This morning, I saw this exchange on my Twitter stream between Dennis Whittle and John S. Bracken: [View the story “Building a Culture of Openness” on Storify] Building a Culture of Openness Storified by Eugene Eric Kim · Wed, Oct 31 2012 07:35:11 Great conf on how open data can hold govt to account. @ethanz alone would be worth price of ticket: http://openup12.org/agenda/ @OmidyarNetworkDennis Whittle @EthanZ @DennisWhittle @OmidyarNetwork I have emailed to ask for an invitation, though doubt I am […]
Month: October 2012
Group Process on Steroids
We often describe our work to others as “group process on steroids.” It’s like organizational development, community organizing, and other related practices done really, really well. Except that it’s also somewhat different. What exactly does that mean?! It means doing whatever you can and leveraging whatever tools are at your disposal to enable groups to work skillfully together, to help them come alive. Where exactly do the steroids come in?! (My business partner, Kristin Cobble, took a pass at this […]
Behind the Scenes: Storytelling and Group Process
One of the great ironies of designing highly participatory, emergent processes is that they require a lot of work. We walk through and practice design scenarios. We scrutinize every last detail, from the wording of each question to the layout of the physical space. It’s exhausting, but it’s also incredibly fun and gratifying, and the results more than make it worth it. We’ve written a rough description of our design process, but the best way to understand it is to experience it […]
Code for America: Hacking City Government, Not Just Apps
I spent this past week at the second annual Code for America Summit, a showcase for Code for America 2012 projects and a meeting of the minds for the Gov 2.0 community. Code for America has been getting a lot of well-deserved press this past year, in part because of the amazing work they’ve done in just two years and also because of founder, Jen Pahlka’s fantastic TED talk. My colleague, Rebecca Petzel, had the pleasure of facilitating a strategy workshop for them last […]
The Skillful, Intentional Practitioner
Last week, our team was preparing for our September Delta Dialogues meeting. As part of our standard preparation, we went over the room layout and discussed how we wanted to configure it. We had arranged in advance for a room that was configurable (movable chairs and tables) and that had a projector and screen. The room was rectangular in nature, with the screen on the shorter wall of the room. The natural thing to do would have been to arrange […]