Another podcast!

lloyd-bcnfpToday I was at #barcampnfp – a rather fun unconference for people working in charities and other not (just) for profit organisations. I was flying the flag for TaskSquad, the fantastic youth employment startup that Mary McKenna is leading, and where I am doing some work at the moment.

I really enjoyed the sessions I attended, and will blog more about some of the topics later on. However, one of the best bits of the day was getting to hang out with Lloyd Davis, one of my favourite and best people, and while we chatted we switched on an audio recorder and did a podcast.

The mp3 is here for you to download and listen to. Alternatively, head over to Lloyd’s post where there are some show notes.

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

The Workplace – Q and A site for your career

workplace

I recently came across The Workplace – a question and answer site for people who go to work.

It’s built on the Stack Exchange platform – which has considerable success in building knowledge communities, particularly around techy topics. I personally find the WordPress one an invaluable resource.

In The Workplace, people are asking questions about how to deal with job interviews, difficult conversations with colleagues, bad managers and how best to use certain tools and processes.

It’s a fun idea and certainly seems to resonate with a big group of people as it is a fairly active community. Why not take a look?

So, you think you want social media training?

whiteboardIncreasingly, following a bit of a chat, it turns out you don’t.

I’ve been delivering training on digital tools, including social media, for a fair few years now. I’d like to think I’m quite good at it, and that those who leave my training sessions get a lot out of it.

One of the most frustrating things, though, is when at the end of some training, a learner will ask ‘so, will we actually be able to use this stuff?’ or ‘this has been great, but until I get these websites blocked I won’t be able to use anything I’ve learned’.

Gack!

What’s happening is that there is an acknowledgement within an organisation that they need some additional digital capacity, so they send people on a course. Trouble is, the strategy, or vision, isn’t in place for the organisation – so those skills are going to go to waste.

Instead, if you want to spend some money on this stuff, it’s better to spend it first on developing some idea of where digital fits into your organisation.

One of the first commissions WorkSmart has received has been to do just this. The original brief was for a series of workshops explaining how to use the popular social media tools. Discussing it, though, everyone became aware that there was a piece of work to do first.

So, we’re running an agile little project, made up of a couple of workshops and some online deliberation and collaboration. The aim at the end will be to have a draft strategy document, outlining how the organisation can use digital tools and techniques – including stuff like agile project management and user centred design.

Along with that there will also be a process defined for rolling this kind of capability out across the organisation, using internal expertise rather than bought in training. Hopefully this means that the learning activity will be scalable and sustainable, and most importantly of all, everyone will know why they are doing it.

Working openly on the web

dougbelshawThere was a nice guest post from Doug Belshaw from Mozilla on Brian Kelly’s blog last week.

Entitled What Does Working Openly on the Web Mean in Practice?, it told us a bit about Mozilla’s culture of openness and how it ties into web based working.

Here’s a quick quote:

Working open is not only in Mozilla’s DNA but leads to huge benefits for the project more broadly. While Mozilla has hundreds of paid contributors, they have tens of thousands of volunteer contributors — all working together to keep the web open and as a platform for innovation. Working open means Mozilla can draw on talent no matter where in the world someone happens to live. It means people with what Clay Shirky would call cognitive surplus can contribute as much or as little free time and labour to projects as they wish. Importantly, it also leads to a level of trust that users can have in Mozilla’s products. Not only can they inspect the source code used to build the product, but actually participate in discussions about its development.

But you really ought to go and read the whole thing.