CPsquare

Here’s a collection of news and tidbits from CPsquare: the Foundations workshop schedule, social artistry, and hacking versus stacking.

Our long-running (almost venerable but still fresh) Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop is running two times this year. It starts next on April 9th and later in the year starting on October 22. If you or someone you know is interested in a deeper understanding of communities of practice, please register or get in touch now!

Social artistry

In a way, social artistry has been at the very core of our conversations, conferences, and workshops at CPsquare for the past 10 years. Recently CPsquare members Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner posted an essay on their new website that Etienne wrote about “social artists” several years ago, reflecting on work that they had done together on an EU initiative.

“One of the key ingredients [in successful social learning spaces] is the energy and skills of those who take leadership in making it all happen. I call the people who excel at doing this “social artists.”

“Social artists are leaders, but the kind of leadership they exercise is subtle. It does not engender or depend on followership. Rather it invites participation. It is a mixture of understanding what makes learning socially engaging and living the process yourself. It is not a formula; it is creative, improvised, intelligently adaptive, and socially attuned.

“By helping people come together and discover their own learning citizenship, social artists build up the learning capability of social systems…. Still social artists tend to be invisible because we do not have good frameworks and language to appreciate their contributions…. Their role is of utmost importance. We need to learn to recognize, support, and celebrate their work. Their contribution is especially critical today when humankind faces unprecedented challenges that will place increasing demands on our ability to learn together.”

Wenger, E. (2009) Social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems. Social Innovation, Sociedade e Trabalho. Booklets 12 — separate supplement, MTSS/GEP & EQUAL Portugal, Lisbon.

But around the edges at CPsquare, the question of how we fit in as social artists is persistent, both existentially and economically. For example, CPsquare member Marc Coenders, whom we are shadowing this year is considering where it is that learning is happening (or could happen) around him in The Netherlands. He’s asking how to organize social learning strategies within organizational, competitive, and economic constraints? How bridge across organizations, projects, and cohorts so that the focus is not so much on individuals, but more on organizational learning cycles? In a way, “where is the learning” is exactly the question that Lave and Wenger were posing in 1991 except that now we know a lot more about the artistry of intervention and leadership than we did back then. (Among other places where you can explore these questions, you might consider one or more of the three BEtreats scheduled this summer.)

Mimi Ito, one of the anthropologists who was at the Institute for Research on Learning back in the 1990′s when Lave and Wenger was published, is still working on “before social artistry” questions: “Where is it that kids learn?” and “What is it that they are learning when using digital media?” She’s one of the leaders of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, which puts on an interesting annual conference. She does some very nice social artistry when she reflects as a community leader on the conversations at the conference.
The hack v stack distinction that she uses to think about work in the educational research and innovation community (posed by Paul Edelman) gets at the question of where different kinds of learning happens or is needed in the “many fangled” world of education. (Ito’s reflections make me think that the DML Conference is a place where CPsquare members and friends could learn a lot.)

In a way, CPsquare member Sean Murphy is putting his social artistry to work developing a series of communities that hack the entrepreneurial culture in ten different locations in California, Illinois, and Minnesota. Specifically, he helps entrepreneurs learn their way to success in regular Bootstrapper’s Breakfasts. He’s purposely navigating around the venture capital ecosystem because of the way that it is focused on sorting people and firms, presuming that not everyone can win, necessarily creating losers. Among other things the venture capital system ends up rewarding people who learn to chase and spend other people’s money, sometimes at the expense of learning to grow more self-reliant firms. Sound familiar?

Despite our enthusiasm for and belief in social artistry, it’s important to remember that so much learning “just happens.” I just finished reading a wonderful book about a giant learning machine called Chungking Mansions. In Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (Chicago, IL: Univ of Chicago Press, 2011) Gordon Mathews describes Chunking mansions, as: “the haunt of South Asian merchants, African entrepreneurs, Indian temporary workers, African and South Asian asylum seekers, and penurious travelers from across the globe. It is, as I discuss in the pages that follow, a ramshackle building in Hong Kong’s tourist district that is a hub of “low-end globalization;’ tightly linked to the markets of Kolkata (Calcutta), Lagos, and Dar es Salaam, among other cities across the globe.”

