Experiencing The Art of Community

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Erika

Just back this past evening from a couple of energizing days in Occidental participating in the first (hopefully) annual Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) Art of Community conference, where more than 150 communitarians converged to share, learn, and connect with each other. The conference brought together members of intentional communities from all around the country (and at least one from BC, Canada) and people seeking to join or build one. Many of the thought and action leaders of the intentional community movement brought their deep experiential knowledge to teach and advise on everything to be known about starting, growing, and maintaining all types of community structures, including cohousing, communal and coop housing, and full-blown ecovillages.

In fact, the whole thing felt to me like an immersion course in the art of community. In addition to the incredible breadth of teachings, I got a little taste of community; this was a group that clearly knew how to live together in community. The openness and engagement, trust and transparency, curiosity and creativity, sharing and downright friendliness between everyone pretty much gave it away. It was a bit like a family gathering, the kind where there’s lots of conversation, listening, laughing; a comfortable familiarity. So much ground was covered it would probably fill fifty pages to write about all of it, so here are my highlights:

  • The keynote by Kevin Danaher on local, green economy issues and the need for a “Soutionary Movement” to pull together the various and currently disparate tools, inventions, and bodies of knowledge that in some way foster a more just and sustainable world. “We need platforms where we can connect the diverse pieces of the movement and create a new system.”
  • Diana Leafe Christian’s presentation on her latest favorite ecovillages, a wonderful photo journey around the world through several communities accompanied by very informative (and peppered liberally with humor) profiles that she painted with narrative. She’s visited and researched more than 100 communities around the world, and she wrote one of my favorite books on community, Creating A Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. I also attended her Ecovillage Timeline Game, an experiential workshop on building an ecovillage from inception to completion. According to Leafe Christian, 90% of communities in the US fail. The game had us work through the tasks, steps, and processes of the 10% that make it and thrive.
  • I got a kitchen sustainability rating from Ma’ikwe Shaub Ludwig during her course on Sustainable Kitchens for Cooperative Groups, and not only did I learn I still have a lot of room to improve my shopping, eating, and general food awareness habits, she also convinced me I should add fermentation to my set of skills. She does cool things like comparing what it costs to get the same items on a shopping list in both packaged and bulk forms and finding that she saves about 28% on average by buying bulk. She also turned me on to the hay box cooker.
  • Mandy Creighton and Ryan Mlynarczyk debuted their new documentary movie “Within Reach,” about their 6,000+ mile, year-and-a-half bicycle journey across the country visiting 100 communities in search of ones they could join while discussing and celebrating intentional, sustainable living. I was touched by the myriad of people and places, and the community spaces, that these two adventurous travelers encountered and passed through, while being candid and personal about their own feelings and challenges along the way. The folksy acoustic soundtrack added a distinctly American rustic tone, and accompanies the positivity and possibility portrayed as a thread through all of the people’s and groups’ lives they intersected with. Beautiful, fun, engaging, and truly inspirational!

I went to several other deeply informative presentations and workshops, bought at least a half a dozen books, and met so many great people, I feel like I packed a semester of college into a single weekend—classes, parties, and all! I have no doubt that the intentional community movement is a major key to a positive future for the world, and I’m more inspired than ever to be part of it.

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A Journey Toward Community

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Erika

Ever since I thumbed my way from New Hampshire to California and landed in a cooperative living situation in Santa Cruz more than 25 years ago, I have been enamored of community living. While I merely couch-surfed for a couple of weeks in this household before I was politely asked to shove off, I got to see and experience how a small group of folks worked together not only to share responsibilities within the house but to connect to a larger network of like-minded houses in the area. During my stay, they incorporated me into the daily workings of the house, which meant I had cleaning, shopping, cooking, and gardening duties.

Shopping was the most interesting, because it didn’t involve just running down to the Safeway with a list. In fact, Safeway was prohibited, as the members of the household preferred to get their food from one of a couple of local health-food markets and from the weekly farmers market. Cheese came from the “cheese guy,” who set up a table behind another cooperative house in town every Wednesday afternoon and sold his handmade cheeses into the community network, and eggs came from the “egg lady”…you get the picture. This was a network of people who were conscious about not only what they would
put in their bodies, but also where it came from and how it supported the local economy. They were also conscientious and supportive of others. They didn’t just kick me off the couch one day, for instance, but rather they all helped me find both a job and a room to rent in another house (before I even got my first paycheck), giving me leads and calling friends to put in a good word.

