CPsquare

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.

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).)

What are the intentional or accidental collaborative possibilities of a public-facing wiki for CPsquare?

One of my motives behind setting up a wiki for CPsquare that’s outside Web Crossing is that I think it’s high time for us to share more of what we learn. (There’s a lot of learning to be done in the process of sharing and it’s a way for CPsquare as a community to serve a larger learning agenda.) Wikis seem to be a natural tool for that purpose because they lend themselves to sharing the workload.

An example of sharing what we learned that was itself a real learning process was how Sue Wolff led an innovative effort to report on the “Long Life the Platform” Conference about a year ago. During the conference we tried to gather comments in a Web Crossing wiki, but did not get many contributions. Then Sue set up a SurveyMonkey questionnaire to get additional comments (by allowing people to append a comment to a page). She then summarized and compressed the whole thing here:

http://cpsquare.org/2008/04/report-on-the-long-live-the-platform-conference/

I was impressed at the recent Recent Changes Camp how ingrained the whole idea of “reporting out via the conference wiki” can be for a wiki-oriented community:

http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Session_Notes

As an experiment I’ve put together a different kind of report (aiming for the easiest possible but still useful report that we might publish as a minimum) on our public Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/WAATWAAT_Conference

(It demonstrates the use of a screen-capture and of an RSS feed Widget, by the way.)

Also, I’m proposing that we put ALL CPsquare help files out in public — often they’re most needed when you can’t get “inside” or are lost…

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Category:Members_Help (This obviously has a long way to go, but, as Ward Cunningham said recently, “For a community, ‘incomplete’ is good news!”)

I’ve added a widget extension, so that we can include slides, videos, and RSS feeds in CPquare’s wiki. Just to demonstrate the use of the video widget, I’ve inserted some of those CommonCraft videos in these articles:

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Blogging_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Wiki_tools
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/RSS
• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Microblogs

We want you to request an account on the wiki. It’s set up to require people to identify themselves in advance so that we won’t have a SPAM-removal burden later on.

Won’t you join us in the continuing discussion within CPsquare? The ongoing conversation about who we are and what we’re doing as a community is important.  Alternatively, or in addition, jump in and contribute to our Wiki right now!

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