Mathews describes an impressive learning feat that goes on every day, sustained over many years: people learn to navigate the building, to do business with each other and get along remarkably well; to sort clothes and phones and a myriad of other goods manufactured in China and exported around the world; to navigate a very complex legal environment; and to evolve new trans-national and trans-cultural identities. And not many people in Chungking Mansions are likely to call themselves social artists, but as they work to survive and make money in Hong Kong (same old stacking), they are changing the world and themselves (hacking on a big scale). The book is highly recommended.

Ning, Ning, can you hear me now?

Meanwhile, back at home, in CPsquare we are fashioning a lens (a mirror?) to look at social artistry by comparing how different communities that rely on the Ning platform are configured and how they are faring in different circumstances. It’s clear that many of the questions we were raising in Digital Habitats are still worth working on. (We’re coming out with an e-book edition this month, by the way.) Drop us a line or leave a comment on the CPsquare website if you’re interested.

For the past five years, CPsquare’s Shadow the Leader series has been an excellent way to engage with the issues that come up in working with communities of practice, through one person’s eyes, in depth and over the course of a full year.  This year our series will shadow Marc Coenders (http://leerarchitectuur.nl/) who has been involved in CPsquare since the very beginning.  Marc has had a successful solo consultancy over the past 10 years and several of his projects were described in his PhD dissertation “Learning Architecture: an exploratory study of space and learning in work settings and close-to-practice learning.” (See the CPsquare R&D series session from July 2010.)  Now economic conditions and organizational arrangements are changing in The Netherlands, and Marc anticipates having time this year to re-think some of the basic assumptions that have shaped his work as a learning facilitator.  Two clusters of questions that will guide this re-examination are:

• How to organize social learning strategies within organizational, competitive, and economic constraints? How bridge across organizations, projects, and cohorts so that the focus is not so much on individuals, but more on organizational learning cycles?
• How can social learning strategies focus on innovation and change rather than on established practice?  To extend the PhD research, what research methods are in accord with a social learning theory and complexity theory?

The series will run from November 2011 to October 2012.

The Shadow the Leader series has been going on for five years.

• We’ve explored questions of leadership, legitimacy, community launch, community tools and how they work together, the intersection of community peripheries and multi-membership, business models, and the interaction of community and organizations.
• The leaders we’ve shadowed have ranged from people who had never heard of CPsquare or communities of practice before to people who’ve been very involved in our community from the very beginning.
• The basic form has been quite simple.  Our monthly teleconferences always start with: “How is your community?” or “What’s happening in your practice?” and we take it from there.

We think this series is important because:

• It focuses on actual practice: examines what is working on the ground in a specific situation (asking why things work as they do) rather than on a theoretical “best practice” aimed at an imagined norm.
• It focuses on “the doing” over time: we discuss the goals, rewards, techniques, obstacles, confusions, and outcomes as they unfold in time.  Instead of the plan or selective the recollection long after the fact, we try to look at community leadership and development as it unfolds.
• It follows one person and the context in which they work over an entire year, with the inevitable ups and downs, moments of ambiguity and clarity, and sense of developmental trajectory.
• It is integrative: we ask how all the elements fit together: personal, political, technical, economic, conceptual, and organizational.
• It shadows a leader, but is unbiased about whether their practice is at the leading or the trailing edge at any given moment or in any given dimension.
• It is conducted so that CPsquare members can participate very casually (e.g., reading notes produced in the sessions) to more intensively (e.g., participating directly in the synchronous conversations).

