Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

a2b3 non-summary for Thursday, July 16, 2009

Every Thursday I organize lunch, come hell, high water, or Art Fair.  This time it was Art Fair.

Eastern Accents takes a vacation in the summer time so I was on my own to organize something somewhere else; and all of Ann Arbor is full of Art Fair food vendors, serving a wide range of cuisine ranging from elephant ears and funnel cakes to key lime limeade and coffee.  (Water, $1 almost everywhere.)  There was even a Taste of Transylvania cart serving the traditional Romanian "mici" sausage.

The a2b3 group ended up at Pizza Pino, which was close enough to the fairs to be an easy walk, but far enough away to be quiet and not busy at all.  I was joined by Larry Kestenbaum, Eli Neiburger, and Dennis Tokarski.  We talked about the future and the past of news, the upcoming primary elections (and the complete absence of Republicans on the Ann Arbor local election ballots), and the ALA conference just finished and its plethora of software vendors.  It was a nice discussion.

John Hritz avoided the Ann Arbor rush and the $10-$15 Art Fair parking, and went to Beezy's in Ypsi.

The a2b3 group started out with 4 people, and you know, I'm just as happy with lunch for 4 as I am for lunch for 40.

a2b3 lunch non-summary, day 8

day 8 of notes on my new job at annarbor.com

Almost every week for the last 4 years I've been organizing a Thursday lunch.  It started with 4 people, and the mailing list now has almost 400; our record attendance at lunch was 41 but the typical table size is much like today, with 22 people sitting around a long table plus one person who came late sitting by themselves.  As with any mostly-open lunch series, you get to know people bit by bit over time, and some people take a few weeks to gain the confidence to describe who they are to a group of strangers.  Repetition makes it a bit easier.

Most weeks I try, or at least intend to try, to put together some notes about lunch.  Now that I'm no longer just an experienced blogger but also a fledgling analog journalist, I took some notes; these are incomplete, but they are more complete than I normally do.  I'm hoping to get better at note-taking as time goes on. 

People go around the table and introduce themselves; I asked people to say a few words about what's going on for them.  This list below links in most cases to people's or organizations Arborwiki pages, since that lets me edit and fill in some of the blanks later or to have some of the blanks already filled in.

In order of how I wrote them down, with a simple question: what did you notice this week?  Apologies if I got anything wrong or incomplete, and I know there are incomplete bits here.

Patricia Anderson - U of Michigan emerging technologies librarian - talked about some meetings she was at with folks at the U looking at getting UM communications people engaged in social media; the good story was about introducing people for the first time to SlideShare.

Linda Diane Feldt - holistic health practitioner - spoke about foraging, and teaching people about where to find black raspberries and wondering why more people weren't out picking them.

David C. Bloom - Chelsea resident, coach, connector - noted the new Chelsea library director, Bill Harmer, and his profile on Concentrate.

Susan Hunsberger - professional organizer - remarked that her summertime student neighbors were quite loud, and wondered how best to manage that.

Susan Harris - writer - observed excitement in town before the Art Fair.

Carol Kamm - I Sold It On Ebay - mentioned the Townie Street Party coming up before Art Fair.

John Hritz - embedded systems engineer and Wayne State grad student - liked Gever Tulley's talk on TED on tinkering.

Karen Epstein was walking around town in the evening and noticed that things felt different, but couldn't pin words on it that I was able to repeat.

Kathy Griswold has been noticing and paying attention to vegetation on sidewalks and at street corners that get in the way of clear visibility for kids on skateboards and going to school.

John Lukacs likes the Farmington Farmers Market, open til 2pm on Saturdays.

Valerio Della Porta has some faded Kodachrome slides that he was able to scan in and restore with software (sorry, missed the name of the software) so that he can again appreciate the nice bright colors.

Lance Carlson - ruby programmer for a California company - enjoyed the Rothbury Festival and notes that Bob Dylan's voice has declined further.

Dennis Tokarski - embedded systems engineer - recommends the Heavens-Above web site to find observation times for the International Space Station.

