Three weeks ago I had the awesome privilege of facilitating an open space event for the first time. Called ChangeCamp, it was held in my home town of Sault Ste. Marie. This is my reflection on the day as an organizer and facilitator, in the hopes other ChangeCamp groups can learn and be inspired by our local experiment.

ChangeCamp Sault is both the fulfillment and start of a personal dream. I attended the first ChangeCamp at Toronto in January of 2009, then my first experience of open space. Over 200 participants actively engaged in answering the question: how can we re-imagine how government and citizens engage each other in an age of participation? It was an exciting day, full of shared ideas, new connections and belief that we can act to shape our collective future. I knew then that I wanted to create that same experience in my own city, which would be something entirely new. In open space, the people who come set the agenda and engage in open participatory dialogue. At the time the idea felt risky – how would people respond?

The event was held at Sault College in the Native Student Centre, a circular room with plenty of glass windows to let in the sun, a perfect gathering spot. The College was very supportive, providing the facilities at no cost and even covering some of the food cost. We had a lunch catered by their food provider, provided free to participants.

We were pleased to have over 50 people register for the event, given a busy weekend of events and the start of summer holidays. The group had a healthy mix of old and young, men and women, newcomers and long-time residents. To my surprise, I knew hardly anyone there. Due to other events a number of people left early or came late, which made facilitating a little more challenging.

We chose to keep the day shorter by having 3 rounds of sessions, including a ‘getting to action’ time at the end of the day, and a brief lunch. My experience with PodCamp is that people run out of energy mid-way through the afternoon. This turned out to be a good choice. A number of people had left before the end, and those that stayed still had energy for the closing circle.

Setting the stage during the opening circle felt like the most important part of facilitating the day. I shared some of the history that led up to ChangeCamp, including Ignite Sault and Soo Podcamp, two smaller event ‘experiments’ that were tried to test the waters. I asked people to get up and sit beside two people they didn’t know and, without instructions, people started introducing themselves – a healthy sign. The rules of open space: 1/n, bumblebee and butterfly were covered, and the grid explained. People were challenged to make the conversations they came to have happen.

What was the result?

Mark Kuznicki, founder of ChangeCamp likes to say that there are two outcomes: the connections made and the content created. Both are valuable. Through being connected, people felt encouraged, with greater hope for our community’s future. One newcomer remarked that she now felt a part of the community.

My great epiphany is that these connections are the seeds of change. No matter our cause, our ambitions, our hopes and our passions, to bring about change, we must also invest in building community, for a connected community is at the root of all the change we seek. I’ve spent time on many causes and issues over the years, often feeling like little progress is being made, or that bringing about change is hard, at times grueling work. ChangeCamp showed me a different path. I’m having more fun and feeling more successful by nurturing community, through which change will occur.

Tips for organizers

These were essential ingredients for us having a successful event:

1. Live the ChangeCamp experience as you organize the event. When the organizing team works in an open, participative way, where individual passions are nurtured and talents harnessed, you have the nucleus for a successful event. I used my Agile experience to help with team formation, planning and facilitation.
2. People matter. This was the most diverse group I’ve ever worked with. We had marketing, technical and political savvy. One person had a lot of spare time to do a lot of necessary grunt work. Combined we had numerous key connections in the community. A group of 7 people felt about right for us.
3. Tools matter. We’re all busy volunteers who need to work together effectively with the limited time we have. Digital tools are necessary, but only work if there is buy-in. Our group found a “sweet spot” of simplicity and feature-set that amplified our efforts significantly. Next week, we’ll be presenting our tool set at a ChangeSalon event. We’ll post a follow-up to that event to let you in on our tool stack.
4. Event design matters. Mark Kuznicki, ChangeCamp papa helped a lot with shaping our event. Combine expert knowledge from someone like Mark with knowledge of the community and your goals for the event to help determine the best format. We were fortunate to have learned from an earlier event in designing this one.

