CPsquare

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

How does YOUR community use its wiki? Does it have one? Could it use a wiki more effectively? What would be the implications of adding a wiki or stimulating its use in various ways?

CPsquare’s January conference is about wikis and these very questions. You are invited to join us to discuss these questions and more.

“Wiki all around the world and all the way” will be a short, intensive internet-based conference that’s a follow-on to CPsquare’s Long Live the Platform conference in January of 2008. We will look at wikis from the perspective of communities of practice and as tools for communities. How do wikis work as the principal platform for a community? as an add-on or auxiliary tool? What is the logic of a wiki as a tool for community use? Where did wikis come from and how are they evolving? What other tools work with wikis? What are some of the commercial and open source offerings? What kind of integration issues do communities experience when other tools are added on to a wiki or when a wiki is added on to another tool? Are there some communities that take more naturally to using wikis than others? Are there strategies for hastening wiki adoption in a wiki?

Here’s a tentative schedule (confirmed names are in bold). All teleconferences would be at 20:00 GMT. Each session needs a host and others to summarize and pull it off.

• Jan 7 - conference opening: wiki videos and resources, open wiki sandbox, basic wiki resources - Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz
• Jan 9 - Wiki as basic community software or add-on? KM4Dev (Nancy White) and Kehilliyot (Naava Frank / Caren Levine)
• Jan 12 - The of core of the wiki way and its evolution - Ward Cunningham
• Jan 14 - Wiki case study: non-profit and government examples
• Jan 16 - Wiki as platform element: Moodle and Ecco (Sylvia Currie on SCOPE / Moodle & Eric Sauve on Tomoye’s Ecco’s wiki, and how the SharePoint wiki is integrated into it)
• Other sessions to be scheduled
• Ongoing a-synchronous discussions

Conference Tag: waatwaat - http://delicious.com/tag/waatwaat

Join CPsquare now or register for the conference separately.

We’re pleased to announce that CPsquare members are offering “Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice” — a five week workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and  tools to support them (referred to by some as Web2.0) for the second time.  It starts November 10, 2008.  We anticipate offering it twice a year. This workshop is a hands-on, practice-shifting, dive into using new technologies to meet community needs. At the end of this workshop, participants can expect to:

• Become more confident in managing and combining tools to support a community’s orientation and ongoing activities
• Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools enable one another, are adopted and supported in communities
• Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, leaders and community conveners.

New technology stewards are especially encouraged to join us. The workshop includes virtual field trips to successful communities and deep dives into the use of new tools. We will explore many freely available technologies, including web conferencing, teleconferences, blogging, RSS syndication, microblogging, social bookmarking and tagging, wikis, mashups, and social networking.  Each aspect has the support of experts and leaders in areas such as organizational, educational, government and enterprise communities. Participants will work through a process of thinking through new social strategies and technologies to support the ongoing life of their respective communities of practice. Participants will also receive an advance electronic copy (PDF) of parts of the forthcoming book “Digital habitats: stewarding technology for Communities” (Wenger, White, and Smith 2008).

More information about the workshop is here:

http://cpsquare.org/edu/cp2tech/

Registration page is here:

http://admin.cpsquare.org/Default.aspx?pageId=72847

It’s true that we’re forcing it into the calendar, offering it without a lot of advance notice, but we’re trying to build on the experience of the first offering in the Spring of 2008.   We’ve decided that we can’t really claim to offer a “practice-altering” workshop unless the presenters collectively practice offering it — at least twice  year.

One thing we’re exploring this time is how different Web 2.0 tools build on each other.  That matters in a workshop setting, but it also shows up in the trajectories of individuals and communities.  Another is how to use a new “Action Notebook” chapter in “Digital Futures” in a workshop context.

The Fall 2008 Research and Dissertation Fest lineup includes 5 presentations (one more is in the “possible” category).