Tom Meloche - working on HomeSchoolAdvantage - has been noticing vegetative reproduction.

Kyle Mulka - twitter developer - muses on the phenomenon of canceling your Twitter account and starting over when your life changes.

Steven Fox of Secure Lexicon notes the reporting on the recent cyberattacks and is looking for folks to interview.

Chris X was in Chicago, and spent some time in a neighborhood that was much obviously more prosperous than the ones he sees here.

Jen Fox notes that her vegetable plants are actually producing things that look like vegetables, not just greenery.

Patrick Haggood notes an awesome treehouse in Dolph Park.

Roger Rayle is looking forward to a week of making sand sculptures.

Mary Morgan, a GM engineer, is newly able to park at the Whole Foods on Washtenaw; usually the problem is that store's lot is full.

Martin Newland remarks that vinyl records, of all recorded media, are on the upswing.

Thanks everyone for coming; please fill in the blanks!

@a2b3 non-summary for July 2, 2009: how to introduce lots of people; day 4

Not a summary of what was said, but more of some observations on process.

Lunch was incredibly full today - we had upwards of 30, filled one entire side of the restaurant plus a second table of four.  And becuase I asked a question that allowed a long answer, it took a full hour to get through everyone, and some people left early.

In some sense that's OK, if you believe in the open space "law of two feet", and if you think that whoever shows up are the right people.  I had a great time but the dynamic was odd enough that I want to try to get to a 100pm stop time again instead of 130pm.  So here's some suggestions that came in from that.

1.  Bring introductions down to the completely minimal.  I've been in circles where the entire intro was full name plus three more words, nothing more, and the intros go around the table at something like two or three per minute.  If you have to condense your identity into three words you have to think hard, or be funny.

2.  Reach a larger audience in more smaller venues.  Promote a set of places to meet at the same time, and let people pick which of many places they want to show up; synchronize and coordinate so that someone organizes at each location at the same time. 

3.  Use some kind of token - like boarding passes a la Southwest - to hand out to people so that you know how many people are there and which order you handed them out in.  Use that both to plan how many seconds you have for each intro and to provide an order to things.

4.  Get inspired by events like Ignite Ann Arbor and hold a rock paper scissors tournament to winnow out the crowd down to a reasonable size; only the last four or eight people standing get to say who they are, and they get more time to talk.

5.  Don't let people introduce themselves; rather, the host introduces everyone.

6.  Inspired by the Washington Post, host an exclusive event and charge a lot of money for access to "those powerful few". 

7.  Don't worry about it; it will work itself out somehow with something someone suggests on the spot.

"the conversation prism" as seen through the eyes of the a2b3 lunch

Today is a Twitter conference, so Twitter is full of good stuff people have been saving up.  Here's one: a "conversation prism" in bright happy colors showing a set of categories of tools, and how each one of them is occupied by some set of applications.  Here's a mapping of each of them onto the set of tools that I am using to keep a2b3 loosely connected.  Sorry no links, didn't have time to hyperlink everything

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

Forums: Yahoo Groups

This is the biggest single tool I use for group continuity; it perhaps reflects my elderly nature that email is the first system rather than web-based forums or modern social networks.  All I can say in my defense is that Usenet would have been better but it's really not available, and that I have 10 years of continuous use into Yahoo Groups and they haven't ruined it (yet).

Social networks: Facebook (intermittently)

Facebook will show up here frequently, if only because it's ubiquitous and because Ann Arbor is full of people who use it.  My sense is that its group tools are way weaker than its personal tools and so it's best used as an adjunct to the main Yahoo group just so you can attach names to faces and so you can promote events.

"Interest and curated networks" (?): LinkedIn

I'm not sure about the category, but LinkedIn certainly qualifies as one ongoing conversation starting and continuing tool.  Like Facebook, groups are second class objects in LinkedIn, and thus it's weak at building cohesion.  On the plus side you don't have to pretend to be someone's pal to look up their resume.

