CPsquare

CPsquare is happy to announce the schedule for our Spring 2009 Research and Dissertation Fest.

Roy Greenhalgh: justifying the use of communities of practice and network analysis as approaches to study volunteer organizations

We know very little about the mutual support that exists between volunteers. Most scholars use the term support to mean management (Brudney and Williamson 2000; Hager and Brudney 2004). And management is usually restricted to three activities: recruitment, selection and retention. The last 30 years has seen the adoption of modern managerialism, which is odd considering that volunteers usually decide to gift their time and skills in an atmosphere supporting freewill rather than one of command and control. This doctoral study is using the twin lenses of Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1992; Brown and Duguid 1996; Wenger 1998) and social network analysis (Wellman 1981; Hall and Wellman 1985; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988; Wellman and Wortley 1990; Scott 2000) to explore the micro support structures that are created, maintained and managed by the volunteers themselves.”

Roy will talk about his work and dissertation plans on Tuesday, May 26.

Marian Thier: Listening habits assessment instrument

Marian Thier is the founder of Expanding Thought. She has recently become interested in understanding people’s listening styles. A small research project has developed an instrument that assesses people’s listening behaviors as a function of habit more than conscious choice. If you are joining us for this session, you are invited to complete a ten-question survey that assesses which of four different listening habits you most commonly use during communication. It does not address how well or poorly you apply the habit. She’ll present the project and individual results on Wednesday, May 27.

Debra Beck: The Nonprofit Board as Community of Practice: An Exploratory Case Study

Debra Beck recently completed her EdD, at the University of Wyoming. This dissertation focused on describing how learning occurs in the routine activities of preparing for, and participating in, nonprofit board meetings. Evidence of a community of practice was found and linked to the qualities necessary to foster generative thinking and governing. A case study approach was selected to allow for immersion in the meeting environment and deep exploration of the experiences, roles and motivations of individual members. She’ll present her work on Thursday, May 28.

Mirjam Neelen: “Lurking: a Challenge or Another Way of Learning? A focus on Corporate CoPs.”

Mirjam Neelen, is working for a telecommunications company in Seattle and studying learning sciences at Open University, the Netherlands.

Online, or virtual, communities have become an important method of KM to leverage an organization’s intellectual capital by enhancing knowledge exchange and that way, support continuous organizational learning (Anthony, Rosman, Eze, & Gan, 2009). Although there is no solid understanding of why, in many cases an online community only has an active core group of posters and a much bigger group of people who read messages of others but not or rarely post (Kahnwald, unpublished paper). This phenomenon is called lurking. There are many different approaches to lurking. Some see lurkers as free-riders (Kollock & Smith, 1996) that limit the organizational intellectual capital, while others see them as peripheral legitimate participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In addition, Kahnwald (unpublished paper) describes lurking as another form of learning.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 2.

Akila Sarirete: Knowledge management within CoPs

Akila Sarirete is reporting on work on the knowledge creation process applying the SECI model of Nonaka (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization) in CoPs, using force field analysis. Akila will present her work on Thursday, June 4.

Alice MacGillivray: Use of the C4P Model in a CoP study: Good practice building better theory

In 2004, when Alice MacGillivray and John Smith presented at an AACE E-Learn conference in DC, we heard [then Major] Pete Kilner share his thoughts about a model implicitly used to help the CompanyCommand community thrive. Pete referred to it as the C4P Model: context, connection, conversation and content around purpose. It was one of those models that could be easily sketched on a napkin, was intuitively appealing, and was grounded in Pete’s extensive experience. The model had not been published in peer-reviewed literature.

Later, when I had the privilege of researching counter-terrorism communities of practice in Canada, I built the C4P model into the analysis of data as part of the larger study. The results support the value of the model.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 9.

Although many members of CPsquare are themselves leaders of communities and consultants in the development or support of communities, learning in a community about communities of practice can be another a challenge.  At the beginning you have to just do it, which is what we’ve done with the research and dissertation fests.

They began as a way to go beyond the learning we do inside CPsquare.  Sometimes a member finished a big piece of work and presented it to the whole community or consulted with the community at some critical juncture.  Gradually we formalized the process and it has served us well for sharing work that’s been done by CPsquare members and others.

