Building Abundant Communities (Part 1 of 4): From Citizen to Consumer—And Back Again

To propose the existence of abundance at a time when so many people are discouraged and overwhelmed might appear to be a hard sell. But that’s exactly what John McKnight and Peter Block effectively do and nurture through their wonderful book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods and the Abundant Community website they maintain to support and spread their work—and ours.

A heartfelt and encouraging paean to the power of collaboration, The Abundant Community serves as a positive source of inspiration for rethinking many of our unquestioned assumptions; it also consistently serves as a useful handbook for those of us interested in and committed to building the sort of collaborative coalitions that make a difference locally, regionally, nationally, and globally with surprisingly little effort.

McKnight and Block begin the rethinking process by drawing a distinction between what they call “citizen” and “consumer” societies—maintaining that until we reverse the trend away from the citizen to the consumer model, we’re going to miss the obvious abundance of resources around us and the opportunities to overcome the challenges that leave so many people feeling incapable of effecting change.

Consumer society, they maintain, is predicated upon the belief that “satisfaction can be purchased”; the result, they consistently suggest, is that we try to buy solutions to everything ranging from healthcare and emotional challenges to education, safety, and security needs. Citizen society, in contrast, nurtures “social and civic life” so that we work together to create and support healthier communities that meet their members’ educational, safety, security, and other needs. It’s clear that the authors are trying to move us from being armchair critics to being actively engaged in creating healthy, thriving, vibrant communities where connections foster success and a high quality of life.

“The greatest tragedy of the consumer life is that its practitioners do not see that the local community is abundant with the relationships [italics added for emphasis] that are the principal resource for rescuing themselves and their families from the failure, dependency, and isolation that are the results of a life as a consumer and client,” McKnight and Block suggest. “Their ships and sinking, and they struggle to swim to safety, ignoring the life raft at their side. The way to the good life is not through consumption. It is, instead, a path that we make by walking it with those who surround us. It is the way of a competent community recognizing its abundance” (p. 18).

The writers are explicit about the problems we create when we fail to acknowledge and build upon the abundance that remains untapped within communities: we marginalize nature to such a degree that we lose sight of much of the beauty that surrounds us and the numerous benefits we might draw from nature; we surrender to marketing efforts that create and then require additional resources to alleviate dissatisfaction in our lives; we pay attention to little more than we can immediately see, thereby missing the opportunity to operate within a larger, more positive framework; and we become slaves to debt rather than freeing ourselves by having a goal of living within our means (p. 50).

They are equally explicit about the numerous, simple achievable changes we can make to address these challenges, e.g., learning “how to fix what is broken rather than replacing it. Shopping when we really need something, not shopping as a form of recreation.” And at a larger level, shifting from a primary focus on immediate challenges and needs to a focus that includes “a future orientation” (p. 54).

The abundant community that McKnight and Block want to help us strengthen is built upon several core beliefs that too few of us recognize: that what we have is enough; that we have the capacity to produce what we need; that cooperation and satisfaction provide a framework for organizing our world; that we each have definable responsibilities for and toward each other; and that there is a basic undeniable reality to the human condition within which we must live. The communities that incorporate these beliefs into daily practices are rooted in focusing on the individual gifts we bring to our communities, nurturing “associational life,” and offering hospitality to everyone—an idea based on a commitment of welcoming strangers to our communities rather than creating barriers to their acceptance (pp. 66-67).

And when we set aside all the theorizing and rethink our way into putting this into the familiar context of our own communities, we see that we’re really not talking about much more than what already exists in those that are successful. A neighborhood association (like San Francisco’s Inner Sunset Park Neighbors) that consistently improves the quality of life for significant numbers of people draws from all these ideas and practices. As does a local, regional, or national association organized around a specific profession (e.g., the American Society for Training & Development, which creates a tremendous learning community for those of us involved in workplace learning and performance, AKA staff training). And as is the case with the volunteer-driven community-based Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

There are literally thousands of organizations like this all over our country and beyond our own borders. The challenge for all of us is to recognize them, appreciate them, and support them through our own involvement regardless of whether we can only give a few minutes/a couple of hours/a few dollars a month or whether we recognize that we are ready to become more deeply engaged through deeper commitments—not only to those entities but to the greater extended abundant communities that would not exist without them.

N.B.: This is the first in a four-part series of articles exploring abundant communities

Next: ASTD As an Abundant Community

The Fourth Place Revisited: Creating an Instant Onsite-Online Social Learning Center (Part 2 of 2)

It’s not often that we have the opportunity to produce learning objects as part of a learning opportunity, but that’s exactly what an engaged group of learners (library directors from the state of Virginia) achieved last week during the final two-hour session of the Library of Virginia’s two-day Directors’ Meeting in Richmond, Virginia that Maurice Coleman and I helped facilitate.