Reviews and ratings: Yahoo Groups, Arborwiki

There are a bunch of national scale review sites, but nothing beats asking a good sized group of your peers for recommendations on everything from programming language libraries to pest control.  To whatever extent possible, Arborwiki becomes the public long term storage for what would otherwise be something ephemeral and hard to retrieve through the Yahoo Groups search interface.

Location: none; I gave up on Plaxo when it creeped me out

Location-based mobile services are supposed to be the future of the social mobile web, but I lived through having my location visible on Plaxo and decided against living that way when people who knew where I was without me telling them didn't have the social clues not to be obvious that they were watching me.   If I want to tell you where I am I'll be explicit about it on Twitter, or you can just wonder.

Video: whatever people use

There are a couple of filmmakers in the group, and I respect their judgement what to use for video.  None of the video tools have strong group membership characteristics - or even particularly weak ones - so I treat them all pretty much interchangably as dumb hosting.  (And no, I don't particular care if any given short video clip goes viral.)

Customer Service: Get Satisfaction, but it's not quite right

If a2b3 was a business it might need customer support, but it's not, and Get Satisfaction is just extra baggage.  Tried it, it seemed to be functional, but not for the problem at hand.

Documents/Content: SlideShare seems to be a favorite

Those people who are giving presentations seem to have settled on SlideShare as a common denominator for hosting.  The weekly lunches don't feature presentations so there's no natural synchronization around it as a tool, but it works as advertised.

Events: upcoming, Facebook events, in-person lunch w/announcements

Events are perhaps the hardest nut to crack, the thing that would make you spend all week promoting other people's work and the like.  I have been telling people who don't have URLs for events to post them to upcoming; Facebook will tell you about more parties than you can manage to go to; and there's nothing like someone telling you about something around the table.  The only way to really lick the events question is to have someone full time collecting them.

Music: One each of everything; I'm fond of how blip.fm twitters out songs

blip.fm is the closest thing to Napster that's out there; do a Twitter search for your favorite artist plus the word "blip" and you may be lucky enough to find a fellow fan and a track you can listen to.   YouTube is also really good for songs - my 4 y/o calls it "picture music".

Wiki: Arborwiki, plus my own private Socialtext space

Arborwiki is the designated spot for dropping in information that deserves to live in a wiki; the "Birthday Deals" page there is the one universal attraction point around which much of the rest lives.  I keep a Socialtext private wiki for my own personal memory augmentation tool, in part because it works awesomely on my Blackberry.

Livecasting video: haven't done it yet, not appropriate for lunch

If you want to join in to lunch, you don't want to watch it remotely; the space isn't set up for that.  If and when I get to a place where regular live video streaming makes sense I'll use whatever the cool kids are using then.

Pictures: Flickr, Facebook photos

Once upon a time Flickr was a dynamic photo community, with dozens of awesome funny friendly creative people who you really wanted to share pictures with.  Then everything grew up, people left for greener pastures, Yahoo acted stupid more than once, and my camera died.  Now if I want to share a photo I'm more likely to put it on Facebook.  I miss the old Flickr.

Social bookmarks: Delicious, plus whatever Les is working on

Once upon a time Delicious was a dynamic bookmark community, with dozens of awesome funny friendly smart people who you really wanted to share bookmarks with.  Then everything group up, people left for greener pastures, Yahoo acted stupid more than once, and Twitter came along.  Now if I want to share a link I think twice and either twitter it out or work it into a longer blog post.  I just hope my 10,000 bookmarks stick around for a long time.

Comment and reputation: plenty of that around the lunch table

There's enough people who I care to converse with that I know by face and name that the level of comment-tracking promoted by blog tools seems irrelevant, for the most part, or at least too much work.

Crowdsourced content: arborwiki, a2geeks

Both arborwiki and a2geeks have enough of a wiki platform running for general and for technical info that if you need to crowdsource something there's a place to point people toward to edit things.

