We’re inventing a new portmanteau.  A Stackathon is working party that’s slower-paced than a hackathon and more reflective.  It gathers useful examples of something with a lot of sense-making built into the process.  Therefore a stackathon is not like the current craze for content curation.  Read on for details about CPsquare’s first Stackathon.

During this stackathon we’ll gather profiles and portraits of as many living Ning-based or Ning-supported communities as possible.  We’ve started developing a list of interesting examples.  As we stack these communities one on top of another, we expect to discover new hacks that could make any of them more effective, sustainable, and fun. (And those hacks are probably relevant to simpler or more elaborate platforms than Ning, too!)

We will try to be somewhat systematic in describing how Ning is configured for each community and how it fits in the community’s digital habitat. We’ll pay attention to the ongoing role of leadership, facilitation, and technology stewardship. That means understanding what the community is about, what kinds of activities are typical, and what other tools a community uses in each community. Understanding that would give us a better idea of how and when to recommend Ning. Our stack will also suggest many possible methods that one community could borrow from another (including the use of auxiliary tools, plug-ins, themes, membership restrictions, etc., etc.).

During the stackathon (which will run for a whole year, from March 2012 to April 2013) we’ll have discussions in CPsquare’s Web Crossing site (password required: it’s for CPsquare members and people registered for the Stackathon), we’ll collect ideas in various Google Docs, we may have teleconferences, and we will collect some of our insights on CPsquare’s Media Wiki site. It all depends on what people want to do and are willing to do.

You can participate in the stackathon by joining CPsquare or by registering for the Stackathon here (costs $10). Any Stackathon registrant who contributes a full community portrait gets their registration fee refunded and they receive a CPsquare membership during the last 6-months of the Ning Stackathon.

(Thanks to Amboo Who for the photo!)

• It worked perfectly for some: I selected the video, started it for everyone and could pause it at any point. People watching it could enter comments in the chat or talk over the video.  But you can only watch videos that are on YouTube, so some of the videos from Pepperdine students that we would have considered for watching were excluded because of where they’d been published.
• Even with a uniformly experienced group with consistently high bandwidth and technology, there were some puzzling differences in experience.  When someone speaks, their image jumps to the center of the screen — but their own screen doesn’t show that!  Videos showed up on the main screen for some people but were in a completely other window for some.  If you have the “video” tab clicked on it shows a “related videos” message after a video has finished. But people who did not have the video tab clicked on saw the regular behavior: the face of the speaker (or recent speaker), jumps up to the center screen as the discussion proceeds.
• I take detailed notes in the chat (and encourage others to join me in that practice).  Since my keyboard is loud enough to be distracting during a conversation, I keep muting myself and have to un-mute to speak: it’s really clumsy to do that without a keyboard shortcut of some sort.

Bottom line: although there are clumsy things about it, having YouTube play a video for a small group opens up a lot of really cool possibilities.

Here is the agenda that Sylvia Currie and I had come up with:

In your check-in, give your name, location, and briefly describe any prior experiences attempting to get a group to “observe a CoP”?

After watching each video, we took the following questions one at a time:

• What did we see?
• Comment on the specific community that’s presented — What does it imply about “communities of practice”?
• What’s not shown?  What’s not visible?
• As a result of our watching together, what do we see about our own blind spots?

We watched two videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzZQCZxh5w Ice Skating Sensations
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nfo42ci-Ko Joseph Sikeku talks about the technologies he uses at FADECO radio to reach Tanzanian farmers.

Our wrap-up question was: what are some useful and meaningful ways to look at CoPs together?

Here is my list of take-aways:

• Access matters a lot: we’re not allowed to observe some communities (others may need to observe them on our behalf) or their business is so foreign to us that we can’t even understand what they’re about.  The best we can do is get incrementally closer.
• Active and successful communities frequently have a support structure in the background that is invisible unless you look for it (which you might not do unless you understand something about the community itself).
• Individual interactions or specific roles are more easily observed than a community as a whole, but it’s that community context that gives meaning to the observable stuff.
• A community leader or convener or tech steward can see connections or relationships between people or tools that other community members may not be able to see (and that an outsider might not have access to).

