Supporting Services  0

Overview  1

A wide range of services is provided to support the Bootstrap Alliance activities, with the aim of creating a welcoming, dynamic, enabling environment for collaboration and learning (*footnote)  1A

Learning Environment  2

The Bootstrap Alliance discussions and website are designed to create a rich collaborative learning environment. The special mix of community participants, the learn-by-doing approach, and the unique improvement infrastructure are designed to boost and leverage our Collective IQ.  2A

Orientation and Coaching  2B

A Bootstrap Alliance host is available to introduce you to the Program activities, services, and participants, help you get started in the discussions and projects, and sign you up for an introductory session and other upcoming events.  2B1

To make an appointment with a host, please contact Bootstrap at 510-713-3550 or info@bootstrap.org  2B2

And feel free to venture in on your own, beginning with Getting Started  2B3

Virtual Help Desk  2C

If you have questions about how to use our collaborative website, take a look at our Help page for answers, including pointers to summary descriptions, documentation and frequently asked questions, and hotlink email addresses to help you fire off requests for assistance to the appropriate person.  2C1

Or just send a message to help@bootstrap.org with your question(s).  2C2

See also Orientation, Getting Started, Guidelines for Participation, Help Using the Website, and Bootstrap Alliance - Human System  2C2A

For direct personal assistance, please call 510-713-3550, or page 650-306-5549.  2C3

In the future, a virtual help desk should include a shared-screen capability, allowing helpers to view your screen while talking you through a procedure or quest, and/or demonstrating what you need to know.  2C4

Introductory Seminars  2D

Introductory half-day management seminars are offered to give you a complete introduction to Bootstrap concepts and strategies. These are generally scheduled the afternoon before our quarterly workshops, and often scheduled between times as well. Check the News page for upcoming events.  2D1

Learning Community  2E

We have taken great care to assemble high caliber learning community, including peers, thought leaders, innovators, pioneers, researchers, and consultants, aligned along a variety of technical and socio-organizational improvement vectors such as healthcare, education, program management, knowledge management, collaboration, design, and continuous improvement and learning.  2E1

Bootstrapping Leverage  2F

The Bootstrap Alliance is an outgrowth of Doug Engelbart's A/B/C Improvement Strategy. In this model the core business activity of an organization is its "A Activity", any act of improving "A" is a "B Activity", and any act of improving "B" is a "C Activity". The Bootstrap Alliance, whose mission includes learning how to boost an organization's capacity to improve, is by definition a C Activity. Improvement vectors such as knowledge management, collaboration, customer collaboration, design, and learning, pursued in the context of the A/B/C Improvement Infrastructure, offer added leverage because results will keep increasing the Collective IQ at all three levels. This offers the potential for a snowballing effect, or in engineering terms a "bootstrapping" effect, of the improvement capacity (i.e. increasing area of coverage and velocity), which in turn translates into a compounding ROI on each improvement dollar invested. We have structured our activities and services, and hand-picked the participants, based on this high-leverage strategic framework.  2F1

Joint Exploration  2G

The Bootstrap Alliance offers hand-on experience of bootstrapping for participants as they work together to investigate, assess, and integrate selected emergent technologies and practices into our evolving prototypical collaborative learning environment. Based on iterating requirements drawn from scenarios, lessons learned, discussion, and qualified intelligence gathered on worthy products and services, we will be continuously evolving the supporting infrastructure as resources permit. This will be a "foreground task" (a central Activity of participants) rather than a "background task" (done magically for you). This provides participants the opportunity for hands-on learning, and allows us to leverage the collective IQ of the membership.  2G1

Human-Tool Co-Evolution  2H

The system of tools, or "Tool System", will be evolved in concert with evolving practices, or Human System. based on requirements surfacing in our collaborations here, and lessons learned emerging from our usage and from member pilots.  2H1

Working group teams are encouraged to adopt and evolve their own mix of tools and processes to suit their particular needs, provided that their results are compatible.  2H2

Extended Services  2I

In addition, the Bootstrap Institute offers a range of ongoing complimentary services such as management seminars and talks, hands-on workshops, expeditions, consulting, and publications. Ask about our Alliance member discounts.  2I1

Collaboration Environment  3

Meetings and Workshops  3A

Member workshops are scheduled quarterly for 2-3 intensive days of presentations and interactive breakout sessions. See meeting records in Archives for past agendas and attendee lists. Working groups may also schedule separate meetings and teleconferences between times. Schedule and agenda information is posted in the BA Calendar and the News page.  3A1

