CPsquare

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.

Join CPsquare, SCOPE and friends in our next quarterly field trip, when we will visit the Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises community:

People gathered around http://open-sustainability.org/wiki/WSE

Our field trip starts here:

• Monday, February 22, 2010 12:00 PST 20:00 GMT (your time zone)
• Elluminate

Jenny Ambrozek will be our host.  In her invitation she said:

As creators we think Wikisourcing Sustainable Enterprises community is essential, based on hearing the need from practitioners at The Sustainable Enterpise Fieldbook launch events and exchanges in the Sustainable Enterprise Network.

However, currently WSE is a grand vision, a serious aspiration and the seed of a network (as captured in the network map, slide 27, of this “Collective Intelligence” presentation). Our learning so far is about:

• The practical realities of crowdsourcing, and the challenge of getting contributions and interest.
• Network thinking and approaches to convene, and interconnect, the stakeholder networks we’ve identified as essential to WSE’s success.
• sustainability. (For more context see slides from ODNetwork NY presentation.

The CPsquare / SCOPE field trips use an informal community comparison framework

C4P model as we’ve adapted it:

• Content: What explicit knowledge objects such as documents or video clips are created or shared in this community?
• Connections: What interpersonal contacts between community members (e.g., that facilitate relationship-building between community members) can you observe?
• Conversation: what face-to-face or online conversations are going on?
• Context: what context gives meaning to the content, connections and conversations in this community?
• Purpose: what is the reason for which the members come together in this community?

More about the C4P (see description and references)

Our visit page is on the CPsquare Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Visiting_Wikisourcing_Sustainable_Enterprises

It’s ironic that Alexander Osterwalder uses a “business model for a cow” as a playful exercise to get people thinking about the issues of how to design business models. We have been using Osterwalder’s business model canvas to think through the issues around  a learning community of expatriate Dutch dairy farmers. One of the issues that Josien Kapma is working on, and that we’re trying to understand with her in our “Shadow the Leader” series, is how a learning community can be sustainable financially.  It can take significant resources to support a community of practice, so financial and other resources can be a limiting factor in pursuing a learning agenda.

Using Osterwalder’s scheme has not led directly to a financial plan.  Instead, it has brought up a lot of issues about the social context of learning. During our monthly conversations we have come to see that these three issues interact with learning and financial sustainability in interesting ways:

• Increasing mobility (farmers born in The Netherlands, farming anywhere in the world) requires people to re-invent practices like farming and learning.
• The internet breaks old models for supporting knowledge brokering (it strips control that once was tied to physical books or agricultural extension services, for example).
• New environmental sustainability goals are quite ambitious, and make farming even more knowledge-intensive than it was before).

It has also been interesting to see some of the analogies between a community startup and its Silicon Valley cousin.

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.

During the next year, CPsquare will be shadowing Josien Kapma, a Dutch dairy farmer living in Portugal.

Trained as a Water Management Engineer (MSc.) Kapma earned a postdoctoral diploma in Development Management.  She’s the mother of 3 children and an active member of KM4Dev and CPsquare.  In CPsquare, she’s participated in the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, in the Connected Futures workshop, and been a mentor in the Foundations Workshop as well.

We’ll be shadowing her work as a leader of “Melken Over De Grens” or “Milking on the border” — http://www.melkenoverdegrens.nl.  It’s a global community for expatriate Dutch dairy farmers that’s developing its learning agenda and trying to find its legs at the same time (in terms of organization, business model, funding, and learning activities).

Join us once a month to reflect on the birthing and development process for this community.  We will consider questions such as:

• In what ways is diversity and a global diaspora a resource for a community? In what ways are those characteristics a challenge?
• What individual and group interests are served by the community? How are they balanced?  What leadership is needed and can leaders be compensated for their work, apart from learning as a leadership benefit?
• What activities make sense and what publications are useful in the development process?

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).)

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

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

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

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

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

Although many members of CPsquare are themselves leaders of communities and consultants in the development or support of communities, learning in a community about communities of practice can be another a challenge.  At the beginning you have to just do it, which is what we’ve done with the research and dissertation fests.

They began as a way to go beyond the learning we do inside CPsquare.  Sometimes a member finished a big piece of work and presented it to the whole community or consulted with the community at some critical juncture.  Gradually we formalized the process and it has served us well for sharing work that’s been done by CPsquare members and others.

At this point it’s something we do regularly.  We developed a set of notes on how to do it internally and now it’s shared on the CPsquare wiki as a page on our Research and Dissertation Fests.

CPsquare’s wiki has some areas that visible to the world and others that are not.  In addition, some pages can only be edited by certain people.  The idea is to have a more nuanced boundary between what happens inside CPsquare’s workshops and internal conversations and the resources and materials that we want to share.

* If you were ever a member of CPsquare you will have edit privileges
** Permission for workshop spaces based on registration and participation in the corresponding workshop.

At a recent conference here in Portland, Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, commented that “saying ‘It’s not done‘ is good news for a community.” Particularly in an organizational context, that can be hard to take. But there’s a lot of wisdom in Ward’s comment: it’s one of those “glass half empty” kinds of things. And as we all know, keeping a community alive and moving forward can be discouraging if we forget how much has been accomplished incrementally, one conversation at a time. I’ve always thought that “keeping it going” is a very worthy goal for leaders of communities of practice. It’s actually a big deal when you think about it. This collection of notes from CPsquare and the communities of practice part of the world is all about “keeping it going.”

Five CPsquare members (Bev Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, Shirley Williams, and I) are offering the “Connected Futures” workshop again, starting on April 20. We’ve offered it twice before and want to make it be more eye-opening and useful for community leaders who are seeking to help their communities leverage all the technology resources that are out there. I’ve just added some participants comments to the description page.   Nancy White, has just written a marvelous description of an urban ornithology community using one of the tools we present in the workshop on her blog.

The venerable Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop ran this past winter (with a rather small group). The workshop itself still keeps growing and evolving and creating a deep impression on participants after 10 years. Three of the prospective presentations for CPsquare’s “research and dissertation fest” this Spring are directly related to the foundations workshop.

CPsquare had a conference on all things wiki this January. Some of the materials from that session are on CPsquare’s new (public) MediaWiki. The wiki is quite incomplete (even the SPAM prevention and registration procedures are frustratingly incomplete), but it is starting to have some valuable material on it. Shawn Callahan mentioned recently that a corporate team he was working with was worried about the incompleteness of wikis. They were immensely relieved when they realized that incompleteness was handleable in the sense that you could classify pages as “incomplete” or as “more complete than not” as we’ve done with the tools pages here.

This year’s “shadow the leader” series is in its 9th month. We are talking with a wikipedia editor who has a life in the real world. It’s been a fascinating story about attention, political conflict, apprenticeship, morphing conversations, and not giving up. Just paying attention to the ongoing ups and downs of practice has that feeling of inconclusive insight, but it also underscores Gardner Campbell’s comment that “Wikis only work in practice, not in theory.”

So I guess that the world of wikis, like the world of communities of practice, is beavering away in the background. In fact “Wiki” just had it’s 14th birthday! Have a look at all the Tweets about it.

There’s a lot of unfinished business, but the glass is more than half full!