I was interviewed for the new Wired effort to crowd source articles called Assignment Zero. Appropriately enough the first article is about Crowd Sourcing.

In my Interview “Your Online Identity Defines Your Role in the Crowd: Identity Woman builds networks of trust, face-to-face and through Internet Identity” was just posted last week.

I highlighted the differences between *camp ad-hoc way and Open Space Technology and talked about how effective it has been for the Identity commons community. It was a fun interview and I thought it would just be about unconferences however as we got to talking it was clear that user-centric identity played a role in making crowdsourcing really work. I am not a big believer in the power of ‘random groups of people’ solving complex problems. I think persistence of identity over time and context that allows the development of a transaction history or record could really be interesting because it is an architecture that can support the emergence of trust.

It was a pleasure to feel integrated talking about both main themes of my work.

I had a great chat Thursday with Chris Taylor, “Futureboy” a senior editor at Business 2.0 Magazine. He has written a good post on the Business 2.0 Blog about unconferences and contrasts them with very high cost events like TED. First off error correction:

As Supernova takes place later this month, a free unconference, organized by Hamlin, will be going on right next door.

The Unconference – Supernova Open Space is being hosted by Supernova as a community space that it is sponsoring and helping create. It costs $25. It is also not at the same time as Supernova but the day before June 19th. So. If you want to come to that it will be great and so will Supernova itself where I will be speaking on Friday on User-Centric Digtial Identity with my Identity Woman Persona.

Back to the great article He points out the obvious – you are not going to meet the next “Steve Jobs” at least when he is in the ‘homebrew computer club’ stage of life at an event that costs $8,000 or $2,000. I am excited that he has highlighted an element that I emphasised but has not yet be put forward in the press articles about the “movement” that the INVITATION is a critical element.

“Unconferences are peer-to-peer learning,” says Hamlin. “Invitation is the most important element: Why do you want people to come together, and what do you want to talk about? People who share a passion create the day.”

It is interesting to see how finally Open Space Technology was mentioned but in “quotes” and draws a parrallel between open space and open source (there is more to say on this but I will save it for another post).

Just as programmers are using what they call “open source” to collaboratively build free software like Linux, unconference organizers are using what they call “open space” principles to build low-cost, design-it-yourself confabs.

Supernova will be great – this is the panel that I am on as Identity Woman.

Do You Know Where Your Identity Is?
(John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, Reid Hoffman, Marcien Jenckes, Jyri Engestrom)
As our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtual worlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial from both a business and a social standpoint. The future of e-commerce and digital life will require identity mechanisms that are scalable, secure, widely-adopted, user-empowering, and at least as richly textured as their offline equivalents. This session will examine how online identity can foster relationships and deeper value creation.

There is a great event coming up in Colorado that will dive into 4 different methods of Strategic Collaboration. It starts with the question.

Are you interested in learning how to engage groups of 5 to 2,000 in strategic conversations? Would you like to attend a training that will give you the skills and knowledge you need to utilize four powerful methods that are being used around the world for breakthrough thinking, decision-making and collaborative action?

It covers Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, World Cafe, and Polarity Management. I lead Open Spaces and have participated in World Cafe’s. I have done short AI process and have friends who lead long AI process and just at Nexus for Change I learned about Polarity Management and was very impressed. I would from all I know recommend this training.
WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES

• Through experiential learning, gain a working knowledge of the principles, steps and practices of Appreciative Inquiry, World Café and Open Space Technology.
• Practice Appreciate Interviews, small group learning and large group synthesis as part of the Discovery Phase of Appreciative Inquiry.
• Engage in a World Café as part of the Dream Phase of Appreciative Inquiry.
• Participate in an Open Space Technology meeting as part of Design Phase of Appreciative Inquiry.
• Craft appreciative questions and provocative propositions in your own language and for your environment.
• Design a large group project to take home.
• Participate in two follow-up coaching sessions.

I am really excited about the opportunities that are coming up for me to facilitate Open Space in the tech world.

