CPsquare

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.

Are you involved in conducting online interviews for your community research? This 2-week seminar at SCoPE, facilitated by Janet Salmons, will be of interest to you. Here is an excerpt from the description:

We are accustomed to live social interaction on the Internet. Text or chat have become a part of everyday culture. We use video calls to stay in touch with distant friends and family members, attend online meetings or webinars; we jump into Second Life for fun or learning. We may know how to use synchronous tools, but do we know how to use them for scholarly research?

While social conversation and research interviews share some characteristics, the purpose, protocol, and context are quite different. This SCoPE seminar will explore key e-research steps needed for educators, graduate students, and community leaders to use synchronous tools for scholarly interviews. In addition to asynchronous discussions, two synchronous events in week two will demonstrate the use of Elluminate and Vidyo for online interviews.

The seminar will draw on Janet’s new book on the subject, Online Interviews in Real Time.

SCoPE seminars are monthly topics facilitated by volunteers in the community. They are free and open to the public and there is no registration required. To contribute to discussions and to customize your visits you will need to create an account (quick process!) Please pass along this flyer to your colleagues or point them to the seminar forum at SCoPE.

Hope to see you there!

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.

Our next Virtual Field Trip is scheduled for November 16, 2009 20:00 GMT. This excursion will be to Cloudworks, an evolving, dynamic community for learning design developed and hosted by the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University. Grainne Conole, Professor of e-learning at OU, will be our tour guide. We are organzing the background information and details of the trip on the CPsquare wiki.

When: Monday, November 16, 2009 12:00 PDT 20:00 GMT (your time zone)

Where: SCoPE Community Enthusiasts Elluminate Room

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?

CPsquare is happy to announce the schedule for our Spring 2009 Research and Dissertation Fest.

Roy Greenhalgh: justifying the use of communities of practice and network analysis as approaches to study volunteer organizations

We know very little about the mutual support that exists between volunteers. Most scholars use the term support to mean management (Brudney and Williamson 2000; Hager and Brudney 2004). And management is usually restricted to three activities: recruitment, selection and retention. The last 30 years has seen the adoption of modern managerialism, which is odd considering that volunteers usually decide to gift their time and skills in an atmosphere supporting freewill rather than one of command and control. This doctoral study is using the twin lenses of Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1992; Brown and Duguid 1996; Wenger 1998) and social network analysis (Wellman 1981; Hall and Wellman 1985; Wellman and Berkowitz 1988; Wellman and Wortley 1990; Scott 2000) to explore the micro support structures that are created, maintained and managed by the volunteers themselves.”

Roy will talk about his work and dissertation plans on Tuesday, May 26.

Marian Thier: Listening habits assessment instrument

Marian Thier is the founder of Expanding Thought. She has recently become interested in understanding people’s listening styles. A small research project has developed an instrument that assesses people’s listening behaviors as a function of habit more than conscious choice. If you are joining us for this session, you are invited to complete a ten-question survey that assesses which of four different listening habits you most commonly use during communication. It does not address how well or poorly you apply the habit. She’ll present the project and individual results on Wednesday, May 27.

Debra Beck: The Nonprofit Board as Community of Practice: An Exploratory Case Study

Debra Beck recently completed her EdD, at the University of Wyoming. This dissertation focused on describing how learning occurs in the routine activities of preparing for, and participating in, nonprofit board meetings. Evidence of a community of practice was found and linked to the qualities necessary to foster generative thinking and governing. A case study approach was selected to allow for immersion in the meeting environment and deep exploration of the experiences, roles and motivations of individual members. She’ll present her work on Thursday, May 28.

Mirjam Neelen: “Lurking: a Challenge or Another Way of Learning? A focus on Corporate CoPs.”

Mirjam Neelen, is working for a telecommunications company in Seattle and studying learning sciences at Open University, the Netherlands.

Online, or virtual, communities have become an important method of KM to leverage an organization’s intellectual capital by enhancing knowledge exchange and that way, support continuous organizational learning (Anthony, Rosman, Eze, & Gan, 2009). Although there is no solid understanding of why, in many cases an online community only has an active core group of posters and a much bigger group of people who read messages of others but not or rarely post (Kahnwald, unpublished paper). This phenomenon is called lurking. There are many different approaches to lurking. Some see lurkers as free-riders (Kollock & Smith, 1996) that limit the organizational intellectual capital, while others see them as peripheral legitimate participants (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In addition, Kahnwald (unpublished paper) describes lurking as another form of learning.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 2.

Akila Sarirete: Knowledge management within CoPs

Akila Sarirete is reporting on work on the knowledge creation process applying the SECI model of Nonaka (Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization) in CoPs, using force field analysis. Akila will present her work on Thursday, June 4.

Alice MacGillivray: Use of the C4P Model in a CoP study: Good practice building better theory

In 2004, when Alice MacGillivray and John Smith presented at an AACE E-Learn conference in DC, we heard [then Major] Pete Kilner share his thoughts about a model implicitly used to help the CompanyCommand community thrive. Pete referred to it as the C4P Model: context, connection, conversation and content around purpose. It was one of those models that could be easily sketched on a napkin, was intuitively appealing, and was grounded in Pete’s extensive experience. The model had not been published in peer-reviewed literature.

Later, when I had the privilege of researching counter-terrorism communities of practice in Canada, I built the C4P model into the analysis of data as part of the larger study. The results support the value of the model.

She’ll present her work on Tuesday, June 9.

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.

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!

During our WAATWAAT conference we have looked at a dozen different communities or organizations and had almost as many synchronous meetings. We’ll be sharing more of what we learned as time permits. Meanwhile, since the core discipline of CPsquare is to practice what we preach, we’ve launched a new wiki, where, among other things, we share the materials that were gathered together to launch our conversations.

We expect to consolidate CPsquare resources from far and wide on this wiki. CPsquare members, current and past, as well as friends of CPsquare and others who are involved in the subject of communities of practice are invited to request an account. (Edit privileges will be limited in advance to assure a quality resource, but accounts will be freely given to those who want to contribute.)

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