Ground rules for our conversations are:

• Emphasize inquiry: we do not volunteer advice. Our goal is to understand the work through the eyes of a practitioner.  We seek an ethnographic stance rather than coaching the subject.
• Open participation: any member of CPsquare can jump into the conversation at any point.  Although the conversation evolves and a lot of context accumulates, the conversations are such that you can get a lot out of any one of the sessions without having participated in any of the previous ones.
• The series is designed so that multiple levels of participation are possible.  You can just scan the chat room notes, listen to an audio recording, “sit in” on the occasional call, or be one of the active participants in the whole series.

Here’s a collection of news and tidbits from CPsquare: our workshop schedule, a CPsquare award, some Wiki goodies, and some highlights from the CPsquare conference on Religious and Spiritual communities.

The Foundations Workshop

The Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop  runs from Oct 24 to Dec 2.  We’re running late this fall due to a wedding.

First annual community development award to projects at Pepperdine University

With the support of Pepperdine University faculty members Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks, and the collaboration of Alice MacGillivray, Sue Wolff, and John David Smith, CPsquare is pleased to award Christian Borja and Noah Sparks, from Pepperdine’s MA in Learning Technology Program,  the

2011 CPsquare Award for Community Development through Action Research

This award is given to recognize skill and excellence in leveraging technology to support the formation, growth, and development of a community of practice through action research.  This award includes a membership in the CPsquare community and an invitation to present their work in the CPsquare Research and Dissertation series during the 2011-2012 year.

Accumulated (public) goodies on CPsquare’s Wiki

In the normal course of “business” at CPsquare, our Wiki grows and evolves.  Here are some pages in our public Wiki that have been updated because of conversations in CPsquare.

• http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Narrative_techniques now has another “how to” reference because Shawn Callahan was the “My Practice” person in September
• We have accumulated a remarkable collection of articles about communities of practice in the healthcare world and John Parboosingh and Jim Palmer added to the list in our most recent session of CPsquare’s R&D Series.
• (And the  resources related to Digital Habitats keeps growing, too.  For example, have you used Twitter to conduct a poll?

Of course all these pages are incomplete.  They need work.  Could you contribute?

Religions, communities and practice

During June, July and August, CPsquare capped off a conversation that has been brewing for 4 years, considering religious and spiritual communities from a community of practice perspective.

Once we started looking, what seems remarkable is that we conventionally think of religious and spiritual communities as completely different from the garden variety communities we observe or cultivate in corporations, schools and other institutions.  But come to find out, they’re not really so different.  Here are a few snippets from the conference.

• A traditional social form such as praying together is striking when we consider it as a learning activity.  May seem strange, but it’s not so far-fetched!  And prayer is a more malleable form than you might imagine.   One example we discussed was a prayer request meeting at Coco’s restaurant in Lake Forest that Saddleback Church sponsors.  It’s described on pp. 65-69 of Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). It sure sounds like a community of practice meeting to me! (If you’re curious, the book has a website and a blog .)  Another example we looked at was how two Catholic nuns, Sisters Julie and Maxine, that have evolved a practice of regular prayer as a podcast on their website, http://anunslife.org.  Part of what makes it work as a podcast is that the sisters are exemplary community leaders: inviting, warm, authentic, and above all inquisitive.  Of course having the technology stewardshipchops never hurts. Question: what similar traditional community activities have you seen translate to the Internet? (Or fail to translate?)

• We also explored the relationship between formal organizations and communities in religious and spiritual the context.  From the organizational side, we heard about a very successful CoP on project management in the Mormon Church’s Office of Temporal Affairs that sounds remarkably similar to CoP projects in other corporate settings: dealing with organizational silos, the dance between formal and informal structures, gathering just enough resources for the community to grow, and keeping a focus on value-for-time.  From the opposite side, after the conference, Grady McGonagill shared a draft in CPsquare’s R&D Series of a study he is working on that looks at more than a dozen Buddhist meditation communities, considering how they depend on and develop formal organizational structures.  It seems that both “community inside!” and “organization inside!” are viable (and they all seem to have “Intel inside!”).  A third multivalent example comes from a session where Lisa Colton described independent minyanimwhich are self-organized Jewish worship and study communities.  They can either be an extension of or a (possibly threatening) alternative to traditional organized synagogues.
  Question: Does friendliness to communities have anything to do with whether an organization is “secular” or not?

