The Bamboo Project

5 Strategies for Supporting Bottom-Up Social Media Use

Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down. What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving into social media use. 

For example, one organization with which I've been working identified a project where employees had expressed interest in using Facebook as a strategy for sharing information and connecting with stakeholders. Management rightly concluded that it made sense to experiment with social media by supporting this project. However, despite my best efforts, the "support" for the project quickly devolved into conversations about who was "allowed" to post and what they were allowed to say--classic control issues that characterize the top-down approach.

Reading Jane's post it occurred to me that we need to have a better understanding of the questions and strategies that will nurture bottom-up participation in social media. Nothing kills a grassroots initiative faster than "Big Brother" strategies. So, some thoughts. . .

• Ask  employees what they need from management to support the project. This is probably the most obvious question, but one that I think can get lost in the shuffle. If employees have shown the initiative to start using social media, then they probably have some good ideas about what would be helpful to them in keeping the initiative going. In particular, they are likely to have identified the institutional barriers that impede their ability to make full use of social media. Pay attention to what they say and use an open mind in evaluating their ideas. Do what you can to implement their strategies.

• Focus on removing barriers to social media use, rather than on erecting new ones. In my experience, employees who are trying to use social media for work have a wealth of ideas for moving things forward. Their major problems tend to be with the organizational barriers that stand in their way. Although it is tempting to management to want to control social media use, if they're serious about supporting bottom-up projects, they need to refrain from going down this road. They should work with the project team to remove barriers and make sure that they are not putting new ones in their place.

• Provide employees with resources and ideas that will help them implement their project. Keep an eye out for articles and examples you can share with the team. Share these as a way of indicating your understanding of and support for what they are doing.

• Highlight their successes. Recognition is always appreciated. Share the results of the social media work done by your teams with other members of the organization during meetings and through organizational newsletters and emails. Focus on what's working and share that with others.

• Treat mistakes as learning opportunities. Don't panic and clamp down on the team when the inevitable social media mistakes are made. Accept that someone is going to accidentally post something problematic and that this is part of the process. Use these situations as learning opportunities to determine how you can handle situations the next time they arise.

These are a few of my thoughts. What do you think are the best ways to support bottom-up social media initiatives. What has/hasn't worked in your organization?

On Improving Conferences: The Reflection Session

Harold Jarche, like me, is reflecting on his recent attendance at conferences:

I’ve been thinking about knowledge sharing, after attending a couple of conferences in a row and heading off to another. One thing missing in these discrete time-based events is that there is litle time for reflection. Most presenters hold back their knowledge in order to “deliver” it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions & discussions and a coffee break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home.

I've encountered this issue, too, so I'm thinking that one way we could improve conferences would be to provide a "Reflection Session." It would be near the end of the conference and scheduled like any other breakout session. Instead of stuffing new information into people's brains, though, it would be a workshop for consolidating what they've already experienced.

I'm picturing:

• A quiet room with more of a coffee shop set-up--some tables with chairs, but also a few lounge chairs.

• Possibly some music, although that's such an individual thing it might be better for people to be invited to listen to their ipods. 

• Some guidelines on reflective practice. Note, we would NOT discuss these. They would simply be available for those who were interested.

• Some tools for reflection--some small blank journals, some prompts for thinking. These Debriefing Questions could be good. Also the One-Sentence Journal--could be applied to each session the individual attended. 

• Art supplies--some people are visual thinkers and it could be very cool to encourage them to use art to express what they've learned.

Of course, this is something of an introvert's dream of a reflective session, so I'm thinking it could be followed by an extrovert's debrief where we had people share one or two ideas they got or questions they have as a result of their participation in the conference. If we wanted to get really creative, it could be a sort of Ignite format--3-5 minute presentations on the most compelling question or idea you experienced.

What do you think? Would you attend a "Reflection Session" at a conference? How would you structure it and what would you include?

Flickr photo via Laurel Center for Social Entrepreneurship

Virtual Career Fair Lessons Learned: Implementation

In a previous post, I shared some lessons learned in planning for the virtual career fair we piloted in the spring with several Pennsylvania counties. Today I'm going to share some lessons we learned during implementation.

