From our conversations with public and private agencies that manage volunteers we can reliably report that since last fall a radical, widespread increase in volunteerism has occurred. Many volunteer organizations are overwhelmed with the uptick in their numbers of calls and participation.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 science fiction novel Cat’s Cradle created a language that included the term “karass” to define a group of people who, often unknowingly, do what Vonnegut termed “God’s work in the world.” We’re now able to communicate virtually, creating the potential for karasses across the globe. Everyone has become a potential collaborator. So how do we connect with our karass?

Parker Palmer, an education theorist, describes the need for “a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” Every day, meetings, conferences and summits attempt to create such a space. Increasingly, gatherings are cross-disciplinary, as more of us believe that integration of disparate perspectives is needed to unravel complex issues.

On May 15, the Oregon Arts Commission – and emcee Bart Eberwein – and a large cadre of people from many walks of life – opened the door at the Oregon Arts Summit 2009, a large group gathering of 320 Oregonians, titled “The Art of Collaboration.” Subtitled “where the arts meet… your business, your community,” the Summit placed the word “meet” at the center of its activities. To connect with our karass, we have to sit down at tables with people we don’t know, open conversations that lead us to discover what we share in common. Much of the day’s content was devoted to how to start these conversations.

(For those who did not attend the Oregon Arts Summit, you will find a number of posts on our website on our website about the Summit that describe the day, the speakers and what various attendees learned. We have also compiled a variety of links to other blogs, responses and articles about the event. We would love to have your feedback about your experiences with collaboration or the Summit.)

While much of the Oregon Arts Summit was an extraordinary success, a significant number of participants suggested in their evaluations that they wanted more help to “meet new people” during the Summit’s busy day. We hypothesize that these Summit attendees may be thinking, “My karass was in the room and they didn’t find me (and I didn’t find them).”

The conscious intentions of the Oregon Arts Summit were “to have us meet”, “to help us learn” and “to inspire us to future collaboration.” So as we seek to learn from the Summit, and feed that learning forward, there are questions to answer.

Here’s some questions we want to explore:

• The Summit design was grounded in concepts from Parker Palmer, an educator best known for his book The Courage to Teach. Palmer’s ideas include the notion that humans learn best by posing their own questions, and that a community of co-learners at work on the same topic will expand the scope and quality of what the group learns together. The Summit’s question was “What is one thing you know about collaboration and how did you learn it?” What kinds of questions stimulate people to connect outside their existing circles and “find one another”?
• Presenters were asked to be co-learners. Each told their individual learning and personal stories. Each was paired with a collaborator from a different industry for small “studio dialogue” with attendees. Collaborators were chosen for their demonstrated on-your-feet curiosity and for their cross-sector “renaissance perspectives.” Each collaborator asked their presenter to expand their perspective – unscripted and unrehearsed. While the speakers knew this would be the format, each agreed to risk thinking and learning “n front of the audience.” We want to know the following: What encourages experts to interact with one another – and with the rest of us who have something to add to the dialogue – in a community of learners?
• The Summit sought to establish a common culture: plain, honest, open, and transparent. The agenda and Eberwein’s service as emcee established informal “rituals” to provide attendees with a sense of personal control and safety. A question: When we enter a new place we’ve never been before, what empowers us to explore, what provides the sense of safety so that even the most conservative of us choose to engage fully and passionately?
• Experimentation and pursuit of individual curiosity were actively encouraged: Go where you want to go, learn what you want to learn, trust that you’ll be in the right place at the right time were communicated as Summit values. A question: How can the learnings and values of a one-time event influence us when we return to our desks?
• All sessions were videotaped for later web access, so attendees were offered the “safety net” that following their curiosity in the moment was not an irrevocable choice. A question: With blogging and tweeting from conferences increasingly popular, what’s the common language and information that should be posted by organizers to provide representative content from the variety of perspectives?
• Content of more focused interest was delivered in 8-minute off-the-cuff briefings during the Summit’s 15-minute “move-breaks.” Some attendees chose these move-breaks as times to text-message or tweet, others decompressed with coffee and snacks. The move-breaks, the extended 75-minute lunch, the pre-Summit presentation, the post-Summit social hour, all were provided to stimulate informal networking. A question: How do we find/meet our karass in such random situations?

