I’m working with the organizers now to determine if there is a good fit for me to lead one of the discussions. I’ll keep you posted in regards to that. Either way I am registered and excited for this important event to happen. I hope to see you there!

[Full information available here and LinkedIn page here]

Change Leadership on the path to Democratic Governance

Initially, the focus for this symposium started as individual topics at the frontier of change leadership. These topics included complexity science as a framework for understanding change, interconnection of change at different scale (personal, organizational, and societal), building community, and managing a portfolio of change. However, as the topics were evaluated it became clear there was a common theme involving the continuing movement into a knowledge era and how individuals choose to structure their relationships as they organize with others.

Within this shift, “Democratic Governance” is starting to surface as an approach to community governance. This approach seeks to involve more stakeholders in the decision-making process and works to overcome conflicts by addressing root causes. Yet, while Democratic Governance normally involves local governing bodies, the same issues are involved in empowering teams and collaboration among organizational stakeholders with different goals.

Therefore, this symposium will examine a number of issues within the framework of the greater change processes underway today. It will seek to build a holistic understanding that incorporates leading edge thinking about change processes. Attendees are expected to come from a range of backgrounds with expertise in different aspects of organizational change and thereby share their knowledge within the framework of building a sustainable model of Democratic Governance.

Adopting new approaches for organizing diverse groups of people, the symposium is designed to be different from traditional conferences and workshops. Collectively, attendees will experience techniques for building a sense of community around common interests and move to deeper levels of learning. Attendees will be encouraged to be active participants by investigating the numerous issues that arise as you scale from small groups with single focus into larger groups bringing conflicting agendas to the table. It is these larger issues that are expected to dominate the symposium dialogue.

Registration fee: $20 includes lunch, afternoon refreshments, and symposium supplies. Contact Dr. Ross Wirth at wirthr@franklin.edu or 614-947-6128 for more information. Profiles of those attending are being organized at http://www.linkedin.com/e/vgh/1865279/

I have times when I feel my ambitions are leading me in a different direction than my current career is headed. With the economy in the state that it is I haven’t had a great deal of success finding a position through interviewing; however, I’m thinking that might not be a bad thing.

At this point I’m starting to figure out that I may well need to start over on my own instead of relying on an employer to give me that direction. Thanks to the website The Art of Nonconformity, particularly their downloadable manifesto A Brief Guide to World Domination, I think I’m getting my purpose together.

I’m working on a couple of questions posed by Chris Guillebeau that I think are really helpful in this mission.

• What do you really want to get out of life?
• What can you offer the world that no one else can?

I’ll keep you posted as I come up with a good and honest answer to these questions. If you have any input I’m always open to some crowdsourcing; even when it deals with my future. Particularly if it deals with my future.

This week has been a tough one; and that’s a fact of life.

There are times in each of our lives when we have a hard week and we start shutting down, saying “life’s not fair”, and wishing away our troubles until we’re blue in the face. I’ve done that in my life too from time to time. That is merely opportunity lost though.

Opportunities come too few and far between to let them slip away like that.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with some really great community leaders at Experience Columbus to discuss growing the number of “Columbus Advocates” and how we might affect this via social media. Before the meeting my head was a million miles away, full with all of my weeks negativity. Sitting in that room, talking with passion about the community and the technology that I love was all it took for me to remember opportunity.

Experience Columbus provided the perfect backdrop to this mind switch. One year ago this organization invited about 40 local bloggers and social media savvy folks to the premiere of the Experience Columbus social media strategy. While it had some good elements to it the total package did not go over well.

Experience Columbus had spent a great deal of time designing a failure.

Instead of engaging their online networks up front they brought them in on the backend. The message fell flat without the buy-in that develops organically from early engagement and continued collaboration. Experience Columbus, like many organizations, might have walked away from this and headed back into the vacuum. But the didn’t.

Experience Columbus found the opportunity in this failure.

The meeting held yesterday was only one of several being held. Beside the meetings, the employees of Experience Columbus have spent this last year getting personally involved in building their social media networks throughout the region. Along with that development they have been gathering massive amounts of user generated content from the local blogging and social media networks.

What did our group learn at its meeting then?

First of all is that Experience Columbus has an incredible amount of information to share – and do they ever want to share it! Unfortunately all of us at the meeting not directly employeed by Experience Columbus had no idea how much of this info was already available because it wasn’t convenient to find and the Experience Columbus site (and story) wasn’t compelling enough to get us to search it out.

Experience Columbus continues to learn.

The Experience Columbus team had amazing questions and insights to offer as the discussion moved on. Seeing how committed they have been to learning from the failure last year I expect this interaction will only spur them on to even greater work. I really appreciated being asked to participate in this important community effort.

Want to help by being a Columbus Ambassador? It’s easy, just keep spreading the good word about Columubus and look up the folks at Experience Columbus and offer to help!

So first things first. Ignite is an excellent opportunity to share and listen to exciting ideas and presentations in a very fast paced setting, giving maximum bang for your virtual buck (it’s free is what I mean). Alvin aka @wyliemac along with Dan and several others have setup the next Ignite Columbus #IC3 for Friday, June 19, 2009 from 6-8pm at the OSU Mendenhall Lab. I’ve submitted my presentation “A new social movement I call Digitalocracy” and need your help to make it up to the stage.

