WE_PK_BA_210823

[00:00:00] Peter Kaminski: Um, I don't know that I have anything to say.

[00:00:19] Wendy Elford: Um, I can't, I'm going to encourage you. What about the jumping around piece and the channels that Bill shared?

[00:00:29] Peter Kaminski: Um, I, uh, so, so Bill had shared that it feels nowadays, like we're having. Conversations that start in a channel that does is' isn't appropriate and may or may not end up bridging over to another channel and may or may not end up getting to the channel that it should actually be going on and to the point where he doesn't even know like something simple, like I wonder where I could talk about this text sniper tool that's so cool. Does that go in tools, [00:01:00] and technology, or does it go someplace else where we started? Does it go on textual? Does it go on? So, um,

[00:01:06] Bill Anderson: That's exactly my problem yesterdaythe,

[00:01:18] Peter Kaminski: so it, I guess it, it can feel confusing, um, and not safe to start talking and not feel like you're in the right place or that people are going to be listening to you or the right. People are being amazed. Listen to you. But another way I think of it is that even if we have,

[00:01:43] I guess, let me back up a sec. Um, my observation from watching people use email for a long time. Um, we used to have, uh, uh, netiquette that said you should change the subject lines of your emails when the subject changes in the email. And [00:02:00] a few of us pedants could do that. Um, very few people could actually do it.

[00:02:05] Um, and it, it's not reflective of the way people really work because, uh, it's really common. They have not one subject, uh, in an email, but like 10, um, and they shift. And it's hard to tell when you go from one subject to another subject, um, natural conversations are not sure. Um, that's uh, but yeah, if you want chunking to happen, I guess, so then if you want chunking to happen, you kind of have to chunk, uh, after the fact, rather than during the fact.

[00:02:48] So then you need tools and processes to manage that. So when I think of there's like, it's easy, it's easy to say. And some people do say this too [00:03:00] many channels in this chat system. There's too many conversations. I don't know where the conversations are happening. Um, it makes me want to throw up my hands.

[00:03:08] I think that. I look at that the other way around the glass, I can look at a kind of glass, half full thing and say, these conversations are happening and maybe they're not quite in the right place, or maybe they're not quite structured the right way, but thank goodness that we're having the conversations.

[00:03:26] Um, so, um, one solution, which I think is a bad solution is to say, well, we're going to be thread Nazis and. You can only talk about certain things in certain channels. Um, and we'll kick you over to the other channel if you're not in the right place. Um, that's a poor solution.

[00:03:46] Um, another solution, the more generative solution I think is to have a.

[00:03:56] Has kind of a group [00:04:00] social group social awareness. I was going to say self-awareness, um, uh self-awareness and in a social sounds of things that are happening and. Mention to people could you also cross post that to a different channel or, um, in another channel you might say, Hey, there's an interesting conversation happening over here.

[00:04:23] So, and then, uh, even better than that is kind of what we have promised ourselves to do with the Wiki, the conversation wiki but we haven't quite gotten to yet start garden conversations into uh, into curated and, um, uh, less chaotic places. So the, the kind of thing I like to see happen is, um, I called it for OGM forum.

[00:04:52] I called it beat reporting. Um, uh, it would be really cool if somebody got paid actually, uh, [00:05:00] to kind of watch what was going on, uh, in the channels over the course of a week and write up a little newspaper. Uh, broadsheet, you know, um, Bill's talking about, uh, text over here and Bentley is talking about, um, the, the zoom chat formater are over there.

[00:05:20] Uh, and Hey, a reminder folks, public service reminder, here's where you go to talk about certain things or feature channel this week is textual and things that happen in textual and maybe the things that shouldn't happen in textual, they should happen in tools and technology or in coffee shop or, or whatever.

[00:05:38] So, so in general, we can make things better by, um, adding overhead functions, um, and reflective functions. Um, and. In our society over the past 20 or 25 years, we try not really hard not to do that. Um, it's a general, general purpose [00:06:00] problem. Uh, it happens everywhere. Yeah.