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.

1. Opening – Bill Snyder: Communities of Practice: Organizing for Renewal – June 27 (see more detail below)
2. Robert Putnam reading: Prayer request circles vignette from American Grace – June 29
3. Josh Plakoff and Estee Solomon Grey: Isomorphism between Judaism and Communities of Practice – July 5
4. Lisa Colton: the Jewish indie minyan “phenomenon” – July 7
5. Joe Kutter: Community of Practice initiatives in the American Baptist Church – July 20
6. Sr. Maxine and Julie – anunslife.org an online Catholic community – July 21

Not quite scheduled yet:

• Frank Daugherity, “A Christian community ministering to disaster victims in Japan.” Spiritual and religious communities are alive and well in Japan, despite the devastation from the 9.0 earthquake and Tsunami. Frank observes the interactions of several communities during a work mission with http://crashjapan.com/ during the first half of July. CRASH is a group of Japanese Christians that have been doing relief work all over Asia. Frank is an ordained minister and long-time member of CPsquare who lived in Japan for 20 years earlier in his life. How do the several communities show up and how might they evolve in their response to this crisis? Join us for an interview at (TBA).
• Dave Makokwski, “WebEx support for Tibetan New Year in an international Buddhist Sangha.” (TBA)
• A transcription and publication project as community of practice: http://www.unfetteredweb.org/pod/who-and-how

To give a flavor of our conversations, here are a few of the provocative propositions that 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, has offered to kick off our conversations.

The learning church: initial propositions

William M. Snyder wsnyder@socialcapital.com

January 7, 2008

• The superordinate purpose of the church is the ongoing discovery and fulfillment of the Mission of God
  • This provides a context for setting expectations and priorities at global, diocese, and congregation levels
• As “the Body of Christ,” the church is built on human faith and relationships as well divine inspiration
  • Thus the church, like any community or organization, is affected by personal and social dynamics
  • This means attending to issues such as power, conflict, and personalities as well as scripture, sacraments, and spirit
• Many faith communities do not demonstrate capabilities required to engage and energize members to fulfill their mission
  • Key capabilities include leadership, community-building, and practice-innovation and -development
• We must dramatically increase our learning capacity to thrive: technical learning for improvement and transformational learning for sustained vitality and influence
  • Much to learn about learning from organization experience in other sectors
  • There is a growing repertoire of learning-related concepts, methods, and structures to draw on
• A key strategy for learning is cultivating generative relationships—across congregations as well as within them
  • Mutually supportive relationships among peer practitioners are key for generating ideas and getting them shared and applied
  • “Communities of practice” foster learning, innovation, and collaboration
• The church is a unique organization with distinctive capabilities—and barriers—for transformational learning
  • Large-scale, systematic change is not easy for established organizations, particularly ones (such as the Church) with a deeply embedded hierarchical structure and ideological buffers that obscure market forces
  • Yet the Church also has distinctive advantages: members’ faith and their communal commitment to embody the love of God provide an openness to the Spirit and a trustworthy foundation to build on
  • The Church’s “witness of hope” to the world also inspires internal renewal

We’ve been having a conversation in CPsquare for more than 4 years about communities in religious and spiritual contexts. What is unique about those contexts? What similarities do they have with each other or with other secular communities of practice (e.g., of Java programmers or skateboarders or mothers of newborns)? What could we learn about communities in general by looking at spiritual and religious communities? What could those communities learn from exploring each other using a communities of practice perspective? We’ve decided that it’s time to hold a larger and more organized conference and invite you to join us during July 2011, whether you are only able to dip into one or two sessions or whether you can spend the whole month exploring these issues. Here is why we are doing it:

• We are interested in what we see people learning and what they do to learn, rather than what or how they are supposed to learn. Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples — apparently different from the corporate or professional communities that have been associated with the term “community of practice.”
• We are always looking at communities from inside and outside because we are concerned with personal experience and social organization. Many of us actively participate in religious and spiritual communities and find that they inform our work with other communities. It seems important to practice looking at them from the outside a bit more systematically.
• CPsquare is an international and cross-cultural community. We are curious to know more about how “situated” religious and spiritual communities are when they straddle the cultural or national boundaries we straddle or when we can observe them across those boundaries.
• We see communities of practice at multiple levels of scale, tucked away in organizations as well as spanning the globe. We see community of practice structures at the level of an individual congregation (e.g., First Baptist Church or Congregation Beth Shalom), across congregations (e.g., meditation instructors across Shambhala) as well as inside congregations (e.g., self-organizing prayer breakfast at Saddleback Church described in Robert Putnam’s American Grace). What does that imply for those of us who seek to support or cultivate communities?

Conference organization

This is an online conference, so we will use our several platforms as we get organized in June and hold the conference in July, 2011. This conference is like an open space technology conference where the conversations are traceable back in history and the community hosting it expects to continue interacting and working on the topic as a whole in the future. (See more about participation in the conference.)

Focus issues

Because CPsquare is an ongoing community, we don’t mind tackling issues that are larger than what we can handle in one conversation or one conference. Here is the beginning of a list of issues that we could discuss or investigate:

• Many religious or spiritual communities are examples of long-standing, highly evolved communities of practice. At the same time we find young, very recently formed communities that are attempting to address age-old issues in new ways. Communities along the whole spectrum are of inherent interest to us in the CPsquare community.
• Religious and spiritual communities are interesting examples of communities of practice that:
  • occur at all levels of scale, from the smallest, self-organizing minyans (Jewish prayer groups that are often lay-led) to very large and formal institutions,
  • are embedded in very diverse social, cultural, technical and economic contexts,
  • create a kind of “mycorrhizae” stratum (to use Engeström’s metaphor) that creates a beneficial context for other communities.
• Migration and social changes cause religious communities that evolved separately to now exist in social settings that are very different from where they originated (and now they live right next to traditions with very different origins), presenting new challenges as well as opportunities.
• A social learning perspective is useful in that it allows religious communities to look at themselves in such a way as to consider the relevance of insights, innovations or difficulties faced by other communities.
• From a social learning perspective new technologies presents opportunities for spiritual communities such as:
  • reaching larger peripheries (including proselytizing),
  • for supporting or teaching teachers,
  • technology also presents challenges because it can facilitate multi-membership and “religion as an identity game” that’s superficial, or a needlessly confrontational “issue”.
• Communities always face interesting issues about how to organize themselves, how to grow, and how to sustain themselves. How they fund themselves and fund their ongoing evolution is always an important theme.

Case Examples

These are the kinds of cases we are thinking of (and as the schedule gets organized we will be editing the conference schedule with our latest thinking. These happen to have a technology theme, although this conference is ‘not’ limited to technology:

• Twitter For Churches is framed for a fairly specific religious segment, but could work for many others.
• Kandro Rinpoche advises leaders from a kindred group and it’s posted on YouTube.
• Should pastors friend parishioners of Facebook?
• New online ministries.

Schedule overview

Religious and spiritual communities conference schedule overview
The public, overview schedule will be updated as the conference takes shape. The official and more detailed conference schedule is inside the CPsquare community space.

CPsquare conferences are open but intimate. We examine a particular subject within our general field of communities of practice in greater depth across several days or weeks.

Our conferences are primarily by and for CPsquare members. Membership is open and you are invited to join us. (Dues are low enough so that a year’s membership costs less than many other conferences.) In addition to members, some people participate as guests during the conference:

• Guests of the conference who are making a presentation (and are invited by the conference organizers)
• Guests of an individual CPsquare member (who join as “a friend of CPsquare” and designate the individual as “sponsor” on the membership form). The expectation is that sponsors will help their guest participate and become acquainted with the CPsquare environment)

CPsquare conferences usually combine synchronous and asychronous elements, making participation possible from anywhere in the world.  (See the times in the password-protected community calendar). We will typically use more than one of our several platforms for our interactions in a conference.