I feel like I could easily write 4 more posts on our experience, but we’ll see. My commitment to blog writing is not what it used to be.

Good luck with your next event. Hopefully I’ve shared something useful. Come back in about a week to learn more about tools that can help your team succeed.

My experience of church growing up was that of an extended family. We attended small rural churches of no more than 50 people. Many a Saturday night after church (there was one paster for 4 parishes, Saturday at 5 pm was our time) was spent at someone’s house, where the adults chatted about deeper matters over egg salad sandwiches and the kids played all sorts of games. Fr. Eric, our priest back then and still a good friend likes to remind me of the time he suggested I find a mass to go to while out of town at a hockey tournament, to which I replied, “Why would we go? We don’t know anybody there.” From a young age, the people I gathered with was integral to my faith experience.

Church continued to have a significant place in my life. I stayed active, serving on parish council, organizing a youth group, leading social justice initiatives. I remember organizing a skit with the youth with me as Jésus, a Mexican coffee grower promoting fair trade. We travelled from parish to parish with our message and a car full of packaged coffee. In university I copied Protestant friends by bringing a notepad to church to take notes during the sermons. I even considered becoming a priest, attending a come-and-see weekend at St. Peter Seminary in London as part of my discernment process. In the end, Rowena won and the church lost, as Eric put it in his homily for our wedding.

Fast forward to today, where I have been seriously struggling for over a year to find meaning and fulfillment in my experience of church. In a world where I can interact, dialogue and connect, sitting passively in a pew, going through the same rituals every Sunday no longer satisfies. As a community we do not know each other, going through the motions week after week. Some continue to do volunteer work year after year, despite how unfulfilling it is. What has changed? The world and my faith journey have evolved; the church experience has not.

My work is partly to blame. As an Agile coach, my goal is to help organizations and teams transform their experience of work, where the core roots: respect, courage, focus, commitment and openness can flourish. I have tasted many times the fruits of collaborative work, where all voices are valued and heard, leading to consensus decision making. The Agile community has taught me we do our best work when we can be creative, have fun, feel a sense of purpose; that servant leadership and self-organized teams trump top-down control for results.

Agile is a way of looking at and experiencing the world that matches my personal values, values that were shaped in part by those years growing up in small church communities. I use my experience with Agile to better family life – my wife and I have weekly planning and retrospectives. Agile training helps me create an inclusive atmosphere for volunteer efforts like ChangeCamp Sault. I have often imagined the beauty of a self-organized, empowered church community.

Last October, I began an experiment to apply Agile to take steps towards creating vibrant church community. I was blown away by what this small group accomplished in just their first session – imagine an entire parish community engaged in creating its own vision! Imagine being part of a community actively working on “lives connected”, “positive power”, “bonding mission” and “spiritual partnership”. That’s what I long for. Of course, defining and creating are not the same thing, and I soon realized that major, fundamental change within the Catholic church would be necessary to achieve this vision. Governance model turned upside down. Parishioners given real authority and input. Focus in the mass shifted away from priest, choir and ministers to the people in the pews. Major systemic change that feels so far away from becoming reality.

Unfortunately, there is no real dialogue about the elephant in the sanctuary. Well, I’ve had enough suffering. Sadly, after almost 40 years, church has become an impediment to my faith journey. I feel a sense of loss, with no place to go, only that God is calling me to something greater. I know I am not alone. Starting now, our family begins a journey outside traditional church, meeting in our home, praying for direction. We invite others who thirst for more to come join us and help create that vibrant faith community. In a follow-up post, I will share more about this turn to organic church. I do not know where all this will lead, only that I have to go this way to be true to myself and my beliefs. Egg salad sandwiches optional.

So what’s a way to address all of those needs without spending tens of thousands of dollars and hiring a team of iPhone wielding, Twitter buzzing social media peeps? If I were in charge of defining a solution, I would include these in my toolkit:

• SCHED
• Posterous
• Scribblelive
• TwitterFountain

Note: I’m not covering Twitter, YouTube and Facebook here, though you definitely need them. I will discuss how to use these social media juggernauts together with the tools below in the next post.

