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April 17, 2002
Technography
I ran across a reference to technography, which is essentially using technical tools to move meetings forward. This article refers to site called CoWorking, but at the moment I can't actually find anything about technography on that site.
In the context of Manila/Frontier/Radio, one technique used in technography is to create real-time meeting notes by using a laptop and an outlining program.
I've been using that technique for years to take notes for meetings, usually using MS Word. My main frustration has been that I can't get Word to print an outline in outline form; it insists on printing a flat form marked up with various sized fonts. I'll swear that once upon a time I was able to make word do this.
http://technography.userland.com also has useful information.
What's strange is that although I find a number of references to technography on coworking.com via Google, all those pages don't seem to exist; when I go to the coworking site, I don't see any useful references. Similarly, I've seen a couple of references to technography.com, but I get a 404 when I go to that site. What's going on?
You'll find some articles on technography, and my approach to meetings, on http://deepfun.com/colab.htm
I sell a template for Word that takes care of that outline problem you noted.
Central to the idea of Technography is who's making the notes. In my definition, the notes are being produced by the participants, the Technographer is helping to record and organize them.
Hope this helps