The Green Kangaroo

In a session at the annual conference of the American Society of Association Executives (still working on a post about that), William Taylor (Mavericks at Work) advised advised us to focus on our "architecture of participation." A Google search takes me a Wikipedia article and from there to Tim O'Reilly's June 2004 "Open Source Paradigm Shift."

The "architecture of participation" has been one of the most persistent focal points in the greenroo space during the past months -- and will be for months to come.

I began thinking about this in association space -- trying to facilitate broader discussion on a 2005-2006 study from ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership on major trends affecting associations. Many association executives are serious readers -- probably not a surprise to those of you in the library world. So, we took the mechanism of a existing association executives book club -- a monthly teleconference on a specific book -- and tweaked it a bit. We shifted the discussion focus to a trend area -- but sent out an advance reading list for each session and asked the month's facilitator to use books, journal articles and web-based resources (including blog posts) as "springboards" for the discussion. That lead us into some interesting explorations.

At the same time, an association colleage -- Ben Martin at the Virginia Society of CPAs -- built a discussion group within an online community structure. That discussion, the exchange of stories in that community month by month, trend by trend, was very rich.

Then, Ben and I worked together to present a session at the ASAE conference in Boston this August. Well, we started down the path of doing a panel-style presentation -- then changed our architecture. We decided to facilitate a series of small group discussions. There were groups at tables, on the floor, clustered in the doorway -- a full house. People in each cluster took rough notes -- which we added to the website. Our change in approach came after the program deadline -- so people came expecting talking heads. Presented with an opportunity to sit or stand and share their worries and their success stories with colleagues -- people not only adjusted and stayed, the energy level zoomed upwards. Maybe we all need more opportunities to do that.

On the library side, the ALAL2 prototype was an intense six-weeks or so before the New Orleans conference -- and taught me, and others, a lot about what works, and what doesn't work, in architecting participation in the 2.0 environment. We've spent time thinking through feedback and have more thinking to do about next steps. I'm watching with considerable interest the "Five Weeks to A Social Library" (sociallibrary@gmail.com) educational opportunity being developed and managed by Meredith Farkas, Michelle Boule, Amanda Etches-Johnson, Karen Coombs, Ellyssa Kroski and Dorothea Salo.

ALA has had a small explosion of blogs and wikis in the past few months. This past Monday, Meredith Farkas -- who built and managed both the ALA2005 (Chicago) wiki and the ALA2006 (New Orleans) wiki -- spent a day here talking to ALA staff about wikis, sharing what she's learned, and providing us with some basic training. She created a lot of enthusiasm and energy around the concept of using wikis -- and we'll see where this path may take us. There is a wiki up and ready for your use for the 2007 ALA Midwinter in Seattle.

This, though, begins to bring us to place where we need to think together as we build an "architecture for participation" in the 21st century world. How do we effectively and respectfully blend different concepts of experience and participation? How do we facilitate without stiffling? How do we honor the needs for both experimentation and persistence? ALA President Leslie Burger has appointed a special task force to look at "member participation." The committee is chaired by Jim Rettig and includes some active bloggers, such as Michael Stephens and Karen Schneider. Jenny Levine is the staff liaison. This is a discussion of importance to all of us -- those who blog and those who don't, members and staff, regardless of generation.

This is a path -- architecting participation -- that will get wider and deeper with use over coming months. In the meantime, I keep exploring, reading and listening -- watching for the direction signs, the unexpected options.

On my reading stack now is Tom Kelley's The Ten Faces of Innovation, which has me thinking about the need for a serious talk with an organizational anthropologist. A couple of posts ago, I quoted from James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which brought me a recommendation (from Jenny) to read Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck & Mitchell Wade, which I've just finished and passed along to ALA colleague John Chrastka. I think the dynamics of the gaming environment have something to tell us about architecting participation -- but I have a lot of thinking and listening still to do. Finally, for late-day trains, I've picked up a book by an environmentalist who took a year to look -- seriously -- at her backyard: Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, by Hannah Holmes. We won't talk about the growing stacks of unread...

Blogs continue to provide ideas, book citations and discussion threads -- which reminds me that I made a note to check out Edward Tufte's latest book (Beautiful Evidence) after I picked up the citation from Paul at Thinking About the Future, who picked it up on the O'Reilly Radar ... and so it goes.