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  • Tiffany von Emmel 5:04 pm on August 23, 2010 Permalink  

    Relational Value – what impact do we want to make together? 

    There is $120 billion dollars in the U.S social capital market, money waiting to be spent on social good, according to Hope Consulting’s new report. Imagine what that investment could do for alleviating poverty. Why are investors interested in investing in a better world?

    Because money is not the thing. People use money to create what they really want – belonging, health, peace, making a difference and environmental balance.  People are choosing to lead a simpler life and give back to society more (London School of Economics, Boston Consulting Group).

    Now, to free up this value for good is another thing. We need new new business models, organization design and social processes grounded in the new paradigm of a relational economy. The Dreamfish cooperative is building such a relational economy. We  are developing value tools that are grounded in the fundamental idea that development flourishes in connection, not control.

    Every Friday, we host a Leadership Lab to explore new ideas in “human work” and relational economy. This last Friday, I introduced this Relational Value model. This model is the outcome of a Dreamfish Labs project started in 2009 by Paul Loper, Peter Kaminski and Marguerite Manteau. The first phase of the Value Project focused on what is value and how do we relate to it? Do we create it, exchange it, transfer it? At what moments of work collaboration do we experience it? What kind of social software tools enable us to generate value? The second phase has led to a codified map of categories and processes that are grounded in both an analysis of Dreamfish member experience and research in micro-enterprise development and human development.

    Want to swim a little? Here are the notes and  audio-recording (available for limited time).

    There are three views of the Relational Value model. The first graphic above shows you “what is value”. The second below shows you “how do we get there”. The third graphic shows what the experience is that social designers and change agents design for.

    The Relational Value Map above is an analytical tool. It offers individuals and teams a tool to make meaning and evaluate what kinds of impact you want to make.  These five categories have subcategories.

    • Belonging includes family, friends, and community.
    • Wellness includes food, shelter, physical safety, health, security.
    • Achievement includes quality, productivity, self-worth, self-efficacy, self-confidence.
    • Development includes learning, collaboration, human and enterprise development
    • Global care includes peace, human rights, and sustainability.

    The Relational Value Flow above is the “how we get there”. It is iteritive and agile.

    The colours on the model correspond to the pyramid shown above, now shown in a process.
    Connect out loud – We grow through relationship, rather than a heroic journey.  Connectivity also builds the ground for resilience as the chemical oxytocin floods us. In marriages, the number of frequent interpersonal  “bids for connection” and a low number of criticisms per hour is a good indicator of whether a relationship will last (Gottman). Connection bids, such as a handshake or a blog link help us develop empathy and sympathy, what neureconomist, Paul Zak describes as “the “social glue” that adheres families, communities, and societies, and as such, acts as an “economic lubricant” that enables us to engage in all sorts of transactions.”

    Work out loud –  Open Source your life!  When we allowing our selves to show up without the perfect thing or the completed thing, we give the signal to others that is o.k. to be a life-long learner. By opening up and working out loud, we are helped to learn from each other. This spreads value….

    Value Out Loud — At the end of a meeting or project, reflecting on value created enables you to develop critical reflection skills and an increased awareness that value is not a commodity transacted, but something we participate in. Use the value map as a tool to assess belonging, wellness, economic impact, learning, social impact.
    Give Out Loud –  As we recognize abundance and our development, we experience the generosity of the network and ourselves a part of the network.
    Spread out Loud – Show your impact. Do not hide it under a bed or rock. Whether quantitative financial spreadsheets or qualitative stories,  images and guides, create “reifications” of your value to inspire others to generate more value.

    The Relational Value Experience describes the individual’s experience. This is helpful for designing a social experience.   You know your design is in the right direction when individuals say things like this. To paraphrase Nancy White, “we build social software for networks of people, but it is individuals who experience it.”

    What’s under the hood? The Relational Value model is built from an analysis of Dreamfish member experience through a lens of my research in knowledge and relational culture design. The map correlates with Relational Cultural theory, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Brian Hall’s Value Technology. (For a deeper read and application to an organization, there is a case story  project to build a culture of resilience and sustainability in Dreamscape, Innovations in Transformative Learning.

    Commodity thinking versus relational thinking?
    I’ll leave you with a great quote from last Friday’s Dreamfish Leadership Lab. Leonard Perlson told a great story that illustrates the difference between the Value as commodity or value that is growthful.  Leonard says,

    The difference between trading value and creating value is the difference between trading a Picasso and developing an artist.