• Make presentations more interactive and visually interesting--While a few of our presenters had some experience in presenting online, most did not. We ran practice sessions ahead of the actual events, but these were primarily to get presenters comfortable with the technology and the process. While the presenters did a great job with their webinars, they were not always as engaging and interesting as we had hoped. The reality is, presenting for an online audience is very different than presenting in person. Next year, we're going to work more closely with presenters on the actual content of their presentations so that they are more visually engaging and interesting. We will also work with them to include more interactive components, like polling, for a change of pace. 

• Have more people in a presentation who use a more conversational approach--Ironically, one of our highest-rated webinars was the one where the presenters were the least prepared. Five minutes before the webinar began, they were still discussing who would handle which slides and I could feel my stomach start to churn. Apparently someone else had created the slides and the two guys doing the presentation had never actually looked at them. I was afraid we were going to have a harrowing 45 minutes ahead of us. But when the recording started, these guys proceeded to just talk, reacting to the slides, rather than elaborating on them. I'm always preaching "prepare, prepare, prepare," but on the other hand, if you have smart people who have interesting things to say and there's no step-by-step process they need to review, lack of preparation can work. 

• Personality is critical!--I hate to say it, but a webinar can make even an interesting presenter sound boring, so if you're going to do an online event, you REALLY need people who can relax and let their personality shine through. We had a couple of great webinars in terms of the content and information that was shared that received somewhat lower ratings because the presenters sounded like Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• Test EVERYTHING beforehand--Because we'd used Go-to-Webinar for other events, we were pretty confident and comfortable that it would work. However, we didn't count on its bugginess with Macs, so the presentation we thought we'd recorded was not captured. Next time we'll be sure to test before we assume, even when it's a platform we've used before. (I should add that Go-to-Webinar provided me with some great 140-character customer service through Twitter, so I was really pleased with their response, even though we had some issues with the recordings).

• Free can work--This project was grant-funded and money was tight. We made the decision to see if it was possible to use primarily free or very low-cost tools to put on the virtual event because we also wanted to demonstrate to the cash-strapped agencies and schools we were working with that it's possible to do some pretty cool things without laying out a lot of money for technology. No doubt we could have spent a boatload of money to have more integrated tools and a better "look," but we wanted to see what could happen on a shoe-string budget. As it turns out, quite a lot can be done.

I was actually really pleased with how smoothly things went overall. We'll make some scheduling and content changes for next time, but the virtual concept worked well and demonstrated to a number of naysayers how this kind of thing can work to supplement or replace face-to-face events. This was a big step.

Next time we're looking at incorporating live streaming video and some other elements. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

Borrowing from the Library to Support Workplace Learning

Joyce Valenza is a librarian rockstar who also happens to be the head librarian at my daughter's high school. A recent post she wrote for the School Library Journal on strategies for teaching and using social media showed up in my Twitter feed the other day. It turns out there are were some cool ideas in it that I think would translate well to workplace learning. A couple of that jumped out at me. . .

Moving Beyond One Trick Single Search

Students aren't the only ones who need to use search engines to get their work done. Most cubicle dwellers these days need to sharpen their search skills and Joyce has some good advice and resources. Check out her Categorized Search Toolkit with links to tons of search engines and videos on running searches. (Here's another great list of search resources and an excellent post from Tony Karrer on doing better searches. And here are some Google lesson plans on search to check out).

Also don't miss Google Wonder Wheel. It's a search option that allows you to  display Google search results in a mind-mapped sort of visualization that makes it easier to see relationships and drill down into related terms. Very cool, but you may need to check it out to see what I mean. (For more visual search engines, check out this post on 4 options)

Joyce also describes some of the strategies she uses to support her learners' search efforts that I think translate well to the workplace. For example, she sets up Google Customized searches to query targeted sites and address specific needs.This could be set up  to search key best practice resources or for social searches of Twitter, blogs, and other resources related to company or occupational keywords.

While we're on the subject of search, she also teaches students about some people-finder search engines to assess and possibly address their digital footprint and online "personal brand." This is something many workers need to learn how to do and should be part of any organization's orientation training, I'd argue.

Personal Information Portals

I firmly believe that one of our developing roles in the learning world is that of digital curator. There is just so much information and people need help in identifying good sources and pulling it all together, something librarians do very well.