• The agenda and a launch pad to participate is here: http://meetingwords.com/VbOaSj0WHB.  Here’s how the agenda stands at this moment:
  • 1:00 p Introduction and welcome
    • Event logistics review: balancing broadcast & interaction,
    • Platform & technology components
    • Fall-back positions
  • 1:10 p Morning Fish bowl report-out (format & conclusions)
  • 1:20 p Planning an online symposium to launch a community with Linda Blong, Connie Silva-Broussard, George Triest, and Percy Young.
  • 1:40 p LaDonna Coy and Susan Stewart: increasing participation by diversifying tools (See the diagram on the right.)
  • OCE Elluminate room (continued)
    • 2:00 p #KMers chat report-out on excellent events http://www.kmers.org/chat
    • 2:20 p Breakout # 2
    • 2:40 p Breakout # 3
  • CPsquare Elluminate room
    • 2:00 p Breakout # 1
    • 2:20 p Breakout # 2
    • 2:40 p Breakout # 3

We’re also having a Twitter chat at 18:00 GMT on Thursday May 12 http://www.kmers.org/chat on “Effective online vents from a KMer perspective”

Because KM4Dev is big and a bit sprawling, because there has been an overlap between CPsquare and KM4Dev membership, and because this is an interesting inflection point for KM4Dev, this field trip will have both synchronous and asynchronous components.  The asynchronous part will begin on April 20 where we look at several different facets of KM4Dev.  We will collect pointers to historical events such as face-to-face meetings or notable transitions as well as tools that have been developed, platforms or tools that have been tried.

For example, recently (in the current “My Practice” session) Joitske Hulsebosch mentioned a blog posting by Nancy White describing the effort to “translate” from the D-group email list discussions to a wiki page: it’s a great idea but hard to do.  We will try to collect such stories and examples more systematically.  Another example is that at one of the KM4Dev face-to-face meetings, Josien Kapma and Beverly Trayner practiced and developed the craft of social reporting so as to benefit the KM4Dev community (and spread good practice) and develop their own learning as well.  When I went to a KM4Dev meeting in Brussels a couple years ago, I observed a Bingo game as part of a community warm up (the video has an advertisement at the beginning):

I have to say I was pretty skeptical, but when I saw it translated into Spanish, being used at the KM4Dev meeting in Cali, I think I “got it.”  So the question is, how can KM4Dev’s history of innovation and learning be kept alive and developed further?  All successful communities face this kind of question sooner or later, and having a field trip like this is a great way to explore the question and come up with possible answers.

Although this event is different in scope and structure than our regular field trip visits, it will be open (and free), as in the past.  If you are interested in spending some time on this project, write to john (dot) smith (at) learningalliances (dot) net for enrollment in the online, asynchronous discussions.  We hope to have a good number of KM4Dev members participate in the conversation along with CPsquare members and (some) guests.  Also, if you would like to participate in just the synchronous part of field trip (which will last for 90 minutes and will be held on 27 April 2011 at 15:00 GMT, come back here for details that will be posted the day before.

For this field trip we are intending to produce a more comprehensive and systematic summary of what we learn than what has been the norm in our previous trip reports.  The final report will be published or linked from here and we have allocated some funds for an honorarium to the CPsquare member who undertakes writing the summary.

• 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

To help us handle the richness, we have these provocative propositions to consider:

• Forums and email lists unconsciously shaped our thinking about communities
• Communities need “a place” to identify with
• A community’s topic can be known in advance, otherwise why cultivate?
• Membership in a community should be identified in advance
• It’s best to build a platform so they will come
• Practices for “Being Together” can be taught or changed after the other elements of a community are set
• Forming a community requires a certain amount of privacy, don’t do it in public

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