FabLab Year Book Released! The Why and How.

We in the Dutch FabLab community just released a year book for the FabLab community. The first ever year book actually. Consistent with FabLab principles the release was printing the book physically in the CabFabLab in the Hague, and sharing the digital files online so you can make your own copy. Download the FabYearBook 2010 and instructions on how to put it together.

This post is about how the year book came about, and some of the rationale behind it.

What's a FabLab?
A FabLab is a workshop that contains industrial quality equipment that is controlled by widely available software like Google Sketchup, Inkscape or Coreldraw. It puts the power to produce basically anything into your hands as an individual. It does for production what social media does for publishing and sharing. You hit print on your computer, and end up with a physical product. There are four of these FabLabs in the Netherlands, and a couple of dozen worldwide. In the past 2 years I've seen things being 'printed' as diverse as furniture, food, fashion, car and motor parts, jewelry, lamps, and toys. As prototype or as personal unique product. It's amazing and hugely empowering. Remember how amazing it was when you first started blogging: the relationships suddenly forming, the value of conversations? This is the same all over, but now you're turning bits into atoms and change your physical environment.

FabYearBook 2010
The idea for the FabYearBook came from two things. First, when visiting the then still very empty space that now is becoming the FabLab Groningen, I saw how Bart Kempinga had put together a reader with print-outs from different FabLab websites from around the world. He had placed that reader on a table in the middle of that big white empty room. Visitors and potential partners leafed through it, and it helped them paint with their imagination a vision of what the FabLab Groningen could be on the bare walls around them.

Bart Kempinga with his 'scrapbook' in a still empty FabLab Groningen

Second, I worked with a group of students at the local university in my home town in the spring of 2009. I gave a few guest lectures on knowledge management and community building. As part of their assignment I asked them to generate ideas on how to stimulate community building in the FabLab network, as well as knowledge sharing. In a bigger list of ideas, the students also came up with the FabYearBook. Marloes Wilmink, Anne Heesink, Eva Rennen and Karlein Sanders were the students that planted the year book idea firmly with me.

Presentation slide by my students

We put forward the idea for a year book at the global Fab5 Conference in India last August, and sent out calls for contributions in November. Actual contributions started coming in around January 15th, with the latest arriving this week Monday. Now, Wednesday we've printed the first FabYearBook 2010. More than 50 pages, from mostly 'close by' sources, but already with interesting variety and diversity.

Making the year book was not just about making a book, it is an intervention in the global network and community as well. There's two components to that: visibility and rhythm.

Networks, nodes, visibility
In a network all nodes are distributed. That makes it often hard to see the breadth, depth and potential of a network from your perspective as a single node in it. For you and me to perceive the network from our individual position in it, we need to be visible to others and the others need to be visible to us. You probably know a sizable number of the contacts of your own direct contacts, but after that visibility of people/nodes brakes down quickly. To look further, over that '2 degrees out'-horizon from your own position, we need tools. Network visualizations are helpful. Sharing stories from the network in the network is helpful too. All this is true for the global FabLab Network as well. Some nodes are highly visible and see a lot, others are mostly dark nodes in the overall network fabric. The FabYearBook 2010 is a first attempt to share stories in a more persistent way, a beacon as it were in the FabLab landscape. So that visibility can improve, and new connections can be made.

Community, rhythm, predictability
Functioning communities show a number of characteristics that can be also purposefully used to create circumstances for community to grow and blossom. Community creates these characteristics, but the characteristics also help create community.

Rhythm is such a characteristic of community. Our society has rhythms on larger and smaller scales. They help us to feel as part of a whole, and give us predictability where there actually is none. Christmas is such a macro-rhythm in the western world. Even if you haven't seen your family for a full year, you'll be welcomed at Christmas. Weekends are a rhythm like that too. Morning coffees as well. For the Dutch FabLab community we've set a rhythm through FabTables, regular meet-ups at 6 weeks intervals with a fixed date and time. Anyone is welcome, and they always take place no matter what. I've done the same with Elmine to get our local GeekLounges going, at a 2 month interval. Even if you have to miss out on one or two, you know you'll be welcome at the next get-together, and when it takes place. An existing macro-rhythm for the FabLab community is the yearly Fab Conference. It's FabLab's Christmas so to speak. You have to travel for it, and meet up with the extended family as it were. The year book hopefully will serve as a new macro-rhythm, about half way (January) between two Fab conferences (August), and it comes to you.

The finished year book

Looking forward to when next year January sees the next FabYearBook coming out!