First of all there is the Online Community Unconference on June 6th being put on by Forum One. I went to their Online Community Camp last year and gave them some grief about it. It was a great event with great people and I am really looking forward to facilitating it this year. It will be at the Computer History Museum which I love.

Jeremiah highlights why it is going to be great.

The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities. Those involved in online community development (and social software in general) share many common challenges: community management, tools, marketing, business models, legal issues. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners.

I am working with Supernova to facilitate their Open Space day on June 19th at Warton West this is going to be great. It is basically free with a price of $25 (this is so that people who say they are coming actually do)

The Supernova Open Space Workshop is an open forum on the social, moral, technical, and strategic questions impacting the increasingly connected world in which we live. Discussions about topics like user control, neutrality, identity and open standards are setting the stage for future policies and economic decisions. Come to this event to learn more, participate in the community and shape the future of the New Network.

Then I am heading to Chiago to spend a week at the IETF meetings and then working on the BlogHer unconference day on Sunday July 29th.

All of these will be lead using Open Space Technology.

This week was a great week for unconferences with the publishing of a two page article in Business Week. I was debating weather I would blog about the clear gender bias I felt in reading the article. However since Chris brought it up I thought I could chime in too.

I did want to take issue with his singling me out of “two fellow Web2Open organizers”, and bring some attention to gender blindness in media stories such as this one.

And I’m sure that Scott didn’t intend any malice, but that Ross and Tara, who both stood on those chairs with me went unnamed strikes me as a missed opportunity to highlight not only the hard work that lots of folks have put into building this community, but in particular undermines the credit that Tara deserves for the incredible amount of work that she did to make Web2Open happen. If anyone, she’s the one that really deserves to be called out in the article.

I wrote several well linked e-mails to Scott regarding Open Space and the unconference work I have been doing in identity community including sort of unbelievably at the ITU and in other tech contexts. I also spoke to him for about 45min at Web2.0 Expo regarding this work. He chose to quote Doug Gold extensively and not mention me even though I have facilitated all of the Mass Events Labs unconferences to date. I “the woman” doing the more feminine role of facilitation – a key part of what actually makes an unconference run was made invisible in the article. So there were two women who were closely related to this story Tara and myself and neither are mentioned.

Promoting women when they’re doing great things in the tech community has to become a top priority. Providing and seeking out the women who are serving in backbone roles within our community and bringing the spotlight to them and supporting them must become a shared priority. Working with women’s groups to create both inviting events and interesting opportunities to draw out and inspire the reluctant or hidden female talent is something that conference and *camp organizers alike must attend to.

Thank you for saying this Chris. It is really important that this “allyship” be more common.

I should hope, and moreover expect, that it would be the BarCamp community to take the first worldwide steps towards addressing this critical matter and setting some baseline priorities for how we’re going to improve this situation.

In this spirit of making *camp events welcoming I invite the *camp organizers and community to consider the nature of the ‘rules’ that are currently held up as those that *camp events should be guided by. Perhaps the ‘rule’ that everyone who comes MUST present is intimidating to people and perhaps particularly women who might come but are shy or unsure. In a culture where low self-esteme is so prevalent a more welcoming frame and ‘rules’ might encourage more women to experiment with coming to a *camp event. It may be as simple as including at least a reference on “the rules” page to Open Space and its guiding principles might alow some *camp organizers to experiment with more welcoming ‘rules’ or guidelines for their events.

Perhaps this whole thread can be a topic of conversation face-to-face at the SuperNova OpenSpace Workshop.

This morning I was invited to present about Open Space to those at the International Telecommunications Union who are interested in learning more the process and how it has worked in the User-Centric Identity Community.

Here is the slide show and the four page PDF that goes into more details.

I think it is a good overview of the process covering how and why it works, in particular for technical communities.

What is Open Space all about? It is not about hippies in California using some “idilic process”. It was a methodology designed by Harrison Owen to have really effective meetings. Effective as in solving problems, building consensus and getting things done.

