We had a great knowledge cafe last Thursday about storytelling. The magnificent personal impact coach and storyteller Tim Sheppard gave us a swift yet thorough overview, starting and finishing with a powerful tale about ‘Truth’ and ‘Story’ with plenty to think about in between. Storytelling and narrative analysis bounced ...

Attached is the final report about the facilitation work done with iShed for the Media Sandbox 2008 development scheme. It covers all of our strategic planning, the tools we used, activities we pursued (and chose not to pursue), the lessons we learnt and the metrics we measured by. And there are some handy diagrams. Download the full [...]

The next Bristol Skillswap is about user experience, and is in The Pervasive Media Studio on Tuesday 11th December. As well as our very own Joe (the uncle of usability) Leech, we have some experts from further afield as the gig is partnered in with Dan Dixon and Alex Older’s Web Developers Conference. Here’s the blurb: Bristol’s [...]

In our latest podcast I talk with Michele Kimpton and Sandy Payette. Michele is Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, and Sandy the Executive Director of Fedora Commons. We discuss the repository software solutions offered by each community, before exploring the implications of their recent announcement of a collaboration between the two ...

This is a brief report about 4talent’s inspiration session about online communities held in Birmingham, 26/10/08. I gave a short presentation alongside Emma Monks (Sulake), Ally Branley (Channel 4) and Heather Champ (flickr). It was a great pleasure to meet them and see their presentations which were all very interesting indeed - there are ...

This sign is on the street down the road from where I live. It was put there by the amazingly admirable People’s Republic of Stoke’s Croft‘. The street is called Stoke’s Croft and is in the middle of a tug of war between a range of ‘redevelopment’ forces - council, property developers, bottom up community folk, ...

The Knowledge And Innovation Network is looking for organisations to partner up in its ongoing Community of Practice (CoP) benchmarking research project. There are a great range of organisations associated with this network, and the first round of benchmarking was a great success. Here’s the blurb: Networks and communities of practice ...

From August 2006 to July 2007 I worked with CILIP’s Department of Knowledge and Information to help them prepare for, establish and nurture their online membership communities. It was a wonderful experience; we all worked hard breaking new boundaries, and we all learnt a huge amount about all sorts of things one encounters while getting ...

As you might know, I find equal inspiration for group facilitation from the online and offline worlds. As well as this, I find inspiration from books and blogs etc. just as much as it exists in pubs, parties, festivals and life on the streets around me - there are lessons to be learnt all over [...]

I presented a short story at Steve Moore’s ‘All Together Now’ gathering, hosted by Sport England at Channel Four yesterday; it was fun. Also speaking were Gi Fernando, Antony Mayfield, Mark McGuiness, and it was all chaired by Rebecca Caroe. It was great as I got to talk about sport stuff, and communities, and virtual tools, [...]