At this point it’s something we do regularly.  We developed a set of notes on how to do it internally and now it’s shared on the CPsquare wiki as a page on our Research and Dissertation Fests.

CPsquare’s wiki has some areas that visible to the world and others that are not.  In addition, some pages can only be edited by certain people.  The idea is to have a more nuanced boundary between what happens inside CPsquare’s workshops and internal conversations and the resources and materials that we want to share.

* If you were ever a member of CPsquare you will have edit privileges
** Permission for workshop spaces based on registration and participation in the corresponding workshop.

This SCoPE seminar begins Monday and will be of interest to CPsquare members!

Evaluation Practices for Informal/Self-Paced Adult Learning: April 13 - May 1, 2009

Facilitators:
William Owen, Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, University of Northern British Columbia
Caren Levine, Consultant, Etheoreal, specializing in adult learning, communities of practice, and social media

Description:
Informal learning is a key part of our personal development. It is also becoming a larger part of our working lives. But in an era of increasing accountability, we begin to question the role of evaluation for informal / self-paced adult learning…

What are existing rationales for evaluation of informal / self-paced adult learning (for the learner and the provider/developer)? What accountability do we have to learners / providers/ funders? What’s different about evaluating informal learning vis a vis formal learning? What are emerging practices for evaluation informal / self-paced adult learning? What are some challenges in the field? What are the opportunities in the field?

During this 3-week online seminar, we will begin to address these and other questions as we informally learn about the role and practice of evaluation in informal learning.

About SCoPE:
SCoPE seminars are free and open to the public and are designed for busy people like you — no registration, no obligations to participate for the full length, and no homework. Read along via email, the web, or RSS. Seminars are moderated by volunteers in our community and are archived for future reference. To contribute to discussions and to customize your visits you’ll need to create an account on the site. It’s a quick process.

Here is a direct link to the forum with further details about this event:
http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=1691

Please spread the word!

There is nothing like a project to focus community effort.  The leaders of the “Connected Futures” workshop are in more or less constant touch planning version 3.  This post is a little out-take from our conversations as as we get ready to launch.

The initial idea of the workshop was introduced by email, and followed by several conference calls, using a phone bridge and Skype chat for note taking. A wiki was used to develop material and regular calls used to keep up to date with development. Throughout both of the previous runs of the course a Skype chat was kept open for the facilitators.

The first run of the workshop, had a “home base” in Web Crossing, with other technologies introduced during the five weeks. The second run used a Google Group as the home base.  This time we’re using a beautiful implementation of Drupal designed by Howard Rheingold and friends.  Although the home base matters, all the other technologies that are used during the workshop matter as well because:

1. Choosing and using technology is a primary topic of the workshop
2. The workshop leaders seek to present the workshop in a transparent way, where the practice of organizing and presenting is open
3. Workshop participants are themselves invited to introduce technologies to the group — and explain the logic of adding a specific tool

Each home base choice and the additional technologies that were introduced open new possibilities and create some frustrations for everyone (participants as well as workshop leaders), including dilemmas about where to post things, the chance of missing what was considered important, and monitoring each other’s “presence” in the workshop.

We keep re-writing the workshop description as we think through the details, building on our experience from last time.  Beverly Trayner inserted an off-hand comment in a draft of the Participant’s Handbook, “Of course, it’s the reason that we choose the tools we use in the workshop that’s really interesting.”  Or was that Nancy White?  This is not a scholarly environment where you get to keep track of who contributed what.

We don’t know or can’t say all the reasons for picking a tool — each of the workshop leaders probably has different reasons because each brings a different perspective. And each offering is an experiment — an instance of practice that hopefully gets better and better.

One reason that the tools we use for this workshop seems problematic and keeps changing is that there is an inherent tension in the workshop because of our practice orientation:

• The tools we choose have to work for workshop participants, to help us work and learn together creatively for 5 weeks;
• but they also are for illustration and experimentation — they are supposed to illustrate what you can do at home and how you might think about the choices you  continually make on behalf of your community;
• and finally we are constantly picking up new tools or using them in new ways (e.g., copying interesting uses from the communities we are involved in)!

