Monday, February 05, 2007

Friday, February 02, 2007

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Monday, January 15, 2007

Sunday, January 14, 2007

index

index

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics: National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC)

Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics: National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC)

VAC Consortium Meeting Agenda

VAC Consortium Meeting Agenda

group mind blog

We've Started a Blog
We invite you to visit our new public blog. We intend this to be a place to publish ideas about collaboration and collective intelligence, both our own thoughts and those of our partner consultants. You'll find articles there already on:

* Issues in getting people to work online
* Consultant Partners' ideas on the Value Proposition for their clients in online collaboration
* References for Effective Decision Making
* Studying collective intelligence (a quick pitch for the new MIT site on this subject)
* A section we'll develop to Exchange ideas about how GroupMind tools can be used.

Take a look at http://blog.groupmindexpress.com

Point of View
We certainly have a point of view. It revolves around the power of group intelligence, the importance of group process and shared access to archived meeting or project data, the usefulness of visual cues for context in online work. These are design considerations in building out a collaborative space, but they also speak to the need for project leaders to think about group psychology when setting up online work. Here are some further viewpoints:

*
Role of simplicity (in building in usability and adoption)
*
Need to allow for change dynamics (group has to process information at head, heart and hands levels)
*
Importance of iteration (moving through repeated steps of divergent and convergent thinking)
*
Power of an accessible written record (transparency, shared context and urgency)

Here is an excerpt from one of the articles:

One of the biggest issues in getting your organization into online work is the mental shift. It isn't just a matter of "doing what we already do, but do it virtually." This shift is one of

* being clear about the process
* building steps backwards from your desired result
* intentionally simplifying what the group does
* building in feedback cycles.

Most people using collaboration, it seems to me, are doing one of these: running surveys, conducting ongoing disucssions, holding online meetings or making a list of tasks. Nothing wrong with this -- but what we advocate is setting up an ongoing workspace, and doing several of these things in context within an organized environment. When you do this, you are more likely to involve your constituents in interaction, and in getting the work completed.

If you are a consultant or a student of online collaboration, and would like to write a short article that would fit with our purpose of forwarding ideas about working together, please let us know.
Please email or call us if you have an issue to discuss. We will be happy to go over things with you. (jon@groupmindexpress.com or 831-465-0576)


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Visual language

Visual language

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

About COA human ecology major

About COA

Human Ecology Essays - Xander Karkruff

Human Ecology Essays - Xander Karkruff: "I'm not sure how much I agree with the theory of discontinuities, but I appreciate what it is trying to say: humans create barriers between things that do not need to be there. We are forever erecting walls between things we think need to be distinguished, and over time, these walls become so taken for granted that we don't even consider trying to see over the top. Most often, we are afraid of what's on the other side - be it beast, man or heathen - because we are afraid of what the 'strange” implies about our 'normal,” and we're afraid of seeing in ourselves the 'strange” we fear."

Human Ecology Essays - Amy Hoffmaster

Human Ecology Essays - Amy Hoffmaster: "patterns"

In "The Patterns Which Connect,” Bateson(1) describes three orders of connections: first, the relationship within objects. There is a second order connection that describes the relationship between two objects. Third, there are "meta-patterns,” those that relate the contexts of the objects to each other. Bateson illustrates his levels of patterns with phylogenic homology, or similarities in the limbs of humans and horses, compared to lobsters and crabs. He continues to explain that the crab's anatomy contains patterns within the individual itself; this is the first order of pattern. When you compare the crab and the lobster there are similarities, or phylogenic homologies between the parts of the legs and claws. Each of the organisms has segmented legs and similarly shaped claws. These comparisons are second order patterns. The third order pattern, or meta-pattern, is more abstract. You can compare the relationship of the lobster and the crab to the relationship of the human and horse. That is, relating the patterns to each other. Bateson considers the appreciation of the "meta-pattern that connects” an aesthetic.

I map Bateson's theory of "the pattern which connects” on to my understanding of the human ecology of questions. There is meaning at each of the three levels. There are patterns within the ideas of a question, there are patterns between the questions, but there are also patterns that describe the patterns between questions. This third order pattern creates what I would like to call the question space. Robbie and I understood each other's thoughts when we engaged in the space that was created by the patterns of relationships between our questions.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Monday, October 09, 2006

Thursday, October 05, 2006

MindCanvas

MindCanvas

Wednesday, October 04, 2006