[00:06:03] Bill Anderson: Could you go back and say that again,

[00:06:04] please?

[00:06:06] Uh, which part.

[00:06:10] Um,

[00:06:14] Wendy Elford: can I just say that if you don't actually have to repeat it because we know we've got it. And I think that should be part of our process is said

[00:06:23] Peter Kaminski: okay. To be, I think self-reflective during. Um, so I, I think that we're not doing and it's happened, you know, I feel like netiquette used to kind of help people be more self-reflective and.

[00:06:37] And help each other in society in general, um, over the past 20 years or so. Um, and especially our, our experiences with technology companies like Google have learned that they can abdicate customer support, um, and replace it [00:07:00] with essentially automation. Um, so if you're having a problem with Google, Google is going to notice that some subset of all of their users are having that problem and they're going to fix it without you asking them

[00:07:13] and without them telling you that they fixed it. Um, uh, society has become self-service and we've all been compartmentalized into having to do self-service on our computers. Um, and with the web. We have to figure out what's wrong and we have to fix it. And so we've lost this kind of social interface, social, um, social care that I feel like we used to have more and especially in community, computer media com communications, we've learned not to have it, so we don't have reflective intervals after we talk. And after we have conversations, a great example of this is the OGM there's. [00:08:00] Where each call is super generative and covers a lot of topics and, and actually it gets recorded and the chats get saved and those don't get back, get back nobody gets back to those to harvest them. Um, and I'm not picking on OGM or the Thursday calls. Um, that is a really. Example of this. It's happening everywhere, you know, so it's, it's what we've been doing it with what happens at Mattermost there's a flurry of conversations that flutter around and fall like snow. And nobody goes around to do the gardening afterward to make, um, second order learning in third order learning.

[00:08:45] Wendy Elford: Okay. Okay. So this is really, I think really great because I think just the process of saying things and I love the fact I've ha I've seen this so many times as you say that you haven't got anything to [00:09:00] contribute and you just gave the greatest piece of information. It was really good. I think this is powerful.

[00:09:06] Um, and so what we need now to do is to say the, what we would do, and we've got 15 minutes maybe to do it is how do we, how do we put a bit of will to actually do the thing that we say we're going to do, which is to bring this to some sort of reflection point because we have got the recording and I know there will be odd bits and pieces there.

[00:09:29] Um, part of the challenge, I'm just talking second. Order learning here. And this is a tool thing is getting good transcriptions and this work and time in that. Um, but I don't think we will make good progress as a group or a team or as individuals unless we sort of double down on what we know independently here.

[00:09:51] Um, keeping these exchanges going is really important. Um, and. I think that the [00:10:00] technical part of actually getting a good transcript, um, is a little tricky, but Otter doesn't do too bad a job. We could throw that in. I mean, all of us are quite articulate as we add diction is good. So Otter often doesn't do too bad a job, but I would say that someone's got to spend an hour cleaning up or, maybe half an hour, cleaning up a transcript.

[00:10:27] So we've got 20 minutes worth how much time since we started recording? 15, 10,

[00:10:34] Peter Kaminski: probably 15, I would guess. And different thing to do. Um, uh, maybe a complimentary thing to do. Uh, we've got typed notes. Um, and the way I would process these natively is to bring up Scapple um, Uh, Wendy do you might use Miro and just start throwing some of the key phrases, [00:11:00] um, onto a map and then start to connect them and

[00:11:04] Wendy Elford: decorate.

[00:11:04] See if I do it on Miro, you bring up scaffold. What I'll do is I'll get the conversation and see if Miro will actually turn that into little pasted notes. Um,

[00:11:16] Peter Kaminski: I don't, I don't think I would I don't think I would paste it wholesale. Um, I might, uh, collaboratively, like that's what I would do is talk through, uh, have one person show their map and talk through the notes and capture things, um, on essentially a shared whiteboard.