Nevertheless, here are some top-of-mind criteria for the tools we are using in this workshop:

• Collectively they serve different purposes and they are varied enough for us to do those various tasks together.  We try to demonstrate the various things that communities frequently do together using the different tools that are available.
• They are common tools, not too exotic.  We have a bias toward open source or readily available tools.
• They work together more or less, although they were not “designed together.”  Dealing with the reality of separately designed tools is something community leaders and technology stewards have to deal with every day.  We illustrate diverse possibilities but also have critical conversations about the challenges that these tools raise for communities and their leaders.
• We’re not using too many tools: as practitioners we want to share everything, but previous workshops suggest that enough experience with each tool and with the issues that come up when they are combined is more useful than a shallow survey of everything that’s out there.

And  here are the tools we’re using this time through:

At a recent conference here in Portland, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, commented that “saying ‘It’s not done‘ is good news for a community.” Particularly in an organizational context, that can be hard to take. But there’s a lot of wisdom in Ward’s comment: it’s one of those “glass half empty” kinds of things. And as we all know, keeping a community alive and moving forward can be discouraging if we forget how much has been accomplished incrementally, one conversation at a time. I’ve always thought that “keeping it going” is a very worthy goal for leaders of communities of practice. It’s actually a big deal when you think about it. This collection of notes from CPsquare and the communities of practice part of the world is all about “keeping it going.”

Five CPsquare members (Bev Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, Shirley Williams, and I) are offering the “Connected Futures” workshop again, starting on April 20. We’ve offered it twice before and want to make it be more eye-opening and useful for community leaders who are seeking to help their communities leverage all the technology resources that are out there. I’ve just added some participants comments to the description page.   Nancy White, has just written a marvelous description of an urban ornithology community using one of the tools we present in the workshop on her blog.

The venerable Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop ran this past winter (with a rather small group). The workshop itself still keeps growing and evolving and creating a deep impression on participants after 10 years. Three of the prospective presentations for CPsquare’s “research and dissertation fest” this Spring are directly related to the foundations workshop.

CPsquare had a conference on all things wiki this January. Some of the materials from that session are on CPsquare’s new (public) MediaWiki. The wiki is quite incomplete (even the SPAM prevention and registration procedures are frustratingly incomplete), but it is starting to have some valuable material on it. Shawn Callahan mentioned recently that a corporate team he was working with was worried about the incompleteness of wikis. They were immensely relieved when they realized that incompleteness was handleable in the sense that you could classify pages as “incomplete” or as “more complete than not” as we’ve done with the tools pages here.

This year’s “shadow the leader” series is in its 9th month. We are talking with a wikipedia editor who has a life in the real world. It’s been a fascinating story about attention, political conflict, apprenticeship, morphing conversations, and not giving up. Just paying attention to the ongoing ups and downs of practice has that feeling of inconclusive insight, but it also underscores Gardner Campbell’s comment that “Wikis only work in practice, not in theory.”

So I guess that the world of wikis, like the world of communities of practice, is beavering away in the background. In fact “Wiki” just had it’s 14th birthday! Have a look at all the Tweets about it.

There’s a lot of unfinished business, but the glass is more than half full!

What are the intentional or accidental collaborative possibilities of a public-facing wiki for CPsquare?

One of my motives behind setting up a wiki for CPsquare that’s outside Web Crossing is that I think it’s high time for us to share more of what we learn. (There’s a lot of learning to be done in the process of sharing and it’s a way for CPsquare as a community to serve a larger learning agenda.) Wikis seem to be a natural tool for that purpose because they lend themselves to sharing the workload.