Take a moment to visit http://ignitecbus.uservoice.com/pages/general and cast a vote for me. While you’re out there take a look at other ideas and check out the Ignite Columbus blog.

In other blogging and presentation news:

• My blog post “Trust Management” was selected as the Best Trust Post of the Month on the Carnival of Trust website. Initial props were given by the good folks at EGYII who first linked the post up.
• I received an email from the fine folks at Schmap that they wanted to use one of my photos from my St. Augustine trip on thier latest mapping mashup. This is particularly ironic because I took the photo while I was at Flagler College giving a presentation about Social Media and Collaboration – and here it is in action!
• Finally, I’ll be presenting at MORPC on May 1, 2009 with my friend Jody Dzuranin about how non-profits and local communities can utilize Social Media and Collaboration Tools to promote a greener, more sustainable and communicative city. I believe it is open to the public in case you’d like to check it out.
• Oh, and next Tuesday, April 28, 2009 is when my next commentary airs on WOSU 820. This one will be about Volunteering Your Way Out of the Recession – I’ll post it up here as well but tune into 820am!

Keep your eyes out for these upcoming projects that aren’t yet fully cooked yet but will hopefully start to boil in the near future, including:

• This years garden/mini-farm in the backyard will include a new special garden for Sophie.
• Hosting conversations that matter in the city of Upper Arlington.
• Launch of OurUA.org community website and conversation point.
• OSU Communicative Cities presentation.
• OTEC presentation (hopefully).
• More to come about my manifesto, Digitalocracy, and my contribution to another Social Media book project.

Seems like an obvious question for a condo association, town or city to ask but what about your work organization? The average person spends much more time working in thier life than any other pursuit. All things considered you, or your employees are essentially choosing what community they want to live in when they go to work for you.

Is your organization the ghetto or millionaire mile?

I don’t often write specifically about business culture unless it is a tie-in to social media, this post is no different. In the current economy it is imperitive that organizations retain the best employees and in order to do that they have to create an environment that allows them to live happily.

If your organization uses the internet then encourage your employees to search the web as they see fit (except for the obvious porn/gambling type sites) as long as they continue to meet their productivity expectations. Productivity is the charge of the manager anyhow. A happy and engaged employee will be more productive anyhow, so stop trying to block them from participating in the world around them.

When employees are happy and they spread that message across thier social networks your organization is getting free, positive and engaging marketing.

And beyond the simple such as that what about taking the time to listen to your peers and employees about what they are most concerned about. Positively engage them, use conversation and collaboration as a way to empower people instead of building stagnant systems. Boredom at the workplace chases away creative thinkers – aka your best and brightest.

[slideshare id=1117862&doc=flaglercommweek-090308141852-phpapp01]

I was given the opportunity to meet with a large government agency today who is interested in figuring out how they might build a better community, in part, through the use of social media technologies. The conversation was particularly interesting because of the many different experiences and opinions that existed in the participants. Interestingly the other reason this meeting was exceptional was the fact that the organization currently denies access to pretty much any and all social media tools on their network. A lesson learned here is to bring my own laptop and connect through the tethered Blackberry.

If you happened to be at the meeting you might like an easier way to check out some of the links I had hoped to show off here is a list. Take a look and feel free to post any questions you might have about how they relate to the topic. Sorry for not making a pretty powerpoint and posting it to slide-share, you’ll have to deal with bullet points instead.

Blogging (e.g. WordPress, Blogspot)
http://andrew-miller.com

Wiki (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikispaces)
http://www.hurricanewiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Media Sharing (e.g. Flickr, Youtube)
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=comfest&w=all

Social Sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter)
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=columbus

Collaboration versus Ownership
http://columbusunderground.com

Outposts and Active Voice
http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/group.php?gid=18005416576

Open Knowledge Systems and Mashups
http://www.cota.com/index.asp

Social Media Café Background
http://columbussocialmediacafe.org/

Ganther’s Place
http://ganthersplace.wordpress.com/

twitter: @ganthersplace

Independents’ Day
http://www.thisisindependent.com/

Motorcycle Parking
http://Scooterparking.wordpress.com

Hurricane Information Center
http://www.hurricanes08.org/

Foreclosure Website
http://stlmortgagecrisis.wordpress.com/

Video the Vote
http://videothevote.org/

NBC Storm Twitter
http://search.twitter.com

@NBCSquire on Twitter

If you’ve followed my blog a bit you’ll see some strong similarities between this event that my friend Mike and his collaborative artist group Couchfire Collective helped to bring to life and my Convergence Columbus idea. In fact Mike and I had some discussions about how this event might essentially grow into my idea of Convergence Columbus albeit with a different moniker. Whatever happens I’m excited to be a part of it.

With that in mind I’d like to invite everyone out to the Independent’s Day festival this weekend at Gay St and Pearl Alley (just off High). If you’re interested I’ll be hosting a talk from 12pm-1pm at the Interactive/Idea Convention Vault about building local community through online tools. I have worked on several initiatives which have done just this and will gladly talk about some of those, but I would love for this to be an open discussion where we can all learn from each others experiences; so please come out and share.

Beyond just my discussion there will be food, drink, music, art and lots of workshops on tap – check the schedule here. The event is all volunteer driven so if you have some time please consider volunteering for an hour or so on Saturday. I really hope to see you all there!