Before I forget……

I’m just back home from KM4Dev2007 and so completely fatigued I’m convinced it must be the right time to throw some thoughts into the blog, although my current efforts to create an ergonomic work environment out of a deck chair and a couple of boxes are failing miserably. It is amazing how distracted a person can be in an empty house whose only furniture is an air mattress, a deck chair and a floor lamp – and did I mention the boxes?

Oh well, on to the real content, but I warn those who may be looking for something concrete to prepare for disappointment…it will take me a long time to realize what I’ve learned, felt and talked about over the past few days, but there are some highlights…

Wearing a participant hat at a workshop is something I haven’t done in a while. I really looked forward to be able to engage in dialogues much more than I could as a facilitator, and I was not disappointed. But one thing that surprised me was in addition to extra room for dialogue, I also had room to observe the workshop as a historical moment in the life of km4dev and in the lives of the individuals flowing in and out of the community and the workshop! It gave me all sorts of impressions about km4dev as a kind of organism that is somehow becoming more complex, yet stronger and with the capacity to generate great insights and to exist as something that is not just the people who collectively make up what we call the community, but a social space that itself influences the debates, the feelings, the sense of common purpose, the capacity for the workshop and the community to present itself to, absorb feedback from, and respond to questions, frustrations, and ultimately its own need to grow and change despite recognising all the dangers implied by such change (one of which to me is that it necessarily becomes km4dev communities, with greater or lesser engagement with each other, rather than one big community).

For me part of the magic was the mix of old and new: people who have been there for a while, those who’ve just shown up; ideas that have been bounced around here and there for years, and new spins on existing dialogues; older people and younger people sharing experience and enthusiasm. Sometimes it hurt, but not everything that’s good for you feels good….

KM4Dev2007 showed the community to me in a new way, and it gives me the feeling that I can have a deeper understanding of how it works if I just persist a little bit. I’m sorry that, like every social event, whether face-to-face or virtual, the workshop can’t help being exclusive because it just isn’t possible to have everyone there who might have an interest in being there, and anyway if everyone were there, it would be a dramatically different event. I’m also starting to appreciate as a human being, that the fragmentation of experience which happens by having different collections of people from the same community together at different times is part of what keeps that community enough on its toes that it doesn’t stagnate.

For those who were there, thanks for all the interactions, emotions, thoughts and trust. For those who weren’t, see you next time! For both, a small nugget of something learned this time around: several people in different sessions mentioned either their sense of confusion around what was being discussed at the time, or their sense of others being confused, but the interesting things I heard were that many people were happy and confused at the same time, or that they saw the value, if not the need for such confusion. So, I offered a word to describe some of that:

Confusiasm

Riff Fullan