Austin's unique "BE"

Friday, June 25, 2010

Converting Experience Into Expertise

As our Austin Equation community continues to pioneer the process for Scene Mapping and Stewarding, the Scene Lab meetings are being used to share lessons-learned to convert our experiences into expertise.

In the June 14th Scene Lab, we applied a variation of a fishbowl conversation to excavate experiences, knowledge and lessons from Brandi Clark Burton (Sustainability Scene Steward) and Bijoy Goswami (Entrepreneurship Scene Steward). In this format, a set of open-ended questions were posed to both, with the rest of the attending stewards and community members seated around them, and engaging in structured and broad dialog.

We discussed how each:
  • initially mapped their scene
  • collected feedback and critiques of their mapping work
  • convened discussion groups of scene participants
  • evangelizes for the mapping process and their scene
  • poses their 'elevator pitch' about their scene and the stewardship work
  • articulates their challenges and next steps
... and the discussion was unsurprisingly rich and enlightening. We've captured the conversation in notes and video and are distilling the shared lessons into collaborative documentation, which we will be sharing here and in the Google Group.

Coming soon:
  • Date for next Scene Lab
  • Google Group-shared documentation on suggested and required Scene Map data for mappers to collect
  • Google Group-shared documentation about talking points/elevator pitches distilled from Scene Lab discussions for getting started mapping your scene
  • Tweaks to this site to increase usability and clarity
As always, please send Robert Matney your queries, ideas, and feedback on the Scene Lab (rmatney AT g mail).