By the end of our time together Friday morning, all of us not only had collaborated to create a blended (onsite-online) social learning center that had onsite participants seamlessly engaged with several online colleagues in discussions about the future of libraries and learning and learners, but we had also used the wisdom of the group to capture and produce a viewable record of the conversations that took place via Twitter by using Storify.

How we achieved those results as a temporary community of learners drawn together and supported by Library of Virginia Continuing Education Consultant Cindy Church and her colleagues provides a wonderful example of social learning at its best and most creative. It also provides a wonderful case study of how any trainer-teacher-learner can promote and nurture what we’ve been calling the new Fourth Place in our world—social learning centers that can exist onsite, online, in onsite-online combinations, and even in unexpected places, 39,000 feet above the surface of the earth, when the conditions for social learning are in place.

The creation of our onsite-online social learning center last Friday was a response to necessity: those library directors clearly needed something far different than what Maurice and I had planned to offer, so the two of us, after our Thursday afternoon sessions with them, completely threw out what we had prepared and, instead, spent Thursday evening contacting colleagues who are active and innovative users of social media tools in libraries and others settings. The results were spectacular, and improv was at the heart of much of what we accomplished.

Our new plan for Friday morning was to take the existing meeting room space in the Library of Virginia there in Richmond and transform it into a setting where social learning could occur. We decided to begin with a Twitter feed (#lvadir12, for Library of Virginia Directors’ Meeting 2012) that would connect onsite participants to Bill Cushard, Buffy Hamilton, David Lee King, and Jill Hurst-Wahl so that our online colleagues, well-versed in social media tools and learning, could explore options with the onsite participants. That Twitter  feed, aggregated via TweetDeck, was projected onto a screen in the front of the room; it was also visible to the many onsite participants who followed and contributed to it via their own mobile devices—a stunning example of how quickly we all are adapting the Bring Your Own Device movement into our workplaces and other venues.

Maurice and I also, on the spur of the moment, decided to take advantage of onsite wireless access to connect onsite participants to our online partners via a Google+ Hangout—a plan that had to be abandoned when the wireless access proved to be inadequate for what we were trying to do. Even that disappointment, however, provided a useful learning experience: it helped everyone to not only see and understand the advantages and challenges of trying to incorporate social media tools into learning, but also to see how easy it is, in the moment, to change course and use what is available to produce effective learning in a social context. As Maurice himself observed, we learn as much from our failures as from our successes.

Anyone reading the Storify transcript—it appears in reverse chronological order, so requires that we go to the final page of the document and work out way back up to the top to follow the flow of the exchanges—quickly obtains a sense of how dynamic this sort of learning can be. While there was an overall structure to the discussion, there was an equal amount of on-the-spot adjusting to themes that turned out to be important to the onsite and online learning partners. All of us were learning from each other—an achievement well-documented in that moment when we tweeted out a request for help in capturing the Twitter feed and immediately received Buffy’s suggestion that Storify would produce what we needed.

There was also a clear focus on being engaged in something more than an ephemeral discussion to be forgotten as soon as it was finished. The final segment of the conversation produced commitments by the library directors themselves as to what they would do to apply lessons learned when they returned to their libraries.

Among the offerings:

• “We will ask our community how we can help them.”
• “We will ask people how they want to hear from us.”
• “We will designate staff time to learning-opportunity development.”

And in a wonderful moment of laying the foundations for the concrete results that the best learning opportunities can produce, one discussion group said “We commit that we will post on our listserv, within six weeks, one thing we have done from this session”—thereby assuring that this particular social learning center will remain in existence for at least six weeks after participants formally left the physical site to return home.

If that sounds like a surefire way to demonstrate how social learning centers can produce tangible, sustainable results, then we all will have benefitted from the creation of this particular example as we look for ways to create and nurture our own. And we’re well prepared to further explore the concept of social learning centers as a new Fourth Place (after the first three places—home, work, and social settings where members of a community informally gather) in libraries or any other setting where learners gather in Intersections to enjoy each other’s company while learning from each other.

The Fourth Place Revisited: When Social Learning Center Learners Take the Lead (Part 1 of 2)

You know you’re onto a major learning success when your learners seamlessly and playfully take the lead—which is exactly what happened late last week, halfway through the Library of Virginia’s two-day Directors’ Meeting in Richmond, Virginia.