Joyce helps students develop "personal information portals" using tools like iGoogle PageFlakes and NetVibes. These are simply feed aggregators that can be customized to include RSS feeds to blogs, news feeds, videos, etc. related to particular topics. I think of them as "dashboards" for collecting information on a particular area of interest into a single page that is automatically updated.

In the work world, this means that we can create customized pages with RSS feeds related to any topics we want. Picture, for example,  a "leadership" information portal with the feeds for key leadership blogs and resources embedded into the page. Or a "management" portal that includes great supervisory/management feeds. These can be shared with others via email, IM, etc. Here's an example of a UK Hospital Management Page--note that there are tabs for different departments. And here's another example for university staff to keep up-to-date on leadership issues. Note that these can be just one page in a larger personal information portal that workers could set up for themselves.

Related to this idea, I've been using Delicious to support many of my clients, setting up tags for various projects and continuing to add to the resources even after my work has finished. It takes me less than a second to add the project tag and is a great way for me to continue to add value and support learning long after I've gone. And for those who use PageFlakes, Netvibes or iGoogle, subscribing to the Delicious tag feed puts these resources right into their own personal information portal.

Telling Digital Stories

Increasingly we are seeing that digital story-telling is a powerful strategy for learning. As instructional designers we can use stories to illustrate key points, especially in designing e-learning. Storytelling is also a good way for learners to process and reflect on learning, particularly in support of reflective practice and communities of practice. Stories also help us to remember things. Joyce has a nice library of digital story-telling resources that could be used in a work setting. Alec Couros also has some resources that he got from his Twitter network.

Wikify Your Handouts

This is a strategy that I've been using for most of the courses and workshops I do--putting all of my "handouts" into a wiki. Actually, my wiki IS the handout. It's the easiest way for me to share links, videos, photos, documents, etc. related to my topic. I don't waste paper and people can keep adding to it after we're done. I can also embed the Delicious tags that I set up for the training and continue to add after the learning event is finished.

Joyce does a version of this with the subject area pathfinders she's set up for students to explore different topics. Here's one I did recently to support a project on implementing social media to support a youth project. 

Many other interesting ideas in Joyce's article that could potentially be adapted for your situations. I strongly encourage giving it a read.

Do You Know How to Ask the Right Questions?

Looking at tools like Google Squared, Google Trends and Wolfram Alpha, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that one of the key challenges we have before us is learning how to ask questions. And not just any question, but the RIGHT questions. There's tremendous power in the possibilities of these tools, but if you don't know what to ask about or how to ask it, then what's the point?

This leads me to wonder if we're really doing a good job of teaching the art of questioning, either in schools or in the workplace. My anecdotal response would be "no, we do a terrible job of this," partially because we seem to do what we can to kill curiosity and creativity, starting from an early age. A 4-year old does a great job of asking question, but by the time he gets out of 2nd grade, not so much.

And from what I can tell,  many workplaces are structured to avoid questions. Let's just do what we've been doing and not stir things up with curiosity. We also seem to love moving immediately to answers and solutions. Maybe we need to spend more time formulating the right questions.

This seems like one of those areas where we need to think carefully about how our tools may be outstripping our ability to use them. I love all this cool technology, but are our skills keeping up with what the tools can do? And how are we going to address this?

Course Community Building with Ning

Building Community with Ning

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: netork maricopatech)

Alisa Cooper of South Mountain Community Colleges has produced a great narrated presentation on how she uses Ning to build community in her courses. She's also using podcasts, live streaming video and drop.io. And check out her Voicethread on using Ning, which she said she started using because she thought the usual online offerings were "a little sterile and boring." Good stuff.

Deconstructing the Work Literacy Learning Event

The Work Literacy online learning event is over and Harold Jarche has posted some of what he learned from our facilitation of the course. Time for me to share some of my thoughts. .  

Using Ning for the Course

Our first big decision was what platform to use. We ended up going with Ning because it integrated several different tools (blogs, forums, video and photo-sharing, social networking profiles, groups) at the right price (free). We also wanted to use something that would give people a true flavor of Web 2.0 learning. While Moodle would have been a potential choice, it's still a CMS and we wanted to see what would happen with a tool that was set up for social networking rather than for course management. We also considered using a blog platform (like Wordpress) and having people participate via comments and their own blogs, but decided that Ning might give us a fuller experience of using social media tools in a more integrated way.

