News

We are pleased to announce that anyone who's registered as a user on our Group Works website community can now DRAFT NEW PATTERNS.  This functionality is long overdue, and any work completed here may someday be included in an "expansion" set or future edition of the Group Works deck.  If you are inspired to add patterns you believe are missing from the current set of 91 cards, i invite you to:

1. Register as a user at the website if you're not already (upper right corner of website homepage www.groupworksdeck.org )
2. Read the Template for pattern writing at https://groupworksdeck.org/template-pattern-writing
3. Get started at https://groupworksdeck.org/pattern_seeds

This is a new functionality, so please let us know of any barriers or bugs you encounter.

In addition as has been the case for a long time, you are also invited to add further details to existing patterns, using fields that don't fit onto the printed cards but are available online.  Someday that content may become the basis for a book version.  To do that, once you're logged in, simply go to the page for the pattern you want to supplement and click Edit.  Have fun!

We're delighted to announce than an independent courseware company called the unMBA Institute has just released an introductory two-hour course on Group Works 

https://www.udemy.com/course/group-works-deck/

Russell Giesbrecht's course straightforwardly describes the contents of the deck package, gives his version of what purposeful group conversations are and what pattern languages are all about, and steps users through each card in the deck, category by category. He reads each card aloud and adds his own commentary. The course concludes with a brief description of some uses of the deck. We see how this may be especially useful to any user who prefers to learn by audio (or to share the concepts in the deck with anyone who has a sight impairment). 

The professionally-made course costs about US$12.

Our thanks to Russell for this initiative. When we created Group Works we deliberately chose to use a very open Creative Commons license, one that allows anyone to create their own spin-offs. So we're happy to see that coming to fruition through someone new stepping up with an independent creation! It's clear that Russell shares our belief in the power of groups and the importance of democratic deliberation.

Tree and I (Dave) spent Thursday afternoon and Friday at a joint conference of two organizations, Pattern Languages of Programs (PLOP) and Portland Urban Architecture Research Lab (PUARL), held in side by side at the Portland campus of the University of Oregon.

We learned about major pattern language initiatives overseas, including 10 pattern languages developed by Wolfgang Stark and his team in Germany (the same folks who translated Group Works into German), and 60(!) pattern languages developed by Takashi Iba and his team at Keio University in Japan (who brought 25 attendees from the Iba Lab to the conference — wow).

We are pleased that Group Works seems to be recognized as an exemplary pattern language, and has been the inspiration for some others.

Tree appreciated connecting with the diverse international community of people working in this area, and the underlying intention of social change motivating many of them. She was surprised and delighted to learn of the pattern language antecedents to the creation of both wiki (the first wiki was created to hold and modify software patterns) and agile. She especially enjoyed talking with wiki innovator Ward Cunningham, whose new Federated Wiki project shows great potential for use in connection with Group Works, and with Ross Chapin who works on “pocket neighbourhoods.” All in all, she found the conference more lively and fulfilling than she expected.

A highlight for me was Takashi’...

Robert Best has kindly developed a method of incorporating the selection of a random Group Works card within any Slack application. Here's his video that explains how to add a slackbot with that functionality to your Slack team, and here's a link to his Google Doc file of shortened URLs for all of the Group Works cards (you'll need that file because of the length limit for URLs in the Slackbot).

Once it's in place, all you have to do is type the magic phrase ("Group Works card please" in Robert's example, or whatever phrase you choose to set) and the bot will retrieve and display a random card from the Group Works deck.

Thanks so much to Robert for developing this cool add-on for Slack users, and to Ferananda Ibarra and Jeff Clearwater for showing it to us.

Group Works est disponible maintenant en précommande en français! Merci à Juan Carlos Londono à Montreal, Christine Koehler à Paris, and Jeremie Schaeli à Lausanne, Suisse pour avoir traduit Group Works en français comme Les Clés des Dynamiques de Groupe.

L'équipe Group Works est très fière d'accueillir cette nouvelle version de notre outil pour la facilitation de groupe efficace!

~~~~~

Check out the new website for French deck users!

Kudos to Juan Carlos Londono in Montreal, Christine Koehler in Paris, and Jeremie Schaeli in Lausanne, Switzerland for their great team work transforming Group Works into "Les clés des dynamiques de groupe"

I spent a delightful day on Monday with Delvin Solkinson (from gaiacraft.com) and Kym Chi, along with 14 others in Heart Gardens and Elphinstone Park in Roberts Creek BC, learning about the principles of permaculture. They use the Group Works deck as part of their toolkit, and now it's being used by 'permies' all over the world, such as Looby Macnamara in the UK. The banner photo on our Facebook Community page was taken at one of Del's workshops in New York (that photo is by Gene Stull). Awesome! Thanks Del and Kym!

The core team is fresh off a fabulous session on Bowen Island (a short ferry ride from Vancouver, B.C).  Very nourishing to return to Dave’s gracious hosting and home, the site where many of the patterns were born, and where inspiration crystallized to publish the group pattern language as a deck of cards!

A core purpose of this session was to ‘go meta’, to reflect on—and celebrate! —all that has been achieved in the past six and a half years since Tree founded the project in 2008.  The project has never really truly paused to take a deep breath together, especially since the first Group Works printing at the end of 2011, so this gathering was special. 

With Nancy White’s artful facilitation we gained new perspective on our overall trajectory, and discerned ways to simplify back to essentials.   Clarity about the minimum work required to keep decks moving out into the world opens up space for rest and renewal for core team members.  Deleting tired old task/to do lists (along with the guilty consciences that went with never getting to them!) frees energy to focus on emergent initiatives such as nurturing the quickly expanding community of Group Works enthusiasts—that would be all of you reading these posts! ;-) 

While we have decided to take a break from organizing Group Works workshops for the coming year, we are putting out a call for any of you to organize one yourself in your home community!  For ideas on how to construct an experiential workshop of your own, check out the “workshop segment compilation” handout on our resources page.  Feel free to ask for our consultation if need be, and/or invite us to come design and facilitate a custom...