Playing into the Future with a Jam

The first Community Leadership Summit was terrific. The group of people who gathered for this summit were a smart mission-driven creative bunch, most of whom also are going this week to OSCON, the Open Source Convention. Free to register and held as an unconference, hats off to the organizer Jono Bacon, Community Manager for Ubuntu.

During the conference, I co-led a project jam with Mei Lin Fung called Playing into the Future. The goal was to enable individuals to develop project ideas that build towards a positive future. Through the experience and use of artifacts produced in the session, participants could fuel their emerging work. They could also inspire new exhibits in the Program for the Future at The Tech, built upon the collaboration principles of Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse and whose team developed hypertext.

To see what the group looked like in action, here’s a video clip of the session, filmed by Rich Reader.

Serendipitously, Ubuntu has been running “jams” as well as informal meetups to have people come together to meet other Ubuntu community members and talk about Ubuntu shop. They will soon run another Ubuntu Global Jam. One of the things I like about the design is that by making it over a weekend, everyone can participate in a flexible way that suits their local needs.

The jam methodology we used at the Community Leadership Summit was a derivitive of Change Jam, another open source event for project innovation. The first change jams were in San Francisco last year. In the tradition of group technologies,  a change jam has these defining characteristics:

  • start with building connectivity as the basis of social innovation, rather than focusing first on ideas or problem-solving
  • apply a performative approach to collaborative inquiry
  • further a shared goal to positively change the world

A  jam is built upon improvisation principles, such as “Yes, And”, which is decidedly focused on amplifying the positive. To underline this point with a negative ;-) , a jam is not is a problem-solving session. Improvisers, when in an ensemble, practice listening and building upon the connectivity between people and ideas in order to create something new.

Here are the  instructions for how to do a change jam. You really need three hours to move from forming relationships to project ideation to performance and then to value reflection and group ritual. However, in this session, we experimented with a micro hour version. But, I would recommend the full format, as it is important to have enough to time to set up well and to  generate critical reflection at the end.

So, why do we do this? A  jam produces results that are not obvious at first, but can lay early ground work for collaborative production. There are four kinds of knowledge that can be produced in a jam:

1. Relational Knowledge: Knowledge as relationship. When we are in a jam, we build new connections, as we are present, listening to each other. This kind of knowledge is fundamental for addressing the alienation of institutional knowledge, and is also the basis of forming the other kinds of knowledge.

2. Practical Knowledge: Knowledge as  know-how. Knowledge is not a commodity to be pushed or pulled, but rather, something that we physically cultivate through aesthetic practice. In the jam, through practice and repetition of interaction, people begin to learn systems thinking, moving as an open fluid complex ensemble.

3. Representational Knowledge: Information. We create meaning together as we see patterns and tell stories. Taking social construction and liberation pedagogy seriously, we involve participants in both appreciative inquiry and critical reflection.

4. Responsive Knowledge: Stimulate innovation and adult development. The reason that performance, costuming and props are used in a jam are to enable people to experience themselves as practicing active agents in the process of innovation. Practicing performance skills, participants learn to work in the gap between the habits and possibilities unfolding. Based on Vygotskyian human development theory and East Asian philosophy, Responsive Knowledge treats knowledge as capacity to respond.

Thanks to participants in this session:

  • Mei Lin Fung, Program for the Future
  • Rich Reader - videographer
  • Peter Kaminski - Social Software expert, Dreamfish Community Tech Maven
  • Cliff Figallo, GuildSmith – how local communities will network.
  • Chris, Ubuntu
  • Teresa, Open Solaris
  • Bob Ketner, Virtual Communities Manager at The Tech
  • Aaditya Batia, Developer Intern at The Tech
  • Michael Tiemann, open Science and Tech museum, Signis, RedHat
  • Stina Cooke, Museum Exhibit Designer formerly from Boston Science Museum
  • Veera Swaminathan, Singapore Ambassador for the Program for the Future Challenge
  • Grant Bowman, technologist

Here are the session notes on the Community Leadership Summit wiki.