Hackathons are the current equivalent of a barn-raising, where people get together and work really hard for a short period of time on a fun project that somehow contributes to the common good.  We’ve used barn-raising as examples of the kind of personal, skin-in-the-game generosity that’s involved in communities of practice.

We’re inventing a new portmanteau.  A Stackathon is working party that’s slower-paced than a hackathon and more reflective.  It gathers useful examples of something with a lot of sense-making built into the process.  Therefore a stackathon is not like the current craze for content curation.  Read on for details about CPsquare’s first Stackathon.

During this stackathon we’ll gather profiles and portraits of as many living Ning-based or Ning-supported communities as possible.  We’ve started developing a list of interesting examples.  As we stack these communities one on top of another, we expect to discover new hacks that could make any of them more effective, sustainable, and fun. (And those hacks are probably relevant to simpler or more elaborate platforms than Ning, too!)

We will try to be somewhat systematic in describing how Ning is configured for each community and how it fits in the community’s digital habitat. We’ll pay attention to the ongoing role of leadership, facilitation, and technology stewardship. That means understanding what the community is about, what kinds of activities are typical, and what other tools a community uses in each community. Understanding that would give us a better idea of how and when to recommend Ning. Our stack will also suggest many possible methods that one community could borrow from another (including the use of auxiliary tools, plug-ins, themes, membership restrictions, etc., etc.).

During the stackathon (which will run for a whole year, from March 2012 to April 2013) we’ll have discussions in CPsquare’s Web Crossing site (password required: it’s for CPsquare members and people registered for the Stackathon), we’ll collect ideas in various Google Docs, we may have teleconferences, and we will collect some of our insights on CPsquare’s Media Wiki site. It all depends on what people want to do and are willing to do.

You can participate in the stackathon by joining CPsquare or by registering for the Stackathon here (costs $10). Any Stackathon registrant who contributes a full community portrait gets their registration fee refunded and they receive a CPsquare membership during the last 6-months of the Ning Stackathon.

(Thanks to Amboo Who for the photo!)

This is a working version of the conference schedule which is still evolving (mixing scheduled items with a few tentative items). Numbered items are scheduled. Bulleted items are not quite scheduled yet.

1. Opening – Bill Snyder: Communities of Practice: Organizing for Renewal – June 27 (see more detail below)
2. Robert Putnam reading: Prayer request circles vignette from American Grace – June 29
3. Josh Plakoff and Estee Solomon Grey: Isomorphism between Judaism and Communities of Practice – July 5
4. Lisa Colton: the Jewish indie minyan “phenomenon” – July 7
5. Joe Kutter: Community of Practice initiatives in the American Baptist Church – July 20
6. Sr. Maxine and Julie – anunslife.org an online Catholic community – July 21

Not quite scheduled yet:

• Frank Daugherity, “A Christian community ministering to disaster victims in Japan.” Spiritual and religious communities are alive and well in Japan, despite the devastation from the 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami. Frank observes the interactions of several communities during a work mission with http://crashjapan.com/ during the first half of July. CRASH is a group of Japanese Christians that have been doing relief work all over Asia. Frank is an ordained minister and long-time member of CPsquare who lived in Japan for 20 years earlier in his life. How do the several communities show up and how might they evolve in their response to this crisis? Join us for an interview at (TBA).
• Dave Makokwski, “WebEx support for Tibetan New Year in an international Buddhist Sangha.” (TBA)
• A transcription and publication project as community of practice: http://www.unfetteredweb.org/pod/who-and-how

To give a flavor of our conversations, here are a few of the provocative propositions that William M. Snyder, co-author of Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) with Etienne Wenger and Richard McDermott, has offered to kick off our conversations.

