CPsquare

CPsquare’s “Research and Dissertation Fests” were partly based on a strategy of trying to cope with the amount and variety of good work about communities of practice being produced out there.  We would try to create a reflective space to look at as much of it as we can and do so in a way that facilitates comparisons allows for one piece of work to spark insights around the others.

It turns out that the way we had organized the events was too intense.  For several years we held a 2 or 3 week series in which 7 to 12 people presented their work.  I assumed that nobody would actually try to participate synchronously in all of those events and that doing them in a short period of time would force people to choose, which was assumed to be OK.  We did a little polling and reflecting and have changed our practice.  By way of a report on the new format, here is a welcoming announcement by Alice MacGillivray:

Welcome to the first in a new series of research and development events with CPsquare member Grady McGonagill. Grady will present a draft report on leadership implications of the evolving web, which he is writing for the Bertelsmann Foundation. I’m Alice MacGillivray, one of the event hosts, and I’m sharing some of my perspectives on this event.

As you know, we have many learning events and processes in CPsquare. One ongoing tool is the “Help in Real Time,” forum. in which anyone can ask for advice on a current challenge. Another was “Dissertation Fests,” which morphed into “Research Fests” and have now grown into this “R&D Series” concept. I believe the event we are now launching has roots in both Research Fests and Help in Real Time, and therefore the potential for synergies from this overlap.

Grady has brought us a timely topic and format for the first event in this series, for several reasons:

• The work is not yet complete, and we have often found dialogue about research-in-progress to be more provocative and multi-layered than presentations about completed research (no matter how excellent and informative those sessions have been).

• Grady is modeling the opening of a consulting project, including the engagement of his client, into the CPsquare space. Imagine the potential for learning and excellence if CPsquare members regularly consulted with each other in this way. On the flip side, there may be some cautions about jumping into “someone else’s” consulting, and we might learn about such cautions and approaches during Grady’s event.

• This project addresses at least two topics which are firmly woven throughout Community of Practice work: social media and leadership. We talk about both, but neither has been a dominant focus. As a meta-community of practitioners, we are used to working with ideas and with the real world: this event has the potential to stretch the boundaries of those conversations within CPsquare.

Grady will be with us to pose some questions and engage in conversation, beginning Wednesday morning. I encourage you to introduce yourselves before we dig into Grady’s requests. A typical introduction is fine, but I challenge you to consider telling a story from which we can learn more about you as a person, your interest in the topic, and how you came to this gathering.

Bring good questions, think about how you can learn from these exchanges, and enjoy the week.

Alice MacGillivray, PhD
www.4KM.net

Once a month we invite member of CPsquare to talk about their work: their job or current projects and the communities of practice or social learning issues that are currently coming up for them.  We launched the practice in January, 2010 and it has been a fascinating, informal and open-ended way for us to get to understand more deeply what kind of work people do .   People  talk about what’s difficult, challenging or rewarding about their work. They are invited to reflect on their experience, where they would like to go, and what opportunities or constraints they see.  We’ve heard from Sue Wolff in higher education, Jack Merklein from Xerox Business Services, Joitske Hulsebosch, an independent consultant from The Netherlands, Lauren Klein, a consultant from the US, and from Tony Carr, who is in higher education in South Africa.

We have just finished spending almost 2 weeks with John Parboosingh, Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary, Adjunct Faculty at the School of Nursing, Mount Royal University, and a community learning consultant in the healthcare area.   Here are a few of the items he shared:

• Community Of Facilitators For Education and Exchange http://www.coffee-ab.ca - in Calgary, Alberta that he
• His use of Voicethreads as a community tool http://voicethread.com/#u32616.b1040623.i5547297 and http://voicethread.com/?#u32616.b1098165.i5880544
• A comment in the British Medical Journal (1999;318) arguing that  “I don’t know” are the three most important words in education http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7193/

Here is a Wordle summary of our conversation:

One of the great things about the sustained connections we make through CPsquare is that when you bump into people in other settings there’s such a strong connection.  There are common interests, common vocabulary, and an extraordinary willingness to share insights.  Last week during the Yi-Tan Tech Call 274: on Digital Habitats, I noticed LaDonna Coy tweeting about it.  Afterward I wrote here, asking:

I’ve seen your tweets off and on and wondered what you’re up to and was really excited to see that you were on the Yi-Tan call.

How was it?  What was surprising?   I was wondering if you’d be up for sharing some reactions & thoughts — possibly even on the CPsquare blog.

