Blue Oxen Barnstars

From BlueOxen

As part of my ongoing quest to tell the story of the people in this community, I'm launching a podcast in April 2009. The goal will be to highlight Barnstars in this community and beyond doing extraordinary collaborative work. These are people who not only think about collaboration, they live it in meaningful ways, and they make the people around them brighter. In particular, I'd like to highlight the hidden lights, people who don't normally get much attention, but who are quietly raising the level of their particular work.

Episodes

These are also available on iTunes.

Episode	Guest	Date
1	Jeff Conklin	March 23, 2009
2	Leslie Hawthorn	April 6, 2009
3	Gail Taylor	April 20, 2009

Format

The goal is to keep conversations under an hour, from beginning to end.

The beginning opens with Podcast Music, followed by a brief introduction: "Welcome to Blue Oxen Barnstars, a podcast highlighting people doing extraordinary collaborative work within the Blue Oxen community and beyond. The interviews are conducted by Blue Oxen's principal and cofounder, Eugene Eric Kim."

The format will be conversational. There will be a basic framework for the questions, but mostly, I'll be looking for people to tell their stories.

Each interview will be led by the question, "Tell me the story of your name." They'll end with, "Tell me an inspirational story about someone you know." In the middle somewhere, I'll ask for stories about great collaborative experiences.

There may potentially be an intermission in the middle.

We close again with some Podcast Music: "You've been listening to Blue Oxen Barnstars, a podcast highlighting people doing extraordinary collaborative work within the Blue Oxen community and beyond. This work is copyright Blue Oxen Associates and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. For more information, visit Blue Oxen's website at http://www.blueoxen.com/."

Background

Focusing on Barnstars is nice, because many of these folks are not highly visible, even though people pay lip service to finding these folks. Chris Messina has written two posts on diversity at Web 2.0 conferences. The problem is that people don't look for the right people; they fall back on the Old Boys Club (which is not always "Old Boys," incidentally). Leadership Learning Community does a great job of attracting diversity, because they focus on it, and they live it.

I'd like to be a showcase for the diversity that we focus on and live.

I got lots of good recommendations for Podcast Music. I ended up choosing Ant Neely's "Might As Well Whistle," from his album, Not Fit For Human Consumption, which was recommended by Paul Youlten.

We're licensing the podcasts under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.