• Joe Kutter, an American Baptist pastor and the director of that denomination’s Minister’s Council talked about pastors in protestant churches as a group who greatly benefits from participation in a community of practice because of how a leadership role can isolate people.  Among other things, he shared a big study that makes very interesting comparisons between pastors who participate in Pastoral Leader Peer Groups and those who don’t.   There are remarkable differences between the churches where those pastors serve, too.  (The study concluded that participation in peer learning had a very positive effect on factors such as church membership growth as well as leadership integrity and persistence.)
  Question: Is the presence or absence of community participation in a group of organizations a useful metric? Where have you seen it used?

So it turns out that the religious and spiritual side of society is an important laboratory for experimentation, conservation, and assessment of learning and communities of practice.  Maybe this summer’s conference is not “the end”, but rather an important new thread of our ongoing conversations about communities of practice.

With the support of Pepperdine University faculty members Margaret Riel and Paul Sparks, and the collaboration of Alice MacGillivray, Sue Wolff, and John David Smith, CPsquare is pleased to award Christian Borja and Noah Sparks, from Pepperdine’s MA in Learning Technology Program,  the

2011 CPsquare Award for
Community Development through Action Research

This award is given to recognize skill and excellence in leveraging technology to support the formation, growth, and development of a community of practice through action research.  This award includes a membership in the CPsquare community and an invitation to present their work in the CPsquare Research and Dissertation series during the 2011-2012 year.

Welcome Christian and Noah!

During the first week of our conference on religious and spiritual communities of practice we had two very different sessions, one synchronous, where 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, presented some work he had done with the Episcopal archdiocese of Massachusetts and the other an asynchronous discussion where we read a few paragraphs from Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Remarkable contrasts between the two sessions in terms of scale, although both instances were connected with Protestant communities in the US.  Snyder described a vision of renewal and innovation, where communities of practice could play a crucial role at different levels of scale in a large institution: both across multiple congregations and within a single church.  He brought out some of the organizational consequences and possibilities of such a strategy, speaking from the perspective of an organization that would cultivate many different communities and be transformed by their activity.  On one level it was an extension of ideas from Cultivating Communities of Practice, but the emphasis on the role and mission of the church and the satisfaction of participation in communities had a very different flavor from what has seemed typical in all the many communities that have been guided and inspired by that 2002 book.  In fact, Snyder pointed to the second and last footnotes in the book as reminders that part of the book’s vision was to ground the whole argument about communities in a civic and social purpose, rather than an intention that is primarily secular, commercial,  and corporate.  So this conference is in that sense reconnecting with a forgotten root.

The second “session” was at an entirely different scale.  Through Putnam’s eyes, we looked at one meeting on one morning of one of a Saddleback Church’s morning prayer breakfasts. Over oatmeal, omelets, and French toast 10 professionals enlist each other’s help in prayer and offer support and sympathy in dealing with everything from the challenge of a new client to grief over recent bereavement. Caren Levine sums it up:

I am particularly struck by the intimacy of the group, the lay facilitation and distributed leadership, and how they create sacred space together in a public venue which in itself seems to communicate that sacred community can be found anywhere.

We’re running the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop again two times this year, starting next on April 4 and (tentatively) on September 12. Since its predecessor first ran in 1998, the workshop has been under continuous redesign as participants from all over the world pitch in and make it better, as new tools become available, and as we formulate new strategies to make it more useful and impactful. For example, recently Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, and I have been thinking about how participation and reification show up in communities and in our workshop. We are developing summaries of each week’s activities as a visible marker and transition to the next. We want to use summaries that work in a workshop setting that are also useful in an ordinary community of practice.

