commonspace

What's next?

Certainly, the world summit was a milestone. The idea that is telecentre.org is now out there in the world. More people understand it. And, I think, more people feel like they are a part of it.

The thing with milestones is they quickly fade off into history, leaving you with the question: what's next? Mixing both the big and small, there are some obvious 'what's next?' priorities for telecentre.org:

• Keep investing in networks. We need to ensure that the networks we're already partnering with -- Uganda, Sri Lanka, M2007 India, South Africa, Mozambique, Chile, Somos, TAP, PacTOC, CTCNet -- have the support and resources they need to thrive. At the summit, we met people who are running or starting networks in Spain, the Phillipines, Indonesia and West Africa. We need to follow up with these folks, quickly. And, also, there is a need to do some conscious outreach to places we haven't made contacts yet -- Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.
• Figure out what we mean by social entrepreneurship, and do something about it. A lot of us have been mixing the words social with entrepreneurship, enterprise and innovation for a while now. We've started work on these fronts by asking NESST to help with business planning for some of the networks we support. But we need to dig deeper. Most likely, this means finding three or four projects this year that SHOW what we mean by social entrepreneurship / enterprise / innovation within a grassroots telecentre context (yes, mixing these terms muddles ... but we need to live in the muddle for now). It also means bringing more partners to the table who understand this space.
• Get serious about evolving and sharing telecentre content. Peer production of content is one of the biggest nuts we need to crack. How does curriculum invented / adapted / innovated by a person in one telecentre can shared effectively with 10,000 others? How do you coordinate and integrate improvements to content from hundreds of different people? How do we make content and curriculum better –but also faster and cheaper? We need to start investing in projects (Mission 2007?) and finding partners (people who have done this in software?) that help us jump deeply into these questions.
• Develop easier ways to partner. The partnerships we've developed so far have involved a lot of effort, which is totally okay. But we also need ways in for people who are ready to jump out of their chairs and say: I've got something to offer right now! Significant effort this year should go into creating partnership opportunities with a lower barrier to entry (e.g. simple content sharing between web sites).
• Stick to our facilitation guns, and scale it slowly. So far, insisting on participatory meetings has met with rave reviews from our partners (overall participant rating at WSIS workshops = 8.8 out of 10). It's my belief that meetings like this are central to building the trust and relationships necessary to create successful networks. Unfortunately, we've got a very small pool of people available to work as facilitator. We need to make some conscious investments in growing this pool. This could include training our partners as facilitators, documenting the way we run meetings so others can copy us, showing what our workshops look like through video (Jarra, you rock!).
• Make what we do on the web better, and better, and better. Face to face networking events only matter if we can take the community online afterwards. We made some first steps in doing this with our WSIS blogging sessions and our beta site. Over the coming year, we need to get way better at this. Some priorities: getting reference desk team in place; making Drupal WAY more usable; making it easy and fast to create new site instances; doing more online community coaching; building transparent, real time online communication into what ALL of us at telecentre.org do everyday.

This is just a brain dump. Of course, it draws on the brains and hearts of everyone I talked to at the summit, hopefully capturing the general energy and direction. But it's just a start. Over the coming months, we'll be developing telecentre.org's Business Plan 2.0. This will give a chance to refine these ideas further by tapping into the collective intelligence of our partners.

Rome, Italy

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing

Reflecting back at the hurly burly week that was WSIS, I can't stop thinking about the amazing group of telecentre people we were able to gather.

After nine months searching for people who share our vision of telecentres connected to each other, we had three passionate partners join us on the podium at the launch ...

... Sulah, Priyanthi and Ivan, showing how their stories are beginning to intertwine with ours. We also had sixteen passionate telecentre leaders pitch in to become the heart and soul of our workshop series ...

 
... and begin to construct the collective narrative of telecentre.org: through conversations, through blogs, through action. And, of course, we had well over a hundred people join us at the workshops themselves, taking a risk to ...

... talk to people they didn't know, form connections across continents, and begin to build the puzzle which is the future of the telecentre movement.

Rome, Italy

... can really get in the way of blogging

Tunis, Tunisia

My last real blog posting was eight days ago. Or something like that. The title was "17,000 of my closest friends ..." which is a sentence that might well have end "... can really get in the way of blogging."