This set of revelations for me, at 19 years old, laid a foundation of awareness that I have appreciated and strived to act into ever since, and as much as I wanted to choose to continue to live in community, circumstances did not always support that possibility. Suffice it to say that I’ve planned, I’ve visioned, and I’ve explored all kinds of community structures, and now, two and half decades later, circumstances are aligning, loving and enthusiastic people are showing up to participate, and it finally feels like it’s time to grow our community!

This also means the hardest work is just beginning. We’ll be growing a group from a core of four; a core that is still getting to know each other through bi-weekly potluck dinners, social get-togethers, and field trips to check out established communities. There are so many steps we need to take together, as we build trust, develop and agree
on a mission and shared set of values to strive for, and processes for vetting newcomers and making decisions as a group. All of this needs to be done before we can start looking for land and housing to share, which itself requires a whole set of planning activities, understandings, and preparations.

The bottom line is, community is not just something to jump into, but all it takes to start is intention. We are lucky to have such a passionate and committed core of four, along with several curious others, and this exciting journey is just beginning. I will do my best to share our progress and challenges along the way with the hope that I can inform and inspire future community-building efforts, and I invite fellow community builders (or joiners!) to chime in as they feel compelled. Onward!

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Technology Challenges and Solutions for the New Decade

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Erika

The first decade of the millennium has brought us so much incredible, new technology and ways of working. The world has gone much more mobile, with the work becoming more distributed as the workforce has become infinitely more connected through social networking and Internet-based communication utilities. At the same time, businesses have seen an increasing number of challenges—not just economically, but also in adapting their business systems to meet the needs (and reap the potential) of this highly connected world. And the more I read about the challenges the software industry is facing over the next ten years, the more excited I get about the future of my company, Simmunity. As I scan articles and blogs across the web, I keep finding myself thinking, “Our solution addresses that!”

For instance, the cover of MIT’s February 2010 issue of Technology Review magazine asks in huge letters, “Is the Cloud Safe?” This is one of the biggest areas of concern for businesses that want to take advantage of the economics provided by cloud computing but don’t trust that their data and processing will be secure in these enormous data centers accessed only over the Internet. In the cover article, titled “Security in the Ether,” writer David Talbot tells us that nobody has solved the security problems inherent in the current cloud infrastructure. “When thousands of different clients use the same hardware at large scale, which is the key to the efficiency that cloud computing provides,” writes Talbot, ”any breakdowns or hacks could prove devastating to many.” It comes down to a need, he says, for dynamic and hierarchical encryption on cloud-based servers, and intelligent process monitoring within and between virtual machines, but that adequate solutions will not be in place for several years.

In the opinion section of that same issue of Technology Review, Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, voices his desire for integration between clouds. “We need to start developing interfaces,” says Cerf, “so that clouds can communicate directly among themselves.” He posits a kind of virtual cloud to act as an intermediary communication hub, in which “each cloud could translate its internal method of organizing data to and from standardized naming conventions, data exchange protocols, and perhaps data description protocols.” That brings us back, of course, to the security issues.

In a Network World article this week titled “2020 Vision: Why you won’t recognize the ‘Net in 10 years,” writer Carolyn Duffy Marsan gets right to the root of the issue. “As more critical infrastructure — such as the banking system, the electric grid and government-to-citizen communications — migrate to the Internet,” she writes, “there’s a consensus that the network needs an overhaul. At the heart of all of this research is a desire to make the Internet more secure.” Marsan provides a list of “10 Fool-proof Predictions for the Internet in 2020,” in which she echoes many of the same security concerns outlined by Talbot in his article. She says that many more autonomous devices, like sensors, will be hooked up to the Internet over the next decade. “By 2020,” she says, “it’s expected that the number of Internet-connected sensors will be orders of magnitude larger than the number of users,” and because these sensors and devices will be monitoring critical infrastructure components, like electricity grids and bridges, more hackers will be attacking the Internet. At the same time, she predicts Internet users will grow from 1.7 billion today to nearly 5 billion by 2020, no doubt bolstered by social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

With people becoming so dependent on the Internet for making and maintaining connections, and enterprises pushing more and more data into the cloud, businesses are going to be seeing early offerings this year from software companies working to integrate social computing with business software. Salesforce.com is releasing Chatter, Google will be opening Wave to the public, and a handful of other companies are starting to incorporate social computing paradigms into their offerings. The problem is that none of these companies are addressing the inherent security issues underlying the use of browsers to send and access data over the Internet. Even Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash and Reader products are under threat, according to a McAfee report on 2010 Threat Predictions, which names the applications as “preferred targets for criminal hackers in 2010.”