The learning church: initial propositions

William M. Snyder wsnyder@socialcapital.com

January 7, 2008

• The superordinate purpose of the church is the ongoing discovery and fulfillment of the Mission of God
  • This provides a context for setting expectations and priorities at global, diocese, and congregation levels
• As “the Body of Christ,” the church is built on human faith and relationships as well divine inspiration
  • Thus the church, like any community or organization, is affected by personal and social dynamics
  • This means attending to issues such as power, conflict, and personalities as well as scripture, sacraments, and spirit
• Many faith communities do not demonstrate capabilities required to engage and energize members to fulfill their mission
  • Key capabilities include leadership, community-building, and practice-innovation and -development
• We must dramatically increase our learning capacity to thrive: technical learning for improvement and transformational learning for sustained vitality and influence
  • Much to learn about learning from organization experience in other sectors
  • There is a growing repertoire of learning-related concepts, methods, and structures to draw on
• A key strategy for learning is cultivating generative relationships—across congregations as well as within them
  • Mutually supportive relationships among peer practitioners are key for generating ideas and getting them shared and applied
  • “Communities of practice” foster learning, innovation, and collaboration
• The church is a unique organization with distinctive capabilities—and barriers—for transformational learning
  • Large-scale, systematic change is not easy for established organizations, particularly ones (such as the Church) with a deeply embedded hierarchical structure and ideological buffers that obscure market forces
  • Yet the Church also has distinctive advantages: members’ faith and their communal commitment to embody the love of God provide an openness to the Spirit and a trustworthy foundation to build on
  • The Church’s “witness of hope” to the world also inspires internal renewal

The text in this post is a snapshot of the Conference Wiki page.  The wiki text is sure to evolve.  This blog post is a matter of record and your invitation.

We’ve been having a conversation in CPsquare for more than 4 years about communities in religious and spiritual contexts. What is unique about those contexts? What similarities do they have with each other or with other secular communities of practice (e.g., of Java programmers or skateboarders or mothers of newborns)? What could we learn about communities in general by looking at spiritual and religious communities? What could those communities learn from exploring each other using a communities of practice perspective? We’ve decided that it’s time to hold a larger and more organized conference and invite you to join us during July 2011, whether you are only able to dip into one or two sessions or whether you can spend the whole month exploring these issues. Here is why we are doing it:

• We are interested in what we see people learning and what they do to learn, rather than what or how they are supposed to learn. Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples — apparently different from the corporate or professional communities that have been associated with the term “community of practice.”
• We are always looking at communities from inside and outside because we are concerned with personal experience and social organization. Many of us actively participate in religious and spiritual communities and find that they inform our work with other communities. It seems important to practice looking at them from the outside a bit more systematically.
• CPsquare is an international and cross-cultural community. We are curious to know more about how “situated” religious and spiritual communities are when they straddle the cultural or national boundaries we straddle or when we can observe them across those boundaries.
• We see communities of practice at multiple levels of scale, tucked away in organizations as well as spanning the globe. We see community of practice structures at the level of an individual congregation (e.g., First Baptist Church or Congregation Beth Shalom), across congregations (e.g., meditation instructors across Shambhala) as well as inside congregations (e.g., self-organizing prayer breakfast at Saddleback Church described in Robert Putnam’s American Grace). What does that imply for those of us who seek to support or cultivate communities?

Conference organization

This is an online conference, so we will use our several platforms as we get organized in June and hold the conference in July, 2011. This conference is like an open space technology conference where the conversations are traceable back in history and the community hosting it expects to continue interacting and working on the topic as a whole in the future. (See more about participation in the conference.)

Focus issues

Because CPsquare is an ongoing community, we don’t mind tackling issues that are larger than what we can handle in one conversation or one conference. Here is the beginning of a list of issues that we could discuss or investigate:

• Many religious or spiritual communities are examples of long-standing, highly evolved communities of practice. At the same time we find young, very recently formed communities that are attempting to address age-old issues in new ways. Communities along the whole spectrum are of inherent interest to us in the CPsquare community.
• Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples of communities of practice that:
  • occur at all levels of scale, from the smallest, self-organizing minyans (Jewish prayer groups that are often lay-led) to very large and formal institutions,
  • are embedded in very diverse social, cultural, technical and economic contexts,
  • create a kind of “mycorrhizae” stratum (to use Engeström’s metaphor) that creates a beneficial context for other communities.
• Migration and social changes cause religious communities that evolved separately to now exist in social settings that are very different from where they originated (and now they live right next to traditions with very different origins), presenting new challenges as well as opportunities.
• A social learning perspective is useful in that it allows religious communities to look at themselves in such a way as to consider the relevance of insights, innovations or difficulties faced by other communities.
• From a social learning perspective new technologies presents opportunities for spiritual communities such as:
  • reaching larger peripheries (including proselytizing),
  • for supporting or teaching teachers,
  • technology also presents challenges because it can facilitate multi-membership and “religion as an identity game” that’s superficial, or a needlessly confrontational “issue”.
• Communities always face interesting issues about how to organize themselves, how to grow, and how to sustain themselves. How they fund themselves and fund their ongoing evolution is always an important theme.

Case Examples

These are the kinds of cases we are thinking of (and as the schedule gets organized we will be editing the conference schedule with our latest thinking. These happen to have a technology theme, although this conference is ‘not’ limited to technology:

• Twitter For Churches is framed for a fairly specific religious segment, but could work for many others.
• Kandro Rinpoche advises leaders from a kindred group and it’s posted on YouTube.
• Should pastors friend parishioners of Facebook?
• New online ministries.

Schedule overview

Religious and spiritual communities conference schedule overview
The public, overview schedule will be updated as the conference takes shape. The official and more detailed conference schedule is inside the CPsquare community space.

CPsquare conferences are open but intimate. We examine a particular subject within our general field of communities of practice in greater depth across several days or weeks.

Our conferences are primarily by and for CPsquare members. Membership is open and you are invited to join us. (Dues are low enough so that a year’s membership costs less than many other conferences.) In addition to members, some people participate as guests during the conference:

• Guests of the conference who are making a presentation (and are invited by the conference organizers)
• Guests of an individual CPsquare member (who join as “a friend of CPsquare” and designate the individual as “sponsor” on the membership form). The expectation is that sponsors will help their guest participate and become acquainted with the CPsquare environment)

CPsquare conferences usually combine synchronous and asychronous elements, making participation possible from anywhere in the world.  (See the times in the password-protected community calendar). We will typically use more than one of our several platforms for our interactions in a conference.

We are about to launch the SEEDING 2.0 conference. We have rich and varied cases to look at together:

To help us handle the richness, we have these provocative propositions to consider:

• Forums and email lists unconsciously shaped our thinking about communities
• Communities need “a place” to identify with
• A community’s topic can be known in advance, otherwise why cultivate?
• Membership in a community should be identified in advance
• It’s best to build a platform so they will come
• Practices for “Being Together” can be taught or changed after the other elements of a community are set
• Forming a community requires a certain amount of privacy, don’t do it in public

August is turning out to be a busy month for CPsquare members: we’re visiting with a community leader from a big software company, reflecting with Etienne and Beverly on the on multiple layers of the BEtreat that they hosted during July, and we’re wrapping up a year of inquiry around business models for public communities of practice

Our next Quarterly Field Trip is on Wednesday August 18, 2010 at 18:00 GMT to Healthy Minds – Healthy Campuses community, which has the goal of promoting peer-to-peer learning about issues related to campus mental health and healthy substance use amongst British Columbia post-secondary students. Members include students, professors, counselors, human rights advisors, disability advocates, administrators, residence life staff, and researchers. Public participation in our quarterly field trips is encouraged!

Announcing: Community Seeding 2.0 – a short conference on community launch strategies and cases that are based on introducing Web 2.0 tools. It starts August 23, 2010 and you have to join CPsquare to participate.