Event Social Gymnastics: SCHED

SCHED is an interactive event calendar, personal agenda builder and social networking tool. This tool is simply awesome, and I know of no other tool in its category that comes close to its feature/price point. SCHED was originally developed for the king of conferences, SXSW. Look what you get for a mere $800:

• Event calendar with colour-based categorization, live search, and detailed session pages. Filter events by category, date, venue, company, subject, audience, geographic area and most popular events. Highlight most popular events to help attendees figure out what to attend.
• Attendees can create and save a personal schedule and share it with others. Export schedule to use in Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar or just print it out. Share via email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks.
• Attendees can better connect socially by seeing a list of who else is attending, including their network of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn friends. A group schedule of current friends is also automatically generated showing you the events your friends are planning to attend.
• Arrange meet ups by viewing attendee’s schedules and contacting them through their personal profiles.
• Attendees and presenters can discuss sessions by adding comments to each session’s page.

Sustainable bonus: instead of printing out schedules, attendees can print their own, customized to their liking, or just refer to it on their mobile device.

Administration bonus: manage list of published events using a familiar spreadsheet format

Toss in another $300 and your event gets its own iPhone app with a full schedule preloaded for offline use, with search and filtering capabilities.

View full list of SCHED features.

Agile 2010, the giant gorilla you are, please put this tool on your list to help nearly 2000 attendees feel less overwhelmed connecting with each other and choosing between 200+ sessions.

Online content hub: Posterous

I had my big a-ha moment with Posterous using it as a community blog for the 2010 Orlando Scrum Gathering. I needed a blogging tool that makes it super easy for several contributors to publish and distribute content, with a minimum of effort. Posterous is the answer.

The process is simple. Email a post, attaching any type of document, image, audio or video, or just link to the file online. Posterous handles media smartly, embedding videos, audio and documents, creating photo albums, posting PDFs. Hook up sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and have your content automatically posted to them. All with the effort of creating one email. Makes a one person social media team look mighty smart.

Live publishing: ScribbleLive

ScribbleLive is a free tool that a conference can use to capture the conversations, sights, sounds (hopefully smells coming in a future release) in real-time. Conferences like Mesh have used ScribbleLive to create live blogs per session. ScribbleLive will also (for a fee) create a custom portal listing all the live blogs related to an event.

Key features:

• Super simple to use. I’ve shown people who have never live blogged before how to get started in less than 5 minutes. It’s like Twitter or Facebook – type in a box and update.
• Pull in all tweets using a hash tag. People are already tweeting about your conference, this puts them all in one place, in real time, archived online. Any photos linked in tweets are displayed. Post ScribbleLive postings back to Twitter.
• Self-organization. Set up the live blog links, and invite anyone logged in to participate as a live blog writer.
• The iPhone app works really well for posting and watching content.
• Upload audio / video for viewers to watch / listen to instantly.

Bring the online conversation offline: Twitter Fountain

I tried Twitter Fountain for the first time at the 2010 Orlando Scrum Gathering and it was a big success. People enjoyed conversing while watching the constantly updated series of Twitter posts and images. Like a big visible chart, it shows what people are saying and sharing without having to go online and check.

For consideration: timely, shared feedback: SpeakerRate

In my search for a decent feedback tool I recently discovered SpeakerRate. SpeakerRate is the one tool I’ve listed that I haven’t actually used, other than to check it out. I first discovered PodCamp Toronto using SpeakerRate to provide more details about topics and to obtain feedback for presenters. It’s simple enough to use, though registration is required (please integrate Facebook/Twitter logins guys). Reviewers rate content and delivery and can provide constructive feedback via comments. Presenters build up a rating over time if they use this tool for multiple presentations. Worth considering, though I’d like to see SpeakerRate integrated with another tool like SCHED for a more seamless experience.