From my perspective, Ning seemed to work well. It was more chaotic than if we'd used a structured tool like Moodle, and I know that some people struggled a little with feeling that they couldn't quite connect with what was going on. There was less of a step-by-step feel and more of a networked approach that, at first, was disconcerting.  But I also think with Ning we did a better job of helping people to form more social connections. The profile pages gave a good sense of who people were and I felt like I had more of a handle on having specific people involved in the course, rather than a list of names.

One thing that I think was a MAJOR asset of using Ning was the fact that it made it very easy for people to assume responsibility for different aspects of the course. We saw several people start up smaller study and interest groups and various forum threads that really added to the overall learning. Many people seemed to take ownership of the course in a way that wouldn't have happened with a CMS. That was one of the most positive benefits from my perspective of using a social networking platform--it really did a much better job of creating a community of practice/peer-to-peer learning environment. 

Facilitating the Course

In setting up the course, we focused on a topic per week, with different levels of involvement in the assignments--Spectators, Joiners/Collectors and Creators.  One thing we heard repeatedly was that people really liked the idea that they had permission to be spectators, dipping in and out of readings and forums as they wanted to. This kind of "lurking" behavior is the hallmark of any online course, but I think that participants were happy that being a spectator was a more "official" and sanctioned way of participating in the course, rather than a cop-out.

As Harold pointed out, the Ning platform did require us to act as synthesizers and information connectors  because great nuggets of conversation started in various locations (in individual blog posts, on forums, etc.) and they could easily be lost in the discussions. We tried to stay on top of that, though, and to pull those nuggets to the forefront by posting them on the main page, adding them to assignment pages and/or sending out blast emails to the entire group to let them know what was happening.

What was interesting for me as a facilitator was that I found myself paying much more attention to creating a particular kind of environment and trying to facilitate dialogue in ways that it's harder for me to do in a face-to-face setting. When I'm doing stand-up sessions, it's easier for me to fall into the "sage on the stage" kind of behavior, even when I'm actively trying to avoid it. But in an asynchronous, social environment like we had with the Work Literacy course, I couldn't be everywhere at once and I found that many other people stepped up to "teach" to others. I also found myself paying more attention to how I framed questions and assignments so that they encouraged thinking and dialogue. Not that I don't do this in face-to-face, but there was a different quality to my thinking in this setting.

Another interesting aspect was finding the balance between being an "instructor" and being a community facilitator. As an "instructor," I think that there's a tendency to want to comment on every blog and forum post. But in doing that, I'm reinforcing this idea of me as "expert" or "teacher," that I wanted to avoid. I really wanted to try to move out of that more traditional role and into a facilitator/community-builder role. I will say that in a lot of ways it was harder to do than I'd thought. There's a certain level of backing off that's necessary, but overall I think the community is better for it. 

Was the Course a Success?

I wondered before the course ended if we'd been "successful" and this was one of the questions we asked in the final week. We got some excellent feedback from participants on this issue that primarily indicated that people had defined for themselves what success would be and then participated in activities accordingly.

One big aspect of thinking about this was the level of participation. We saw a drop-off in the number of people contributing to forums, blog posts, etc. as the weeks went by, so we naturally had to wonder what this meant. I'm still not sure (Harold wonders if the course lasted too long, something I've asked too), but I'm not sure that participation is really the true measure of success anyway. Or at least it's not the only measure we could use.

What I do think we managed to do was create and foster a community of practice that, for a period of time, brought together a large group of people who wanted to work together on learning about using Web 2.0 tools for learning. Through this network of connections and discussion, we also created an excellent resource that will be available to other people who may want to explore these tools on their own, at their leisure.

I know that for myself, I "met" and had an opportunity to engage with the thinking and ideas of some really smart, interesting people--and even had an outstanding lunch with one of the participants, Catherine Lombardozzi, who happens to live in the Philadelphia area. So for me, at least, this was definitely a successful and enriching experience.

What Would I Do Next Time?