In September we’ll run the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop for the 30th time! We keep offering it because every time has its refinements and unique challenges. This time we’re welcoming several people from Latin America with whom we’ll explore many of the issues that come up with multi-lingual and multi-cultural communities. Actually the following explanatory text is interesting in that it has evolved in English over many years, I then used Google Translate to make a first draft in Spanish, I edited it extensively and found that Microsoft Outlook had very helpful Spanish grammar and spelling corrects, after which two of the participants in the upcoming workshop suggested further changes! Here is the invitation in Spanish, which you might share with any Spanish-speakers who might be interested:

El próximo taller sobre los elementos fundamentales de las Comunidades de Práctica se ofrecerá en línea a partir 13 de septiembre. Dirigido por Etienne Wenger, John Smith, y Bronwyn Stuckey, el taller se enfoca en lo que son las comunidades de práctica, cómo funcionan, por qué son importantes, y cómo pueden ser apoyadas, nutridas e involucradas para el beneficio de sus organizaciones y la sociedad en general.

El taller mismo contiene muchos elementos de una comunidad en un ambiente global y ocurre en-línea durante seis semanas. El taller le ofrece la oportunidad de considerar temas de las comunidades en general y familiarizarse con una serie de comunidades de práctica específicas, las cuales nos presentan colegas invitados u otros participantes en el taller.

La experiencia de trabajar juntos de esta manera nos inspira a todos y es algo que realmente no se puede obtener de un libro. Para muchas personas este taller ha sido parte de un cambio de carrera. Participar en el taller lanza colaboraciones de varias clases: algunos que participan regresan después como mentores, colegas invitados, o como miembros de CPsquare. En ese sentido, cuando se comparte en esta experiencia uno está entrando en una comunidad de práctica autentica que vive en la vanguardia de la práctica.

Además de trabajar en un proyecto de su elección con los demás, como participante tiene acceso a los proyectos que otros participantes han producido en los últimos años. (Esta será la 31ª vez que se el taller se ha ofrecido desde 1998.) Algunas muestras están disponibles, junto con noticias y otros detalles en el blog CPsquare:

http://cpsquare.org

El espacio del taller es como un plan de estudios y el calendario del taller también está diseñado como instrumento de aprendizaje:

http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/schedule

La Participación en el taller consiste en conferencias asíncronas basadas en la web, en teleconferencias y reuniones organizadas participante a través de Internet. Los eventos sincrónicos (llamadas por teléfono, por Skype o por chat) ocurren durante las horas de trabajo. Algunas personas participan sólo 4 horas a la semana, pero otros pasan mucho más tiempo involucrados en las conversaciones y proyectos del taller. A menudo alguien trae algún proyecto en el cual están trabajando en su propio trabajo, y los demás se ofrecen como consultoría de alto nivel. Ese estilo de ayuda mutua en el taller tiene beneficios puede todos.

El idioma principal del taller es el inglés. Pero siempre hemos tenido participantes cuyo primer idioma no es el Inglés y en Septiembre del 2010, van haber varias personas de habla hispana (que están participando por primera vez, que están volviendo a ayudar como mentores, que son colegas invitados a dar una charla o montar una conversación especial, o que son parte del personal docente).

Los participantes en el taller provienen de diferentes industrias, países, y variado contexto organizacional, y de diferentes profesiones. Siempre invitamos a algunos colegas que tienen experiencias en el desarrollo de las comunidades de práctica en empresas o en organizaciones sin fin pecuniario. Los detalles y los formularios de inscripción se encuentran aquí:

http://CPsquare.org/edu/foundations

As we try to reorganize and rename our R&D Fest series into a more regular and somewhat more leisurely activity called the R&D Series, we were lucky enough to have CPsquare member Grady McGonagill be the first one to jump in and help us re-think and re-work it. As Alice MacGillivray wrote, we thought it would be different and it proved to be engaging and productive in many ways.  It turns out that nobody could summarize how it turned out better than Grady himself, who posted the following very gracious note of summary and appreciation after he had recovered from a very intense week of conversation:

“I want to express my heartfelt appreciation for the privilege of having a draft of my study be the focus of a CPsquare R&D Fest. My gratitude extends to multiple levels:

• To the entire CPsquare community for being contributors to the ecosystem that created this forum
• To the many who participated in the Fest for their investment of time and energy
• To the facilitators—Alice and Debra, and also John—for their skillful stimulation and guidance of the conversations
• To those (John, Alice, Debra, Pem, perhaps others I’m not aware of) who took the remarkable step of reading the entire 80+ page draft
• To John for the invitation to be the focus of the R&D Fest, for his behind the scenes encouragement of contributions, and for his creation and stewardship of this innovative community of practice.