The last eight days have been a total buzz. The best of it was the telecentre leaders forum – a workshop that began on Tuesday with sixteen grassroots folks we brought on scholarships and grew to seventy deeply engaged people by Friday. For me, these workshops were a chance to show the wetware and orgware we're imagining, to demo what we mean by telecentre.org. They showed that it’s the creativity of P2P human connections that get ideas moving around ... and that build the foundations of collaboration for the long haul.

Wrapped around the workshop were a thousand and one high bandwidth / high speed conversations with brand new friends. Social innovators disguised as philanthropists. Inspired young people chomping at the bit to mashup telecentres and social enterprise. And, best of all, mild mannered telecentre implementers turned network evangelists. These connections, and many more, amped up the buzz. Of course, the launch also rocked – although I still liked talking with people more than talking at people.

The official WSIS process – which seemed like a distant monotone hum from where I was standing -- ended yesterday. Today is wrap up meetings, the telecentre leaders forum video premier (okay, rough cut) and connections amongst old friends who have all been too busy to find a moment to breathe this week.

More reflection still needed (see later posts). Lots learned. Tons of wonderful people. A lifetime of new puzzles to figure out. 

17,000 of my closest friends

I shouldn't have been surprised when I heard: "Mark, is that you?" shouted from the other end of the bus.

It was Lauren Fok, long time APCer turned BCO lead and APCs new operation manager, Estelle (who’s-last-name-I-don't-know-yet). As I scuttled to the back of the bus, Lauren's phone beeped with a have-you-arrived-safely? SMS from APC executive director Anriette Esterhuysen.

Less than 15 minutes in Tunis, and I felt like I was already at a gathering of friends. Maybe not 17,000 of my closest friends. But, certainly, at least 500 hundred folks that inspire me and (as Gunner would say) 16,500 friends I haven't met yet.

That surrounded-by-people-with-common-cause-who-you-also-like-to-hang-with feeling gives me such a glow. Not just because it's fun, but also because it's what makes networks real and powerful. Re-reading Gideon Rosenblatt's Movement as Network paper earlier this week, I was reminded that I'm not the only one who thinks friendships and networks are one of the key ingredients that make networks work.

Despite all the pomp and circumstance, WSIS really does promise to be a place where this kind of human connection flows like a river. What a perfect place to launch a network.

Tunis, Tunisia

The calm before ...

Sitting on the plane from Rome to Tunisia, it was clear that this would be my last 90 minutes of solitude for at least a week.

"The World Summit on the Information Society is at the other end of this flight," I said to myself.  "Nine months of build up to the launch of telecentre.org is just around the corner. Relax. Breathe. Enjoy the solitude."

How to relax? A freshly minted print out of Tim O'Reilly's September article about the meaning of Web 2.0 (I can't believe it took this long to read it!). And, of course, the Ramones' Rocket to Russia. Loud. Peaceful. Really loud!

Coming off the plane and into the hotel taxi, I felt centred. And I wondered why? Probably because O'Reilly and the Ramones both have the kind of energy that drives me, that guides me in what I do. Each in their own eras, they were accidental pioneers with passion.

Watching a Tunisian bowling alley fly by out my window, I typed a staccato of O'ReillyRamones-inspired mantras for the coming week into my phone: Push the envelope. Be irreverent. Play fast. Have fun. Think smart. Stay humble. Relax. Breathe. Enjoy the chaos.

I will.

Over the Mediterranean, between Rome and Tunis

A sprint to the starting line ...

Most people sprint to the finish line. Last week, the telecentre.org did a sprint to the starting line -- the launch of our new program at WSIS in Tunisia.

The sprint in question was a time-boxed content development and bug testing session for the wsis.telecentre.org web site. This site will serve a coordination point, collaboration engine and storytelling repository for our WSIS events.

Very fun, and productive, to do this. We got alot of the site built. But we also got a taste of our own dogfood -- seeing what happens when you throw up a set of sites quickly, try to do something real with them, and then iterate.

The result was occasional frustration followed but rapid progress, and ultimately a set of sites that will serve as great scaffolding for our events at WSIS ... and the networks that follow on from there.