For example, Social Network Graphs are sometimes used to think about the social structure of communities, especially when they are forming. So at the end of week one we use a graph showing how people interact in the workshop’s “Opening Circle.” It represents what people have been doing and provides an opportunity for reflection going forward. At the end of week six, as Practice Lab projects are wrapping up, we’re holding a Share Fair, both because it’s useful for workshop participants to present what they have learned and because Share Fairs are a common and recommended practice. I would like to know what the most useful (and common) reifications that you are seeing in practice! We would appreciate a comment on the CPsquare blog or drop us a line!

The regular activities that we are holding at CPsquare include “Shadow the Leader” (in it’s 5th year), the Research and dissertation series (which has been running more or less since the beginning), a quarterly “field trip” where we visit a community together, and now the monthly “My Practice” series, where people talk about their work and the communities they work with (ranging from HR and medicine, to beekeeping, to software development, to education and on and on). We usually interrupt these regular events with larger scale conferences. Next Fall we are seeking to organize a series of conversations with pioneers — people who were around the Institute for Research on Learning when the community of practice idea was hatched. In June, we are holding a conference on religious communities as communities of practice.

In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) bring up many of the issues that are likely to come up in our conference next June. For example, the graph at right (on page 30) suggests how”a regular place of worship” is such a common experience for Americans compared to other forms of association (and hence learning). Although they come at the topic from a sociologist’s perspective (outside looking in), they provide some fascinating vignettes and insights about how religious practice has evolved in America.

One of the issues that has come up repeatedly over the years in CPsquare is how the surrounding social and economic context (and even “business model”) shapes a community of practice. Putnam and Campbell offer an interesting perspective on that issue in the following two quotes:

However, the congregation as an all-purpose association with members who choose it, belong to it, and make contributions to it is actually a very Protestant model of religious organization. This form and function of the typical American congregation – of whatever religious tradition – is thus a consequence of America’s Protestant heritage. The United States may not be a Protestant nation in law, but its Protestant legacy shapes the contours of the religious landscape. (p 30)

Rather than a congregation with a fixed membership, mosques in Muslim societies were – and continue to be – convenient places into which one steps in order to pray, depending on where one is in the course of the day. . . . But in the United States, mosques inevitably come to resemble churches. (p 31)

From an entirely different angle, a story from a great little book by Richard H. Axelrod, Emily M. Axelrod, Julie Beedon, and Robert W. Jacobs titled You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004) about the very productive coexistence of an Episcopal Church and a Jewish Temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fits right in here. I’m quoting at length (from page 16 on) so you’ll buy the book (notice the different kinds of involvement they mention), because it suggests how learning at many different levels of scale intersect in religious communities, and because it provokes questions about the kind of involvement we seek to encourage in any community we might work with:

It’s important to always stay clear about what you are trying to accomplish since different goals call for different kinds of involvement. Here’s a story that illustrates the point.

A Jewish temple and an Episcopal church share a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan — the longest-standing affiliation of its type in America. Some years ago, the temple and church were in conflict, which threatened the harmony of the relationship. The membership of the temple was growing, but that of the church was not. Members of the temple wanted a larger social hall for celebrating life-cycle events in their community weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and so on. The church wanted to invest its excess funds in charitable works. Initially the boards of each organization met together to see if they could iron out their differences.

After these sessions, the temple leaders thought that the project was clear: the work they faced was to decide whether or not to build an expanded social hall. They planned to hold a few meetings with the board’s audit committee to determine the financial feasibility of such an effort (Know-How Involvement). They talked about what it would take to encourage members of the congregation to contribute to a fund raising campaign (a creative variation of Arms and Legs Involvement you might call “Checkbook and Wallet Involvement”). But as they explored the situation further, they uncovered a more fundamental question: “What kind of temple do we want to be ?”