Cindy Church, continuing education consultant for the Library, had brought Maurice Coleman and me in to facilitate a few sessions on the future of libraries and learning. Maurice engagingly initiated our portion of the program with “A Blind Leap of Faith: Keeping Your Library Thriving in the 21^st Century.” His presentation Thursday afternoon provoked plenty of positive conversation onsite; it also, in the spirit of what we were doing, reached beyond the walls of the auditorium to be viewed by more than 800 people online after SlideShare’s managers highlighted his PowerPoint slide deck on their home page.

Maurice and I picked up where his initial session ended that afternoon by moving into a presentation/facilitated discussion, “Learning to Meet the Future: Libraries Developing Communities,” that was designed to introduce the library directors to the idea that libraries are serving as a new Fourth Place in our world—social learning centers. A major learning point was to be the idea that libraries often fill this need, but don’t call much attention to it, so are missing a chance to more effectively be at the center of the social learning process that effectively reaches and serves significant numbers of people in life-changing ways within their communities.

But a funny thing happened on the way to our denouement Thursday afternoon. It became clear to Maurice and to me, during our end-of-the-day wrap-up with the directors, that even if they hadn’t been familiar with the jargon of social learning and social learning centers, they were already engaged in using libraries as centers of formal and informal learning. And as if to prove how quickly they were assimilating the idea that learning is social, continual, and playful, one of them incorporated the term they had just picked up to tweet out a reminder about a gathering that was about to take place over drinks in a local hotel bar: “Social learning environment at Hilton Garden Inn 5:30.”

Since social learning often benefits tremendously from flexibility and in-the-moment course adjustments, Maurice and I were delighted to see that some of the formal discussions carried over to that social learning environment at the Hilton Garden Inn. And we were also extremely curious about two elements of what we were seeing: what connected those library directors so effectively to learning, and what we could do, overnight, to abandon what we had originally planned for the Friday session so we could more effectively meet those learners where they were and support them even more in their own work.

It didn’t take long to find the answer to the first question: directors with whom we spoke mentioned that Cindy and her colleagues in the state library (the Library of Virginia) had done quite a bit to foster a culture of learning throughout libraries statewide—again proving that if we have the right person or people in key positions, magic occurs. It’s not that we haven’t seen other colleagues in libraries express a commitment to learning—it is certainly visible here California through efforts supported by our state library, and the American Library Association’s current strategic plan goes a long way in fostering a mission statement that includes a commitment to “promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.” What does not yet appear to be so common is the explicit commitment to social learning expressed and demonstrated so overtly by those Virginia library directors last week.

As for the answer to our second question—how to quickly produce an appropriate learning opportunity the following morning since what we had planned was clearly not going to be sufficient to meet this group’s needs—it came later that evening. Focusing on the idea that the library directors would benefit from hands-on experience in shaping and using a social learning center, we tossed out our original workshop plan and decided to turn the Friday morning session into an exercise of creating an impromptu blended (onsite-online) learning center that facilitated a conversation about what the directors could do upon returning home to their own libraries. All we had to do was find some online participants on the spur of the moment.

Next: Redesigning an Entire Social Learning Opportunity Overnight

Building Upon A New Culture of Learning with Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

If doing is learning, there’s plenty to learn and do with the ideas Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown present in A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.

Working with the theme of social/collaborative learning that we’ve also encountered in The New Social Learning by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner, in the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report 2012 Higher Education Edition  and “Communiqué from the Horizon Project Retreat” held in January 2012, the eLearning Guild’s new “Social Learning: Answers to Eight Crucial Questions” report, and many other books, reports, and documents, Thomas and Brown take us through a stimulating and brief—but never cursory—exploration of “the kind of learning that will define the twenty-first century.” And it won’t, they tell us right up front, be “taking place in a classroom—at least not in today’s classroom. Rather, it is happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful” (p. 17).

As we’ve already seen in a series of articles here in Building Creative Bridges, our learning spaces and the way we foster learning are continuing to evolve—which doesn’t necessarily mean, as Thomas and Brown note in their own work, that we’re completely abandoning classrooms and the best of the training-teaching-learning techniques we’ve developed over a long period of time. But the fact that plenty of effective learning that produces positive results “takes place without books, without teachers, and without classrooms, and it requires environments that are bounded yet provide complete freedom of action within those boundaries” (p. 18) offers us plenty of possibilities to rethink what we and the people and organizations we serve are doing.

