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

@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.

a2b3 non-summary for November 6, 2008

The weekly a2b3 meeting was held at Eastern Accents on Thursday, November 6, 2008, two days after the election of Barack Obama as the new President of the United States.   I had ... and ..., which was delicious.  The soup of the day was ...

There were ... people in attendance, a turnout (helped, hurted) in part by a (rare) promotion of the event on Facebook.  Facebook 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 was "how was your experience at the polls".  Responses ranged from ... to ... .

(a wiki page is embedded here)

Attendees included
*
*
*

As always, we discussed upcoming weekend events.  People mentioned the following things which are happening in Ann Arbor on the weekend of November 7-9, 2008:
*
*
*

... took a photo of the event:

(a flickr tag is embedded here)

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

what is a2b3? genotypes, unicode characters, and lunch meetings

every once in a while you have to look at the net to see what other people say that you are. so here's that search for a2b3.

First, all the things that don't relate to the lunch meeting:

A2B3 is a rare genotype resulting from the inheritance of both A and B genes on one chromosome.

The p16INK4a tumour suppressor protein inhibits a2b3 integrin-mediated cell spreading on vitronectin by blocking PKC-dependent localization of a2b3 to focal contacts

Unicode Character 'YI SYLLABLE CIEX' (U+A2B3)

These two transcripts differ by 75 bp and the protein that is coded by a2b3 has 25 amino acids more.

Second, the lunch meeting series:

Ed Vielmetti's a2b3 group is quite popular (Thursday lunches; I missed it today while I wrote this blog post)

A2B3 is a physical/virtual community. There are many versions of the creation myth, but all involve a band of hardy explorers on a mission to try all the versions of bi bim bap served at restaurants in Ann Arbor.

The Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop lunch group (a2b3) is a group of people organized by Edward Vielmetti who meet for lunch on Thursdays in Ann Arbor at Eastern Accents.

a2b3 is a reasonably regular lunch series gathering people from the Ann Arbor area to talk (often about tech stuff, but not always and not exclusively) and share a delicious bowl of bi bim bap. There's no agenda, and a very minimal but evolving bits of organization to make sure that everyone who's coming gets at least a little introduction to everyone else.

A2B3 is a motley collection of geeks, tech wizards, corporate startups, educators, students, hobbyists, politicians, activists, and various other identities who gather once a week for lunch and to discuss interesting ideas.

Started by U-M alum and Internet pioneer Ed Vielmetti as a way to see his friends each week, A2B3 has become an informal nexus for local knowledge workers and entrepreneurs.