It was created over 20 years ago and has diffused far and wide to server a variety of communities. The events are full of energy, life, enthusiasm and give people an environment to grow understanding, shared meeting and evolve collaboration.

In today’s complex world made up of complex systems it is a process that can really help surface wisdom and intelligence to deal with complexity. If a group seeks to build shared understanding amongst diverse stake holders it is a great way to do this.

Today at dinner I heard expressed the desire that the different institutions and communities that are working on IdM communicate with each other more and collaborating more.

I hope that by coming to participate in the Internet Identity Workshop that those expressing this desire can see the power of this format to support their goals.

Here are what some people have to say about open space:

I liked what happened during the course of an Open Space Technology meeting that brought about real problem solving, real creativity, really tapping into the wisdom and potential of the individuals that attended as well as the collective, and fostered high communication, networking, and productivity. – Bridgitt Williams

I was searching around for stories about Open Space and its use in different contexts. I found this amazing articulation of the complexity of our time and where Open Space is particularly effective along with the “two engines” that drive it – passion and responsibility. It is from a PDF Open Space Technology:New Stories from the Field Edited by Holger Nauheimer.

We all experience our life and the world in which we operate as increasingly complex and uncertain. The need for instruments dealing with this uncertainty has never been more pressing than now. On January 23, 2000 the world known theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkins told the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS: “I think the next century will be the century of complexity.” The famous butterfly effect, which suggests that small interventions into a system can have unpredictable, large effects has now become mainstream and was even the subject of a Hollywood movie released in 2004, in which the main actor intends to influence his and other people’s destiny by changing his personal history.

Complexity theory, although in practice having an influence on many parts of our daily life (such as in meteorology or the stock exchange) has only recently entered the sphere of management. It probably started once people recognized that the engineering approach to project management (“objectives+activities+inputs=project success”) did not work out in case of many complex projects. And this is not about small deviations from the original plan, but about projects that did not meet at all the original goals. It has recently been estimated that in Germany alone the loss that can be attributed to failed projects amounts to more than $ 100 billion annually. Leaving beside many other macro and micro economic factors that influence the project outcome (and influence each other in an unpredictable way), the most critical variable for the success or failure of change processes is the human factor. The more people you have and the more diversity – the higher the probability that things develop their own dynamics.

It is this background which has stimulated the development of new tools and approaches that can help social systems of any size to transform. These methodologies utilize the general properties of complex systems such as self-organization as well as the concept of mental models. This idea has been introduced as a basic principle of organization by neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists: organizations are open books; they are continually created and re-created by the way people think and talk about them. If all people in an organization think that it is a torture chamber, the organization will be a torture chamber. If all members of this organization think it is a great place to work, it will be…

In simple words, OST is an approach to facilitate meetings, seminars, workshops, conferences or any other form of gatherings which are described by the following characteristics:

• high levels of complexity
• high levels of diversity
• high potential or actual conflict
• a decision time of yesterday

As OST event is taking participation of stakeholders in their own affairs seriously, the approach cannot be applied if there is somebody who has all the answers and a master plan in mind. Therefore the task of consultants or facilitators starts long before the actual event: they have to make sure that the mentioned characteristics and pre-conditions apply.

Two Engines to Drive With
Passion
OST assumes that if people are encouraged to work on what they are genuinely interested in, their entire passion and creativity will unfold. No passion, no issue.

Responsibility
Those who convene a session in an OS event take responsibility for (i) assigning time and space (i.e., announcing when and where their subject will be explored), and (ii) taking care for the documentation of the working group’s discussion, agreements, results and further steps. The full documentation of all results is handed out to all participants at the end of the conference. In Open Space this is usually called “The Book of Proceedings”.

Mandala at Imaginify Metamedia Cooperation 3
Originally uploaded by Kaliya.