• I say this every time I do an online learning event, but I think that I'd shorten the course. If you're doing activities every day (like we did for the Comment Challenge), I think it needs to last only a week, maybe two. If we're doing one topic a week, I'm thinking that it shouldn't go longer than a month. More chunking and some breathing time in between might keep energy levels up.

• I would definitely do the three levels of activities again, at least in circumstances where that's possible. I think that explicit permission and encouragement for lurking really helps people. At the same time, I have to then be prepared for the fact that they WILL lurk.

• I will be more consistent with some of the structural aspects of the course. One strategy we used was to set up a forum to ask people what they wanted to learn about the next week's topic, but we didn't do that every week. I was trying to fit in the course around work stuff and some weeks were better than others for keeping up with different components. I need to be a little more planful on some of these pieces the next time around. There's only so much "building the plane while you're flying it" that I should do.

• I would definitely use Ning again for a project like this. Overall there was a lot of flexibilty and functionality that we were able to access and I do think that it encouraged more group ownership than we might have had using a blog or CMS platform.

• Related to the group ownership idea, I will be more explicit next time about inviting group ownership and suggesting that people feel free to take the learning in directions where they'd like. Paul Lowe volunteered to run a webinar (which was excellent), but he volunteered on his own. Next time I'd have explicit invitations for people from the outset and provide ideas and instructions to encouraget that thinking. (Although is there an advantage to waiting for things to evolve organically?) 

Overall, this was an excellent experience. I will say that I'm ready for a break though. :-)

How Do You Create a Culture of Sharing?

Yesterday I shared a couple of videos on real-life, online communities of practice. In comments, LaDonna Coy asks an excellent question:

I really appreciate this post. I've been looking for some good examples of communities of practice and here's two that are spot on. Thank you. I'm particularly taken by the sharing culture concept that Dave talks about and Rio Tinto does in practice. In my line of work we'd call it a collaborative culture.

There's a lot of organizations that simply do not have such a culture for a variety of reasons whether silo boundaries, competitiveness or perhaps simply the habit of working locally (co-located) but not connecting beyond in this sharing culture kind of way. I'm wondering if you have examples of companies or organizations that shifted the culture to one of sharing and how they may have seeded the shift?

By coincidence (or perhaps serendipity), Stewart Mader blogged today about an article I had bookmarked awhile ago on how to create a "know-it-all" company. In addition to some excellent real-life examples, it has a few tips that get at LaDonna's question: 

• Show personal ROI--how will knowledge-sharing help people do a better job or build their own skills?  Communicate this to people, even in the most competitive environments, and they're more likely to start sharing.

• Hire the right people--look for staff that want to share and that understand the sharing culture. Find people who talk about "we" instead of "I" and who tell stories about shared accomplishments rather than what they alone achieved. Probe specifically for examples of collaboration and knowledge-sharing that wasn't mandated.

• "Keep it real"--Related to point number 1, the article recommends focusing on nurturing communities around business needs. I would add, though, that there's much to be gained from allowing people to form their own communities based on their interests, etc. Although I think that organizations can certainly provide tools and guidance, if they hold people only to forming communities around "business needs," they're going to miss out on communities that might foster other kinds of relationships or future innovation.

• Recognize contributors--the most powerful incentive to sharing and creating a community is peer recognition. Find ways to acknowledge the contributions of those who share.

• Use a range of strategies, including face-to-face--technology is obviously a fabulous tool for nurturing communities of practice, so look at ways you can tie together different tools. How can you use blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, Twitter, forums, social networks, etc. to provide people with a variety of ways to share. But don't forget the power of face-to-face. Find ways to bring people physically together to share knowledge and form stronger community bonds.

What are other ways to nurture a culture of sharing within an organization? How can we create a foundation for building communities of practice? Do you have any real-life examples of how you can move an organization from a culture of competition or knowledge-hoarding to one that generously shares?

Some Video Advice from Two Companies On Using Online Communities of Practice

A couple of short videos on communities of practice. The first is from Dave Vance, former president of Caterpillar University, who shares some of Caterpillar's experiences in facilitating online communities of practice. His advice?

• You need to have a sharing culture to build from--communities of practice don't work in organizations that have a culture of hoarding information.

