I came home today wearing a jacket covered in a substance I haven’t had to deal with (professionally, at least) in years: chalkdust.

I’d facilitated a day-long session at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre campus, a 21-year-old facility (which makes it a puppy in university years) in downtown Vancouver. It’s a modern, bright, open building -but at least in the room we met in, uses blackboards.

Not whiteboards. Not digital whiteboards… a technology I have yet to actually use. (I nearly did on Tuesday at another day-long session, when I came this close to writing on one with a whiteboard marker before the dismayed howls of the participants stopped me.)

But chalkboards. Or, to be more accurate, chalkboard: a big board divided in two by the projection screen (for which there was a corresponding overhead projector, tucked away into an alcove).

I’m comfortable with flipcharts and whiteboards. Lately I’ve even started casting them aside in favour of shared mindmaps on a digital projector, which often get an “oooooh” from audiences. Blackboards seem painfully retro by comparison, and I wasn’t looking forward to writing on these ones.

Until I did. And I felt a primal emotional resonance in the way the letters took shape in powdery, gritty strokes amid the soft clicking and squeaking of the chalk.

Maybe it’s just memories from grade school (and one teacher in particular whose blackboard handwriting style appealed to me so much that I deliberately set out to copy it, and largely succeeded). Maybe it’s that artisanal satisfaction that comes from using a technology that goes back a few hundreds of years, to long before the days when writing implements would fail because their batteries were drained.

Whatever the reason, I took an unexpected pleasure in filling the board quickly as participants offered ideas, insights and observations. The brand new stick of chalk wore down to half its length by the time I was finished, and I had handprints in half a dozen places on my jacket… the same way, I imagine, a schoolteacher at the dawn of the 19th century might have had.

And then I shot it with my iPhone and uploaded it to Evernote so I can use the OCR feature to make it digitally searchable. You know, because.

Whenever we see a thing that does something we’d like to do, and does it really well, we get a powerful – and often healthy – urge to imitate it. (Or to crush it. Or to belittle it on Twitter. Or to ask, with an arched eyebrow, “Mmm. But does it scale?”)

For those of us in the participation business, gaming has been a source of a lot of envy, and often that envy has turned to imitation. It turns out there’s a burgeoning industry devoted to helping you gamify your web application — and a lot of gamification (and god help us, yes: it’s a word) focuses on allowing your users to earn virtual badges as they reach certain participation milestones.

In response to my cartoon about the new ubiquity of online badges, Eric Andersen kindly pointed me to this presentation by Sebastian Deterding, and I strongly recommend it:

Often, the ways we try to replicate success are far too superficial – kind of the way we once believed wearing an animal’s skin would impart its speed and power to us, or that by eating an enemy’s heart, we would gain their strength and courage. (Actually, that’s still the thinking behind a lot of mergers and acquisitions.)

Badges and level-ups are only a small part of what gives games their power, but because they’re the most obvious outward manifestation of participation, that’s what we glom onto.

My friends Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer have just launched Open Community, “a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web”. (I was fortunate enough to get to do cartoons for the book, which meant I got a sneak peek – and I was impressed with both the scope of their vision and the practical suggestions they have for their readers.)

And while those big ideas are aimed squarely at associations, there’s a lot here for businesses, governments and individuals – anyone who’s ready to take engagement with audiences to the next level. So as part of their virtual book tour, Maddie and Lindy are here on SocialSignal.com to answer a few questions for anyone interested in building community around their business.

How did Open Community come about?

Lindy: So first of all, we want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to you, Rob, for creating the cartoons in the book.  They are so awesome, I know our readers will love them too!!

(blush)

Lindy: Maddie and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web – from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff (and members!), to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. We decided to write Open Community as a way to address those frustrations and redirect the thinking about using social tools to build community online.