Simmunity will also be throwing its hat into that ring this year, and what excites me most is that our path of research and development effort into addressing the security and reliability issues around moving data across the Internet and safely incorporating social computing into enterprise applications—issues we had the foresight to start developing solutions for nearly ten years ago—directly applies to the infrastructure constraints and risks of the cloud today, and to the security concerns of IT managers unwilling to unlock the door to social computing in their environments. For us at Simmunity, it boils down to opportunity to fix critical gating factors that, when cleared, will ultimately lower costs and increase productivity for enterprises seeking to bring their technology into the modern connected age, and I greatly look forward to making a big splash when we jump into the pool with our first innovative product offerings.

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Resolutions and Realities

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Erika

It’s the first business day of the New Year, and the first day I will be working full time at Simmunity, the software company Shannon and I started in earnest last July.  I will certainly miss the fine folks I worked with for the past near seven years at Tides, but I am excited at the opportunity ahead to grow and nurture my own business.  Also, it will be nice to have only one job again! That’s what I’m really writing about today—getting back into balance.

I generally don’t make New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I can make big, life transforming intentions up anytime and decide then and there to make a change. The fact is, I never do. I never set aside 30 minutes a day to write. I never fully learn to meditate or develop a regular spiritual practice. I never stick to an exercise regimen, yoga, or diets, and I never keep in closer touch with my family. I never nurture my garden through a whole season’s cycle, happily harvesting early crops but letting my habit of busy-ness (or maybe I have ADHD?) distract and consume me. Well, this year is different. It has to be.

For one thing, I was inspired by the book Ifinished on New Years Day by Elizabeth Gilbert titled, “Eat, Pray, Love,” which, in addition to stirring up a travel lust, inspired me to act on a persistent set of neglected intentions I’ve fed occassionally but mostly starved over the last couple of years. I also recognize that to make the most of the opportunities in front of me, I need to be healthy—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. So, I’m taking advantage of the facts that I no longer have to commute into San Francisco every day and I now only have one job, and am already starting the pursuit of a few of those things that have been simmering on the back burner.

According to Wikipedia, “Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals.”  From what I understand about resolutions, their chances of being successful increase when made public, so here’s the part where I announce what I’ll be doing this year.

The first thing I’m doing is embracing an Ayurvedic path for physical health and to shed some of the extra weight I seem to have collected over the years.  I’m reading Deepak Chopra’s “Perfect Weight,” and I’ve registered for an Ayurvedic cooking class at ITK in Sausalito. I’ve also signed up for insight meditation classes at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and will be making that a daily practice. Once I master those activities and turn them into habits, I’ll feel pretty accomplished, I’m sure, but there’s more!  I really am going to set aside 30 minutes a day to write, with the goal of completing one of my two near-finished novels by mid-year.  OK, I’m tempted to keep making promises, as I do have a long list of intentions in my head, but this is a year to be realistic, too, so let me make that my last resolution for now. Wish me luck :)

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The Value of Knowledge in the Connected Age: Part II

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Erika

“In the Connected Age, the mechanisms for sharing information and creating connections are almost invisible and costless, and these characteristics give them the possibility of transferring skills, knowledge, and power to people and places like never before.”
   - Allison Fine, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age

I went in search this past month for the best thinking around what knowledge is worth in the Connected Age, expecting to be able to summarize my findings within a week’s time. Although I was hoping to find a tangle of intricate theories and deep introspection, the path actually led me to a very simple notion, but not before I slogged through some foundational concepts concerning the differences between data, information, and knowledge.

One distinction between information and knowledge is that information is collected bits of data that is stored as reference material and knowledge only emerges when someone uses the information to inform decision making in the context of a given situation. Information is thus synthesized into knowledge for purposes of guiding a decision process.1 “Data have no value until someone interprets them,” says Allison Fine. “Pieces of data turn into information when we layer our own viewpoints and judgments onto them.”

OK, so that frames what knowledge looked like in the Information Age, but where does the value of knowledge get recognized in the Connected Age? To answer that, we have to look at the ways people connect, how they build and manage relationships, in an increasingly digital environment. Look first at the wiki phenomenon. Here’s a tool that, at its best, provides people with an openly shared information base that anyone can edit and add to and from which, together, they can generate knowledge in a collaborative manner. It takes the “I” out of information gathering and replaces it with “We.”