An example of sharing what we learned that was itself a real learning process was how Sue Wolff led an innovative effort to report on the “Long Life the Platform” Conference about a year ago. During the conference we tried to gather comments in a Web Crossing wiki, but did not get many contributions. Then Sue set up a SurveyMonkey questionnaire to get additional comments (by allowing people to append a comment to a page). She then summarized and compressed the whole thing here:

http://cpsquare.org/2008/04/report-on-the-long-live-the-platform-conference/

I was impressed at the recent Recent Changes Camp how ingrained the whole idea of “reporting out via the conference wiki” can be for a wiki-oriented community:

http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Session_Notes

As an experiment I’ve put together a different kind of report (aiming for the easiest possible but still useful report that we might publish as a minimum) on our public Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/WAATWAAT_Conference

(It demonstrates the use of a screen-capture and of an RSS feed Widget, by the way.)

Also, I’m proposing that we put ALL CPsquare help files out in public — often they’re most needed when you can’t get “inside” or are lost…

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Category:Members_Help (This obviously has a long way to go, but, as Ward Cunningham said recently, “For a community, ‘incomplete’ is good news!”)

I’ve added a widget extension, so that we can include slides, videos, and RSS feeds in CPquare’s wiki. Just to demonstrate the use of the video widget, I’ve inserted some of those CommonCraft videos in these articles:

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Blogging_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Wiki_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/RSS
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Microblogs

We want you to request an account on the wiki. It’s set up to require people to identify themselves in advance so that we won’t have a SPAM-removal burden later on.

Won’t you join us in the continuing discussion within CPsquare? The ongoing conversation about who we are and what we’re doing as a community is important.  Alternatively, or in addition, jump in and contribute to our Wiki right now!

During our WAATWAAT conference we have looked at a dozen different communities or organizations and had almost as many synchronous meetings. We’ll be sharing more of what we learned as time permits. Meanwhile, since the core discipline of CPsquare is to practice what we preach, we’ve launched a new wiki, where, among other things, we share the materials that were gathered together to launch our conversations.

We expect to consolidate CPsquare resources from far and wide on this wiki. CPsquare members, current and past, as well as friends of CPsquare and others who are involved in the subject of communities of practice are invited to request an account. (Edit privileges will be limited in advance to assure a quality resource, but accounts will be freely given to those who want to contribute.)

A Conference like CPsquare’s Wikis all around the world and all the way is a way for our community to “work a problem together”, although we invite guests to join us in the process.  Part of the process is deciding how to get organized, what questions to ask, what level of analysis is appropriate, what assumptions are “givens” and what assumptions need to be reconsidered.  Then there’s the question of “what is a case?”  Although not all of the cases being presented will use the this framework, we’ve developed the following framework over the past few weeks to get at the question of “What role do wikis play in the repertoire of a community of practice?”

Depending on the size and complexity of a case being presented, here are some points that we agree are useful in discussions and presentations:

• Context or circumstances (how much history or context is useful in presenting this case?)
  • Presenting community or organizational or social context: a metaphor or story that gives a glimpse
  • Role of “the wiki”
  • Other technologies and connections in in use
  • People who are involved, interested, leading, evangelizing
  • Community assets and constraints
  • The topic: what it means to them and how it’s used by writers, editors and readers
• Mechanisms and processes (at what level of detail or scope to describe?)
  • Presenting technical details, screen-shots, process descriptions, anecdotes
  • Sparking interest / curiosity
  • Social and technical guidelines for resolving disagreements and legitimacy
  • Software features and mechanisms that support interaction
  • Time frame and pace of development
  • Specialization and breadth of content
  • How informality and speed are balanced with quality goals
• Direction of development or outcomes (to whom should this make sense and at what level?)
  • Presenting positive outcomes, metrics and measures of success (community, practice, domain?)
  • Uses and benefits of the wiki pages and the wiki as a whole
  • Challenges and possible solutions (brainstorming with group also encouraged)
  • Secondary effects

Greetings from snowbound, deep-frozen Portland, Oregon!  This “newsletter” began because I wanted to let people know we’ll be using a different system to deliver the newsletter to CPsquare friends in the near future and then I had to include additional items around upcoming CPsquare conferences, workshops and related.  It’s all connected!

In a few weeks we start a short online conference on “Wikis all around the world and all the way” (WAATWAAT, for short, so you can see the growing list of related resources here).  It starts on January 7th and is a case-based inquiry into how communities use wikis and how wikis fit into the larger context of community activities and other tools.  The schedule is still evolving.  It’s free to CPsquare members and $75 for guests.