Those are my tool selections that I believe a small operation can use effectively without a ton of effort to greatly enhance the conference experience. What would you add/remove as part of your essential toolkit?

Last year I attended Mesh 09. That was the first conference I’d been to where I think *everyone* had a Twitter account. Sessions were filled with people tweeting and live blogging. I followed the conference hash tag to keep up with what was happening, sometimes switching rooms because of what others were posting. Events that use social media like Twitter and live blogging amplify the value of the “hallway conversations” that are often the best part of conferences. The conference felt more alive, and in turn I got more value from going.

Over the past few years I’ve volunteered to help a number of events use social media to amplify their value and impact on participants. From experience I can say that with a little effort and knowledge, integrating social media into the conference experience does not have to be onerous or expensive. All the tools I use are free, and there are ways to automate part of the effort. Remember, too, once there is an environment in which everyone can participate and share, you don’t have to generate all the content – grab your paddle and jump in the content stream with others.

If I were in charge of social media for a conference, I would start first by identifying the needs people have around information and connecting. For this round of research I sat down with myself for an in-depth interview. Well, I was available and close by.

I see four stages participants go through related to a conference. For each stage I’ve identified needs. While some needs span across stages, I refer to them once to avoid unnecessary duplication. I know you’re busy.

Should I go to the party?

AKA deciding whether to attend the conference or not

• Sessions: where can I find more detailed information about them? What do others think of them?
• About presenters: where can I find more detailed information about them? What do others think of them? How can I contact presenters with my questions?
• Network: who else is going that I might want to meet?

Dress up: getting ready for the party

Getting closer to the event

• Network: contact people in advance, organize meet ups, discuss what is coming up
• Sessions: decide which sessions to attend. What sessions are other people going to, especially people I know?
• Accommodations: find someone to share a room, airport taxi. What lower cost alternatives are there to the conference hotel?

Party time

Ok, we’re there.

• Network: find people to connect with in real-time, organize meet ups
• Sessions: decide which sessions to attend. What sessions are other people going to, especially people I know?
  • last minute changes to schedule, sessions
• Feedback: timely, useful session feedback to presenters and conference organizers
• Conversation: what are the hot topics? What are people thinking/doing/sharing? What stories are being told by the people at the conference?

The morning after

• Feedback / telling the story: what are people saying and sharing about their experience of the conference?
• Network: find for those people you met but don’t have contact details for to continue discussions, follow up on opportunities, request copies of incriminating photos.

My experience is conferences not social media savvy don’t address these needs well, and miss some entirely, especially when it comes to connecting people with each other. Fortunately, all it takes is a reasonable effort and cost to bridge the gap. In the next blog post I’ll list the tools you’ll want to use to become a conference social media superstar.

How does this list compare to what you need? Have I missed anything important? Add your comment below.

Kids helped make a fruity Earth planet pizza for Earth day. Gives new meaning to the tune “He’s got the whole world, in His hands…”

Last week I attended my first ever Scrum Gathering in Orlando. A big part of my voluntary duties was to enhance the experience through use of social media.

Just for fun, I tabulated some numbers on social media throughput by myself and conference goers:

• 1500+ Twitter posts with #sgus hash tag
• 100+ Flickr photos (and likely more to come as people tag and upload their pics)
• 17 Youtube videos
• 78 event blog posts and counting. Close to 2,000 site views.
• All Twitter posts and about 35 Twitter pics with #sgus tag (here and here) posted to the live blog.

The Twitter fountain was a big hit. We set it up in the conference hallway one day and inside the open space ballroom the next. People enjoyed seeing tweets and photos appear live on screen.

In a follow-up post, I’ll explain more about the why and how of social media at the conference, what worked in my mind and what didn’t, and what I would do next time.

The Twitter / Flickr fountain is now flowing for the Orlando Scrum Gathering 2010.

