Room1 | reboot11 – 6 comments
Rethink Value Creation: Camps
as a platform to catalyse creativity and enforce action
Camps, from military bootcamps to Barcamps, DevCamps to Burining man have always had a very particular nature to them. But we have rarely interconnected the features of these sometimes very different formats.
Camps could become platforms that enable a totaly different way of value creation, which is much more dynamic than current project management environments.
Let us create a platform to openly and collaboratively develope modules and formats in order to drive change.
6 comments
Camps are an ingredient, not the recipe
Kim writes:
interest fades unless you arrange a new camp.
So we constantly need to set up new camps, where people can meet.
That makes sense. Communities need things to emerge, and to continue to thrive: rhythm, evolution, different spaces, different levels of engagement, value for its members, internal and external perspectives, and a combination of feeling save and feeling excited.
Camps are a meeting space. Military bootcamps are a of the pressure cooker kind, forging bonds between theretofore strangers quickly, so they can serve as teams and units. Barcamps are spaces that, as Kim notes, can be used to set a rhythm for the emerging community to convene, but creates lasting relationships only after a longer time: you need to keep doing it. Burning Man is a space that creates a macro-rhythm for an entire subculture; in society in general things like Christmas and national holidays serve the same role.
Communities are much more dynamic than hierarchical organisations, hence camps as a platform are more dynamic than project management environments. Makes sense.
So would it be useful to look at camps (or Open Space gatherings etc) in terms of their role in community building (of any kind)? And what to take into account to be able to organize them well? I think so. If it's seen as an instrument in that wider community/network building context, not as a independent thing where the perceived benefits are somehow thought to be intrinsic to the format. I think it's the other way around.
Love the analogy of Burning Man to a "national" holiday
Burning Man is exactly pushing the envelope, and I'd love to have something like that on a global scale.
With governance, I also mean that leadership and facilitation is needed, I sort of find it appauling that commercial conferences, like reboot, doesn't live up to their responsobility, and maintain their (really it's "ours") property during the year.
I guess that's "our" job, but previous attempts has met with failure, like the rebooters group on Google Groups and the Jaiku channel.
Conclusion: online tools doesn't work, and I'm actually seeing them fail increasingly as people move to facebook (which isn't about sharing in the broad sense that I love) and twitter (which is "just" for fun, but useful because it's so friendy, and simple).
Context switch: Another thing is that the flashmob fad shows that you can organise people quickly, but I think this is already being embraced by corporations, and I hate the idea of a "sponsored flashmob".
Not sure whether there's failure, simply social efficiency
The fact that Reboot as a conference is not working as a banner for on-line interaction between conferences does not mean nothing exists in between, does it?
People don't stop being/seeing themselves as an extended family even though they never talk about Christmas from January to November.
Reboot (like Christmas) is an event that serves as a predictable meeting space. Reboot is not the shared context that makes up the community of people, it is a platform for the community to reaffirm shared context and tie in new relationships and connections (about half of Reboot attendants are new each year).
The community you are looking for exists, but does not name itself Reboot. I am in touch with a myriad of people throughout the year, who simply see Reboot as the June event to go to for face to face interaction. They feel connected, they feel part of the same scene, they work learn and talk together over a variety of channels in a variety of settings. It's simply not useful to call all that Reboot, as that's not what binds them together. Reboot is the expression, sometimes source, and certainly reconfirmation of those connections, not the linking pin, the raison d'etre for those connections.
Maintaining the energy of Reboot in some way, takes the shape of you and me making the effort to stay connected to those that we want to stay connected to. That takes some real effort, from both sides. And is therefore not as common. The lazy way out is always to simply show up at the next event, be it Reboot, or one of the Barcamps you mentioned.
You can be in very sparse contact during the year with your family, and still be welcomed back home and embraced come Christmas time.
As long as someone is making the effort of setting a rhythm with events (Reboots, Burning Mans, Barcamps, Christmasses), a large group of us can simply count on it as a way to maintaining ties within a community without spending too much effort ourselves.
So maybe the question is, if Reboot, as one of our camp sites during the year, ceases to exist, what will we do to fill the gap?
camps as a metaphor (and ingredient)
thanks for your comments and the input to the topic.
Ton is definitely right when he says that the format of camps as such is not the cure itself. Camps might just be an interesting metaphor that connects to empirical experiences of a lot of people that act as multiplicators and that are a plastic example how change can be brought about in the physical world.
In an offline world that seems to have forgotten to retranslate a lot of the change that happens online, to the offline world, we are in need to find ways to bring the loose ends together again and create spaces and environments where cutting edge ideas and concepts manifest themselves. Camps, in different forms and with different names, as a concept have proven itself over hundreds of years and have many elements and modules that can be reconfigured in various ways to create environments that can be custom-build around defined as well as open purposes. Therefore camps can be used for more than just community building and could be a conceptual as well as practical starting-point of how, with whom and where we create value in the future. As a lot of the paradigms change or have already changed that were the reason how we have structured our value creation system, Rigid company structures, hierarchies, fixed office space and so on are not apt anymore for our emerging new systems. Concepts such as co-working spaces are not enough either so we need metaphors and ideas how actually rapid prototype new ways and start a process that might eventually create these environments and spaces that enable new forms of value creation.
Lights, Camera, Action - build a tribe!
"We" need to fill the gap, but it's hard work, and I'm not about to hit the conference trail.
I find the conference trail to be lacking in "inclusion", it takes a long time to get integrated into the fabric of it, especially if you're a sideliner like me.
BarCamp is ALL (only) about inclusion, participation and learning.
In Copenhagen "we"'re trying to keep a flow, but "our" (my) bouble is very small, and probably not inclusive, even though I'd like to think so.
I'm keeping track of the flow under the heading of "BarCamp on Tour" : www.barcamp.dk/category/tags/-tour where the idea was to keep "something" flowing, based on IRL activities.
The idea is a spin-off of Henriette Webers', with whom I've coorganised BarCamp Copehagen, idea of a "rock-band", I think the rock-band needs a tour-bus, and that's what I'm trying to set up.
Mad props to "our" tribe, the "interesting mixed crowd", you know who you are!
(you're all familiar with the idea of the tribe, what I have in mind is inspired by Anarcho-Primitism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-Primitivism)
Sorry for drifting SO way off topic here, but that is my vision.
Would love to investigate that (as well)
I keep "Camps" close to my heart, and have helped organise two BarCamps in Copenhagen (www.barcamp.dk), the format is amazing , but what I've found difficult/frustrating has been the lack of continutity - the camps are in desperate need of "governance".
At the BarCamp.dk website, I've been trying to provide content, but the fact remains, that the interest fades unless you arrange a new camp.
So we constantly need to set up new camps, where people can meet.
What I find a bit annoying about the concept, is that it has forked out, and now is highly "topic" - I'm more interested in learning things I had NO idea I wanted to learn, and that's why I'm mostly a BarCamper.
In my mind, BarCamp is trying to teach us how to lead a simpler, villagelike life, where everybody are contributing and participating, with a focus on doing what each individual does best.
It has been frustrating for me to take part in camps, different from BarCamp, because people think they're attending a "real" conference.
So we need to educate people on what's expected from a (Bar)Camper - to me it was frustrating to have made a presentation at a "Camp", and really not getting any feedback from the audience, that's the main reason I'm attending/presenting.
Follow BarCamp in Copenhagen by subscribing to the feed here (yes, I'm adding feeds for reboot11 ;-)) www.barcamp.dk/view/updates/feed