Next, consider social networking applications like Facebook and MySpace. People in these spaces collect friends, build and connect with communities of interest, and weave a web of relationships that channels information not from person to person, but from person to network. Information in this space comes under the scrutiny and interpretation of potentially thousands of people, or as far as the degrees of someone’s network emanates outward. Granted, much of this information may be tuned out, but if one chooses, these networks can be leveraged to great effect for input and participation in decision and change-making, as with the “Causes” functionality in Facebook. Not only is this a giant digital megaphone; it is a multi-way channel for sharing, collecting, and synthesizing dialogue through relationships.

Where there is “We,” there are relationships, and there is diversity, and in order for information to be synthesized into knowledge, there must be collaboration and trust. From an organizational standpoint, whether you are serving a community or supporting clients, knowledge is a coagulant for community-building—people of like mind are attracted to each other into communities of sharing, exploration, and action. It is through nurturing relationships by sharing knowledge that problems get solved together, the community/client feels supported, and those involved in the endeavor become willing to invest more of their time, energy and money into it.

In this way, it is not only the processes by which we come to recognize knowledge that have value, but the connections themselves that become knowledge—the contexts in which we work together to synthesize information, solve problems, develop solutions, and most importantly, innovate. Knowledge thus becomes the bridge between information and wisdom—the bridge to innovation and learning. The more we can facilitate the integration of information and participation of diverse groups in gardening integrated bases of information together, the more valuable knowledge becomes as an instigator for positive change.

I could share more of the material I pored through, more quotes and theories, but that would just delay the inevitable bottom-line insight I came to: the value of knowledge in the Connected Age is simply in sharing it!

1.Wiki That!: Information vs. Knowledge vs. Wisdom

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The Value of Knowledge in the Connected Age: Part I

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Erika

In the oral traditions of early indigenous cultures, knowledge was preserved and passed on through storytelling and used to help others understand their cultures and the dangers and pleasures embedded in them. In essence, stories were a way of creating frames for decision-making based on conveyed knowledge and experience. These were the earliest knowledge management systems.

Knowledge was later captured in paintings, then in symbols that evolved into written languages, and so on until now we have libraries of books, access to boundless amounts of information via the Internet, and standard cataloging systems that help us find and organize information.

There are also more obscure notions of what knowledge is and where it comes from. Have you ever had a Eureka! moment, for instance, when all of a sudden you reach, from seemingly out of nowhere, a point of total clarity around an idea? Author/philosopher Joseph Chilton Pearce would tell you that you’ve tapped into a field of knowledge, an unseen quantum-level source of information existing in an almost ethereal form that our brains can, most often unconsciously, tap into (Pearce has posited that savants with unexplainable skills are connected to such fields).

OK, so maybe that’s a bit out of reach using web services and Web 2.0 utilities, but in this time of technology-based business transaction, communication, and socializing, the organization and representation of knowledge is certainly reaching new levels of potential. The notion of knowledge management is becoming more popular, as in the organizational realms we leave the age of data warehousing and celebrate the rising tide of business analytics, while in the social realms we continue to share information in exponentially rising quantities and organize in ever-growing numbers via the plethora of community building platforms available today.

In her book “Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age,” Allison Fine explains the phenomenon as one of moving from the proprietary, protectionist “Information Age” into the participatory, open “Connected Age.” She describes the fears organizations have in releasing their grip on information they have come to value as core to the worth of their work and services. “They falsely believe,” says Fine, “that this information alone equals power.” So this brings us to the question, what is knowledge worth?

First lets consider types of knowledge. There is raw knowledge, in which specific, targeted information becomes valuable to a research topic. There is strategic knowledge, which helps guide decision-making, drive marketing activities and measure productivity. There is operational knowledge, which is the dull yet sensitive financial and human resource information used by businesses to inform their plans and budgets and improve performance. There is tacit knowledge, which is the kind that is often not captured because it resides in people’s minds and on sticky notes and is leveraged by its holders to do their jobs. There is sociocultural knowledge which steers us toward areas and activities we align with, both recreational and purpose-driven. In other words, knowledge tends to get categorized in ways that keeps it neatly boxed for us to engage with it in contextual ways, and the systems we use to access knowledge are thus equally fragmented. At the same time, every type of knowledge area we draw upon and feed carries value.