I have been remiss in blogging about an amazing event that I had the honor of facilitating a small part of the Imaginify Metamedia event in Eugene at the beginning of March. I have been to all three annual Metamedia cooperation events so far and this one was again mind expanding. Jair did it again with a whirl of visionary art, transformational Music and stimulating interdisciplinary academic/research and community offerings.

The museum opened it self up to visionary art on the ceiling and walls and amazing music. There are some great quotes about the event

This is what a living art museum is all about: bringing a diversity of people together in creative ways through art, and planting seeds of connection and hope for the future…” -Eugene Weekly

The ideas broached there were fascinating, it was like being part of a giant think tank that was planning the future…” – Diana, Myspace Blogs

It was truly a great experience and your concept of bringing a diverse group of people together to discuss a range of issues on a broader, interdisciplinary scale certainly worked very well. – Kurt Fendt

I was very pleased to reconnect with Stuart Cowen who is now at Autopoesis LLC doing Sustainable System Design, One Planet Development and Living Economies.

You know you have come full circle when…

In 2002-3 I was in the research phase of what became Integrative Activism – learning about networks, story telling, communities of practice. Sorting it all out – how they mapped to my communities needs and what it would be like to be strategic. I read Cultivating Communities of Practice by Richard McDermott, Ettienne Wenger and William Snyder. For me it became this keystone work for understanding theoretically and strategically what I was working on to to support community amongst leaders in spiritual activism and to foster connection amongst those showing up at workshops and retreats.

On Tuesday I spoke at the Community 2.0 Conference leading a panel on Community, Self Organization & Governance – Roles & Rules.

I talked about the experience of starting the identity community and the critical nature of both the DNA of the community – Who are the first people and how they interact with each other is critical. The rules and norms of the community will emerge out of that. The invitation and intention of the founders is also reflected in this early stage. At some point you can catalyse some self-reflection of the community to articulate the norms or principles of the community so they are more explicit and available for new people to get up to speed. I also talked about the huge value of face-to-face meeting opportunities to augment online communication – blogs, wikis, mailinglists, podcasts.
Afterwards – Richard McDermott came up to me and said he liked the panel and that it was clear to him that I really had done this work and liked what I had to say about it. Wow! That meant a lot to me.

Continuing on about the panel….
The panel included – Chris Carfi, Cerado; Chris Heuer, Brainjams and Chris Tolles, Topix.net.

Several other folks also thanked me for the panel. Apparently there was some audience discontent because we did not ‘answer’ the questions in the program. “What are THE rules?”, “What are THE roles?”, “How do you “GOVERN?” To me this was actually good because as Kathy Sierra has pointed out some people love you and some people hate you – mediocre sucks.

We turned the tables on the audience and asked them what their questions where. I saw the original frame for the panel:

Through a set of discussions in this session we will take a closer look at the social infrastructure that needs to be in place to ensure successful communities. What is the role of anonymity? How do you define identities? Do you create roles? What rules need to be in place?

and proposed it be changed – this was agreed to but not actually changed on the website or the program brochure (oops):

How do you seed communities? How can you build shared identity and meaning in community? How do you scale – when do rolls and rules come into play? How do communities govern themselves? What tools help build “social infrastructure” help communities thrive?

We had a great panel anyways – people asked these questions to get us going:

• Should rules be flexible, or carved in stone?
• What are the implications of anonymous community members?
• What are different governance models?
• What is the time and/or human resource involved in community management?
• When to post the terms prominently? And when to bury them?
• How do advertisers get involved?
• What about conflict resolution?
• Our industry (pharma) is highly regulated. How do we do this?
• Should the rules be member-defined?
• How do you seed a community, and how does it scale?
• What kills community?
• Should communities be online, offline, or both?
• What are the skills needed to be a moderator?

It was a great pleasure to share at the conference. I am hopeful about the spread of good face to face meeting process into this world. I think there is a link between this Community 2.0 world and Vendor Relationship Management that Doc is working on. I hope some folks will come to the Internet Identity Workshop.