CPsquare

For the last three years, CPsquare has been evolving a practice of visiting with an individual who’s leading one specific community of practice every month for a year. Shadowing one leader of one community is a simple but very powerful  way of developing an in-depth appreciation of a community, its leader, their technology, and their context — all of it being different in large or small ways from anything we have previously experienced, either individually or collectively.  We ask one simple question each time: “What’s going on with you and your community this month?”  Now that we’re about to choose someone for the fourth year, we decided to check back with the people we’ve “shadowed” in the past.

Last Wednesday we met with Robert Tollen who was the community leader we shadowed the first year.  We ended up talking about managing community boundaries, about environmental disruptions, leadership responsibilities, and about specific technologies that work with an email list.  A few highlights:

• Tollen has consciously avoided tools like Facebook or Twitter that might be technically challenging for his elderly subscribers
• Volunteers retrieve information from the rather vast list archives to help individuals who ask for help
• Tollen himself uses 16 different email addresses: one to accumulate an archive of the list digests, another to accumulate searches, another for scheduled announcements, etc.
• It’s interesting to hear about the tools that Tollen has found to extend email functionality.  They are not necessarily “hot” but it’s fascinating to see how they are relevant and work in the context that he’s set up. Those tools have now been added to the CPsquare Email list wiki page.

At the end of our visit, Tollen reflected on the benefits of being listened to in the context of our shadow the leader series.  Another 1-minute snippet from the conversation reflects on how the leader benefits from the work of leading a community, too. Both of those comments suggest what our shadow the leader conversations have been like.

Next week we will catch up with Beth Kanter, who is the leader we shadowed in Year 2. She is now a visiting scholar at the Packard Foundation and has just moved to California which she’s been describing here: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/vlog/ (packing the people, moving the car, checking the cello on the plane, etc.).