Tags: communitybuilding, fablab, fabyearbook, fabyearbook2010

Do You Know Academic Sources Regarding Group Size?

In blog based discussions there has been talk of 'effective' group sizes and network sizes in the past (see some of it here from 2003 and 2004). Most of that however was always based on anecdotal 'laws' or Dunbar's number (the application of which I usually see as the mis-interpretation of Dunbar's theory).

Working in different groups.

Of course I know from personal experience the size of groups I am comfortable with in different settings. I like working on concrete tasks with 1 or 2 others, I like teams of 5, I like doing interactive sessions with 8 to 16 people, with an optimum of 12, I enjoyed working for a company where the communication habits didn't scale beyond 16, I like to do open conversational sessions with 20 to 25 people, and I like to present to larger audiences.

But what are the 'transition points' in group size? How much people do you need to have enough variety in a group to increase the learning in that group during learning activities? When does communication overhead become too big to stay with 1 on 1 connections and additional group roles or tools to facilitate communication are needed?
I can imagine all kinds of variables coming into play: variety of skills in the group, group inertia (though the work of Olson seems proven to be false), organizational overhead needed, cognitive overhead, communication needs, in-/outgroup aspects, peer pressure, etc.
All these factors are probably depending on what needs to be done: group learning, a concrete task, problem solving, collective action etc.

Is there any academic source you are aware of, or empirical studies you've seen that cover this, or at least aspects of it? Any pointers are welcome. I will of course blog what I find / receive.

Working in different groups.

Tags: anthropology, Dunbar, groups, groupsize, sociology

Rotterdam University Learning Network: Yammer activity

Before the start of the learning community project I did at the Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences, Elmine and me did a workshop on web2.0 and networked learning (connectivism) for a number of people. Most of these were group managers in their faculties, and as it turned out the managers of some of the participants of the project. This workshop was, in hind-sight, important because of that: it made sure that the managers of at least some of our participants knew from personal hands on experience more or less what the project was about. And indeed it helped make sure that the results of the participants was more easily integrated in their immediate circle of colleagues. One of the participants in that workshop (Sander Schenk) kept on experimenting with different web2.0 tools on his own. Over the course of several months I saw him pop up in different on-line services and networks. A bit over a year ago it was him that created the first Yammer account within the organisation.

For those of you unfamiliar with Yammer. Yammer basically offers the same functionality as Twitter, but only those people and messages are visible that share the same e-mail domain with you. So everybody at company.com can see eachother, but nobody else. Added to that is group functionality and drawing organisational relationships between people. In short it is an internal Twitter, but lives outside you firewall.

Last week we received the graphs you see on the left from the Yammer team. It depicts nicely how the adoption of Yammer within Rotterdam University evolved. Starting in November 2008, the number of registered accounts rose to just under 200 in a year. The plateau in July/August in all three graphs is the summer holiday (but there was still some activity), and activity rises as soon as the new school year started, especially the number of accounts.

Of those 200 people that created accounts, some 130 posted one or more messages. The total number of messages is around 5500, or on average 42 postings per active user. In comparison the learning community, with 12 people active, wrote some 7000 messages over the course of a year in their platform. This gives you some perspective on the different layers of involvement you always see in groups, from active core to non-posting lurkers. (though the learning community and the yammer group aren't connected per se, the members of the former were generally also part of the latter)

Yammer.com sent us these graphs as a means to sell paid for services. However I think this type of information (and more detailed than this) is increasingly important if you want to understand the group dynamics of the communities you're involved in. In networked environments where social connections are the means of navigation and information filtering you need pattern information to spot opportunities and threats to the health of the community.

(to the left, graphs for total number of posters, number of users, and number of messages)

Tags: connectivism, hogeschoolrotterdam, hzap08, networkedlearning, rotterdam, yammer

Ecofont - Letters With Holes Save Ink

Leaving through a weekly and reading an article on greenwashing and 'deep' green marketing, I noticed something in the right hand bottom corner. It read:

"Ecofont The articles on pages 14-19 are printed with Ecofont Spranq Eco Sans, a letter with holes in it, thereby using up to 20% less ink during printing. You don't see the holes in normal pt-size, but they are there. At bigger font sizes do notice, as the holes get bigger."

A clever idea I think. Unless of course you now start mindlessly printing e-mail again.
The font is developed by a Dutch company, is freely downloadable but also available in a paid version which lets you turn any font (incuding your own corporate font) into an ecofont by 'punching holes' in your letters. Adding installing this font to use in my invoices and proposals (the only stuff I ever print) to my to-do list.

Holes do show at larger font sizes, but otherwise your eyes don't notice at all.