Maddie: It’s funny, I was just re-reading your recent blog birthday post looking back at the last five years of social media. All of the stages of business social media adoption that you talk about really resonated with me – our experience has been very similar.  And the stage we’re in now, where you mentioned that we’ve gone from “Why would I want to have these conversations?” to “How can I have better conversations?” – that’s exactly why we wrote the book: to distill all of this mass of information about social media back to the real crux of why we’re doing it and how to do it better.

Can you say a little more about the title?

Lindy: Here’s the gist. Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online. Connecting with and supporting your Open Community is really important, because if you don’t, someone else will.

Maddie: Yes.  In the book, we talk about five elements we’ve identified as being crucial to pay attention to as you’re building relationships with your Open Community – things like why it’s important to become a social organization, how to embrace the messiness of your “ecosystem”, how to engage your stakeholders the way they want to engage with you.  These things and many more will nurture and grow your Open Community.

I especially like the ability to embrace both a disciplined approach to the social web, and the messiness that an ecosystem entails. It’s one of the places where your advice can apply to non-profits, but also to businesses, government and individual people.

Maddie: Well, we see the book as a conversation starter–we hope tons of people will get the chance to read it, and think about how the concepts affect their organization.

Lindy: And we hope to gather lots of great stories about Open Community in action, which we’ll continue to share in many ways throughout the year. So here’s a question for all of you to consider… How is your business building community online? What’s your strategy for connecting with and supporting your Open Community? Is it working?

Thanks for coming by, you two… and for the opportunity to make a contribution to your book.

And if you’re interested, you can buy Open Community online, or learn more about the book at OpenCommunityBook.com.

My friends Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer have just launched Open Community, “a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web”. (I was fortunate enough to get to do cartoons for the book, which meant I got a sneak peek – and I was impressed with both the scope of their vision and the practical suggestions they have for their readers.)

And while those big ideas are aimed squarely at associations, there’s a lot here for businesses, governments and individuals – anyone who’s ready to take engagement with audiences to the next level. So as part of their virtual book tour, Maddie and Lindy are here on SocialSignal.com to answer a few questions for anyone interested in building community around their business.

How did Open Community come about?

Lindy: So first of all, we want to say a HUGE THANK YOU to you, Rob, for creating the cartoons in the book.  They are so awesome, I know our readers will love them too!!

(blush)

Lindy: Maddie and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web – from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff (and members!), to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. We decided to write Open Community as a way to address those frustrations and redirect the thinking about using social tools to build community online.

Maddie: It’s funny, I was just re-reading your recent blog birthday post looking back at the last five years of social media. All of the stages of business social media adoption that you talk about really resonated with me – our experience has been very similar.  And the stage we’re in now, where you mentioned that we’ve gone from “Why would I want to have these conversations?” to “How can I have better conversations?” – that’s exactly why we wrote the book: to distill all of this mass of information about social media back to the real crux of why we’re doing it and how to do it better.

Can you say a little more about the title?

Lindy: Here’s the gist. Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online. Connecting with and supporting your Open Community is really important, because if you don’t, someone else will.

Maddie: Yes.  In the book, we talk about five elements we’ve identified as being crucial to pay attention to as you’re building relationships with your Open Community – things like why it’s important to become a social organization, how to embrace the messiness of your “ecosystem”, how to engage your stakeholders the way they want to engage with you.  These things and many more will nurture and grow your Open Community.

I especially like the ability to embrace both a disciplined approach to the social web, and the messiness that an ecosystem entails. It’s one of the places where your advice can apply to non-profits, but also to businesses, government and individual people.

Maddie: Well, we see the book as a conversation starter–we hope tons of people will get the chance to read it, and think about how the concepts affect their organization.

Lindy: And we hope to gather lots of great stories about Open Community in action, which we’ll continue to share in many ways throughout the year. So here’s a question for all of you to consider… How is your business building community online? What’s your strategy for connecting with and supporting your Open Community? Is it working?

Thanks for coming by, you two… and for the opportunity to make a contribution to your book.

And if you’re interested, you can buy Open Community online, or learn more about the book at OpenCommunityBook.com.