Their summary of how Thomas’ “Massively Multiplayer Online Games” course at the University of Southern California seemed to be spinning wildly out of control as students more or less restructured the class from lots of lecture and a bit of demo to lots of exploration followed by short summary lectures at the end of each session leads us to the obvious and wonderful conclusion that, by taking over the class, the learners were also taking over control of their own learning and producing magnificent results—a story similar to a situation also documented by Cathy Davidson in Now You See It.

And it doesn’t stop there. As they lead us through a brief summary of instructor-centric and learner-centric endeavors, we see a theme that crops up in much of what is being written now about m-learning (mobile learning, i.e., learning through the use of mobile devices): that the new culture of learning “will augment—rather than replace—traditional educational venues” and techniques (p. 35).

What flows through much of Thomas and Brown’s work—and what we observe in our own training-teaching-learning environments—is what they address explicitly near the end of their book after having discussed the importance of learning environments: the need to foster playfulness in learning and the parallel need to work toward a framework of learning that builds upon the Maker movement and that acknowledges three essential facets for survival in contemporary times: “They are homo sapiens, homo faber, and homo ludens—or humans who know, humans who make (things), and humans who play” (p. 90).

We have plenty of examples upon which to draw: Michael Wesch’s experiments with his Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University; the YOUMedia Center for teens at the Chicago Public Library; smart classrooms where technology enables creatively productive interactions between onsite and online learners; and even the information commons model that began in academic libraries and is increasingly being adapted for use in public libraries. There’s much to explore here, and that’s why some of us have been promoting the idea that it’s time to add to Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place concept of three key places in our lives (the first place being home, the second place being work, and the third place being community gathering places where we find and interact with our friends and colleagues away from home and work) with a new Fourth Place: the social learning center that onsite as well as online as needed.

Another theme that Thomas and Brown bring to our attention is the way communities—those vibrant foundations of our society that are so wonderfully explored by John McKnight and Peter Block in their book The Abundant Community and continue to be fostered on The Abundant Community website—are developing into collectives—less-than-rigid gatherings of learners and others who are drawn by immediate needs and then disperse if/when those needs are met.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community,” Thomas and Brown write. “Where communities can be passive (though not all of them are by any means), collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.” (p. 52).

All of which leads us to an obvious conclusion: if we are inspired to do the things within our communities, collectives, and organizations that Thomas and Brown describe and advocate, we will be engaged in building the new culture of learning they describe—while learning how to build it.

Hidden Garden Steps: Celebrating Our Moments of Transformation

There have been plenty of transformative moments since the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District began in early 2010. But none have been so encouraging and rewarding than what we saw earlier this month at a community celebration centered around the signing of contracts with Steps artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher—pictured here working on the life-size design they have begun creating in their homes and studios.

It’s more than just the acknowledgement that we’ve raised enough money ($100,000 in cash and approximately $20,000 in services completed or soon to be completed) to begin building the 148-step ceramic-tile mosaic that is at the heart of the project. It’s the gathering of a community that through working on this project is even stronger than it was before, and will be even stronger by the time we finish this project that creates a second set of ceramic-tiled steps along with gardens and murals in the neighborhood. And the celebration itself was completely sponsored and hosted by one of our business supporters: the Crepevine at 624 Irving Street here in San Francisco.

The Inner Sunset District, like so many of San Francisco’s individual neighborhoods, is a surprisingly vibrant combination of businesses; cultural (e.g., the de Young Museum, the California Academy of Sciences, the Conservatory of Flowers, and the San Francisco Botanical Garden, just to mention a few) and educational (the University of California, San Francisco) organizations; physical beauty (the numerous paths through Golden Gate Park and the hills that are in the heart of the district; and residents and visitors who cherish the area and sustain a variety of organizations including the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors to continually foster collaboration.

As members of the Hidden Garden Steps organizing committee have repeatedly acknowledged, we’re drawn not only by the sense of immediate community that exists here, but by the extended community that is interwoven into all we do. The Steps project alone has partners including the San Francisco Parks Alliance; the San Francisco DPW Street Parks program; Nature in the City’s Green Hairstreak [Butterfly] Corridor; administrators, an art instructor, and art students from the nearby Woodside International School; members of the Inner Sunset Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community; and the Golden Gate Heights Neighborhood Association, with more partners expressing interest in joining us so we can bring this $300,000 community project to a successful conclusion. We’ve also had tremendous support from City/County Supervisor Sean Elsbernd and his legislative aide, Alex Volberding; the San Francisco Arts Commission; and members of the San Francisco Department of Public Works who have announced that onsite repairs will be underway in the very near future.