We’ll be projecting this in the Dialogue Room at the Scrum Alliance Orlando Scrum Gathering. It’s a collection of Twitter posts and Flickr photos happening in real-time. For now, enjoy tweets and photos from the Olympics. Soon I’ll change the tags to #sg10us, the official tag of the event:

Secret map unearthed for Dialogue Room at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando, FL in March. If you can’t have fun here, you’re doin’ it wrong. :)

The Dialogue Room is the heart beat of the Scrum Gathering. Come experience a lightly structured, free flowing environment where impromptu and spontaneous conversations and activities can take place. It is intended to be a space for those who want to explore Scrum beyond the formal sessions. Anything goes; no formal workshops or talks here. The Dialogue Room coordinators will provide craft materials and games — that will spur the creation of new structure. Explore and contribute to a gallery of questions and other artifacts. Peruse the live Twitter / Flickr wall.

Got a Scrum ailment that needs diagnosis? Come visit the Scrum Clinic at the Dialogue Room. Sign up for a 20 minute session of private 1-on-1 coaching. Doctors wanted.

Are you going to the Scrum Gathering? What do you think of the Dialogue Room? What would you do differently?

Community and Sacred Spaces within the Agile community. This is a topic close to my heart and one that I am considering proposing for the Agile 2010 conference. I don’t have a format figured out yet. I’m looking for like-minded souls to say a) this is a good idea and b) help me flesh out the concept. I’m open to co-presenting with anyone.

Making traditional Sunday pancakes. Can you spot the blueberries?

Another perfect morning for skiing. Beautiful sun, quiet. Standing at Pinder Lookout.

Gorgeous morning on Red Pine trail with Rowena (and no kids). Haven’t been there since the kids were born > 5 years ago.

Classic Rick Mercer: “See this is what I love about Canada. Yes, we are apathetic. But the minute anyone tries to use our apathy against us suddenly we start to care big time.”

Let’s keep the momentum going, beyond protest and towards building a better future by re-connecting with each other. That’s why I am a part of the Changecamp movement.

Yves Hanoulle is asking a question each day for people to think about, through his @Retroflection Twitter account. Each day someone is invited to respond, and today I have been asked to answer:

What does being a team really mean (as opposed to the way the word is often misapplied)

To “be a team” in my experience, means to:

• Share goal(s), to have a common purpose for working together
• Commit collectively to getting work done, in a spirit of collaboration
• Respect each other’s differences
• Trust that each person is competent, will raise issues and follow through on commitments
• Have the courage to remove obstacles in the team’s path, including resolving conflicts within the team

Those familiar with Scrum will notice my team attributes are based on the 5 core Scrum values.

These attributes are not easy to attain. It takes time to become a team, and a lot of hard work. Just ask my wife.

Now it is your turn to answer: what does being a team mean to you?

Hiawatha

I’ll be helping with live blogging the Innovation Centre’s 10 year anniversary. All the action is taking place at the Grand Theatre, 1 pm, Tuesday December 8. Can’t make it? Come back here to see live coverage, including photos. Rumor has it there will be a big cake and unveiling of SSMIC’s new logo.

More details on the event on SSMIC’s site.

Got this link from Jeff Sutherland, co-found of Scrum. Re-affirms belief that healthy lifestyle safe, vaccines not.

Look around you. Things don’t have to be this way. – Jerry Weinberg, session leader at AYE

Relaxing. Welcoming. Insightful. Practical. Intimate. Grounded. Those were a few of the words uttered last night by some first-time participants at the AYE conference. One person remarked, “[At the end of the conference] I woke up late for my taxi ride to the airport, and was in danger of missing my flight. Normally that would have upset me, but strangely I remained calm.”