Collaboration: Google Spreadsheets (for football parking info)

If I need to collect a bunch of numbers from a bunch of people, Google Spreadsheets seems to do pretty well.  I love wiki for private collaboration, but you have to be collaborating with people who love it too.  Otherwise, printing things out and letting someone else wrestle with tracking changes in Microsoft Word is about as good as I get.

Blog platforms: Typepad

Someone else worries about it and I just hit "post".

Blogs/conversations: Google Blog Search is the best of a bad lot

It's hard to track conversations in blogs, in part because the blog vs comment distinction is weird.  It's just as easy to do regular Google searches and put in teh word "blog" as an added qualifier.

Blog communities: mybloglog

I'm using this mostly for stats and to detect one-day spikes that mean that some seasonal post is current again or to notice when something is on fire.

Micromedia: Twitter

twitter, duh. 

Twitter ecosystems: trying out Cotweet

I have a beta account; it's working pretty well to do future scheduled postings and to better track responses.  Not sure yet if and how to open up the @a2b3 account to multiple posters but that's the next obvious thing.

SMS/Voice: Google Voice

It converts voice mail to text so that I don't have to listen to all of my voice mail.  Still in closed beta.

Lifestreams: get a life!  need some privacy sometime

Part of living a life is deciding what to broadcast to the Internet and what to keep quiet.  I'm just as happy to be offline as online, and the idea that you should soulcast every last mood swing seems to be as unproductive as it gets

----

After working my way through this, I realize what it's missing - all of these apps I write about are apps that work on a big screen.  The real conversation prism also includes a parallel set of augmented reality supported by mobile devices, and that very well may include entirely new categories than above.

a2b3 non-summary for 22 May 2009

On Thursday May 22 I had lunch with the a2b3 group for the 183d time.  I'm writing that down as though it was a perfectly accurate number, just so that next week I can look it up and say that it will be the 184th time.

Every week I host lunch on Thursdays at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor.  People start showing up at 11:30 or so, most everyone has ordered and sat down and pulled up however many tables we need by noon, and at 12:30 someone bangs on a glass and I stand up and give roughly this presentation.  This week it felt like Groundhog Day, where I was the Bill Murray character practicing piano lessons over and over again until I really was the person who was good at hosting lunch for 30 instead of someone wondering whether I could pull off hosting lunch more than once.

It was a quiet week in Ann Arbor, my home town, where Garrison Keillor comes to do his Prairie Home Companion every once in a while at lovely Hill Auditorium, though he didn't come this week and won't come next week but he might show up at any moment, making you think that he was just a voice from the radio even though you could see him on stage.  Ann Arbor is still the third or fourth best city in the nation for any number of things that you could measure, and if anyone wants to put together the convincing statistic that ranks this town in the best in the nation for bi bim bap I am certain that our civic leaders can devise the numerator and demoninator for the metric that proves it.  And we're justly proud of our long civic history of providing parking structures for all of the cars of all of the vistors who come to our charming town to experience its pedestrian charms.

Every week, after I give a short speech, I ask a question.  Some of them are great questions, and some of them are ordinary questions, and mostly they give the lunch patron a chance to say something about themselves that doesn't depend on the "what do you do for a living" answer because when you are free for lunch sometimes that is because you are in a career transition and your sense of personal identity that used to be wrapped up in your job is cut adrift.  No one needs to be put on the spot that way, so the lunch question admits a certain ambiguity about your day job.

People introduce themselves, say a few words, and hand the microphone on.  We started using a microphone because the table seats 35 and it's the entire length of the restaurant.  The people who come back again and again sometimes get good at describing who they are in a few words that can be repeated faithfully by anyone else who is similarly a regular.  The question is almost always optional, and people are always free to ask their own question or to ask for assistance from the group from some problem, thorny and pressing or trivial and mundane; generally the specific answers wait until afterwards when people talk among themselves again.

