PTP Blog

TechCamp seems like a lifetime away, and before my memory completely fails me, I wanted to jot down the larger lessons I carried away from TechCamp:

Really big “A HA” moments for me:

• Context is everything. Let me repeat that: “CONTEXT is EVERYTHING.”
• Facilities have to be viewed from the perspective of the participant least equipped to easily navigate the space - and they must be viewed not with the question “is it possible” but rather with the question “how will this facility: layout, travel between sessions, etc. impact our ability to have a good session.”
• Skip the workshop buffet.
• Taking apart computers (and putting them back together) is very empowering.
• Talking about software as a metaphor is a powerful concept for pulling back the curtain.

More details after the jump:

Warning: this is kind of long and rambly, and really directed to other folks doing training on technology as it relates to community organizing.

Context is everything

This is probably the strongest lesson for me out of TechCamp. What I mean by this is that on its own, technology is pretty meaningless - at least from PTP’s perspective. You will never (I know, never say never) see PTP doing a training on technology from the perspective of technology for technology’s sake. For us, the context of how a technology is deployed in a particular community/organization to address a specific problem is what transform technology from a nice add-on to a tool that can potentially enhance community organizing. Remember the 5 W’s that we learned in school - Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why? and How?

Answer those questions - and answer them at the start of a session - and you’ve got context for the technology that session is about. Leave those out, and you’re leaving your participants hanging on a technology with no real-world example of application to help them understand why they would want to learn about the technology you’re trying to teach.

How to assess facilities

First off, I’m not talking about ADA accessibility here. PTP strives to do all of our programs in locations that are ADA accessible. Instead, I’m talking about the simple fact that folks like me who live in pretty flat place just aren’t used to walking up and down hills all the time - and that folks from larger urban areas (or even many rural areas) aren’t used to walking much period. For all future programs, we have to look at space and how we’re going to navigate it from the perspective of someone who may not be used to/able to walk a lot. UC Santa Cruz was beautiful, but if we had all the computer labs clustered in one area, it would have made getting around a lot easier on everyone.

Skip the buffet

Avoiding the workshop buffet - more appropriately, the workshop smorgasbord - is a lesson that I’ve struggled to learn. TechCamp provided yet another opportunity to learn it, and although I think I’ve done well to avoid the extreme, I know that we at PTP still have some distance to travel before we fully realize this goal.

What goal? I first encountered this lesson a few years back via an email message from a former board member, Mike Sayer of Southern Echo. He was writing about a convening we were planning at the time, but the lesson endures. I can’t effectively paraphrase Mike, and I won’t even try. The gist of his cautionary note to me was this: Don’t cover too many topics in any single program - it’s like going to a buffet when you’re hungry - you eat too much of too many things and wind up feeling sick. I think we covered too much in TechCamp, at the expense of getting to the depth of engagement with any given technology that participants needed to really take home increased confidence and skill. I’m not saying that folks didn’t learn things - I know that’s not true, but I do think that instead of adding more topics, our time may have been better spent going deeper and/or providing more hands-on practice with a smaller number of technologies. It comes down to a question of how well participants are able to carry back what they learned, and to some degree how much of that new knowledge is retained. We’ll see what the evaluations have to say, but don’t be surprised if you see the core TechCamp curriculum scaled back a bit in future TechCamps.

Everyone should take apart (and reassemble) a computer

Seriously. At least once, everyone who has to deal with technology on a day to day basis, and who is somewhat unsure or intimidated by it absolutely must at some point disassemble and reassemble a computer. We did this at TechCamp, and it was by far one of the most talked about sessions. I mean folks were talking about it long after the session was over, and people who didn’t attend the session were asking that we do it again (we didn’t). TechCamp was at least partially about demystifying technology. Taking apart a computer, and then putting it back together and proving that it works went a long way toward doing that.

“Software is a metaphor”

Somewhere around the beginning of the first day of TechCamp, I had one of those experiences in which something you’d been thinking unconsciously suddenly becomes conscious in a way that makes a lot of sense at least to you. The thing that moved from non-verbal to verbal was the idea of describing software - interface mostly - as a metaphor. Metaphor might not be quite the accurate word here, but I went with it at the time and described software interface as a metaphor in the sessions that I facilitated. The setup I generally did was something like this:

“software is a metaphor - there’s nothing real about the windows, about the spreadsheet, about the document, there’s certainly nothing “real” about the expand, minimize, or close buttons - these things don’t have real-life properties, but the software tries to talk to us that way because the designers thought that the connection to our real-world understanding of space would help us understand the virtual world of our computers. If you can get your head around the metaphor - the abstractions that software designers have settled on, you’ll have a much easier time using your computers because the metaphors are largely consistent across applications.”

I mention it here because when I talked about software from that perspective, I saw the “lightbulbs” go on (really dislike that phrase) for a number of people and thought that some of you may be able to do something useful with it.