• Alice MacGillivray: Perceptions and Uses of Boundaries by Respected Leaders — a Trans-disciplinary Inquiry – November 4
• Pamela Stern and Christopher Harz: Serious games for first responders — improving design and usage with social learning theory – November 6
• Melanie Brydges Down: Knowledge sharing in Standard AERO’s redesign group – November 11
• Andreas Lloyd: A system that Works for Me — an anthropological analysis of computer hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system — November 13
• Lilia Efimova: Between passion and work– blogging practices of knowledge workers — December 2

How we do it: Overview of what these events are about, how they work, etc.

This is a snapshot of an internal wiki page that has developed over the years to guide this series

Context, assumptions

• The CPsquare community values rigorous research and ongoing practice. We have considerable depth on both sides and we seek to find ways in which one can inform the other.
• This series allows authors to hold dialog around their dissertations, theses and big research projects with the CPsquare community (which embraces academic researchers, thought leaders and practitioners in many community domains).
• For authors, presenting to CPsquare community, with members who are well versed in the theories, methodologies and practices around communities of practice can be very useful and gratifying. Especially if they are “solo” works, which can be often extremely isolating experiences for their authors. This fest offers a sympathetic social context in which to unpack some issues.
• For researchers and practitioners in CPsquare, having others share their research work extends our access to high-quality and in-depth efforts to understand what is CPsquare’s domain.

Activities and processes

• The Research and Dissertation Fest can include several different types of projects:
  • proposals - people looking to clarify their research proposal
  • work-in-progress - people part way through seeking assistance in some challenge
  • findings - people presenting what they have discovered and positioning it in the context of other’s completed research and understandings.

Organizing and supporting a presentation so that it meets everyone’s needs requires some careful design and skillful facilitation. Here is some process advice:

• Be careful to not try to present all of 4 years of work in 20 minutes. Choose a key theme or challenge.
• Before the event you should share a summary resource that gives the key issues of your research and makes it readily accessible to a busy audience (takes less than an hour to read).
• You may choose to share your entire dissertation which is posted in the CPsquare Knowledge Base
• Usually the online dialog begins a few days before the conference call for the presenter and community members to pose some questions that help unpack the context of the research.
• The presenter introduces the research in the conference call for no more than 15 to 25 minutes and the discussion is a free give-and-take around the issues that come up.
• Everyone is invited to explore questions asynchronously afterwards, as interest demands
• The presenter is invited to stay involved in the asynchronous conversation if it continues.
• Summaries are always appreciated and valued.

Also note:

Four members of CPsquare, Bronwyn Stuckey, Jeffrey Keefer, Sue Wolff, and Sylvia Currie, are facilitating a session on SCoPE that begins this coming week: Managing Multimembership in Social Networks: Oct 27-Nov 9, 2008. This is done in conjunction with the a mini-conference as part of the Facilitating Online Communities course that is currently proceeding.

Multimembership refers to being a member of several social networking environments, communities, platforms, and technologies at once. You know, I blog here and Tweet there and participate in Facebook over there (among many others); but how do I manage all this? Considering how many peope involved in the CPsquare community face similar challenges, how about exploring the issue(s) with us?

We are thinking broadly about our topic, and want to reach as wide an audience as possible to get the most ideas out there from the many people who face the same challenges. If you are interested in being a part of this, or cannot attend yet still want to add your voice in some other manner, consider taking our quick and painless online survey so we can get some data to share with the participants when we begin our session.

One of the persistent questions we get from people who are thinking of doing the Foundations Workshop is about “how much time it takes to participate?” I think there are two approaches to the question, so I’m proposing a straight answer and a deeper answer.

The straight answer is that, generally, the more time people spend on it, the more satisfied they seem to be with the whole experience. Since participation and involvement is completely voluntary, the actual amount of time seems to vary a lot — from a couple hours a week up to 10-15 hours per week. (Occasionally there’s someone who just moves into the site and decides its their new home, so they’ve even spent more time than that…

We do try to model a number of stratagems to accommodate the participation of busy people in a community — like making audio recordings of the several synchronous events (available along with chat transcripts that give a sense of what was discussed). For some people, what takes a lot of time is becoming familiar with the technology (mainly a web conferencing platform) so the total amount of time depends on people’s background and familiarity with the technology.