    People are artists of life. Let’s develop the next billion out of poverty.

    Want to dive more into value? An upcoming opportunity is upon us. The social capital marketspace is forming at the SOCAP conference, October 4-6th.

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 12:30 pm on January 3, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , ,   

    We go, girrls…to network 

    It’s time for She’s Geeky, the technology conference for women, started by girlfriend, Kaliya Hamlin. I want to encourage women who may wonder whether they fit in or not, but are interested, to go to this conference, or to reach out. You are not alone…

    On my journey as a woman and social innovator, I have worked and lived at the edge – at the edge of ideas, fields and sectors. This experience of bridging and connecting is more familiar to women. And, in an open source software conference, or in an event for entrepreneurs, I am at the edge as one of the few women in the room. The upside is that I bring multiple value flows such as new knowledge and bridging capital to the table.

    Women are talking… Tara Hunt wrote a blog post about the future of work involving this pattern of bridge-crossing domains. I heartfully agree. The future of work is all about transforming the box into networks.

    The flipside for me, when working at the margins, is that it has been easy to delude myself that I am alone, or to wonder how all this bridging is of value. But, all it has taken is some use of self to reach out and get feedback on the worth of bridging capital and relational knowledge. To get a wake up call, all I have to do is to go hang with the Girrls at She’s Geeky.

    Can you relate? Come out on January 29-31st to Mountain View.

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 9:33 am on December 24, 2008 Permalink  

    vlog with your egg nog? 

    We are starting a vlog about dreamfishing. I am excited, because video enables the surfacing of qualitative value flows, value that is non-transactional in nature. We can see, interpret, and amplify things like value of increased productivity, learning, motivation, belonging, social impact and green efficiencies. And we are starting at a moment when we are mapping blended value that gets exchanged while people co-work.

    To think of this vlog being in a conversation of vlogs, I would want to jam with Noneck‘s travel vlog to explore open source culture. I like the “connective aesthetic” that he brings forward, particularly in the video of Jelly, the co-working space in NY.

    Video in performance ethnography as a research method can be powerful. I started using video in my doctoral research about social improvisation in Berlin. And then started applying it to consulting on organizational culture change. Individuals and groups are moved as they watch video clips of themselves and reflect together on their choices in the moment and interactions. The reflexivity of video helps people to increase their awareness and conscious use of self in the moment.

    Soon, Marguerite Manteau, Pete Kaminski, Paul Loper, Johannes Klose and and I will have our cameras out with dreamfishers in daily activity. more to follow…

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 9:52 pm on December 22, 2008 Permalink  

    Spring to life 

    This is my first post in awhile. I kept my head down in the last months in skunkworks, while Dreamfish has been reforming. And, I have been biting to get blogging again. Hello again!

    My blog’s new theme, green grass.  I chose green grass to advocate springing towards  life.  Coming to life is a theme in my life and work.  Of course, the theme is ironic, because  grass is a monoculture, which is not sustainable. However, this is fake grass, and we’ll hope it is made of recycled material.

    Well, turning towards our new year, I would like to reflect here on the livingness of life. May we step up, to choose boldly and let the world move what we do.

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 8:23 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: agile development,   

    Product development as improvisation 

    Yesterday, Sunday morning,  a member in the Dreamfish
    community, called me at home to tell me he was in town.  Michael is a
    community builder in Seattle, who works at a local level to facilitate
    groups and neighborhoods to move towards sustainability. Michael was in town for the 20th Annual contact improvisation festival. We had never met in person, but we have exchanged on Dreamfish.

    And in
    the familiar communication pattern that fellow improvisers take on with each other,
    Michael and I didn’t dive into our calendars to schedule a meeting.
    Rather, we established an intentionality to meet soon,
    exchanged our mobile phone numbers as an agreement to be in exchange,
    and communicated about what we were doing where and when…and so, we
    will meet in whatever form our interaction will emerge.

    What serendipity that he called, I thought. I
    was in the midst of planning a session for Dreamfish team to practice
    movement improvisation as a way to support organizing principles for
    sustainability in our organization and web development.  A
    thoughtful emergent design process in collaboration with clients is one
    of Dreamfish’s improvisational practices.  And here, Michael Dobbie, our community member aka
    customer and improviser, comes along just at this moment. I think I will ask him if he wants to participate in our jam ession, called product development…..or maybe while at the  Contact Improvisation festival.

