CPsquare

The book. The most exciting news is that Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and I have finished our book, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities! CPsquare serves as publisher. The book shows how technology has changed what it means for communities to “be together.” Digital tools are now part of most communities’ habitats. It brings together conceptual thinking, case studies and offers a guide for understanding how technology can help a community do what it wants to do. It gives a glimpse into the future as community and technology continue to affect and influence each other. This book develops a new literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities. Here are the citation details:

Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009) Book website: http://technologyforcommunities.com ISBN: 9780982503607

It’s been a consuming project for more than 5 years, so it’s really exciting see it come to fruition. (It will be available from Amazon by mid-October, but you can buy a copy now at http://technologyforcommunities.com/buy/).

(I can’t resist recommending a very related book that I’ve been reading recently: Joshua Porter, Designing For The Social Web – http://isbn.nu/9780321534927. It’s aimed at designers and is much more technical than Digital Habitats, but I found it to be very useful.)

Workshops. The next Foundations of communities of practice workshop starts on September 14, 2009 and runs for 7 weeks. If you know anyone who might be interested, please let them know. More information and registration is here: http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations.

An effort to think through how new community-friendly workshops might be developed has resulted in a public Wiki page that describes what we think it is that works about the Foudations workshop and why. If it inspires or you see ideas missing, it would be great to hear from you about this page: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Educational_offerings_guidelines_overview. Of course, since it’s a wiki page, you could edit it yourself!

Events and conferences.

For more than a year we’ve been having a conversation in CPsquare about spiritual communities as communities of practice. In our initial exploration it has been remarkable how many challenges they face in common, even though they see themselves as fundamentally different. We are working toward holding a conference of some kind on the subject.

In addition to our semi-annual research and dissertation fests, CPsquare is continuing with its monthly “Shadow the Leader” sessions where we follow the activities of one community leader for an entire year. The first three years of this series have yielded rich insights. We are adding a quarterly series that is being designed as we go. It’s called “Visits to living communities” and our current thinking is on CPsquare’s public Wiki: http://cpsquare.org/wiki/CPsquare_field_trips_project. The events themselves are open to the  public. Part of the idea is to use a conceptual framework to investigate the communities we visit. We are experimenting with the “C4P model” by Hoadley, C. M., and Kilner, P. G. (2005) “Using technology to transform communities of practice into knowledge-building communities,” ACM SIG-GROUP Bulletin, 25(1), 31-40.  (Discussed and elaborated in Alice MacGillivray, “Knowledge Intensive Work in a Network of Counter-Terrorism Communities” from Handbook of Research on Knowledge-Intensive Organizations edited/authored by J. Kociatkiewicz & D. Jemielniak (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2008).)