“A number of specific benefits of participating in the Fest stand out:

• Thoughtful challenges to the wisdom and value of framing the history of the Web in terms of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 were very helpful to me in thinking through my rationale for doing so. I’ve gotten clear that I wish to retain these distinctions (and include reference to Web 4.0, which I hadn’t heard of!), for their value in highlighting key features of the Web’s evolution, while stressing the limits and arbitrariness of making such distinctions in the way I frame an conclude the history. The exchange pushed my thinking to a “meta” level.
• Challenges and affirmations of my warning about relying on the IT department were helpful in several ways. They deepened my understanding of the complexity and variety of IT dept roles, and the need to couch and qualify my recommendation in ways that acknowledge this. At the same time it affirmed the value of expressing my warning, perhaps even more strongly.
• Challenges to my assertion that few if any organizations had achieved a learning culture generated a very useful discussion about learning that I continue to think about
• Questions about the value and impact of a lengthy written document as a tool for achieving the Bertelsmann Foundations goals were helpful in encouraging my client Tina Doerffer and I to think beyond completion of the report to the creation of forums of various stakeholders for its discussion
• Questions about the coherence and consistency of how I intend to portray the relationship between technology and leadership continue to be on my mind as questions to “live into” as I consider how best to frame the overall study and which themes to highlight.
• I gained from reminders of work that I’m familiar with but could more directly draw upon (e.g., Drath and Palus on making meaning), introduction to new works and ideas (e.g., McCracken on culture, McCandless and Limpanowicz on “liberating structures”), and pointers to examples of practice that I was not familiar with (e.g., “mashup corporations,” Intel’s Planet Blue, Wipro in India).
• And I benefited from Debra’s coaching on use of hashtags and introduction to tools such as Tweetchat and Twitterfall.

“Many of the benefits were less tangible, taking the form of seeds that will blossom over time and beyond the work on this particular study. Examples would be the wonderfully rich sidebar discussions on things like the work of David Snowden, which elicited lengthy contributions from Nancy and Alice. And it includes interactions and ongoing conversations about knowledge, learning, and complexity with several members.

“In the long term the greatest impact may be the deepening of my respect and appreciation for CPsquare and heightened interest in participating in this remarkable and unique Community of Practice. Thanks!”

Getting a community of practice going is a topic of abiding interest, debate, and learning in CPsquare. In the past, the technology side would include starting an email list, setting up a gated forum on a website, calling a teleconference or writing a community charter together. Web 2.0 technologies offer many more choices than we ever had before, so we see a number of communities seeded by teaching a specific group of people to use social media together. As they figure out the different tools and how those tools work with each other, people get to know each other, conversations get going and a community begins to form.

Gathering the different experiences from CPsquare and beyond, in a conference format, we will address several questions during the week of August 23, 2010 such as:

• What are the elements and the results of this strategy?
• Which social media tools are taught, how and in what order?
• What does the developmental process look like?
• What is predictable and what is surprising?
• In what contexts does this strategy work?

This conference is in the early planning stages, but June Holley, Joitske Hulebosch, Josien Kapma, Caren Levine, John Smith, LaDonna Coy, and Nancy White are all planning to present.  There’s still room for others, so join us if you have something to offer or just want to tag along!  If our discussions won’t fit in one week, we’ll go longer.

(Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/evelynishere/)

CPsquare quarterly Field Trip

A CPsquare Field trip to Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises on Monday, February 22, 2010 12:00 PST 20:00 GMT. Free. No RSVP. Just show up.

EW Tweets at 30K’!

Etienne Tweets at 30,000 feet. Nuff said.

