I prepared a toolbox of activities for community of practice events and workshops for the Central Advisory Services on Intellectual Property for a workshop in January, earlier this year.

These tools are activities and processes that can help support the objectives of a workshop or meeting and include:

• Yellow Pages Directory
• Social Network Mapping
• Evening News
• Online Tools
• Facilitation
• Samoan Circle
• Peer Coaching

They are not tools specifically for communities of practice, but I talk about them through my own context and experience which is mostly in communities of practice.

At first I thought it was crazy to be rewriting the procedure for some of these activities, when most of them are already on the internet. (See, in particular, the wiki with the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit).

Then it got me thinking about how people in organisations who are preparing an event rarely think in terms of process activities, let alone know the names of them. So how could they look them up?

 So here are 4 good reasons for sharing these tools in a pdf document rather than - or as well as a wiki:

1. So close and yet so far: Not everyone has free, easy access to internet. This increased access to internet is both true and a myth. It's true for some people some of the time. Outside that time you might be many kilometers away from a connection or you might have to pay, share a computer, or have a server with big downtime. You might be on the move or not allowed to access certain things at work.
2. A document in the hand is worth a wiki in the bush: each click as you navigate a wiki can take a long time if your connection is slow or bandwidth narrow. It's the same if you get many interruptions and lose track of where you are. It's frustrating to find unfinished pages ("put your story here") when it took you time and maybe money to find yourself on that page.
3. Keeping your options open. If the toolbox is in a pdf then you can share it online, and / or print it out to refer to and make notes on and keep it stored on your computer for when you don't have access to internet.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Ada Lovelace (born in 1815 and who wrote one of the world's first computer programmes) was "one of the coolest nerds ever" and we remember her today as a celebration of women who excel in technology.

My celebration toast on Ada Lovelace Day is to my mother who died ten years ago and whose nerdiness outmatches mine to this day. I'm about to be fifty and my mother, today, would have been in her mid-seventies.

I'm also going to use this day to answer Nancy ('nother nerd) who tagged me with "The 7 things I would never tell my mother - NOT!" She changed a meme about what she wouldn't tell her mother to one where she would say things she would like her mother to see, if she peeked in.

I'm using Ada Lovelace Day to talk to my mum and reply to Nancy's meme. I also want Lucy - a Geek Goddess - to know that my mum was brilliant.

Dear mum, on this day of Ada Lovelace this is what I would like you (and Lucy) to know:

• You were Web2.0-ing and Facebook-ing for fun even before they were thought of.

• It's because of you that when people tell me online tools is a generational thing I think they must be referring to the generation before me.

• You would be happy to know that I don't rely on snail mail any more. You warned me of its demise and tried to get me to use email 15 years ago when you bought me my first (second-hand Atari) portable computer.

• Dad isn't as savvy as you ever were on the internet, but he still thinks he knows it all!

• Your website, the one you created before I'd heard of the Internet and with html as a hobby, is STILL floating round the web.

• And my face is still pixeled out on your web page because I told you that I never wanted my photo to be something public. My photo is all over the place now - and I'm sorry I put you to so much trouble!

• Thank you for your playfulness, mum. That and telling me that fairies exist while you believe in them have been two of the most significant contributions to my grown-up nerdy life.

(And you were right about the fairies - they DO exist!)

• acknowledge and celebrate moral heroes and demand that people around us do too  
• strive to be ordinary and extraordinary moral heroes ourselves
• acknowledge that anything that involves interaction with other people involves moral work and that moral work depends on practical wisdom

• he starts a point by making a mundane point or statement that you couldn't disagree with e.g. a janitor's job list is full of all these tasks... and then follows it up with a suprise e.g. but not a single thing on the list involves a single human being.  
• he uses the names of people in his stories. Luke (the hospital janitor) said this, Mark told the story of ....
• he uses moral examplars e.g. Barack Obama and the hospital janitors. He tells us what these moral examplar do and don't do "He didn't say ... He didn't say ... Instead he said...".