AYE is an interactive, small conference focused on people skills and human dynamics (my words). To learn more, I decided to interview myself on the trip home. Here is the (mock) transcript:

Q. Why did you decide to attend AYE Gerry?

I attended the pre-conference session, where I had to answer that question with a drawing, so here it is. Before the conference, I chose a Frisbee to represent who I wanted to be at the conference: active, engaged, giving and taking, being open to wherever I’m directed, having fun. My hope was to be changed personally, to grow in people skills, and in turn impact myself, family, teams and the world. I’m at the point in my Agile coach journey where I realize practices only get teams and individuals so far. Hyper productivity comes not through better processes and tools, but through changed minds and hearts. My logic-driven, analytical mind needs a counterpart to work effectively with people.

Q. What resonated most with you?

Systems thinking

Esther Derby’s systems thinking simulation. This helped me gain a better understanding of the environment teams work in, and what might be impediments / opportunities to bring about desired change. Through a simple scenario of a company making pinwheels, we uncovered many levers for change. Levers come in 3 flavours: containers, differences and exchanges. Borrowing from the HSD Institute definitions

• A container holds a system together as its parts interact to form system-wide patterns. Containers can be physical (team room, office), organizational (departments), or pyschological.
• The significant differences within the container focus the resources of the system and establish the emerging patterns. Some differences matter, some do not. Hair colour probably not that important. Focus on the ones that matter. Look at
• Exchanges among the agents within the container allow for individual and system-wide evolution of new learnings and patterns. Translation: look at the flow of things: resources, language (written/verbal), energy, knowledge, ideas, authority, responsibility, within and between containers.

Building rapport: structuring your conversations

On Tuesday night I had felt some disappointment that I hadn’t had more in-depth conversations with people at the conference. This is partly my own personality weaknesses, so I resolved to work on that for the remainder of the conference. Wouldn’t you know it, the next morning I wandered into Johanna’s structured conversations session, heard her 3 minute what-you’ll-learn pitch and it was as if she was talking directly to me.

I learned the value of building rapport, of connecting on a personal level with someone. Without rapport, you’ll struggle to get to more substantive discussion. My tendency is to want to dive in right away.

People come in many flavours, 16 actually

Underpinning the conference sessions are the work of Virginia Satir, and the Myers-Briggs personality types. Types describe people’s preferences in

• where they get their energy from (extrovert / introvert)
• how they gather information (sensing / intuiting)
• how they evaluate information (thinking / feeling)
• and how they act (judging / perceiving)

My wife will benefit more than anyone from my greater appreciation and respect for people whose preferences are different than mine. I’d like to think I will be more accepting of those differences now. Time will tell.

Meeting Jerry

Two months ago I didn’t know who Jerry Weinberg was. Since then, people have shared how much his writings and workshops have influenced their lives. I valued Jerry Weinberg’s words of wisdom, his challenging questions and quick wit humour. His sessions were shaped more like counseling sessions between himself and a willing participant, with the rest of us listening in, like a reality TV therapy episode. Perhaps the lack of full group engagement was due to his weakening health.

Q. What surprised you?

Most of the participants came from Europe, or so it seemed. Majority of people were there to experience Jerry Weinberg, someone I didn’t know about two months ago. I’m glad I had the chance to be touched by his presence and wise words.

No one except big hotels and fancy homes have green grass. Yards consist of dirt, rocks and cacti.

You can see dry desert, canyons, mountains, forest and snow within 2 hours’ drive of Phoenix.

Q. Was it all good or were some parts meh?

Some simulations felt too abstract to teach me anything. The Satir congruence model didn’t resonate, nor did the session on the Satir change model, which turned into a mini rumble. Felt too meta. Saddened fancy hotels don’t know what vegetarian means, no different than every other non-vegetarian place. When I organize my first conference lentils, beans and tofu shall rule.

Q. Gerry, is there anything else you would like the world to know?

Thank-you to Esther, Steve, Don, Jerry and Johanna (wherever you are standing) for having the courage to be the change you wanted to see 10 years ago by creating AYE. This will not be my last AYE experience.

Everyone at the conference who expressed interest in couch surfing should go there RIGHT NOW and sign up. No excuses. I had a great time staying with Joel and his family, including taking a tour of the country side.