What is more important to recognize is not only the convergence we are seeing in tools for accessing and sharing knowledge, but the paradigm itself to which we are shifting; one which values the social network as the core component for spreading and retrieving knowledge. Just ask your Facebook or LinkedIn networks what the best cell phone plan is for a family of four (the more specific the question, the better), and see how much time it takes to get some experienced, well-vetted answers compared to how much time it would take you to research the plans for even the top four or five cell service providers. Not everyone will answer your questions, but the answers you get will usually be quick and substantive, and the more answers you get, the more likely it is they will coagulate around a common solution.

This may be an easy experiment as an individual, but how can this be extrapolated to the organizatinoal level? First of all, today’s organizations do not even necessarily include social networking potential as part of a knowledge management strategy, especially those that are in the early stages of integrating their internal data sources to achieve a higher level of operational and strategic knowledge management. I’ve been working through an O’Reilly  book called “Visualizing Data,” by Ben Fry, in which he outlines his seven stages of visualizing data: acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact. It was the last step that inspired me to come up with a similar list of steps to consider when building a knowledge management system.

But first, let me step back for a moment so I can explain that I have built many enterprise systems in the past, some of which dealt with specific types of data, and some of which spanned and integrated data from multiple sources. These systems really only achieved knowledge management at the operations level. Today I am faced with building systems that pull together potentially all available knowledge types I listed above, and what I’ve discovered as I pursue this monstrous task is that there is no way to draw a diagram that fits the pieces together nicely and lays out a single path to integration. This effort requires iterations of layering across all of these areas, a persistent weaving of these areas into deepening levels of interaction across the knowledge spectrum. So, it is Fry’s last step, “interact,” that prompted me to create this initial list of steps toward building not just a knowledge management system, but a platform upon which to collaboratively continue to grow solutions:

  1. Assess: Make a list of the data you currently collect across various systems as a starting point, and figure out what makes sense to leverage into metrics, to share more broadly, and to collect more efficiently (especially look for areas where the same data is collected in more than one place). Then extend your list to include data you should be collecting that you are not.

  2. Organize: The traditional way to organize data is to develop a taxonomy by which data can be categorized, and although that’s a good start, it is a top-down approach to the problem. What is better suited in the Connected Age is the accommodation of the bottom-up approach using a “folksonomy,” by which those who access the information can “tag” it and organize it more organically.

  3. Integrate: Ideally, your various sources of data exist within systems that have some way of exporting and importing data between them. XML-based web services is probably the most common technique used for data exchange, but there are a number of ways to achieve this, including the establishment of a central data mart where data can be put together in creative and informative ways. Warning: big black hole potential here–be wary of time, labor, and expertise requirements that can translate into high cost.

  4. Report: Reports are commonplace and should continue to be developed as you integrate your data sources based on your desired metrics.

  5. Represent: Data representation is the next step above reporting and includes charts, graphs, and combinations of visualization methods into dashboards and widgets. It is at this step that having some sort of central, often browser-based portal becomes handy, espeically if you want your representations to be real-time based on the most current data.

  6. Refine: Although this is labeled as step number six, it is really an iterative process that applies to all of the previous steps. You should always be looking for opportunities to incorporate connections to new data sources as well as areas to deepen and improve upon what you already have.

  7. Interact: Finally, the step that raises this system to the social, connected level is interaction, or giving people inside and outside the organization the ability to not only view reports and representations, but also to create their own reports and visualizations. That, of course, would only be scratching the surface. Adding functionality that encourages sharing, tagging, commenting, exploring, and collaborating would truly extend the organizational knowledge base into the sociocultural realm where the real potential lies.

I know I haven’t yet reached any answers to the question of what knowledge is worth, but I have outlined the considerations for what I believe provides a framework for assessing the value of knowledge from an organizational standpoint. I’ll pick up next week with reflections on the role of participation in the framework, what that means for organizations still mired in the Information Age, and how the social networking paradigm adds value to knowledge systems.

