, this book hit directly on many of the things I’ve been scratching at as I talk about open philanthropy:

• Most foundations (and even government grant making programs) are stuck in limiting, old fashioned ideas about charity and engineering solutions to social problems.
• Foundations should be focused more on big picture social change, using their independence to take risks, try new things and shift thinking.
• Big picture social change requires a focus on innovation, a commitment the spreading good ideas widely and a comfort with complexity.

At some level, much of this is obvious. Yet, there are very few foundations that focus on the kinds of innovation needed for big picture social change … and waaaaaaaay fewer who have transformed their day to day business practices to focus on openness and creativity (or whatever other words you want to use). It’s this focus on this transformation of practice that makes Creative Philanthropy so valuable, and that is at the core of the work I’m doing at the Shuttleworth Foundation.

It’s is always a great gift to find kindred spirits. I feel like I’ve stumbled across a number with Helen, John and the authors of this book. I will definitely look them up when I am through London next. Hopefully, there is a vibrant conversation about creative philanthropy going on that I have yet to discover. My intuition says there is.