The CPsquare Foundations Workshop redesign

The Foundations workshop has been running regularly since 1998. (We’re getting close to the 30th time!) Now Etienne, Bronwyn and I are giving it another facelift. It will only be 6 weeks long. It’s more concentrated. It’s scheduled to start March 22. Register now.

CPsquare gathering in Aalborg, Denmark on May 2nd 2010

Immediately before the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning (Aalborg, Denmark) 3rd & 4th May 2010, some of us will be gathering for a day of conversation. Want to join us?

“My practice” series at CPsquare

In a way, CPsquare has been a very outward-looking community, focused on the communities that members lead or support. We haven’t paid as much attention to the work that members themselves do. During the last several months we’ve had sessons with Sue Wolff, Jack Merklein, and Joitske Hulsebosch talking about their work in their settings. Quite fascinating stuff. (There is a kind of avalanche of announcements that “a community of practice has formed” out there on the Interent. I’ve captured a few of them in this mind-boggling list with the “copexample” tag.)

Current books

• Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media,
  by: Mizuko Ito, et al.
  (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) 419. pp Http://ISBN.nu/9780262013369. You can download the whole book in a PDF. An in-depth look at genres of participation – reporting on a huge ethnographic project.
• Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers http://businessmodelgeneration.com/ http://isbn.nu/9782839905800 The business models for independent communities of practice has been a theme in CPsquare’s Shadow the Leader series this year.
• Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith, Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities (Portland, OR: CPsquare, 2009). It was published on August 15, 2009 but our first group “plug” was last week, in a session with the SIKM Community. A really enjoyable experience. Maybe we should do more such.

Save the date for a CPsquare dialog on May 2, 2010 – right before the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg, Denmark. Apart from the date, we don’t have much decided, but CPsquare has a long tradition of holding dialogs where rich conversations with a practice focus can take place. In Copenhagen last November, after the AiR Conference, the group included Gitti Jordan, (now) professor Shirley Williams, as well as people who’d never been involved in the conversation before.   A couple of photos and highlights suggest how rich these dialogs can be – although each one is different from the others.

In addition to hearing a lot of stories about the history of the Institute for Research on Learning and where some of the ideas about communities of practice came from, we had open-ended and lightly organized dialog.

Several people presented their work.  In some cases it was useful to me because I’d heard it before (for example, I finally really got it that Susanne Justesen’s work on diversity using a community of practice framework is really a big deal).   On the other hand it was the first time we connected with Andreas Lloyd, who subsequently presented his thesis on the Ubuntu open source project as a community of practice to CPsquare in our Research and Dissertation fest.

As the date gets closer, we’ll convene a group online to work out logistics and frame the conversation.

Fall 2009 R & D Fest

The Fall 2009 Research and Dissertation fest includes nine presentations.  They will cover theory, implementation and evaluation in settings as diverse as healthcare, higher education, and development and countries including Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the US. Our sessions are somewhat informal and open to non-members for a nominal fee.

Healthcare

• Sue Huckson: Research and leadership around emergency health care in Australia 12/10/2009?
• Jim Palmer Qualities of Personal Interaction: the Promotion of Research Utilisation for Quality Improvement in the US Health Care Sector 12/9/2009

Education

• Cynthia Jimes: The Role of Communities in the Sustainability of open educational resources in South Africa 12/11/2009
• Bettina Arnum Boyle: Online Tables & Table Cloths: Facilitating Space for Online Learning & Collaboration. 12/7/2009
• Jacquie McDonald: Implementing and Sustaining Faculty Learning Communities/Communities of Practice at Australian Universities 11/24/2009?

Evaluation

• Judy Zorfass: Trace analysis in the evaluation of a system of social service communities of practice 12/4/2009
• Naava Frank: The experience of being evaluated from a community leader’s perspective 11/30/2009
• Joitske Hulsebosch: Monitoring and Evaluation of Knowledge Management Strategies in the Development Context 12/2/2009

Social learning theory

• Etienne Wenger: Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept 11/23/2009

The schedule is still open to change.  Sessions will combine a synchronous and asynchronous component.  Register now if you are not a member of CPsquare.