Tags: ecofont, innovation, printing

Enschede GeekLounge

This afternoon / tonight we had a GeekLounge, after the last geek dinner in May '08. We had a pleasant round of conversations with artist Marc Otte, resident philosopher Johnny Søraker, start-up running Melina McKim, researchers Robert Slagter and Lilia Efimova, as well as Elmine and me. Good conversations spanning virtual worlds, ethics, fablabs, conference organizing, expat life, nano-tech, Sinterklaas, food, Russian Christmas, California start-up climate, switching jobs and the credit crunch.

Pics from the GeekLounge by Elmine

We decided to make it a repeating event. The next one will be at the end of January, Saturday 23rd.
Other dates, all Saturdays: March 20th, May 22nd, (July 24th), September 25th, November 20th. Starting at 16:00 hrs, until 21:00 hrs or so. Check the GeekLounge page for info/updates.

Tags: enschede, geeklounge

We Installed Our First LED Light Bulb Today

Today we installed our first LED light bulb. We got it as part of a national action by the 'Nationale Postcodeloterij' ('national zip-code lottery' where your zipcode is your lottery number). In this action all 2.5 million households that take part in the lottery get a LED lamp. That means that 1 out of every 3 households in the Netherlands will be able to replace a 60 Watt incandescent light bulb with a 6W LED.

Each lamp installed will save about 90% of energy use, or 45kg of CO2 output from burning fossil fuels per year, compared to regular incandescents. On top of that a LED lamp has a longer lifespan than both regular incandescents (up to 50 times) and CFLs (up to 8 times). And that times 2.5 million if everybody who gets a light bulb this fall installs it. With almost 20% of energy usage for ligthing this can have significant impact. With the European Union wide ban on regular light bulbs being implemented in several steps since September 2009, it also means a lot of people will already know if and how using LED technology feels different, and lower the threshold for them to replace more bulbs with LEDs over time.

I can't show how it looks on the outside, because it fell to the floor while unpacking it, and the light bulb shattered as all glass bulbs do. This being LED technology though, even with the glass bulb removed it of course still works. So after I took a picture and removed the remaining glass shards I installed it anyway, and it works perfectly.

The lamp is created by a Dutch company and comes in two types a 4 Watt (40 Watt replacement) and the 6 Watt (60 Watt replacement). The last one is dimmable.

An issue with LED technology currently is of course the price tag. The retail price of these bulbs is around 25 Euro. It still means that you earn the price difference back within a year or two (both by saving energy and saving on buying regular replacements).

As you can see in this close up the lamp contains 4 LEDs

Tags: co2reduction, energysaving, led, lemnislighting

Fibre To The Home

It seems it is finally coming in our neighbourhood: optical fibre connections into our home. It means 60Mb internet connection is now within reach, and we soon can leave our 6Mb ADSL connection behind. Brings back memories from when I thoroughly enjoyed getting my 56kb ISDN internet connection. Wow that was fast!

With all my talk about how infrastructures are having societal impacts outside the realm of technology, I am pleased to see this infrastructure reach my door.

Tags: home, infrastructure, opticalfibre

KM Made in Holland - 2nd Edition

Three weeks ago saw the second edition of KM Made in Holland. An initiatieve of professor Robert de Hoog of University of Twente and Frank Lekanne-Deprez of the Zuyd University for Applied Sciences, that aims to bring together researchers and some practicioners from knowledge management in the Netherlands. A good initiative because it sometimes feels like the KM-people in the Netherlands are each well connected to outside the Netherlands, but not so much within the Netherlands. The first edition was in 2007, and now we all returned for an update on the latest research and cases in knowledge management in the Netherlands, and to collectively reflect on it.

Some photos I took

Several talks were about the experiences made with the introduction or development of tools. How Wiki is used at Océ for instance, as presented by Samuel Driessen, and the Knowledge Café of Winkwaves (blog, Dutch) presented by René Jansen. The latter talked about how social media is used to bring 'the smell of humans' to companies and KM. I love that kind of language.

Slides:

Samuel Driessen has written along with several presentations in his own blog (I'm no good at live blogging, so I simply lazily refer to his postings from during the event):

1 The APOSDLE project (advanced process oriented self directed learning environment)
2 Winkwaves Knowledge Cafe
3 Christaan Stam on ageing workforce and KM
4 Rienke Schutte on Wikipolicy

A very interesting presentation was one of the last ones of the day (number 3 in the list above). Christiaan Stam talked about seeing the ageing population challenges organisations face through a knowledge management lens, and presented findings from his ongoing research. Certainly useful input to reflect on with one of my clients, where I support a community of practice dealing with precisely these issues. I will go into Christiaans presentation in more detail in a seperate posting (I received a copy of the slides yesterday).

