[VBbuilders] Thank you, Sasha, for My Video Story

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Sasha Mrkailo, Thank you for your work to collect about 80 "video 
stories" from the Internet.
http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/MyVideoStory
This was very helpful for Franz Nahrada's video communications seminar 
which we're attending here on January 17-28, 2010 in Vienna, Austria.

Franz provided Minciu Sodas with $100 of his personal money for this 
project and I have sent this all to you.   He's very happy with your 
work and we look forward to more such projects.  Sasha lives in Serbia 
and is Minciu Sodas's most experienced online assistant.

I looked over a few dozen of the video bridge stories and notice four 
different kinds of group dynamics:
* "Expert"   One or more experts lecture (or are interviewed) to people 
in one or more locations. 
* "Strangers"   Two very different groups of people get to know each other.
* "Friends"   Two groups of people with a similar interest share 
experiences.
* "Family"  Two or more groups come together for an activity (meal, 
fellowship, song, worship, etc.) as one whole.

Video bridging is not just video communications, but typically group to 
group interaction by which we appreciate each group's dynamics and even 
create a new dynamic for all of us together. 

The different kinds of group dynamics are optimized, cultivated by 
different "patterns" which we're working to identify.

Recognizing these group dynamics and the patterns they build on allow us 
to consider more complicated dynamics as well.  For example, the video 
bridge we do today will involve all four modes, because in some sense we 
are "strangers" (we've never met and we may be quite different), but we 
are "friends" in that we have a shared interest (video bridging), and 
some of us will give short presentations as "experts" and also we look 
forward to working towards a shared community or "family" of video 
bridge builders.
http://globalvillages.org/mailman/listinfo/videobridgebuilders

Join us today (Monday, January 25, 2010) for chat (starting 12:00 New 
York, 17:00 London, 18:00 Vienna, 20:00 Nairobi) and also for Video 
Skype two hours later.

Sasha, your research gave us the stories, the empirical data that 
allowed us to sketch a theory of video bridge group dynamics and related 
patterns. Thank you!  This is very much the kind of research that I 
dream of for Minciu Sodas, WorkNets and our culture of investigation. 

Andrius

Andrius Kulikauskas
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms at ms.lt
+370 699 30003