With all that support in place, it was tremendously gratifying not only to have coverage of the Crepevine event by KCBS radio reporter Anna Duckworth the following morning, but to also find the Steps featured on the cover of our neighborhood newspaper—the Sunset Beacon this month—and in a prominently-displayed letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section recently.

As we move into the production phase on the ceramic-tile mural, we’ll continue to rely on the efforts of volunteers who help us do onsite clean-up on the second Saturday of each month, from 1 – 3 pm on 16^th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton here in San Francisco; donations from individuals, community groups, businesses, and other supporters that now extend not only across the United State but also include a couple of people from the U.K.; and those who can help us build relations with other prospective donors drawn to the mission of creating a new, sustainable community meeting place in a city known for its commitment to communities. For additional information in how you can become part of our community, please visit our website at http://hiddengardensteps.org.

N.B.: This is the thirteenth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco. 

eLearning Guild: Big Answers to “Social Media in Learning” Questions We Should Be Asking

There’s a marriage waiting to be made in heaven for trainer-teacher-learners reading learning technology innovator Ben Betts’ Social Learning: Answers to Eight Crucial Questions, published this week by the eLearning Guild.

In his concluding remarks within the 36-page document (available free of charge to paying members of the Guild), he reminds us that social learning “usually means a learner being more active in the [learning] experience, connecting, creating, and curating ideas.” He also suggests that our “role as learning professionals” may be undergoing a shift from “creating simple and accessible learning resources” to “curating content that already exists.”

It’s a theme that was discussed among colleagues a couple of years ago at an American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) conference—we were acknowledging the fact that we had created so much content that users were having trouble locating and accessing it. The theme is also an essential element in the shifting responsibilities colleagues are assuming in libraries all over the country. Which leads me to think that if members of library staff continue to more fully embrace lifelong learning as part of their natural responsibilities and services—it’s a commitment that already exists in the American Library Association (ALA) 2015 Strategic Plan, where the need “to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all”  is part of the organization’s mission statement, and in ASTD, where the mission is to “empower professionals to develop knowledge and skills successfully”—we could be looking at very effective partnerships between library staff and members of ASTD itself since we’re all working toward the same goal: meeting an overwhelming need for effective learning opportunities in an onsite-online world where those who stop learning will be left behind.

Betts, in Social Learning, does a fantastic job of helping us frame the discussion as to how we can better meet a tremendous need. The questions he asks focus on needs and results and set a positive context by beginning with the question “What Is Social Learning?”; continuing with questions about the benefits of social learning and business risks of leveraging social learning; and moving through a review of existing frameworks, ways to generate value from social learning, tools of social learning, measuring success in social learning, and our own roles in the field.

By the time we have completed this wonderfully inspiring and straightforward journey with him, we’re in a position to see that the instructional/learning and information-management skills required of workplace learning and performance (staff training) practitioners and library staff have never been more overlapping. It’s as if this need to combine learning, information sharing/literacy, and content curation is priming us for a merger of ASTD and ALA into an International Society for Training, Learning, Information Literacy, and Content Creation/Curation (although I have to admit that the acronym doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue—ASTLILCCC?—and may need a bit of work even as a Twitter hashtag).

Betts is very effective in helping us understand what already is in place—social learning (learning that is not entirely dependent on formal teacher-trainer-instructors) is hardly a new concept or practice—and what is changing (social learning, he suggests, has been co-opted by members of the e-learning industry to be about “how we learn from one another via digital devices”). But there’s no denying the positive role social learning plays whether we are discussing online, face-to-face, or blended learning. Collaborative/social learning clearly produces positive results for the learners and those they ultimately serve, as he consistently documents throughout his report, and social learning augments formal learning in addition to supporting professional learning and individual’s self-organized learning endeavors.

He reminds his readers that effective social learning, like any form of effective learning, starts with efforts to assure that “your approach makes sense” within the context in which we are designing and implementing it. He suggest that we pay equal attention to the people we are serving, the objectives we are establishing, the strategies we will use, and whatever technology will help us foster the social-learning endeavors we are implementing.

In attempting to generate value, we are encouraged by Betts to engage in instructional scaffolding—“creating a supporting framework for learners to gradually grow in confidence in a new area until they are fully able to support themselves.” And he reminds us that we are building toward success if we use social media tools our learners already use and like rather than trying to develop new tools that learners will only reluctantly embrace, if at all.

“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that workplace uptake of social technologies has been slow when most of us can’t use the tools we’d prefer,” he says near the end of the report, offering a learning nugget that ought to be plastered all over the physical and virtual walls of every trainer-teacher-learners’ workspace to help keep us on track toward fostering effective learning.

