Facilitate Proceedings » social media

The Art of Steering a Virtual Session

Julia Young — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:50:36 +0000

Recently I responded to a question from one of my LinkedIn professional groups. Someone asked: “During web conferences involving several locations, I often find myself sending SMS’s to my boss at the same time so as to steer or modify the meeting/discussion on the fly – does anybody else do this? Yes, indeed I do.

This is the Brain on iPads

Danuta McCall — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:52:21 +0000

In last Saturday’s New York Times, an article entitled Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price paints a startling picture. The main character is your typical 30-something small business owner, who falls asleep every night with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and goes online as soon as he wakes up. Seems his family has noticed that he gets downright “crotchety until he gets his fix”.

How To Use Social Networking Tools To Strengthen Virtual Collaboration

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:56:54 +0000

I recently plunged (well, maybe dipped a toe or two) into the world of Twitter. It was inevitable, despite some of my early protestations. Pretty much all of my colleagues are doing it, as are my competitors, and more and more of my clients. Social networking (SN) tools like Twitter really are opening up new ways for virtual workers to connect, communicate and collaborate. SN tools do what email, instant messaging and other more traditional communications means cannot: They foster emergence, meaning that people and groups can naturally and easily link together based on their common interests, skills or profiles, often with people they never even realized existed.

Of course, any tool can be disruptive in a group if used in inappropriate ways. Based on my work with clients and colleagues who work as part of geographically dispersed teams, here are just a few helpful ways to use SN tools.

Which Collaboration Tool Is Right For The Task At Hand?

Editor — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:35:50 +0000

We’re trying to answer this question from a facilitator perspective. Web collaboration tools should be a part of every facilitator’s toolkit, but knowing which one to use to support each aspect of the group process is key. Just as using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail wouldn’t work; using a web meeting tool for the wrong purpose could yield results you don’t intend. Here is a link to our first attempt at mapping different categories of web collaboration tools to different purposes, but we think that this concept would benefit from “collaborative” input. We invite you to suggest additions, subtractions and comments to make this chart more accurate and complete.

Here is the thought process behind this project:

Where Facilitation and Social Networks Intersect

Editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 10:25:15 +0000

An essential aspect of the philosophy behind social media is community ownership of information. The advantages of this are the wide ranging input contributed by interactive members and the speed at which responses appear when the network is active. The disadvantages lie in the uncertainty about the accuracy of the information that is put out and the difficulty of sifting through the sprawl to find what is relevant to you. It becomes challenging to maintain focus, direction and deliberation.

How do social media really impact collaboration? Sharing information builds relationships around a common interest. From this “community of interest” can emerge a collaborative solution or work product. What transforms it from community sharing to collaboration is an outcome-oriented facilitation process. And that’s where facilitators come into the picture.
Several facilitators weigh in.

Welcome to Our Corner of the Blogosphere

Editor — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:15 +0000

Facilitate Proceedings recently morphed into its present weblogged form, having existed in prior lives as an e-zine and a listserv. We launched this blog because we couldn’t find any place where discussion of collaborative technology takes place alongside a discussion of group process and human behavior (you’ve surely heard about the perennial triangle of workplace productivity – People, Process and Technology. When any one of these is dysfunctional, the organizational stool topples over).
Along the way, we’ve encountered wonderful resources that are full of good advice on everything from blog etiquette to finding other blogs with similar interests.