[00:11:37] Wendy Elford: Yeah. I think, I think both have value, different things turn up, but I'm just from a tech point of view. I just want to try and throw mud on the wall. You start the, the other one, you start the Scapple one and I'll start the other one. And we'll see what turns up because anything is better than nothing. [00:12:00] And at least we've made one step forwards with three people who care.

[00:12:11] Bill Anderson: So Pete, in response to your description of how. Things are multi-channel and kind of all over in Mattermost. I mean, I know, you know, this piece about putting links in different places is something that can be learned. Doesn't seem to be too difficult. Maybe that's something I should just do. Just figure out how to take the work and do it.

[00:12:40] Which creates a kind of blink thing. So that's nice. And I agree with you. I don't think we should.

[00:12:48] I don't think we should. If we want to see what will happen, we have to let see what will happen here. I think the idea of trying to do, we're going to put all the tools stuff together under this big tool umbrella, we'll [00:13:00] make a very, just, everything will be imprecise.

[00:13:08] Yep. Um, I would say the fact that it makes me uneasy is okay, but, um, for me, it's not so much that I'm worry about where should I put it although sometimes I do. Mostly it's like, where would the, where does, where would it be valuable? Yeah. You know, I use the coffee shop for stuff. I get at the coffee shop I think like we should all listen to this little post from Mary Oliver and this is the kind of thing I would do in a coffee shop.

[00:13:39] So that's what I'm using that for. Um, in fact, I should write this down. I've got to go back right. Last night, I had a very big struggle, big from posting something and I almost put it in off topic, but I somehow felt it wasn't even appropriate for Mattermost and I should dig that out and find out why.[00:14:00]

[00:14:02] And then I didn't, I thought maybe you should be in Metta and I'm like, I. I. So this might be a thing about not feeling safe. I don't really care if somebody says, yeah, well, Bill, you know, so I found a bender of air in the corner was all right. I don't care about that, but it's trying to like, could there be some value, some value to do this?

[00:14:25] Because I feel like we're in this world that, you know, this online world that you hinted at Wendy and your comments of all these little pieces and parts. And I would, I don't know, we have to be able to make sense of being there.

[00:14:46] Wendy Elford: And I, I do think that these reflections that we're having are helping, because I'm thinking, are you an engineer by job? What job were you doing?

[00:14:57] Bill Anderson: I was a software [00:15:00] engineer for Xerox. I studied chemistry for 10 years and got a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Yes I was, but that would be a scientist, I suppose. Um, and then I did some international development pro bono work on scientific data policy.

[00:15:21] Wendy Elford: So in that I hear, um, I go back to the tools that I use and we're, we're now five minutes into our not gardening stories.

[00:15:30] So we're going to have to have some discipline around how we gate, keep around conversations.

[00:15:34] Peter Kaminski: But yeah, and the call's ending in seven and a half minutes, which is about the time Bill has to go anywhere. Yeah,

[00:15:40] Wendy Elford: that's right. So maybe we use it because we jumped, we jumped into the thing that you've quite rightly are experiencing, which I think is the well, I would want to honor is this piece around, where does the conversation fit?

[00:15:56] What should something be called and then stepping back and [00:16:00] thinking, I'm the observing that I'm uncomfortable about this, which is I think a really important step and then saying, is it trust? Is it something else? Is it to do with the fact. Maybe I'm broken and I'm not calling it the right thing, which is a sort of angst, existential angst thing.

[00:16:17] Um, and all these things are stopping us. And I think that actually doubling down on some of those would help us a lot because for example, um, with search and I know that my father was an engineer. That's why I asked that question. Is this the certainty? We want certainty that we're putting it in the right place or that it's not going to cause disorder.

[00:16:38] Um, and they're not certainties that we can have, because it will get renamed later, you have a conversation in an email and other things turn up, you know, Pete says he hasn't got something to contribute and he gives us the greatest bit of value and we are recording it and maybe we won't use something with it.

[00:16:57] There's always ironies and [00:17:00] paradoxes and, um Different things that turn up in these conversations. And that's why they're really good conversations. But we do need a process that says time, let's go back a little bit and see if we can make some rough shapes. So the next time we're not dancing around trying to reinvent the wheel.