Online Conferencing / Discussion Support  3B

To support continuing exchange, we host an online conferencing site where our discussion forums are moderated by designated hosts to help maintain relevance and direction. Online discussions are currently conducted using the Hypermail conferencing tool.  3B1

Collaborative Website  3C

Most websites are organized on a broadcast/consumtion model - the webmaster artstically organizes polished material, and people come and browse it. A collaborative website, on the other hand, must support dynamic group processes, enabling collective action as well as capturing and organizing the swirl of exchanges, input, and output throughout the lifecycle of the group.  3C1

The world is a long way off from offering highly-evolved tools and methods needed to fully support the latter. Part of our mission is to help push the envelope in this direction. To "bootstrap" this effort, we have assembled a website that captures our dialog through the online conferencing tool, and allows individual participants to contribute to the website document repository, calendar of events, contact database, and vocabulary of terms. See Help Using the Website for a complete listing of tools and features employed, including thumbnail descriptions and pointers. This starting point will then be evolved via the Technology Template Project.  3C2

Knowledge Management  4

The Bootstrap Alliance supports a website repository of the accumulating program knowledge, including capture, organization, summarization, and cross-referencing of intelligence, dialog, and knowledge products. See the Archives page on this website, Help Using the Website for a description of tools used, Bootstrap Alliance - Human System for a descussion of procedures, conventions, and roles. See also About Our Website regarding overall website design and rationale.  4A

Principles of Knowledge Management  4B

The traditional notion of Knowledge Management concerns what to do with finished documents. Boosting an organization's Collective IQ, on the other hand, concerns facilitating the development, integration, and application of knowledge by disparate parties working concurrently, sometimes collaboratively, throughout the lifecycle of an activity. The result is an evolving mass of work-in-progress including plans, proposals, thinkpieces, commentary, interchange, meeting records, intelligence collections, rationale, and so on that iterate throughout the life-cycle of a project. Today most of this is not captured or managed in any coherent way, so the majority of intellectual capital is lost or squandered.  4B1

Our view of a repository is not just as a place to put stuff, but an environment which facilitates the in-process work, captures and integrates, and adds value to the information and knowledge.  4B2

The value added comes from conventions that can be imposed in the structure and organization of material that facilitate highly efficient access and utilization of information. Examples include offering on-the-fly view control, such as outline views and filtered views, plus services such as sifting and analysis of intell and dialog into summary overviews, with references to follow for those who wish to drill down into the detail (see Precision Browsing for starters).  4B3

Handbooks Redefined  4C

The new paradigms we'll be exploring in knowledge management and collaborative technologies enable a new, more powerful definition of "handbook" to emerge. Accumulated know-how, captured and appropriately organized, can provide a wealth of useful how-to information. Out of the prototyping, dialog, intell, and shared lessons learned can evolve prototype online hyperdocument handbooks of emerging strategies, practices, and tools for collective work and organizational improvement which members can then apply within their respective organizations. Ultimately we want to be able to organize and structure our knowledge environments such that the whole environment is essentially the current up-to-the-minute handbook for a given group of people - complete with high level summary views which people can drill down into the details of from many vantages and directions.  4C1

Footnote  5

The supporting services of the Bootstrap Alliance as designed to enable collaboration and learning. Since "enabling collaboration and learning" is a key focus of discussion and investigation in the Bootstrap Alliance, there is significant overlap between the "Activities" and "Services" offered. In fact a good measure of success for the Bootstrap Alliance will be the extent to which the Activities' results can be harnessed by the Bootstrap Alliance in the form of services to its members. So the infrastructure described here is designed to boost our own collaboration, while providing a rich context for Alliance discussion, exploration, evolution, and transfer.  5A

This document therefor has two purposes - (1) to help you participate in the Bootstrap Alliance, and (2) to provide the beginnings of an index to tools and practices which you might consider adapting to support your own communities. Because of the latter we have included descriptions of support services that in most Programs would be "invisible" to the members, i.e. kept "behind the scenes". You can think of equating Activities with what you participate in, and Services with how you participate  5B

For Further Assistance  6

If you need help, please see Virtual Help Desk for details. Please contact help@bootstrap.org with additional questions and comments.  6A

Copyright @ 1995-1997, Bootstrap Institute. All rights reserved. Send suggestions, fixes, additions to webmaster@bootstrap.org.

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