Ambassadors

I'm not here to be a naysayer-- I'll try to add genuinely constructive contributions soon!-- but I have to say that I'm cautious about ambassadorship in general, and especially when it's self-appointed.

What might 'ambassador' mean in the context of this group? In the history of social organization, it tends to imply that one is empowered to negotiate agreements 'on behalf of' a group which they represent. Their agreements may require subsequent approval from their home group; but depending on general social dynamics, such processes can often verge on fait accompli.

Of course, there are surely other ways to picture ambassadorship. However, I think there's always a risk of creating or empowering unstated structures of hierarchical, positional coercive authority. I don't deride such authority as a universally inappropriate thing, but I think it's something which many of us are seeking to minimize.

If groups which contribute to the neutral discussion space do want to empower specific individuals with negotiating authority, that is of course up to them.

@gregorycassel - aw, be a naysayer! Pushback and looking at other angles are good at this stage.

I don't mean ambassador to imply any kind of authority or even negotiation. What I have seen is that person A who is a member of group 1 and group 2 tells group 2 what group 1 is doing that might be mutually interesting or offer a potential for collaboration and then some people from both groups start talking to each other and maybe fun ensues, or maybe not.

Also, in many cases, these groups are just matters of history and culture and geography. They are not like separate nations and they don't have "national interests", nor can they actually negotiate anything beyond what some software developers are actually interested in doing together.

I'm offering the word, which may be ill-chosen if it suggests treaty negotiations, as one of the patterns that ~might~ help to foster more actual collaboration. It is happening, and I've seen it help.

P.S. @lynnfoster agrees with you, at least somewhat. She is afraid the ambassadors will not be people who actually do the work. Might end up like that.

But with most of the people I mentioned, they do serious work, as well as communicating between groups, and I haven't seen many promises for the minions to fulfill.

@gregorycassel @bobhaugen Well we'll see if this attempt to get different groups collaborating across the usual lines works at all, ambassadors or not. Realistically the most we can expect is some combination of people interested in the work and people who can also communicate back to others who may not have bandwidth for this type of thing. I think I'd like to just let it develop and play it by ear.

Greg, I do share your concern that some people tend to empower themselves inappropriately to represent their supposedly flat networked group. But we can try to combat that in the specific situation if it arises. This can happen with or without official ambassadors, unfortunately.

"...person A who is a member of group 1 and group 2 tells group 2 what group 1 is doing that might be mutually interesting "

This can often be fruitful, but I frankly think that people generally tend to be pretty lousy reporters, even in a deliberately informal style. I think this is true even for professional journalists, who (often) have practically no conflicts of interest in how they describe a given subject.. I'm often focused on media matters, so I hope y'all will tolerate me being a bit of a curmudgeon on that issue. :)

There are exceptional cases of course; for instance, Bob's references to specific people who lead specific projects on many or most fronts.

Now, trying to be more constructive about the OP: Whether or not someone is a contributing member to a specific group is generally an uncontroversial matter; and the same is often true of leadership roles. I do definitely think it's useful to identify when people are significant members of two or more networks or projects which have profoundly overlapping goals! To my mind, this is a significant potential use-case for Holodex. I think that it'd be great for any 'neutral discussion space', or metanetwork, or supergroup (thinking cheesily of rock music history, haha) to facilitate the creation of highly informative user directories. I also think it'd be best practice to try to include people with two or more 'complementary memberships' in most if not all discussions.

in my talk which has yet. to be published i stress how many different groups and movements i work with

@matthewslater - do you mean your talk at that Impact Economy summit? I want to see that, too. Please ping if you see it published. (Or if you mean some other talk, I'm in for that, too.)

yes italked about my career so far

still waiting for it

@bobhaugen @lynnfoster I think the NRP is one of the magic keys to 'mutual sharing'. Initiated through Impact Economy, SENSORICA and CM are indeed talking about how we can develop proposals and initiatives that support each others goals. Impact Economy proposes to use the NRP in helping others at the summit to see how we can map and connect our contributions.

@matthewslater a member of the media team has the backup drive an I'm waiting for him to archive content. Unfortunately everything was put together. Samer noted the days of media recorded – which helps – but that's all we have. Going through all the footage will take some time. Note to remind and create an agreement on how this will be done in future events! So much going on at the time with focus on podcasts so this got somewhat sidetracked. Hoping to meet with Michael to establish realistic timelines next week. Will keep you posted :0)

I frankly think that people generally tend to be pretty lousy reporters,

For the sake of precision I would have said "biased", rather than "lousy", but yes, this is true. In the context of inter-group communication in the age of the internet though, it doesn't really matter. Any group members has the option of trawling through the full proceedings of any other group any of their members is participating in. The benefit of overlappers (my attempt at coining a word that sums up what @bobhaugen is saying with "ambassador") is that they can give the rest of their group the cliff notes on what's happening elsewhere, and some leads about what group docs are worth reading first.