Margaret Wheatley, in the groundbreaking book Leadership and the New Science, said, “Consider how different it is… when the wave of information spreads out broadly. Instead of collapsing into just a few interpretations, many moments of meeting… will occur. At each of these intersections between an observer and the data, an interpretation will appear…Instead of losing so many of the potentialities contained within the data wave, the multiplicity of interactions can elicit many of those potentials, giving a genuine richness..”

The 2009 Oregon Arts Summit aspired to create such a space. May we all learn something from the effort!

The Arts Summit invited attendees to join together to “co-learn” with selected domain experts in plenary session in what we called the BallRoom (distinguished by large yoga balls adorning the stage). Each speaker (all invited from different industries) addressed his/her key learning for an initial 15 minutes in plenary session, and was then joined by an onstage collaborator for a short, unrehearsed Q & A session.

On a strict schedule, the pair retired to another space, The Studio, to continue their dialogue with those who chose to follow from the plenary session. Meanwhile, the next speaker began the same process again in the BallRoom.

During the move-breaks (15 minutes of networking between each primary speaker), the Summit offered 8-minute off-the-cuff briefings on topical and substantive issues in The Collaboratory. Some attendees chose these move-breaks as times to text-message or tweet, others decompressed with coffee and snacks. The six move-breaks, and the hour-long lunch break got everyone moving their bodies on a regular basis, an antidote to sitting in long sessions.

While we have written about the event in a recent J-Stroke article, the layout of the event had at its hub the Collaboratory: a place for people to gather and experience a variety of collaborative tasks including the following:

• Experience 8-minute briefings on a variety of topics, from the state of arts funding to a reading of the Declaration of Creative Rights by its author, Kim Stafford.
• Register for the Arts Education Network of the Oregon Arts Commission, a project The Canoe Group is partnering on throughout this year.
• Create a group project, the 50 Year Oregon Collaboration Timeline, using a visual tool and content provided by the Summit participants.
• Contribute to the Oregon Cultural Trust
• Learn about a wide number of organizations/activities related to the arts in Oregon.
• Watch a group of University of Oregon Graduate Students work on the Timeline as they collaborated to decide what is important, accurate and significant over the past 50 years.

To use an extended metaphor to describe each of these spaces, if the BallRoom is the initial “tasting” of content and The Studio is the “sit down meal” devoted to a domain/practice/speaker, then the Collaboratory might be best described as the “tapas bar,” where people meet to have small samplings of collaboration, content and creativity. Collaboratory also has a more formal definition.

Here is one result of the day’s efforts, the 50 Year Oregon Collaboration & Innovation Timeline. (If you work in an office setting, you may want to turn down or off your speakers.)

[flashvideo filename=wp-content/uploads/video/Timeline_OAC_Summit_09rev.mov /]

The Canoe Group uses timelines to help our customers reconstruct a common set of understandings about a series of events, a shared history if you will. This was our first effort to distribute the content creation across 300 event participants. Viewing it makes us proud to be Oregonians. And the response has been very positive.

So back to the original source: why does Parker Palmer tell us co-learning is important? Palmer says, “To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced.” The 2009 Oregon Arts Summit aspired to create such a space… in fact many spaces, all engineered to practice the Art of Collaboration. May we all learn something from the effort.

Do you have something you’d like to share or have a question about this post or collaboration in general? Leave a comment and we’ll be happy to engage in a conversation with you.

We anticipate expanding this list of links to the Oregon Arts Commission site and the content from the event in the next few weeks, so look for updates below.

