Mapping the community networks of Centres of Expertise: the “Rotterdam Connections”

My community mapping work is taking off. I have been very busy with it, and have had little time to share the stories recently. Upcoming a series of blog posts introducing some of the very interesting mapping projects I have been doing since last year.

This first post is about starting mapping processes to support community building in two “centres of expertise” coordinated by the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

The RDM Centre of Expertise

The RDM Centre of Expertise  has as its mission to develop better technical education, as well as new knowledge and sustainable innovations required by the Port and City of Rotterdam. It does so by supporting collaboration between educational institutes, research centres and corporations in a range of projects, also involving university lecturers and students. This collaboration takes place in a network of currently 7 communities of practice (CoPs).

Community mapping was considered to have potential to visualize the collaboration ecosystem not only within but especially across the various communities. To explore this potential, a pilot was conducted with two of the communities of practice: CoP Logistics and the CoP Future Mobility. These communities were selected as the community managers were already exploring cross-overs between the projects associated with their communities.

In several iterations, a pilot Kumu map was produced, in which the focus was to find out the overlaps between projects and stakeholders between the different communities. It also shows the links with the educational institutes and programmes of the university, which is key, as these provide the centre with the students and researchers doing the applied research. This map is now being extended by the community managers and researchers of the CoE to make it cover increasingly more common ground.

The EMI Centre of Expertise

Another Rotterdam mapping case concerns EMI – the Expertise Centre Social Innovation.  This expertise centre focuses on addressing complex societal issues – “wicked problems” – related to living, working, care & well-being, and education in the district of Rotterdam-South, in which many of these problems are prevalent.

As a pilot, we developed an experimental map of one of the communities fostered by the expertise centre around its research and outreach programmes: “New in 010” (010 being the area code for Rotterdam).  In this programme, Obstetrics and Social Work and Services students support vulnerable pregnant women through house visits and organizing social events.

Whereas in the RDM Centre of Expertise the map focuses on visualizing project and stakeholder bridges between communities, the EMI map zooms in more on the activities and events within a community, as well as – again – the links with the educational institutes and programmes. Choosing the right “zoom level” is an essential design choice in community mapping projects. If you want to know more, check out this post on how to use community mapping with Kumu for collaborative sensemaking.

Future interactions design: tapping the wisdom of the crowd

Preparing for the future

On April 3, I attended the Chi Sparks 2014 conference on human computer interaction, to present my paper on the Kids’ Knowledge Base. I also attended a highly interesting workshop on “Future Interactions”, hosted by Marco Rozendaal of  Delft University of Technology. His group is developing a method to let groups design scenarios of future interactions. As the workshop call stated:

Future Interactions’ focuses on emerging technologies (communication technology, nanotechnology etc.) that enrich our everyday lives and asks how they can be embodied in a meaningful way.

Design explores new horizons. How can design methods address promises and pitfalls of emerging technologies? How may these technologies transform our bodies, perceptions and behaviours?

The workshop participants were split in teams of two people.  We were first asked to select a couple of cardboard cards from a common pool, covering the main categories technologies, applications, and interactions. 

Our cards to the future…

Together with my “future buddy”, John Swarts, I selected the following cards:

• [Technology: advanced manufacturing)] forever beta – “products that are never finished and always updated”
• [Applications: professional] working life –  “performance, autonomy, and satisfaction”
• [Applications: professional] lifelong learning – “lifelong learning, professionalism, and meta-learning”
• [Interactions: society] politics – forms of political action

We chose these cards, as we believe the forever beta mode is the fundamental mode of the socio-technical design of society, involving all stakeholders as co-creators. That society is shaped by a working life in in which people are always learning from and with one another in networks and communities, without there being any stable knowledge hierarchies anymore. We added the political dimension, as we believe that such an informed, evolutionary, co-creative way of working & learning is not operating in a political vacuum, but should directly help shape the norms, values, and directions of the society of the future.

We then discussed how these cards could be merged into a “future design scenario”. Discussing a concrete case about innovation of elderly care, and inspired by the software design approach of “user-centered design”, we arrived at the idea of “society-centered design“. Such a concept would require much more than currently often the case a holistic multi-stakeholder approach to emergent, knowledge-driven ways of working and learning. This approach should be governed by _and_ frame the political framework in which these productive learning processes ought to take place. An early example of such society-centered design are the increasingly popular multi-stakeholder “living labs” sprouting everywhere, in which working concepts and political governance models for complex societal issues like care and education are being co-created by – ideally – all stakeholders involved.   

Evaluating the future

In the next step, all groups positioned their “draft concepts” on a large gameboard, the horizontal axis indicating how quickly a concept could be implemented (from “tomorrow” till the more distant future). Finally, each group made a 1-minute pitch for their concept, after which each participant could position a number of coins on the concepts (or their intersections) which they thought to be the most valuable and feasible (we were thrilled to see our “society-centered design”-concept to turn out to be one of the winners. We’re almost done with our accompanying future bestseller book 🙂 On a serious note: the popularity of this concept is another indicator that the time for the field of community informatics/communities & technologies has come, as they are all about societal sensemaking of the pros and cons of powerful (IC)Ts).