Suddenly, the entire project changed. The temple leadership knew they needed to engage the entire congregation in such a significant question. In conversations about their collective future (Care and commitment Involvement). A vision for the temple community gradually emerged. At the same time, they also got clearer about the nature of their relationship with their church partners. This new clarity made it relatively easy to resolve the building issues. They proceeded to build a beautiful new worship area, social hall, and educational classrooms that have benefited both congregations — with strong backing from across the congregations’ members.

Today, the space shared by the temple and the church is the best utilized building in Ann Arbor. Schools, community groups, fitness classes, and lifetime learning programs are all housed there for below-market fees. This met the church’s need for charitable works. These various groups have also provided a substantial source of income, defraying the costs borne by the temple and church for the construction project. The lesson: as you get clearer about what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll get clearer about the kinds of involvement you need.

Just think how much learning is happening in that story!  To me it suggests that if people are involved in something important, the learning takes care of itself.  Are involvement and learning goals aligned for your community?

This year CPsquare’s Shadow the Leader series will shadow Franklin Cook, who is working to establish a community of practice on suicide bereavement in the United States. Here is more information about him: http://www.save.org/franklin Some of the big questions that may come  up this year are:

• Is this more of a network or a community of practice? Does that question matter?
• How do institutional role and mission affect the participation of individuals?
• What kinds of resources does a community like this require?

Our first session will be on Thursday September 23.  The Shadow the Leader series has been going on for four years.

• In four years we’ve explored questions of leadership, legitimacy, platforms and how they work together, multi-membership, community peripheries, and business models.
• The leaders we’ve shadowed have ranged from people who had never heard of CPsquare or communities of practice before to people who’ve been very involved in our community over a long period of time.
• The basic form has been fairly constant. We always start with: “How is your community?” and take it from there.
• We continue meeting every month whether the group that shows up on the conference call is large or small.

Ground rules for these conversations are:

• Inquiry: We avoid volunteering advice. The main point is to see the situation through the eyes of a practitioner.
• Open participation: Any member of CPsquare can join us. Although the conversation evolves and a lot of context accumulates, the conversations are such that you can get a lot out of any one of the sessions without having participated in any of the previous ones.
• We design this so that multiple levels of participation are possible. Members can just scan the chat room notes, or listen to the audio recordings, or “sit in” on the calls, or be one of the active contributors to any one conversation or to the whole series.

This series is rewarding because it:

• Explores what works on the ground in a specific situation (reflecting on why things work, as well) rather than a theoretical “best” practice aimed at a theoretical or “typical” setting
• Focuses on “the doing it”: the rewards, techniques, obstacles, confusions, and outcomes as they unfold in time. Instead of the plan or the recollection after the fact, we try to look at community leadership and development “in the moment.”
• Looks at how all the elements fit together: personal, political, technical, organizational.
• Offers an example of the coexistence of the cutting and the trailing edges

Are you a doctoral student doing research related to Communities of Practice?

We are a group of doctoral students and about-to-be doctoral students attending various universities around the globe. We are members of a virtual CoP who share resources via Diigo, discuss our own research on CoPs and strategize about the challenges of doctoral students in several forums such as:

• What’s Under the Bell Jar?,
• Issues of Doctoral Student Life,
• Proposals, and
• PhD Musings.

We also have a PhD support group that meets via phone conference once a month. We are also planning some special events for the fall semester. If you are a potential doctoral student, you are welcome also. We are developing a wiki with information about universities you might want to consider if you are interested in doing research related to Communities of Practice.

If you would like to join our Community of Practice, we are just organizing and would love to have your participation. Membership is open to all members of CPSquare. If you are already a member, you will find our forums under “Projects” on the CPSquare website. If you are not a member, we invite you to join CPSquare, which has many other activities and benefits as well. Click here: CPSquare Membership.

If you have questions, please email us at cp2phd (at) cpsquare (dot) org.

NOTE: We also don’t mind hearing from those of you who have jumped this hurdle  — experience is a great teacher and we value the knowledge of those who have obtained their PhDs already.

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!”