For those who follow Pacific Northwest arts/business blogs, you will find a number of posts about the Summit learnings, led by Oregonian writer Barry Johnson, posting on OregonLive.com’s Portland Arts Watch.

• Barry Johnson’s First post on the day
• Barry Johnson’s Oregonian article online
• Barry Johnson’s Oregonian additional comments online

Addtional Bloggers who followed the event included the Culture Shock Arts Blog.

• From the Culture Shock Arts Blog liveblogging the event
• From the Culture Shock Arts Blog additional comments

Finally, Kim Stafford read the “Declaration of Creative Rights” at the Summit. A video is expected soon and will be included on this list when available. Here is the Oregonian article on the Declaration.

Click on link for larger version.

In my previous commentary, I noted the rationale for the creation of a primary document, a transcript of the conversations in a facilitated meeting. This transcript captures the sense, if not the exact words, of what was said, when and by whom.

What can do do with a transcript once you have one?

Primary documents support the subsequent analysis of the meeting, facilitating a significantly more fact based decision making process. We are very much “into” fact-based communications… as it can bring a clarity to the dialog. Several others in The Canoe Group have discussed this in previous blog entries.

Since group meetings have a life of their own that is completely unlike normal discourse, I want to elevate some of these differences to a strategic perspective by demonstrating one tool we use with our customers, the creation of a “word cloud” through wordle.net. It is also known as a “tag cloud” when it is used as a graphic on a web site.

A word cloud is an analytical tool that takes a frequency distribution of “normal” words and arranges them (with a fair amount of control) in a graphical layout. The more frequent the word, the larger it is proportionally in the cloud. Common content, like articles, punctuation and conjunctions are eliminated.

There are good ways to use wordle and ways that are “cheating”. Since many people were able to watch the Vice-Presidential debates, and the transcripts were immediately available afterwards, it is useful to compare Senator Biden’s word distribution to Governor Palin’s. (Click on either of these links to open up a comparison of these word clouds.)

What is clear from the wordle is that Senator Biden used a more disciplined repetition of a specific set of words than Gov. Palin. While there was a fair amount of snark in some of the political blogs about Gov. Palins favorite word being “also,” the accusation is supported in the transcript. Indeed, the experience of the debates was represented in the word clouds, with Gov. Palin tending to string together concepts (thus the frequency of the word also) and Senator Biden hammering on a small set of words.

The comparison is also a form of cheating. A formatting difference in one of the settings in wordle is exposed: Palin’s cloud has a normal setting for the arrangement of the words which looks more jumbled (i.e. chaotic) than Biden’s. While this is merely a wordle setting, like color and font, the comparison of word-clouds can be obscured unless a similar formatting is used.

On to a word cloud about civic engagement. A long-term customer hired us to have a group conversation with 22 civic leaders an afternoon in September. We asked a set of questions concerning how civic engagement happens in Oregon:

• how it has changed over the years,
• what are the effects of technology on civic engagement today, and
• how can it be improved to make a more livable state.

Heady stuff.

If you look at the smaller version of the image above you see the money words: Civic Engagement, People, Community.

While the conversation sparked a lot of preliminary discussion, it was clear that the precision with which these words are defined (and others visible in the larger version) is critical to help further the conversation.

Another example. In a recent day long planning meeting, I was able to take the morning transcript and create a wordle before the lunch break. I then presented the word cloud on a large screen at my workstation. Over a third of the 25 participants came up to examine closely the wordle. They were interested in such questions as “Who was talking the most?” and “What were the really big themes?” both of which could be answered from the wordle. I couldn’t help but think the afternoon dialogue was informed by this visual representation.

There are other on-line resources for data visualizations. One hosted by IBM allows for word clouds of two-word pairings and other data visualization tools that incorporate the exploration of the data in the graphic itself. We see this process as one that will develop over the next year as we test and integrate it into our formal group processes.

My next blog will talk about integrating these communication tools into a web presence and (hopefully) answer the question as to whether interactive web dialog supporting an event is a technology of the future or the technology of the now.