Happy New Year, bootcampers! I’m currently planning the next Changemakers Bootcamp pilot, and I’m pondering some changes. I’d love your ideas and feedback. Briefly:
- Change the name to Collaboration Bootcamp.
- Make it eight weeks instead of six.
- Stricter requirements around participation. Specifically, you can still miss up to two, but you can’t miss the first session.
- Concept papers. Lots of folks have requested more theory / teaching / Eugene-time. I am reluctant to do this during the two hours we have together, as I want to focus that time on practice. To try and accommodate, I’d like to write a series of two-page concept papers for everything we do at Bootcamp. I’m always willing to have followup conversations after the sessions, preferably here but also scheduled individually.
I’m anxious to innovate around the last point above. It’s flattering that there’s a demand for more me-time, and I want to meet that demand, but I don’t want to fall back on traditional modes of “teaching.” Would love to hear people’s ideas.
Finally, @jessausinheiler has asked a number of times about the difference between Changemaker Bootcamp and my new website, Faster Than 20. Faster Than 20 is simply an online home for my writing and my experiments. Changemaker Bootcamp is one of my experiments. It has its own website, this water cooler, etc. There are reasons for this, but there are also challenges: Namely, a lot of the stuff on Faster Than 20 is directly relevant to Bootcamp, and the way it’s currently setup requires people to go to two different places (an example of bad use of online group physics).
It’s always a tradeoff, but I want to experiment with that line. As a small step, I’m thinking about making this water cooler part of Faster Than 20 rather than exclusively for Bootcamp. It would allow me to broaden the participant list as well. What do you all think?
As a bigger step, I’m thinking about dissolving this website entirely, and just integrating the content with the Faster Than 20 website. Thoughts?
Brooking 4:50 pm on January 13, 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Awesome timing Eugene & thought-provoking for sure. Also seems like a great prompt for a power conversation and perhaps this will come up a bit in our networks discussion tomorrow!
-Brooking
Rebecca 1:47 am on January 14, 2014 Permalink | Log in to Reply
This is really great Eugene. Very sage while useful. I think what Brooking and I will be focusing on tomorrow has a lot to do with you’re concluding sentence. “Starting with these questions [around power] will help you better understand the true meaning behind the many ingredients of successful networks β the importance of relationship-building, of sharing, of diversity, of distributing control, of openness, and so forth. It will give you a broader perspective on the structures β both implicit and explicit β that make your network perform.”
We are looking to spend the session building more shared understanding around those ingredients, why they’re so important. In some ways your power post offers a blanket answer to the Why, but we’re eager to sift through people’s different experiences and see what wisdom we all have on the characteristics of high-performing networks!
Curtis Ogden has a great piece on this as well. He frames it as network thinking, but I think it addresses ingredients and characteristics more than just thinking: http://interactioninstitute.org/blog/2011/12/14/network-thinking/#more-7092