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In case you didn't get the word yet, the next 2-day Fundamentals of Dialogue Mapping Workshop will be held at SRI in Menlo Park, CA on Weds and Thurs, Feb. 20 & 21, 2008. The usual colleague and reviewer discounts are still being offered. I'm not teaching these workshops very frequently these days, so if you know of people who would be interested, please forward this note to them, or send them to http://www.cognexus.org/id18.htm for more information about the workshop.
We have changed the name of this email group to DialogueMapping ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DialogueMapping/). The old name, VIMS (for Visual Issue Management System), just doesn't mean anything any more. Posts to this group should now be emailed to DialogueMapping <at> yahoogroups.com, and any links to the old Yahoo URL should be fixed.
Our free public Introduction to Dialogue Mapping webinars have turned out to be very successful. Since last July I've been hosting a monthly webinar to introduce newcomers to the basic ideas of wicked problems, shared display, and IBIS, and to let them experience Compendium facilitation directly. We hold to an hour and 15 minutes, and there's usually quite a bit of interaction, which I've come to enjoy immensely. We have space for 15 people and registration is required: http://www.cognexus.org/webinar.htm
The virtual classes that we held during the DM Certification Program last year were so successful that I'm going to try offering a new virtual learning program: The Dialogue Mapping Skills Webinar Series. Starting in March, I will host a series of four 1½ hour webinars on Wednesday evenings - for workshop graduates only - to focus on facilitation, IBIS, and Compendium skills and advanced topics. For more info please send an email to celeste <at> cognexus.org.
Finally, I have some very exciting news on the software front. For years I have wished for more effective ways to share with participants the maps we cocreate in Dialogue Mapping sessions. Compendium's Web Outline export is compact and has all the text, including node details, and the Web Map export has the actual graphical maps that the participants engaged with, but neither format is interactive: participants can't comment or expand on the session maps directly.
Attempts to use Compendium itself to share session maps over the Internet have failed because user interactions are just wwwaaayyy to slow, due to the way the Compendium code is structured. However, funding from one of my clients over the past few months is resulting in a new version of Compendium that for most user actions is fast enough to be quite usable. In a few weeks my client will begin 'beta' testing of this new version, and as we get the kinks ironed out we will give the new version back to the Compendium Institute for distribution to the public.
As a result, we can look forward to a time when a natural part of the dialogue mapping process is to make available to the participants full interactive access to their session maps (password-protected), so that project work can continue asynchronously between meetings!
As the software effort gathers momentum I look forward to a completely web-based IBIS mapping tool (code named IBIS Online 8-)) that supports both same-time and different-time collaborative sensemaking, and which will be robust enough for both large distributed project teams, in the corporate setting, and structured discourse on a wide range of wicked problems in the public arena. We will probably start with my hot-button issues, sustainability and climate change. If you are interested in being involved in this next phase of the evolution of CogNexus' work please drop me a line.
Oh, and don't forget to sign up for a workshop or webinar ... and tell your friends!
Sincerely,
Jeff
CogNexus Institute ... Collaborative Display, Collective Intelligence
http://cognexus.org Phone: +1-707-256-3425 Fax: +1-707-256-3903
1037 Juarez St., Napa, CA 94559 USA
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