He brings us to a strong conclusion by suggesting that we engage in a collaborative learning cycle: design for performance improvement; support existing communities; create, source, and curate resources; leverage appropriate technologies; champion effective social learning; and measure and prove impact.

If those of us who are not already seamlessly moving between libraries and other learning organizations are inspired to reach across the aisle by what Betts writes, we may help bring to fruition the wonderful goal ASTD has so consistently proposed: “creating a world that works better.”

Hidden Garden Steps: Community, Collaboration, Volunteerism, and Benches

I hope I won’t offend anyone if I offer the heartfelt hope that you’ll just sit on it. The bench, I mean. The one now at the foot of the Hidden Garden Steps, where Kirkham Street and 16^th Avenue intersect in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset District.

And while you’re sitting on it, I hope you’ll reflect on how that one little bench—one of more than a dozen now spread throughout the neighborhood—says so much about the spirit of community, collaboration, and volunteerism that is at the heart of any dream that starts with one or two people and quickly becomes a self-seeding endeavor that makes our world considerably better—and a lot more visually interesting and playful.

The innovators, in this case, are Adam Greenfield and Chris Duderstadt, two wonderful neighborhood activists who are key players in the Inner Sunset Park Neighbors; love the idea of nurturing public spaces and “maximizing personal interactions”; and are slowly but surely adding to San Francisco’s vibrant street scene though their playful Public Bench Project.

Their idea is simple, as they note on their website: “We will give a bench to anybody who wants to put a bench outside their building in the public realm. Contact us and we’d be happy to give you a bench.” The results are exquisite and inspiring; from the initial bench, which features a wonderful design by artist Devin Keller, to the latest bench, added this week and featuring a beautiful display of sunflowers, you can’t walk by without involuntarily having a smile find its way onto your face. And, more importantly, even the most hurried of us feel the invitation to stop, sit, and enjoy our neighborhood a bit more rather than simply racing through it on our way to our next appointment.

Which is exactly what we’re hoping will happen with the bench now at the foot of the Hidden Garden Steps—and which will become even more colorful when a group of our supporters return to make the bench even more colorful by connecting it visually to the mural painted onsite by art instructor Angie Crabtree and students from the Woodside International School. Ever since we began making the onsite improvements that are creating the foundation for the 148-step ceramic-tile mosaic that will eventually cover the concrete steps, we’ve noticed more neighbors and visitors spending time lingering onsite rather than hurrying past what was formerly a somewhat secluded and less-than-inviting space. The volunteers who gather on the second Saturday of each month from 1 – 3 pm to sweep the steps, continue adding to the garden that is beginning to take shape on a few parts of the site, and enjoy the growing sense of camaraderie, talk openly about how our work together is creating a greater sense of community. And the bench now provides yet another gathering place for conversation, idea exchanges, and friendship.

With the addition of the bench, we’re hoping you and many others will join us there. To help create the vision. To strengthen the sense of community that already exists. And to simply enjoy one of the many lovely settings that make life worth living.

For more information about the Public Bench Project, please contact Greenfield and Duderstadt at publicbenchproject@gmail.com. For more information about the Hidden Garden Steps project, please visit our website at http://hiddengardensteps.org, follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@gardensteps), check out the videos on our YouTube channel, or look for us on the Steps.

N.B.: This is the twelfth in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco.

Hidden Garden Steps: Hoops and Hopes and Aspirations

Hidden Garden Steps volunteer Sherry Boschert has once again outdone herself. Working with us to film a playful fundraising video that is now posted on Indiegogo, she is helping us make our current and prospective supporters aware of one of those routine yet essential elements of any successful fundraising campaign: attracting money for something as basic as a set of permits allowing us to carry to the project to completion.

After confirming that we would need nearly $8,000 in application fees from the City/County of San Francisco, Sherry and I met to discuss the latest hoops that project volunteers would have to jump through to create a ceramic-tiled mosaic similar to what exists on the Moraga Steps here in San Francisco’s  Inner Sunset District and surround it with attractive gardens and murals.

Appreciative for all the support we have received from colleagues in the San Francisco Department of Public Works as well as in the San Francisco DPW Street Parks Program, City Hall, and the San Francisco Arts Commission, we wanted to emphasize that this particular fundraising effort is grounded in a real need and in full partnership with our City/County colleagues.