I try to introduce the whole table by 1 pm so people can move to the next thing they need to do.  It has been a remarkable crowd for many reasons, not the least of which is the wide variety in ages of the people at the table, ranging this week from just out of high school to nearly retired.  It's a special design of no specific purpose that you need to get a diverse crowd - by not having a clear cut agenda, you make it possible to let pretty much any person who shows up be the right person to arrive.

At the end there is some attempt to organize information about upcoming events, either meetings of other groups that organize regularly, or one time events that someone is planning. 

With the routine as established as it is, and with enough people knowing what to expect and how to work within the time boundaries that are the only real fixed limits, it's been possible for me not to show up and not to announce that the event is happening and have everything go pretty much the same as if I were there. 

Organizations that don't exist yet, but should

National Association of Professional Lunch Organizers.   For people who organize civic, professional, and industry meetings at lunchtime.  Publishes a national directory of meeting times and locations organized by day of the week, and a guide to the tax laws on entertainment expenses with a handy records filing system for the lunch professional.   Their for-profit software development spinoff, NAPLOsoft, produces mobile phone applications with customized daily alerts for travelers for professional lunch opportunities wherever they are.  Local organizing meetings of NAPLO are always held at breakfast time (because you don't want to interfere with work).

Ann Arbor Downtown Software Development Authority.  This organization captures tax increment financing from increases in the value of intellectual property in downtown Ann Arbor, and uses those funds to provide project financing for programs that assist in the development of human capital and information infrastructure.  The DsDA also operates an innovative system of "municipal data garages" which offer  computing and storage resources paid for by user fees as well as a network access point to the Alameda-Weehauken Burrito Tunnel.

photo: MAE East, IT History blog, Paul Ceruzzi

Lunch non-summary for a2b3 for March 12, 2009: 34 people there, a status update on the parking project, lots of good discussion.

Ann Arbor downtown parking information by mobile phone

Fred Posner put together a proof of concept application for real time parking information at the Ann Arbor DDA's Fourth and Washington structure, available from your mobile phone.  Dial 212-937-7844 x6 to get the current information, pulled from the DDA's own parking information system.

You will notice if you look this instant that there are 130 spaces free; that's not true; the system has been down for some amount of time.  This would not be the first Ann Arbor online transportation information system to be down, but that's another story.

Thanks to Carol and Ben at Eastern Accents for hosting this week's a2b3 lunch; there were 24 people there including two who weren't planning to be part of the meeting but ended up joining us anyways.

community organizer's checklist: weekly lunch meeting

A checklist of things to do for the weekly lunch.

1.  Day of the week: Mo - Tu - We - Th - Fri
2.  Frequency: Every - First - Second - Third - Fourth - Last - Even - Odd
3.  Location: Fixed (Eastern Accents) - Floating - Alternate (Ypsilanti TBD)
4.  Holiday schedule: Skip - Alternate Day (Weds or Fri) - Alternate Week
5.  Summer schedule: Skip - Alternate Time - Alternate Location (Ypsilanti TBD)
6.  Start time: 11:30 11:45 12:00 12:15
7.  Time zone: Eastern Time - Michigan Time
8.  Meeting calendar: Yahoo Groups - Google Calendar - Facebook - Upcoming - Alternate
9.  Email list: Yahoo Groups - Google Groups - Hosted list - Self-run list - No list
10.  Facebook: Group - Fan Page - Restaurant Fan Page
11.  Wiki: Socialtext - Mediawiki - Confluence - Other Wiki
12.  Civic wiki: Group page - People pages
13.  Twitter: Group account - Followers

there's more but lunch is starting.

mobile meeting notes and mobile social networks

You're at a meeting, somewhere, and you want to quietly and unobtrusively take meeting notes or some other record of the meeting while it's happening, and you have a mobile phone but nothing else.

What tool or application do you use?

Mobile twitter.  Twitter your short notes out to the world, or use a direct message to some bot of some kind that collects and gathers the notes for you.   Twitter's mobile interface is fast, simple, and reasonably complete.  Down side: no easy way to look up something about the person who just introduced themselves.