I was one of the speakers the first time in 2007 (then I talked about seven years of data gathering for a knowledge management benchmark), and also gave a presentation this time.
I described how we went about setting up and doing the project at Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences where we used a self-steering learning community as an instrument for professional development. I talked about balancing issues of steering/control and freedom to explore, experiment and fail, and the way that worked during the 12-14 months the project ran.
See my posting at the start of the project and some thoughts on the results and community forming afterwards, as well as some specifics about the resulting changes in the teaching of the teachers involved.

My slides are in Dutch, but I embed them here nonetheless to give you an impression of what I talked about.

Definitely looking forward to attending the third edition of KM in Holland in 2011!

Tags: hzap08, kmnl, knowledgemanagement, research

Ministerial eGovernment Conference Malmo - General Impressions

I am here in Malmo for the 5th EU ministerial conference on eGovernment. Elmine and I are staying in Copenhagen, and I hopped across the bridge into Malmo/Sweden to attend the conference.

The conference venue, and European flags in front of the main entrance

The conference was opened by the Swedish Minister for Local Government and Financial Markets, Mats Odell. The Swedes are it seems very much aligned with the principles of transparency, participation and empowerment, that I have come here to promote. It was the first time I heard a government minister call upon the audience to publish as much as you can and use the hashtag egov2009 to make it findable. The conference website incorporated a live Twitter feed, and the plenary sessions were streamed live on the web. I thought, highly sceptical as I am of these large scale EU gatherings, that was an encouraging sign. Minister Odell does not use Twitter or Facebook himself but his general secretary does (here he clearly explains why).

In contrast the EU Ministerial Declaration on eGov (PDF) was rather disappointing to me, with vague language and without clear targets. I think it clearly lacks leadership where leadership is much needed. Especially if you compare it to earlier draft versions where phrases like 'publishing in machine readable formats' were in the text. All of that apparently disappeared on Wednesday when the final text was drafted. What's left is a declaration that hardly contains anything new, and basically only reaffirms what was already in the EU Directive on Public Service Information from 2003. Its intentions are great but the Visby Agenda, adopted last week, which covers the entire ICT policy of the EU has more meat to it, I think. (Also see this review of the Ministerial Declaration)

Minister Mats Odell presenting Ministerial Declaration, EC VP Siim Kallas accepting it

Throughout the conference, as noted by an official of the EC I talked to, there was a lot of talk about social networks and web 2.0 (next to electronic identity), for the first time on an event like this he said. I later talked to a Swedish guy from the IT industry who thought that there was way too much talk about social networking and web 2.0, which he regarded as a turn for the worse.
Indeed it was the Industry Declaration, read after the EU Declaration, that I thought was the most awful contribution to the conference. Instead of pointing to a clear way forward, DigitalEurope (no website it seems, odd) demonstrated the industry, or at least the part of IT it says it represents, lacks vision. The very clear key message was 'thanks for all the funding you provided in years past, please keep on giving us more'. At least it was transparent, I have to give them that. It was a major piece of sucking up to the European Commission, and I was relieved when the moderator cut the speaker short as soon as time was up. 'I've only got two more slides'. Whatever.

While the Vice President of the European Commission stated in his opening words he was pleased to see that not only industry but also citizens had drafted an accompanying declaration to the EU one, it was the Industry Declaration that was part of the opening plenary session, while the Open Declaration was part of the last parallel session on the last day of the conference. Nevertheless I think it was already a great step that a citizen declaration was part of the proceedings.
To my ears the word citizens on this eGov conference was too often replaced with the word 'users' and 'consumers', betraying technological focus and approaches where people are just the means, not the goal. DigitalEurope seems to believe they are the conduit between government and citizens and vice versa, but I rather speak to my government directly. It was good to hear Minister Mats Odell say in his closing statement that the EU needs to take up the challenge issued by the Open Declaration.

David Osimo and Paul Johnston presenting, video of citizens reading the Open Declaration out loud

EU citizens reading the Open Declaration. The video drew applause from the audience

In parallel to the conference William Heath and Donagh organized 'Malmö '09' a barcamp style meet-up of EU citizens around eGov. Meeting up at Thursday evening they brought together pertinent works of art. Donagh provided input in the form of personal opinions of EU citizens around different questions concerning the EU, identity, and eGov. We also started to compare the language in all three declarations, the Visby Agenda, and the White House memorandum on transparency as published by the US administration. That's something for a later posting. On Friday morning the group worked this into a set of statements and suggestions for EU eGov policy. To the credit of the Swedish government, Minister Mats Odell attended this session by EU citizens and gave a presentation there in pecha-kucha style (PDF slides, PDF transcript).