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Data As Art: Sharing Your Visualizations

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Erika

Displaying data in clever ways is cool, but clever does not always translate to meaningful. I’ve been playing with a tool this past week that takes seemingly unfathomable sets of data and turns them into both artistic and often insightful pictures that even the most extreme dataphobes would be drawn to. IBM’s experimental visualization tool dubbed Many Eyes allows you to copy and paste information from your favorite productivity tools and cast it into any of several types of visualizations. For instance, I took the text of my first blog post and created a “Wordle” visualization, showing the most frequently repeated words more prominently in a multicolor cloud-style design:

153f8792-bea8-11dd-9447-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

And here’s another example using Barack Obama’s victory speech:
C7c86b1a-ada8-11dd-b553-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

After that, I opened iTunes and grabbed my music list, popped it into a spreadsheet, and copied the genre column into Many Eyes to see how much variety is in my music collection. Then I fed my growing addiction and played with the charting and graphing visualizations, using data from the Marin County government web site. Check out this interactive chart I made from some October home sales data:
82ed1190-beaf-11dd-a570-000255111976 Blog_this_caption

If you like to play with data, you’ll find Many Eyes a lot of fun, and although you may get frustrated at its lack of customizability on some visualizations, you will at least have a large selection of types to choose from, including Word Trees, Tag Clouds, Block Histograms, Bubble Charts, Scatter Plots, and Network and Tree Diagrams, among the most common types of charts you’d expect.

I also spent some time working with DabbleDB, using the same home sales data, to see what kind of results I could get. A simple bar chart took only a couple of minutes to produce and set up for sharing:

Sample DabbleDB Chart

Sample DabbleDB Chart

I noticed DabbleDB also had a “map” display utility as well, so I spent a little extra time adding a “location” field, which is a special type of field the application recognizes to help place it on a map. However, it turns out the map will only get as detailed as showing the entire US. Many Eyes has some mapping tools that get down to the county level, but I couldn’t get it to work with the data I was using. Their maps look much nicer than DabbleDB’s, though, but getting them to recognize locations took more work than I was willing to put in for the experiment.

Of course, it only took me a few clicks to create a simple bar chart in Excel, but the best thing about both of these other tools, of course, is that you can share your creations with others on the web, and they are free to use (up to a point).  The next step is to find robust, web-based visualization tools that can hook up to web service-based data sources, so if anyone has any suggestions, do leave a comment!

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Food for a Healthy Social Networking Habit

Posted on November 22, 2008 by Erika

Every time I return from a technology conference, I say to myself, “I’m going to start my blog,” and then I ruminate on it for a couple of days, maybe open an account on some blogging site (I probably have one on just about every one at this point!), and then I get down to the business of procrastinating until the conference fades away into the past and I’ve been sucked back into the day-to-day churn of work, family, life.

Yesterday, upon my return from the TAG conference, where there was a lot of deep delving into the use of Web 2.0 social networking tools for various aspects of organizational and personal applications, I decided to seize the opportunity of fresh inspiration and take the plunge. This is by no means a new conversation, especially at nonprofit tech conferences, but when Beth Kanter, during her presentation entitled “Our Grantees are on Facebook, Now What?,” talked about her system of organizing her various social networking and spontaneous communication utilities, it struck me with greater than usual realization that I share and network a lot, and I’m not really very good at it.

Beth shared a picture of her complex web of digital expression, and how she organizes her tools so as not to duplicate any effort while getting her messages out to all of her networks. She also talked about how she leverages her networks to get quick answers to things she could otherwise spend hours researching. The more she talked, the more I realized that blogging and other forms of social media are not just about pushing information out to anyone who might resonate with it, but rather they are about inviting others into dialog, facilitating connection, and ultimately building living fields of knowledge.

The other thing I learned from Beth these past few days, as she pulled her Nokia out to live stream video up to Qik at the drop of a hat, as she Twittered, blogged and deftly sought out interesting opportunities to share and learn, is that being a part of the public social media web becomes a way of life, beyond habituation (although she did recommend putting aside a fixed amount of time daily to feed the habit); for her, social networking seems a passionate, purpose-driven activity that generates great value when pursued with intention, integrity, and consistency. How could I not be inspired?

SL Preso TAG 2008On top of that, I also drew inspiration from the experience of leading my own presentation at the conference, titled “Introduction to Virtual Communities: Communications and Fundraising in Second Life,” with a panel that included Susan Tenby of TechSoup Global, who leads the Second Life-based Nonprofit Commons, and American Cancer Society volunteer Keith Morris.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: npsl)

I have given variations of this presentation before, but this was the first time I presented it at a tech conference, and the first time I did it with a panel. For one thing, I felt privileged to be presenting alongside such accomplished figures in virtual community building, but more importantly, I learned about the adventures of others in the audience who have experimented with Second Life, and their excitement ignited my passion even more. It helped me realize that not only can some of my experiences provide guidance and insight to others, but theirs are equally important to me, and I really can’t think of a more inspiring reason to develop a social networking habit.

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