Nancy White on Sharepoint

I've long said one can work online successfully in almost any environment; it's the approach, not the tool, that makes the difference. Yes, I have my preferences, but they vary a bit by the need of a group, and I've only rarely encountered a tool that just didn't seem to work anywhere I wanted to be.

If you don't know her, Nancy White is one of the leaders in the online facilitation space (she started and still moderates the onlinefacilitation yahoogroup, and she teaches an excellent and very intensive course in online work) as well as a number of other fields. I've known her for about a decade, enjoyed working with her a number of times, and come to trust her judgment highly.

She recently posted Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience, which claims "SharePoint is a silo builder, not buster." I've never even seen Sharepoint, but I do sense that her words are worth considering when you're considering a tool to foster community.

Check out other parts of her blog, too; you might find you like it.

Incidentally, David Woolley's Thinkofit Web Conferencing Review has long been a classic place to see what online tools exist.

System dynamics in practice: lessons learned

Drew Jones, Don Seville, and Dana Meadows of the Sustainability Institute wrote Resource Sustainability In Commodity Systems: The Sawmill Industry In The Northern Forest. That provides a good example of a way to use system dynamics models (it's of course not the only way).

I like that paper for several reasons. The model seemed good (at least from the explanation; I haven't explored the model yet), and the explanation of the model and its implications seemed good. What may be especially interesting to some is that they spent the last third of the paper talking about what they learned about the human side of the equation: how people responded to their work, and what they learned from that. The top of page 26 seems noteworthy, although you'll probably have to read the preceding 25 pages to make good sense of it.

Guiding principles, ethics, and values

As a member of the American Evaluation Association, I thought it only appropriate to post a link to their Guiding Principles for Evaluators on my Links page. I've also posted a link to the IAF Statement of Values and Code of Ethics for Facilitators, which I helped craft, there. Even though I am not a member of the IAF, I use that as my guide when I am in a facilitation role.

I'm posting these so you can see some of the standards to which I hold myself and so that I can have a ready link to those as a frequent refresher. Perhaps they will be useful for some of you, too.