    In this encounter, I am reminded of how many amazing change agents there are in this sustainability network, whom I would like to reconnect and collaborate with as we continue to produce the New Thing of Dreamfish around the corner. I have had less frequent communication with you for awhile as I was building. And, I would like to adjust course and be in closer communication, to support product development as an Agile community jam as we move forward.

    Improvisation is the art of
    facilitation of a system. With a high
    comfort with ambiguity, we produce our collective creativity through
    establishing the container of shared intentionality, balancing the
    frequency of exchanges, and sharing the differences that influence our
    choices. These three things–Container, Exchanges, and Differences
    —are elements, which two of my colleagues,  Ed Olsen and Glenda Eoyang , describe as the organizing principles of  a complex adaptive system. Facilitators of a system practice an art of
    listening in the present moment and responding by tweaking these elements to enable a healthier system. 

    We have some artful change agents in the thousand people within the community of Dreamfish. Let’s jam!

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 8:47 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: learning   

    Linking the context of learning 

    I use my blog as a space for learning and reflection. Today, I was asked to write about what I know, and it brought me to sitting here, slowing down to reflect about how much the support systems around us shape our perspectives. My first and most important mentor was my mother, also a woman entrepreneur out to change the world. Interestingly, it is now in my life when I choose to look particularly for guidance and stories about women leaders. I am now reading the book, Women on Top. 

    It is a curious thing to see how I shape the work of my life through the choices of ecosystems that I participate in. I am also having fun with Twitter. As a life mission, I work on problems related to the people side of sustainability, where we need new thinking, new models, and new tools. Seeking to address these issues has led me into wide deep collaborations with many amazing men and women and their pioneering work. To honor them here…. Charlie Seashore and Edie Seashore in the Use of Self,   Peter Park in Participatory Action Research, Anna Halprin in participatory performance with large groups, Wataru Ohashi in somatics and systems thinking, and my co-facilitator and beloved life partner, Dietmar Brinkmann. 

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 3:45 am on December 13, 2007 Permalink  

    Gift Giving 2.0 

    Caroline Bernadi co-founded Maatiam, which gives individuals and businesses an easy way to help nonprofits to raise funds through everyday online shopping. Caroline just announced a terrific opportunity today…

    “Today (Dec 13), Maatiam is co-hosting TechSoup’s 1-day free online event: Gift Giving 2.0: Give the Gift that Keeps On Giving, taking place in TechSoup’s Technology for Fundraising forum .

    Join hosts Robert Tolmach of ChangingthePresent.org and Caroline Bernadi of Maatiam, as they explore the various gift giving sites available for nonprofits. We’ll discuss how your organization can harness some of the enormous holiday spending towards your cause. In addition, we’ll discuss ways gift giving sites can be a fundraising boost not only during the holiday season, but all year long.

    It’s a free all-day, asynchronous (not-live) online event in the TechSoup Technology for Fundraising Forum . No registration is needed; just show up and post your questions and comments, and share your experiences!

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 3:18 am on November 29, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: , denmark, ,   

    Dream Conference: Digital Creativity in Denmark 

    So many intriguing cross-pollinating meshy events are happening in Denmark these days. Here is the DREAM conference in September. How could it not catch my fish eye!….

    Digital Content Creation:
    Creativity, Competence, Critique

    The second international DREAM conference
    18-20 September 2008
    University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
    In knowledge-based societies, competence formation through education is key, and the formative role played by digital communication is widely acknowledged. However, one of the major challenges today is the mismatch between the digital resources nurtured by users in and outside of formal educational contexts. Not least young people’s rapid take-up of social software such as weblogs and wikis, online chat clients and virtual world applications serve to challenge existing forms of communication for learning,… since these innovations allow and assume users’ own creation, sharing and editing of content.

    Conference goals
    This conference will present and discuss the most advanced and exciting research on digital content creation, its socio-cultural contexts and educational consequences. A major aim of the conference is to bring together an international forum of scholars from a range of disciplines including media and ICT studies, education, psychology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies – and to promote dialogue within and across research traditions. We also aim to develop dialogue between researchers, educators and producers of new learning resources.

    Conference themes
    Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
    Digital content creation: creative processes and textual reappropriations
    Competence formation through digital content creation: personal voice or commercial coercion?
    Institutional ramifications of digital content creation for learning
    Studying digital content creation: the challenge of new methodologies

    Papers are encouraged from researchers with interests in any of these specific themes as well as the general issues of the conference.

