Thursday, October 09, 2008

Debriefing dotmocracy and speed geeking

Once we had finished talking for an hour about D-Groups, Google analytics, River of life and incentives for knowledge sharing, we debriefed the two methods: dotmocracy and speed geeking. The reactions to the two were as follows:

Dotmocracy
  • Good for settings where communities are illiterate (vote on pictures and graphs)
  • Because it is open voting, those who vote at the end have a picture of which topics are leading and thus can skew the results. Is this really "democracy"?
  • Some participants were discussing beforehand which topics to vote on and this raised the question of possible "vote rigging"!
  • It was unclear how to decide the number of dots to hand out.
  • Some of the topics could have been grouped together (for example: CMS, Joomla, Wikis) before we started to vote on them. The groupings were done in the open space technology process.
Speed geeking
  • This method provides a snapshot of different things in short time. If one is interested to know more, one can go back to it to look at in further detail.
  • It is a good way to learn a lot if the person leading each session is an expert.
  • Time limit helps to get a lot out and keeps the questions and discussion focused.
  • Some participants felt that it was an efficient method but they were forced to move to groups that were not necessarily of interest. Like OST, they could not be butterflies!
  • Those who were leading the session felt that they had lost the opportunity to learn and participate in other topics. A solution to resolve this could have been that each one facilitates two but not necessarily all four discussions. On the other hand, it also provided them with the opportunity to learn a lot through the repetition
  • Some participants felt that this was a good method to learn about different KS tools.
  • Some participants appreciated being given the chance to volunteer to be a facilitator.
  • This technique is extremely scalable, and larger the group and higher the number of discussion topics, the more people have choice to go to what they are really interested in.
We could use this during the Knowledge Fair?

1 comment:

Dean @ eco2oh said...

Hi Gauri, thanks for sharing so prolifically and openly. This is really great stuff and interesting to see what eExtension tools people are using. I have subscribed and look forward to reading more. Dean