“Our $8,000 goal will cover a $3,379 fee set by the San Francisco Planning Commission for permit applications as well as other Department of Public Works fees established by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors based upon the number of hours it takes to process applications for a project of this scale,” we explain on our Indiegogo site. “We don’t begrudge the City this money—we know that these departments provide valuable services, and we couldn’t do this without their help. A small portion of funds raised will go towards Indiegogo and banking fees.”

Efforts to seek fee waivers were unsuccessful—our colleagues in City/County government are, of course, facing the same financial challenges so many of us face—so we’re moving ahead to publicize this particular need in the hope that project supporters will step up to the plate and push us closer to our goal.

Campaigns like this one—drawing from any level of contribution our current and prospective supporters care to offer—obviously rise or fall on our ability to engage the level of community support and collaboration that has been at the heart of all our successful efforts to date. That clearly means we need help raising the funds within the next 60 days to meet our latest campaign deadline, to reach the widest possible audience, and to foster action by everyone who has been touched and inspired by our vision for taking simple steps to create another magnificent set of Steps here in San Francisco—an effort supported not only by neighborhood residents but by donors from seven states beyond California and, as of last week, our first donor from London.

If you can help us by forwarding information to those you know, please do. If you can donate any amount to help us raise funds for the application fees, even better. And if you’re inspired by the sense of community and collaboration the project is helping to create, we hope you’ll join us in our efforts to clean up the site (second Saturday of each month, from 1 – 3 pm on 16^th Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton here in San Francisco), prepare it for the structural repairs our DPW colleagues are about to begin, and continue helping us reach the current and prospective volunteers who are making this project soar.

N.B.: This is the eleventh in an ongoing series of articles to document the Hidden Garden Steps project in San Francisco. 

ALA Annual Conference 2012: To Tweet or Not to Tweet

Although I was more intensely engaged in the twitterverse than ever before while attending the 2012 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference this week in Anaheim, I was surprised to find that at some levels it was a far different experience that participating in the recent American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) International Conference & Exposition Twitter backchannel.

Both conferences had streams of tweets that were virtually impossible to completely follow; there was simply too much content for anyone to absorb. And I was relieved to hear an ALA colleague who was dedicated to keeping up with it finally admit, halfway through the conference, that even she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the flow. Both conferences also had a core group of tweeters who recorded and disseminated information about what was happening in conference sessions.

But one thing that was distinctly different between the two conferences was that ASTD members who were prolific at tweeting were capturing content from a teaching-training-learning point of view—live-tweeting from sessions to share information that the rest of us could later incorporate into our own workplace learning and performance (staff training) endeavors—while many of the more frequent conference attendees who were tweeting in Anaheim were producing a combination of personal tips about where to find the best conference freebies; sightings of keynote speakers and other celebrities onsite for conference events; personal observations about the experience of attending a conference with more than 20,000 other people; or, at an extreme edge of the backchannel, an overtly snarky set of observations—sometimes live and from sessions where the subjects of their criticisms were in the front of a workshop room or on stage in a crowded auditorium. Fortunately for those tweeters, none of their targets seemed aware of or inclined to respond to those criticisms in the moment as happened in a situation described by Cliff Atkinson in his book The Backchannel.

Anyone inclined to think the comparison between the two groups of backchannel contributors is unfair or an apples-and-oranges sort of effort needs to remember that members of library staff are increasingly finding themselves in the role of trainer-teacher-learner as a core part of their responsibilities to those they serve, as Lori Reed and I document in Workplace Learning & Leadership. Members of library staff also need to be as up-to-date in their knowledge of tech tools as workplace learning and performance practitioners need to be—yet there were signs at the ALA conference that we’re somewhat behind others in our acceptance, use, and promotion of those tools.

When Sharon Morris and I introduced a live Twitter feed via TweetChat into our “Ignite, Interact, and Engage: Maximizing the Learning Outcome” session at the conference, for example, one of the first tweets to go out from a session participant was one of amazement (and, we hoped, happiness) that we were encouraging our learners to incorporate Twitter into that learning experience.

There were signs elsewhere at the conference that others were not at all pleased by the presence of a Twitter backchannel and the use of the mobile devices that connect so many of us and those we serve without regard to geographic barriers. One conference attendee noted, via Twitter, that someone had yelled at him for tweeting, and another attendee reported via Twitter that she was told she shouldn’t be using her iPad during a general-assembly keynote presentation.

It’s obvious that we’re still very much in a state of transition in terms of how we use and accept the use of Twitter, backchannels, and tech tools in public settings. And I firmly believe we need to develop a better sense of etiquette—perhaps along the lines of something I usually do: asking those around me if my use of a laptop or mobile device to capture session notes and share them with others via Twitter will disturb them. I’ve never had a colleague turn me down, and only had one presenter—one who was going to give a presentation on e-learning best practices in a venue far removed from the ALA conference—defer.