Here is LaDonna’s response:

Hi John,

I’ve got a colleague I work with (Ken Homer) out in CA and he has encouraged me to join in on the Yi-Tan calls for some time — when I saw it was you, Etienne and Nancy engaging in a convo about the new book — I just knew the time had come for me to be there. Now that I’ve had the experience I’m wondering how I can fit the call in more often?  If we don’t get a respectable outcome with our CoPs work, I may have significant free time on my hands, sigh. Surprising, provocative, intriguing — very much so.  Here’s my takeaways..

• Considering the important truth that no matter what tech we choose (or don’t choose) we include some, exclude others.  Not an easy space to stand in.

• thinking about Nancy’s statement, “technology is designed for group but experienced by the individual” .. pondering .. she’s given voice to my wiki experience.

• Challenge of navigating and negotiating the spaces with broad continuum of experience, knowledge and skills. What a challenge it is even when some are adept with the the tech while others remain timid or right-down resistant.  Not so much critical mass but critical intention.

• What if tech development were guided by tech steward rather than IT peeps?  (great question, huge wish, especially in state gov where all things are Sharepoint. Wrestling with how to make Sharepoint do what the groups//community need it to do, sigh.

• Tools in “tech stone age” … not so sure, maybe bronze age … at least I don’t have to know and be able to write code to engage my colleagues – I remember when it was that way, when one had to be 90% geek not 10%.  Now, 10% geek will do in most cases.

• Difference in perspective between “what can we make/do with these [tools, platform]” versus what do we need the [tool, platform] to do for us?  One feels resigned, adaptive to what exists while the other creative challenge for what could be.

Seeding? What we didn’t  talk about is something I’m facing and wrestling with still.  Seeding (where there is little or no real community) and supporting engagement in our withering attempt to engage community sectors online.  The Provider Network is doing a bit better but not by much.  Thinking about why — conditions, capacity, attitudes, and what we are learning mixed with disappointment.

Measurement? (still) I’ve also been thinking a lot about measurement, and what I think of as the core about what CoPs are about about.  Seems the main thing about online community is 1) relationships and engagement... wondering how to measure, has anyone actually done it … so went looking for tools and resources — found two instruments that measure relationships that I’m thinking of tinkering with and using with my group in KS (want to tinker?).  Grunig-Hon here and in Katie’s book, Measuring Public Relationships and attached paper and instrument from Vern Larsen’s work on collaboration (research shows quality of collaboration has a direct impact on the quality of the outcomes).

Not sure this is what were looking for or whether appropriate for the blog – but if it fits, point me that away I’d be happy to share and learn with everyone.

LaDonna

There are two upcoming face-to-face meetings that involve CPsquare members and friends in one way or another. You are invited to join in!

The first is an event about the barriers and enablers to communities of practice in higher education that takes place at Birmingham University (UK) on May 10th. See this leaflet. The cost of attending the event is minimal (£20). The announcement describe the conversation:

Communities of practice are increasingly seen as effective ways for organisations to address the knowledge challenges they face. The focus of this day will be on how communities of practice can enable research collaboration and promote interdisciplinary work, can inform pedagogy and enhance the student learning experience and can facilitate the development of teaching networks in Higher Education.

Speakers include Etienne Wenger, Karen Guldberg, Paul Edwards, Malcolm Ryan, Jenny Mackness, Tarsem Singh Cooner, Paul Lowe, and Helen Walmsley.

The second is a one day informal conversation in Aalborg on May 2, immediately before the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning Conference on May 3 and 4, 2010.  Our day together will be:

• Mostly an informal, get-acquainted conversation: an extended round of introductions to find out what people are working on. I’m hoping that Barb McDonald, Beverly Trayner, Brenda Kaulback, Etienne Wenger, Floor Basten, Jeffrey Keefer, John David Smith, Joost Robben, Patricia Arnold, Susanne Nyrop, and Thomas Mathiasen will be there.  You are invited to join us.
  
• We are having discussions in our member’s space to decide on a few topics for more extended conversation.  (If you are a member of CPsquare you can just log-in to participate.)
  
• Drop us a line using the CPsquare contact form (option #4) if you would like to participate and are not a member of CPsquare.
• This kind of conversation beforehand can enrich the experience of the formal conference that follows although participation in our Sunday gathering is independent of the Networked Learning Conference.
  
• We will pass the hat for snacks.

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).)