[00:17:18] When in actual fact we were in quite a good place. Last time we just needed to double down on that one thing.

[00:17:24] So in five minutes, you know, I've got a Miro board up and I've learnt from a technical point of view that I need to know how much texts I can put up there if I do copy and paste. And if I'd done that in an Excel, Spreadsheet.

[00:17:39] If I'd written my notes in an Excel spreadsheet, I know that I can just drag them across, onto Miro and I have X number of, um, post-it notes. So that's the technical thing. For mapping. It would make a lot of difference. And if I was actually typing the notes where I was putting the lines if I was doing that in an Excel spreadsheet.

[00:17:58] If I did arrow down type [00:18:00] type arrow down top, top down top, top, then I can put it across in Miro sheet for Scapple, what would you need to do?

[00:18:10] Bill Anderson: Well, for me, Scapple is more like. A. Pete might be able to do this real time. I would use Scapple as, or I would like take these notes. If I were going to do them, if I am kind of the secretary this week, I'm going to produce the summary of the conversation. I might then take notes and then put together. You know, pick terms kind of like what Peter's done, pick terms, and then add in from the kind of minutes things I thought were valuable to be written down because when I come and take everything down. Yeah.

[00:18:48] Wendy Elford: But part of it is I was doing sort of more real time word for word, but I think if we look back, there would be a lot of times where we actually wrote the same thing.

[00:18:56] Like, um, What was the [00:19:00] channel Nazis or whatever it was they'd, they'd just phrases. And we're thinking, right. Do I want to be like that? And the answer to the question is probably no, because we've used language that forces us to make a decision about what we like. And if the answer to the question is no, that we've got a different design to make. So if it's then letting it spread across the different channels, because that's the organic thing, and that is the metaphor I'm using, um, then you need a different way of collecting it. And I think what we've just said, then in terms of how we make sense of the conversation afterwards, I think the fact that it took place in a place where we could go back and find it and we have recorded it, we fought two artifacts we can use in design. One of which is scattered. But Bill, would you rather have taken your notes in Scapple and not on the channel?

[00:19:51] Bill Anderson: If I was just taking notes, I'd just type in likethe channel is fine, you know? Cause I would just produce a string of [00:20:00] whatever. I mean a big set of words. Then I would, then if I were going to write minutes, I'd go along with the help.

[00:20:08] I'd read this thing three times and find out what, what would, what would. That's the trouble, you know, when you do it and one person it is going to be here is how I see and want to reflect what happened in this conversation. Because it's like, right. I can't escape the fact that I'm going to pick, or this was really cool.

[00:20:29] This phrase. and not some other one.,

[00:20:33] and what you hear and remember is a part of where you were focusing at the time of the conversation, but we still do have the real words. And so we've got the design debt of Bill going back and understanding or revisiting the text three times and then making another add artifact. We've got Wendy wanting to do a visual mapping because I've got this screen that I need to then go back into to do my version of that on a different tool. And [00:21:00] I know that I could have done it on Miro, but then it's not in the conversation and it's not linear. And then we've got this design debt of the imperfect, um, transcription, some of which will be quite good because all of us are articulate. So we've got a couple of different departure points there,

[00:21:20] This would be a great wiki page when

[00:21:24] Peter Kaminski: When we get around to it, we've got 90 seconds left. I'm just saying, we just say goodbye.

[00:21:31] Bill Anderson: All right, goodbye. Thank you so much.

[00:21:34] Peter Kaminski: Thank you, Bill.

[00:21:35] Bill Anderson: Let me know how I can help, but I think a Wiki page, we have some stuff in a Wiki. We should just try and pick one. Yep.

[00:21:43] Wendy Elford: The conversations, Wiki, and make this about exchanges and keeping the exchanges survivable. And useful. So it's the processes that get us that. So we could do reflection next time and not add more content. There will be more content that [00:22:00] turns up when I say that. Evil

[00:22:11] Bill Anderson: See you tomorrow morning.