Over the past couple of months, as part of a grant program performed by IBM Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, I’ve had the pleasure to facilitate a series of workshops for a number of nonprofits on the use of social computing and social media. Each one has been just an absolute blast.
Last week, with my friend and colleague Tyrrell Donelan, I had the pleasure to facilitate a workshop for United Ways of New England. United Ways of New England serves as an umbrella organization for many of the individual United Ways here in the local area.
I had no idea at the time, but Jessica Esch (twitter) an artist who was one of the participants in the workshop from the United Way of Greater Portland was taking visual sketch notes that she has shared on Flickr.
I am admittedly a little bit biased (read: understatement), but I think that these are just absolutely excellent. (Okay, I’m also a geek…about a quarter of the image views are probably mine. It makes me smile every time I look at them.)
I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky. His book “Here Comes Everybody” is one of the best I’ve read about the sociology of participation on the Internet.
At any rate, through a tweet from my friend Eric, I came upon Alex Howard’s Gov 2.0 Week in Review post including a link to Clay Shirky’s presentation at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum.
Any talk that features “The Association of Loose, Forward and Pub Going Women” and “Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf” is probably well worth watching.
Beside being entertaining, informative and insightful, what strikes me about Clay Shirky’s presentation is that it almost directly follows the format of an episode of This American Life (cue Ira: Each week we pick a theme…tell stories that fit with that theme…), but not only in the overall flow, but also in the flow of each story (action, action, reflection.)
The use of this structure and flow is not unique to this particular presentation. If you are interested, here is another example from his presentation at TED at State from a while back.
The reflection? It’s not necessarily profound, but here’s what I’ve got…Structure is important in storytelling. Good storytellers use structure as a tool to help them communicate.
As many of my friends know, for the past two years I’ve been working on the social media strategy for IBM Global Business Services. There have been many good ones, but without a doubt, this project has been the most enjoyable one on which I’ve had a chance to work over the past 10 years.
We’re at the beginning of the deployment phase of our project, so the first small pieces of our work are just now becoming visible.
I’m not sure which is more important in this case, the journey or the destination, but I’m leaning toward it being the journey. Because of this, I don’t feel that the quote below from near then end of the book is too much of a spoiler, but if you lean the other way, then consider self warned – SPOILER BELOW.
Not the most profound advice, admittedly. But Happy is wise, for only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.
The book was a delight, one of the best that I’ve read in a long time. I would happily recommend it. Besides making me literally laugh out loud at least once each chapter, because of it, I’ve suggested to Kim that we just need to visit Bhutan.
Update 3/3 – Because adding a link to a video from The Colbert Report to a blog post is like adding bacon to any food…Eric Weiner appeared on The Colbert Report on January 21, 2008 to talk about the Geography of Bliss. The description of the segment reads “Eric Weiner found out that the happiest places in the world are cold, dark and drunk.” Here’s a link to the video.
Kim and I spent a couple of hours last night surfing the web and watching videos. Here are the ones we liked the best plus some others that I’ve watched and really like over the past couple of days.
Logorama – I think this is a nominee for the Oscars in the short film category. Without giving anything away, I love the choice of the villain. (via Kottke.org)
DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box – Jesse Schell talks about game design beyond what we are currently seeing. I think this is pretty much required viewing for folks working in the design business. (again via Kottke.org)
I’m reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner (twitter). It’s essentially a travelogue mashed up with an introductory guide on positive psychology. I’m about three-quarters of the way through and I would already recommend the book as both highly enjoyable and informative.
One of the chapters of the book is about the Kingdom of Bhutan in southeast asia where His Majesty the Fifth King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck has made Gross National Happiness (GNH) one of the ways that it measures its success as a nation.
Using Gross National Happiness as a measure of national success is in complete alignment with the Happiness Idea.
To support, share and explain the measurement of GNH for Bhutan, the Centre of Bhutan studies has created a web site.
Across the world, indicators focus largely on market transactions, covering trade, monetary exchange rates, stockmarket, growth, etc. These dominant, conventional indicators, generally related to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reflect quantity of physical output of a society. GDP, along with a host of supporting indicators, is the most widely used indicator. Yet GDP is heavily biased towards increased production and consumption, regardless of the necessity or desirability of such outputs, at the expense of other more holistic criterion. It is biased against conservation since it does not register conservation or stocks.
Indicators determine policies. The almost universal use of GDP-based indicators to measure progress has helped justify policies around the world that are based on rapid material progress at the expense of environmental preservation, cultures, and community cohesion.
The best of the things that I found, saw, watched on the web this week (only 4 days late).
Gore’s Choice – A tale of typography, choice and change – starring Al Gore, a mysterious character named Nikola and the number 1. (via John Gruber)
Letters of Note – In the words of my friend Marvin, this is one of the things that the “Internet was made for.” (via Reddit)
A New Approach to China – Google rethinks its approach to business in China because of attacks on gmail and the theft of some of its intellectual property that originated from there. Also, probably the best and most interesting analysis I read about the decision elsewhere.
Move Your Money – Change starts with us. I’m kind of tired of my current (and soon to be former) bank neither earning my business and taking fees a bunch of new fees from our accounts. (another one via @missrogue)
So in my desire to restart the blog, I started to write a post about The Whuffie Factor, an excellent book by Tara Hunt about social media, social capital and marketing. If you are interested in these things, then I definitely would recommend the book.
If you don’t know her, Tara is one my favorite thinkers in the whole marketing and social computing space. I originally came to know of her through Jane McGonigal who gave one of the keynotes (audio / slides) at SXSWi in 2008.
Jane is also one of my favorite thinkers. If you haven’t seen the linked slides or listened to the keynote and you are interested in design or business or marketing or games, then you really should. You can thank me later for sharing it with you.
Tara’s book is indeed very wonderful, and I will probably finish and post the blog entry about it later, but as I was writing it, I decided that there was a related but different topic that I wanted the first post on my restarted blog to be about.
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