The deeper answer has to do with the nature of communities of practice themselves. To the extent that the workshop really is similar to a community of practice, the time it takes is difficult measure. When the workshop is running, I find that conversations from it are running in my head almost all the time. Would that count? We try to encourage participants to bring their existing community projects to the workshop so that it becomes more ambiguous whether time is “for their project” or “for the workshop.” To the extent that participants accomplish real work in the workshop, the time is “free,” right?

Another aspect of the deeper answer is that people’s practice of participation changes over the course of seven weeks, so that we all become much more skillful at squeezing in 2 minutes here and 5 there to check-in and add a comment or kibitz or keep a conversation going. Those activities and competence at that practice are important and change the way we spend our time in many areas, although they certainly make time-keeping messy.

Of course, we have to admit that everyone involved in the workshop is pretty enthusiastic about the subject and about the way we are exploring it together, so we may be guilty of modeling a general behavior of spending too much time and we are disciplined in other areas, but not in tracking time the time it takes to participate. You will have to be the judge of that, I guess.

After last January’s Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness conducted in-depth interviews with almost half of the participants to try to understand what was going on in the workshop — with a view to describing what lessons could be applied elsewhere. They’ve presented their work at a conference and will soon be submitting it to a journal.

The Foundations Workshop is truly an ensemble, community production, so continuing in that spirit, if’ you’ve participated in the Foundations Workshop previously (or are a member of CPsquare), you’re invited to read and discuss their work during the coming week. And, after reading their working paper, please join us to talk with them in a teleconference next Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 20:00 GMT on the CPsquare phone bridge.

You may already have access to the discussion space (which contains the paper and a PowerPoint presentation that we’ll use on Thursday). If not, get in touch (mentioning which workshop you attended). It would be great to be able to reflect on their good work and help them take it further. The stated goals of their research are:

• to appreciate the learner perceptions and experience of the learning environment in terms of the domain, the community and practice; how did learners make use of the learning space offered by the workshop and co-create their learning through interactions with each other?
• to understand the interrelationship between communities of practice, advancing technologies, social and emotional dimensions and learning in this community

The first two weeks of the book discussion group have already occurred, with much of the discussion focussing primarily on higher eduation. To expand our thinking about the issues in the texts we are using and the potential audience for discussion, two new discussion areas have been added as next steps:

1. My Favourite Chapter, a place to raise discussion around a chapter that really speaks to any of the book discussion participants, especially those that may be outside the set themes of the discussion.
2. CoPs and Technology, a location to discuss any issue in and around technology and how it relates with communities of practice.

We look forward to a few more weeks of stimulating discussion. It is never too late to join us for this!

CPsquare has been organizing informal gatherings since it came into existence: http://cpsquare.org/category/events/face-to-face/

In connection with the AoIR 9 and EPIC 2008 conferences (which are quite different but happen at exactly the same times), we expect to meet for a day of conversation somewhere in Copenhagen on Sunday, October 19 from early morning (9 am or so) to late afternoon, followed by dinner. We may ask for a financial contribution from participants, depending on where we meet and how many of us there are. Generally we use an “open space” format, adapted to meet the needs of an ongoing community (we do some planning in advance, but decide the details on the spot). We always try to share back what we talked about and learned, but it’s a very informal process.

There are a handful of CPsquare folks who are presenting papers, panels, round-tables, etc. at the AoIR 9 Conference. A future blog posting will list them.

CPsquare’s password protected Web Crossing space is at: http://conversations.cpsquare.org/P/CP2aoir08 . We’ll use it for:

• posting arrival & departure times in Copenhagen
• working out lodging plans (sharing rooms, staying nearby each other, figuring out directions)
• planning our time together (beginning Tuesday night October 14)
• figuring out where to meet on October 19

Our Web Crossing space is open to:

• all CPsquare members
• anyone who’s identified themselves or expressed interest in joining us. Send an email to John Smith or use the “Ask a question” form on the main CPsquare website: http://cpsquare.org/contact/ to get access if you don’t already have access.

We’ll use cp2aoir08 to tag resources, photos, tweets, etc.: http://delicious.com/tag/cp2aoir08