Annotating the Ministerial Declaration, Opinions from EU Citizens

During the conference the finalists for the EU eParticipation awards presented themselves. I visited some of them and came away with several inspiring examples, technological, but more importantly also on a human level. That too, is something for a different posting.

What became apparent to me on this conference, and what popped up in different conversations with people here from both government, industry and citizenry, is that we need the EU equivalent of a Sunlight Foundation. To consistently lobby for transparency, participation and empowerment of citizens on the EU level. Building blocks for that are already apparent in the Netherlands, Germany, UK, Denmark, and elsewhere. I think we need to start combining those building blocks and turn it into a European effort.

Tags: egov, egov2009, eups20, Malmo, malmo09, opendata

Human Networks Navigation Needs Visualization: Node XL

We are our own end-points
For me one of the key aspects of the impact that internet and mobile communications have is that it makes it possible to navigate information via human relationships. This because internet/mobile connects us all in a non-geographic way (unlike every other infrastructure, which all have geographically defined end-points). We carry the end-points of these infrastructures in our pockets and in our backpacks. I do not need to know where you are, where you have been or where you will be to be able to reach or find you.

Internet and mobile communications: we carry the end-point with us

Human networks for navigating information and our need for visualization
Using human relationships as a navigational structure is something we've been doing since the dawn of mankind. Grooming, gossip, storytelling, literature, anthropology, markets, politics, all revolve around how we humans relate to each other and place information in that relational context. For most of our time these human relationship networks were only usable to navigate a small segment of the world. Our village, our neighbourhood, our guild, our voting district, our extended family, our tribe, our band of brothers. Basically we took geographic boundaries and definitions of our immediate scope of the world as given. We relied on taxonomies, categorization, hierarchies, libraries, party programs and representatives for all the things outside of that scope. The internet/mobile have blown apart that geographic barrier, and made our potential scope in terms of human relationships global. Our basic cognitive abilities to deal with human relationship networks are not enough to deal with that suddenly global scope (Dunbars theory). So we need new tools to help us out, new ways of constructing insights we cannot construct on our own. With language and writing we've been neatly able to cope with the increasing complexity of our societies until now. To deal with seeing entire humanity as a network for navigation we need additional tools however. Visualization tools that can convey the complexity, diversity and richness while at the same time helping us making sense.

Trying to find meaningful visualizations for making sense of networks

NodeXL
Several of those tools are popping up and becoming available to us individually, so we can reflect on our own networks and how they help us navigate the information abundance around us.
One of those tools is NodeXL.

Marc Smith, whom I have the pleasure of knowing for some years now, is a sociologist who used to be with Microsoft Research. There he, amongst other things, helped data mine use-net for behavioral patterns ('answer-persons', 'hobby horse riders', 'trolls', 'noobs' etc), and helped develop things such as an e-mail triage tool based on how important the sender seems to be to you considering your past e-mailing behavior.

Working independently now at Connected Action he brings us NodeXL, which he is pushing into the direction of providing free and open tools that support the analysis of social media usage. In other words to help us analyze the global networks we weave and see how we use them to navigate the world. Part of that analysis is seeing who is in your network (not everybody might be visible to you, we see most of our network relations as 'spokes' in a wheel with us as center, and only for a limited part do we see the connections of our connections), and another is helping us see how your connections are connected between eachother.

The Twitter-users that mention the word 'digg'
As an example of what NodeXL can do see the pic below, visualizing the people and their connections who used the word 'digg' over a certain time frame on Twitter. Can you see yourself doing that for a topic you care about (#opendata e.g.)? Or for your brand (who is talking about it, and how are they clustered)? Well with a bit of effort you can do that by yourself now. See the video below for instructions on how to do that (and read this posting by Marc).

Digg mentions in Twitter network

2009 - November - NodeXL - Demo - Mapping Twitter Social Networks "Digg" from Marc Smith on Vimeo.

Who is talking about open data?
Marc asked me what topic I would be interested in and helped me to construct a network map of Twitter users for that topic.
So I suggested the topic 'open data' and below is a first picture of that network. Marc gave me the data set so I will be exploring that myself in the coming days, and blog about my findings.

The network of people on Twitter talking about Open Data

Tags: marcsmith, networks, nodexl, opendata, opendatanetwork, socialobjects, twitter, visualization