The Future Interaction design method reminds me very much of other pattern-based design methods, such as the Liberating Voices “pattern language for communication revolution” (see Ken Gillgren’s piece on “lifting every voice” for a great application of that language). The beauty of such socio-technical design methods is on the one hand the simplicity of their components and rules, and on the other hand, the endless ways in which these elements can be configured and used for scalable, intricate human sensemaking.  In the end, such methods are just catalysts, all the knowledge is in the heads of the participants. How to get that knowledge out of these heads and into socio-technical designs of politics, business, education, and every-day life & work is what such socio-technical sensemaking & design methods could help us accompish.

Though promising, there are still many open research questions on how to make these methods more effective, such as:

• How to build rich sets of concepts/patterns/cards that are generic enough to be multi-purpose yet specific enough to trigger creative use?
• How do such sets differ depending on their use, such as future interactions or “communication revolution” design?
• What rules of the game help (1) elicit the most powerful configurations of patterns and (2) make sense of what these configurations mean?
• How to document, share and disseminate the results?
• How to enrich physical workshop sessions with digital preparatory and follow-up work?
• How to make such insights actually influence policy-making and research?

To be continued in “future research”…

 

“It’s the Conversation, Stupid!” – Social media systems design for open innovation communities

On November 5, the Swedish Open Innovation Forum organized a “Managing Open Innovation Technologies” workshop at Uppsala University, to present and discuss state-of-the-art research insights into open innovation & social media and for authors working on an anthology on this topic to get feedback on their draft chapters. It was a very lively meeting, generating lots of ideas for new research. Concluding, it was clear there’s still a very long way to go for social media to realize their full potential in this domain.

At the workshop, I gave a keynote on social media systems design for open innovation communities:

After that, my good friend and co-author Mark Aakhus (Rutgers University, USA), reflected upon what I said.  Mark wasn’t physically present, but participated from his study at his home in New Jersey, 6000 km away. Of course, I have been in many videoconferencing sessions, but normally these are cumbersome events, requiring lots of high tech, special rooms, microphones, cameras and what not. However, this time none of this was needed. All we used was a Mac and Skype. As Mark was presenting, he was displayed larger-than-life on the main screen using the projector:

Mark Aakhus presenting

Reception was crystal clear, he could hear everything being said, even in the back of the room. Things really got weird after he was finished.  The laptop was left on the table, and Mark’s image removed from the screen when other people used it to present their Powerpoints. However, once in a while, suddenly, the laptop started speaking, as Mark commented on something being said. The funny thing was that we all quickly got used to that situation, looking at and talking to a laptop as if it were a human being. Still, sometimes, Mark/the laptop would suddenly make a sound, and the whole flow of the conversation was disrupted, nobody quite sure what to make of it. A very strange and powerful experience of, literally, “extreme computer-mediated communication”!

Dutch Innovation Seminar 2008

On October 9, a beautiful autumn day, I went to the De Baak estate, in the wooded centre of the country to attend the Dutch Innovation Seminar 2008. De Baak is a well-known training institute, established by the largest employers’ organization in the Netherlands. As their site states, it “is the place for leaders, business people and professionals in search of inspiration, motivation, knowledge and insight”. Well, inspiration abounded, plentifully.

The seminar comprised a couple of keynote addresses, as well as a number of workshops, and lots of opportunity to network in a very pleasant atmosphere. The theme of the event was “Pulverizing Borders”, about how the Internet allows all kinds of borders to disappear, borders between people, organizations, supply and demand, and so on.

Interesting to observe were the different foci of innovation approaches of large-scale, corporate organizations like Shell and DSM, and new kids on the block like Nabuur and SellaBand. Shell and DSM are mainly interested in involving the “wisdom of the crowds” as idea generators, but themselves want to keep  close control over their often very complex, long term, and expensive product innovation processes.

Nabuur and SellaBand, on the other hand, act much more as facilitators, delegating substantial control to the users of their site. Nabuur, the “Global Neighbour Network” is an NGO that mediates between villages in developing countries having concrete requests for development assistance, and volunteers, from both North and South, who are able to help address these requests, leading to long-term collaboration and relationship networks. SellaBand facilitates between beginning bands looking for investment capital to produce an album and music lovers who are willing to invest small amounts of money. Once enough money has been raised, each music lover receives a limited edition copy of the album.

An interesting question is whether the “control paradigm” is really necessary for large scale product development, because of, for example, the need to protect intellectual property rights. Or could the new business models being developed by the likes of Nabuur and SellaBand in the longer term be adopted/adapted by their larger, more bureaucratic peers? Innovation of innovation…