Discussing this with a colleague at the conference, I found myself in the strange position of actually speaking up in favor of the tweeters—strange because, five years ago, I really didn’t want a cell phone or a laptop or anything else that I perceived as a burden/distraction rather than a resource, and I had little experience with social media tools. But colleagues, friends, and outright necessity have completely reversed my thinking, and I don’t believe it’s an understatement to say that those of us involved in training-teaching-learning—workplace learning and performance practitioners, library staff members, people involved in customer service in an onsite-online world, and many others—really can’t afford to overlook these resources if we want to be competitive and effective in meeting the requirements of our work.

My colleague’s observations about the conflicts between those using Twitter and mobile devices and those distracted by or resentful of the presence and use of tech tools and resources produced an interesting exchange. Perhaps, she suggested, we could resolve the conflicts by setting aside a special area during keynote addresses and smaller workshops for those who want to tweet. Perhaps, I responded, we could set aside a special area for those who want to be free of the presence of mobile devices and tweeters. For in an onsite-online world where the majority of those we serve actually appear to be ahead of us in their acceptance and use of Twitter and mobile devices, we might as well intellectually as well as physically make a clear and visible statement about where we stand in terms of meeting them where they are and prefer to be met—as unobtrusively, civilly, and respectfully as possible.

N.B.: To hear an extended (45-minute) conversation on the topic of Twitter as a learning tool at conferences, please listen to T is for Training Episode 101, “Instant Professional Development,” hosted by Maurice Coleman on June 28, 2012.

ALA Annual Conference 2012: Volunteers, Irresistibly Doing What They Do Well

Offering librarians a chance to provide information to their peers is like offering learning facilitators a chance to facilitate a learning experience for other trainer-teacher-learners: irresistible. Which is why the opportunity to serve as an Ambassador providing information to thousands of attendees at the 2012 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference that ended yesterday in Anaheim drew far more volunteers than we could place.

The role is simple: after attending a 30-minute orientation session online or onsite, conference attendees each serve a two-hour shift at a highly visible information kiosk directly outside the main exhibits hall or at the ALA Membership Pavilion in the center of that huge expanse of vendor exhibits. Working alongside ALA staff and paid greeters who live here in Anaheim, the Ambassadors were part of a seamless team that made life much easier for frantic conference-goers than would otherwise have been the case.

Watching those volunteer Ambassadors at work is to see artists engaged in their art. As is the case with any volunteer matched with an appropriate assignment, the Ambassadors were completely at ease, quick on their feet, calm under pressure, and amazing in their ability to find and share what their colleagues might not so easily have found without their assistance, e.g., locations for sessions; information about programs; pointers about how to take advantage of the free shuttle service that ferried attendees from the convention center to the various hotels where conference events were taking place; and, in a few cases, assistance in loading the conference app onto attendees’ tablets—which, by the way was spectacular for those of us who wanted not only to be able to track the sessions we planned to attend, but to also integrate our own privately-scheduled meetings into that central scheduling aide).

Even more worth noting is what motivates them—something that came to my attention when a colleague asked “What do they get?”, and I was temporarily flummoxed because those of us who recruited, oriented, placed, and checked in with them didn’t offer them anything tangible. The answer, however, is clear to anyone who has ever volunteered, worked with volunteers, and/or read Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. There is what he calls Motivation 3.0—Motivation 1.0 is survival-based motivation, Motivation 2.0 is a carrot-and-stick rewards-and-punishment model, and Motivation 3.0 uses autonomy, engagement, purpose, and mastery—which was clearly on display among the Ambassadors as they worked with little supervision, were completely engaged in what they were doing, understood the purpose of the assignment they had taken, and felt comfortable in their mastery of the skills required to excel at what they were doing. And asked, as they left their shifts this year, how they can return to the assignment next year when the conference is held in Chicago.

It really was a stunning example to anyone interested in designing, implementing, and nurturing a volunteer program: trust volunteers, don’t micromanage them, provide them with work that appeals to them and uses their skills effectively, and they’ll match what you receive from the best members of your paid staff.

By definition, volunteer opportunities are going to attract those who are willing to provide something without expectation of receiving tangible rewards. But those oh-so-intangible Motivation 3.0 rewards will always attract a first-rate group of volunteers who excel at what they do. Serve the constituencies they have agreed to serve. And contribute to the continuing development of the communities we all so clearly crave.