CPsquare

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
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* 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