Mobile Facebook.  Write on the wall of people (or your own wall) as notes come up, and then somehow reconstruct it afterwards.  The people search tool is very handy for looking folks up on the fly, and you can send someone a followup about some question while you're still at the event.  Down side: Slow enough that if people are moving fast you don't keep up.

Mobile wiki (Socialtext Miki).  Keep notes on a scratch pad on a wiki that you edit on your mobile device. A perfectly good text input box and it makes refining your notes into something longer very easy (and you can go back and figure out more about what you missed).    Down side: no lookup on the fly, so if you fumble someone's name you can't look it up.

Other mobile contact network and social network managers - both Plaxo and LinkedIn have mobile versions, and I haven't tried to figure out how to use those while standing up and listening to be a bit more informed.

Notable here is that there isn't a single Google mobile tool in the arsenal.  The Blackberry native mail client is better than the Google Mail java client, and almost anyone can have a text box open, but if there's a mobile Orkut then my world of people doesn't use it.

If I had two hands free to do this I probably would have used delicious as a part of the process - I've gone to a bunch of lecture or seminar type events where my pattern is to google what the speaker says and delicious the results, and if the net is fast enough where that is you can almost do that in close enough to real time to keep up.   But that's too much and too rude to do in anything other than a lecture situation.

Paper has some tremendous uses here - one recent event I went to I used some of Dave Gray's visual thinking skills that he's taught and put into his new book and did things like sketch what the speakers were wearing in addition to taking notes on what they were saying.   I have a much clearer visual memory of that event, but I don't remember anyone's names.

A work in process to be sure.  There were 11 tables full of people, and I got almost everyone's names, and didn't quite catch everything I hoped to catch; thanks everyone for lunch.  The conclusion of the question at the table - would you buy a car from a bankrupt auto company? - is that most people would be worried about service and availability of maintenance and parts, and that a Cuban mechanic would be someone to keep in your rolodex, and that if the worst happens at least we can look forward to an expanded orphan car show in Ypsi.

a2b3 anticipatory non-summary for November 13, 2008

(graphic float left) a2b3 is a [noun phrase] organization that meets [frequency] for [meal] at [location] in [city].    It started in [year] and is modelled on [well known organization], which first started in [previous century] to provide [noble goal] for its [notable participants]. 

This week's a2b3 meeting [future perfect tense] held  on Thursday, [date], [number] days [relative time] to [notable event].  I had [meal description], which was delicious.  The soup of the day was [soup name] (link to soup recipe).

There were [number] people in attendance, a turnout (helped, hurted) in part by a (rare) promotion of the event on [social networking site].  [Social networking site] doesn't have a repeating event structure, so to do this regularly I'd have to type it in every week; perhaps it's worth that, perhaps not, I don't know.

The question of the day, which I ask every week at [time] after [ritual noisemaking] was

    [leading question designed to spur conversation]. 

Responses ranged from [brief description] to [longer description]. 

(widget embedded with editable portion for you to put your answers)

Attendees included [name], a [professional identity] who recently moved here from [location] to pursue [noble goal]; [name], a [honorific title] who is planning [notable event]; and [name], a student of [scholarly pursuit].  [Number] people were new this week; they had heard about this group via [online marketing method], [print mention], [social networking site], invitation from [name of friend], and [yard sign].

[Growing organization] is hiring for [job title], looking for [common skills], [uncommon skills], [patience with the local economy], and [incredible rolodex].  Please contact [hiring manager] for details.

As always, we discussed upcoming weekend events.  People mentioned the following things which are happening in [city] on the weekend of [upcoming weekend]: the [sports event], the [genre] concert by [artist] at [venue], the [fundraising activity] to promote [good cause] organized by [civic association], the [noisy parade through the streets] organized by [bicycling group], with [tasty beverage] to follow, the [seminar full of grad students] hosted by [obscure but interesting institute] which features [notable speaker from somewhere else] and food.

[Photographer name] took a photo of the event:

(a flickr tag is embedded here)

Thanks for coming!  I'll see you next week.