Social Artistry

What is a Network? A network is a system of social ties that links people together in a particular context, generally around topics that interest them or types of connections (i.e., people I went to college with, people I work with, people from my church, etc.) Networks of organizations have: Distributed authority--no centralized decision-making figure, no "boss." Typically have coordinators who help network members decide what they want to do and help them do it. Negotiated agreements about how to accomplish the work of the network.

I like Jane Hart's use of the word "smart" when it comes to the transformation happening in the workplace (other places as well).  The revolution that is social media means that everyone now can have access to the Social Web and a range of services and applications to support their own as well as their team's learning, performance and productivity.

"Every single human being is creative. The biggest challenge of the creative age is to lift the bottom up and encourage a prosperous, vibrant and sustainable community for all." -Richard Florida.Richard Florida and the Creative Class Group have donated a variety of services to several charitable organizations including:

I proposed a lecture about my experiences using social media in teaching and learning, leading up to a proposed project: students would join me in two face-to-face seminars of about two hours; between face-to-face meetings we would meet online via forum, wiki, and one live session with the Blackboard Collaborate platform. We would be joined by others online who might not have attended the lecture and/or face to face seminars, with the objective of creating a living resource for self-organized groups of self learners -- a peeragogy handbook that would complement existing resources such as the book in progress by Joe Arided and Charles Danoff, including guidelines and annotated resource guides to methods, theories, tools, examples, and more.

After all, a healthy community is a basic premise through which deep learning and meaningful work come to life.  And yet it has been the messiness, the shifting, emergent nature of geographic communities and online communities outside the structure of semesters, grades, classes, disciplines, departments and majors that has really brought home for me how and why we need story to make sense out of the maelstrom of sensation and information-to slow down the rush of impressions, to make us confront our biases and fears and habits, and how we need storytelling to connect us and to build trust and curiosity and to push us past the façade of what we think we know so we can immerse ourselves in meaningful, creative work to bring better worlds into being. 

Communities of practice and strategic capabilities Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of social learning theory, communities of practice, and their application to organizations. He has authored and co-authored articles and books on the topic. Etienne's work is influencing both theory and practice in a wide range of disciplines. Cultivating communities of practice is recognized as a key component of a learning strategy in a rapidly growing number of organizations across private and public sectors, including business, government, international development, healthcare, and education.

A Knowledge Cafe is a means of bringing a group of people together to have an open, creative conversation on a topic of mutual interest to surface their collective knowledge, to share ideas and insights and to gain a deeper understanding of the subject and the issues involved. This ultimately, leads to action in the form of better decision making and innovation and thus tangible business outcomes.

W H A T   I S   S O C I A L   A R T I S T R Y? Social Artistry is the art of enhancing human capacities in the light of social complexity. It seeks to bring new ways of thinking, being and doing to social challenges in the world. 

Through Nancy's post and my own research into social artistry, I came up with a few definitions that I think tie together Etienne Wenger in a comment on David Wilcox's blog says that social artistry is "knowing how to use who you are as a vehicle for opening spaces for learning. . .it's about being able to use who I am to take my community to a new level of learning and performance."

I then tracked tags to try and read and comment on most of the blogs that either blogged in general on the #socialartist idea or took up my challenge. Here are a few of the links (and yes, I'm still catching up commenting on some of them! DO look at the comments in these posts! Lots to think about)

Engagement is the individual and collective choice of how we choose to be together. It is to collectively create the power to cause a breakthrough in the social capital of community. This kind of engagement begins with a shift in language, which correlates with a shift in context. The language and subsequent conversations that occur in the public debate and when citizens are assembled have the power to shift the experience of our future.