• It isn't about capturing the knowledge, although that can be a good side benefit. It's about facilitating the conversations between people.

• Caterpillar makes their communities as de-centralized as possible. They provide people with the tools, the guidelines for using them and some idea of the potential and then they leave it up to employees to develop their communities. One full-time staff person supports 4,000 communities of practice that include 40,000 Caterpillar employees.

• Don't worry that people will give bad advice. There are enough people participating in the conversations that if someone says the wrong thing, it will quickly be corrected. "You have to let it sort itself out," says Vance.

• Don't put knowledge through a vetting process. Again, because there are so many knowledgeable people, the system is self-correcting. Plus having to always vet information will certainly hamper any kind of sharing.

This second video is an example of the benefit of online communities of practice in the mining industry at Rio Tinto. It shows how through an active online CoP, one Rio Tinto division saved over a year's worth of work and headaches because they were able to quickly connect with another division that had experienced and solved a similar problem.

Both Caterpillar and Rio Tinto mention that their communities of practice save considerable time and money. What's also interesting is that these online communities are being fostered in heavy manufacturing types of industries where you'd think that maybe uptake would be slower. Not the case, though.

Implementing Social Media: A Tale of Two Case Studies

A couple of interesting posts from Nathan Wallace on his organization's experiences in implementing a wiki and then a year later, a customized microblogging platform called Jitter. You need to read both, but here are some key points:

The organizational wiki seems to have been adopted more quickly and used more extensively than the Jitter solution. This is in part, Nathan says, because the wiki was responding to a need, while Jitter was trying to create demand:

Open collaboration and idea sharing are common organisational goals, but that doesn’t mean there is latent demand among the people of the business for the tools that enable it. With any new organisational capability, always stay focused on end users and helping them to solve a problem.

While Jitter is a highly flexible tool that people are already using for a wide range of purposes, we didn’t do enough to position this new communication medium or to demonstrate the business value. People didn’t know how to use this new tool. Some feedback was negative, but overwhelmingly people asked “What do I post to it?”, “What’s the business value?”. Without clear answers, people just waited to see what others would do.

Related to the idea of launching a social media solution in response to a particular need, the organization's wiki was piloted as an information source related to the moving of the company's head office. As Nathan points out, "Nothing drives traffic like a seating plan for a new office."

He also has some great advice on dealing with people's concerns about people making "improper" changes to a wiki:

Predictably, the main argument against this system was fear of improper changes to content, particularly for information subject to regulatory control. I would counter this argument in two ways:

1. There are two ways to control people's behaviour: social forces and technical forces. Currently, we successfully rely on social forces to control a wide range of things like who calls or emails the CEO with their latest crazy idea. Technical forces are powerful, but with each technical feature we increase training and raise the bar against collaboration. Surely, we can see if social forces will be enough for all but the most critical of content?
2. Anyone can choose to monitor any content that they are concerned about (e.g. automatic email alert with changes). So, they can quickly jump in and correct any mistakes.
3. For exceptional cases, we may choose to lock down critical content and define clear ownership and responsibility for its maintenance.

It also seems that there are real challenges to implementing microblogging in the enterprise:

Microblogging is particularly difficult to position as a business tool since it’s so hard to say anything worthwhile in so few characters. For an organisation starting the journey of sharing ideas and thoughts, blogging may be an easier starting point. Posts can be more serious and business like. Blogs are better known, and at worst look more like normal web pages. Authors can craft and position their entries to meet the political challenges and communication realities of the enterprise. Even if your organisation is ready for fast thoughts and short posts, authors can evolve towards really short blog entries.

Note that this doesn't say that microblogging shouldn't be used in the enterprise. Nathan suggests that it might not be a great starting point though.

Finally, check out this excellent article on implementing Web 2.0 in a 1.0 Culture. In it Nathan discusses the two cultural barriers to collaborative tools in the organization--sharing knowledge adds more work and sharing knowledge increases personal risk. Then he outlines some strategies for minimizing these barriers. He also proposes four values for building Enterprise 2.0:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
2. Ease of use over comprehensive training.
3. Flexible tools over completeness.
4. Responding to needs over creating demand.

Really great stuff, well worth your time.