    Submissions
    If you would like to present a paper, please submit a 400 word abstract with an indication of which of the above themes you will address. Abstracts must include the title of your paper along with author name(s), affiliation, and contact details (postal address, telephone, fax and email address). Abstracts (format: pdf, doc, rtf) should be submitted to mail@dream.dk

    After the conference, authors are invited to submit revised versions of their papers from which contributions will be selected for a peer-reviewed volume focusing on the main themes of the conference.

    Important dates
    15 April 2008 deadline for submission of abstracts
    1 June 2008 notification of authors
    1 July 2008 deadline for early registration
    1 August 2008 deadline for submission of final papers

    Keynote speakers
    Keynote speakers will include professor David Buckingham (London Knowledge Lab, University of London), professor John Hartley (Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology), professor Ellen Seiter (School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California), and professor Angela McFarlane.

    Pre-Conference: One-day ph.d. course
    The research conference is preceded by an intensive ph.d. course 17 September 2008, offering a venue for young scholars within relevant conference areas to meet with some of the main conference speakers and to make project presentations and discussions.

    Conference language
    The conference language is English.

    Stay informed
    Please visit the conference website for full scientific and social programme, registration form and keynote abstracts: http://www.dreamconference.dk/

    Please feel free to circulate this message as appropriate.

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 3:28 am on November 12, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: book, christian fuchs, critical theory, , ecology, internet economy, ,   

    Internet and Society by Christian Fuchs 

    This new book from Christian Fuchs sounds interesting, a critical theorist’s take on the internet …

    Christian Fuchs (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415961327. 408 pages. Routledge Research Series in Information Technology and Society.

    More infos:
    http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html

    Discussion Board on Internet+Society issues http://www.nabble.com/Internet-and-Society-f28205.html

    “In this book, the author develops a theory that shows how Internet has changed society and society shapes the Internet. It discusses the ecology, the economy, the politics, and the culture of transnational informational capitalism.
    Topics addressed in the book include: self-organization in nature, self-organization in society, foundations of social theory, theory of capitalism, critical theory in the age of the Internet, transnational informational capitalism, Web 2.0, social software, ecological sustainability and ICTs, informational monopolies, strategies of accumulation related to the Internet, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, Open Source, Free Software, filesharing, knowledge labor, class theory, multitude and Empire (Hardt and Negri), class theory in informational capitalism, gift internet economy, commodity internet economy, gift commodity internet economy, digital divide, eParticipation, digital democracy, democratic theory, information warfare, electronic surveillance, cyberprotest, the movement for democratic globalization (“anti-globalization”), virtual communities, social networking platforms, cyberstalking, social relations online, individualization and isolation online, Internet addiction, cyberculture, cyberethics, etc.
    The book provides foundations for Critical Internet Research / Critical Theory in the age of informational capitalism.”

    Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
    Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
    ICT&S Center – Advanced Studies and Research in
    Information and Communication Technologies & Society

    http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at

    University of Salzburg
    Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
    5020 Salzburg
    Austria

     

  • Tiffany von Emmel 4:07 am on November 9, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: drupal,   

    Dmitri is Full of Awsomeness 

    I have attended lots of conferences in different fields, and they usually have a lot of professional adults in varying shapes and costumes. At the Drupal web developer's conference at U.C. Bekeley, I had a remarkable moment. I took a workshop taught by Dmitri Dmitrigoi, a programmer who was brilliant, funny, and self-composed and passionate presenter. Here's the kicker. Dmitri is 11 yrs. old. It blew my mind to watch him teach a full lecture hall packed with 20-60 yr. old experienced technologists, who sat in rapt attention, as Dimitri stood on a step to see above the lecturn and demonstrated PHP and CSS coding. He patiently answered our questions and guided us step by step. Gesturing to the future, he talked about the upcoming release in our content management system, which he has worked on. He described the new features that are "full of awsomeness".

    I can't wait to tell the children, parents and educators I know about Dmitri. Because I can't help but think that much of what he can do has been encouraged by people around him believing in the capacity to learn and not buying into society's tendencies to infantalize and marginalize children as being less than full contributing members of society.

    Soon, DaveO, also writing about Dmitri, will release a podcast with Dmitri.

    Thanks, Dmitri, for being "full of awsomeness".

     

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