CPsquare workshops

We’re just wrapping up the 2nd offering of the Connected Futures workshop.  The basic model of readings (from Wenger, White and Smith’s “Digital Habitats” book that’s still “forthcoming”), practice using new tools, reflection on one’s own community and one’s own experience of using the tools, with case studies and field trips thrown in seems to be very effective, though time-intensive.  It pushes us all out of our comfort zones and makes us appreciate the support we can get from (as well as give to) others.  We’ll be offering it again in April or May.  The workshop description is here.

The next offering of our “Foundations of Communities of Practice” workshop begins online on January 19, 2009.  If you know anyone who’d be interested, please steer them toward us.

It really is all connected

The WAATWAAT conference is an outgrowth of last year’s Long Live the Platform Conference.  It incorporates and builds on our practice of going on “field trips” that has evolved in the Foundations Workshop.  But it also reflects the conversations we’re having in this year’s “Shadow the Leader” series with wikipedia editor davee evans.

Last year’s visits with Beth Kantor and the community around the “NPtech” tag continues to provoke experimentation and further learning.  We’ve found, for example, that tagging is a technology that is best introduced early in the Connected Futures workshop.  Every CPsquare event now has a tag so that people outside the community or not attending can see what we find to be useful, if they are interested.  Here’s a very practical and useful book about the design of tagging systems:

Gene Smith, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (New York: Macmillan Computer Pub, 2007) http://isbn.nu/0321529170

In connection with the “nptech” tag, have a look at an excellent reflective and critical piece about the nptech community, the difference the tag has made, and its evolution here.  And don’t miss this marvelous visualization tool.

Hackers’ communities as communities of practice

I’ve thought of our research and dissertation fest is one of those CPsquare events where you kind of “have to be there.”  Talking with someone who’s spent years studying a community is compelling and rewarding.  But it turns out that insights from those conversations pop up months and years later and sometimes after the CPsquare conversation you have to go hunker down alone to study what’s been presented.  I actually printed out and read Andreas Lloyd’s thesis (”A system that works for me - an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux System”) a few weeks ago.  Lloyd spent 6 months from April to November 2006, studying the social dynamics of the Ubuntu Linux developers’ on-line community.  You can download it here.

More or less at the same time I ran across a book full of good stories (even though it’s more on a “sociology level” than the usual “community of practice” level) about hackers that’s really fascinating:

Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism. Polity (2008), Paperback, 200 pages http://isbn.nu/9780745639727

A provocative book

Lest you think all we talk about in CPsquare is about technology, here’s a book that’s just come out that’s extraordinarily rich on many different levels.  (Interestingly it’s written by another IRL alum, like Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Mimi Ito and Gitti Jordan, to name four others that I’ve been reading or bumped into personally in the last 2 months.)

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Having fallen in love with so many of the communities that I’ve visited, helped, coached or supported over the years, I really like how she frames her relationship with her subject:

“A final epistemological note: the reader may note my admiration and affection for the people we worked with, and for MidWest itself, and may conclude that I have fallen into the anthropological trap of falling in love with one’s subjects. I agree that I am guilty of that. However, I can note that it has been at least eight years since I worked with them: the blindness of first love has had time to wear off. Also, I have studied other corporations where my most positive emotion was an appreciation for the difficulty of the challenges their members faced but not an admiration for the companies themselves. So I suppose I am arguing that MidWest was truly admirable–the reader may believe me or chalk it up to a protracted infatuation. I can only hope that my admiration has improved rather than contaminated the analyses I present.” p 37

Growing CPsquare

Finally, I’m working on building appropriate organizational infrastructure for the CPsquare community.  That involves updating the list of members blogs on the CPsquare website as well as moving the “friends of CPsquare” email list to a new platform (soon).

John
*
* John D. Smith ~ Voice: 503.963.8229 ~ Skype: smithjd
* Portland, Oregon, USA  http://www.learningAlliances.net
“It is not happiness that makes us grateful but gratefulness that makes us happy.” - Br. David Steindl-Rast