CPsquare

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.

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

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?

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.).

The goal of CPsquare’s “shadow the leader” series is get close to the lived experience of leadership, beyond short-term, drive-by views or our models of what experience should be.  (It’s a members-only series of phone calls with “ground-support” in our online space.) We’ve done two series before, one with Robert Tollen and the other with Beth Kanter. In both cases it’s was interesting to see how the conversation evolved, how the leader’s thinking changed, and how those of us who participated made sense of what we heard.

This year’s leader is Davee Evans, who was an engineer at Apple Computer for a number of years, transitioned to design and usability, now is consulting with small companies around usability. His involvement with Wikipedia began with a 4 day rally to save a page about “Shambhala” from deletion. In retrospect, the page’s content was poor but the topic was worthy. Now, 1,000 edits, 500 comments on articles later, Davee is involved with a set of related pages. He’s deep into issues such as the different notions of “serfdom” in European and Asian societies.

Although participants in the process can be completely anonymous, Davee has found a convivial group with loosely shared values (around the process of improving an article) who have a mission or goal to produce a better, more neutral, and more all-encompassing encyclopedia. They depend on and cite scholarly sources that are peer reviewed, neutral, and credible. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

Collectively, editors who hold those values hold “a vigil” around a topic, watch for changes that might go against their values. Davee monitors about 300 pages, checks them once or twice a day.

After our first session, Davee thought that the CPsquare conversation, reflecting on an interesting year and a new avocation, was very enjoyable. Interesting to consider whether the wikipedians are a community and to bring out an insider’s view of how it works. In the longer term Davee is interested in policies and approaches to conflicts and how they promote or hinder a sense of community. You’re invited to join us in that inquiry, which applies to all communities of practice.

At the end of our first session (on July 9th) we reflected on our conversation: our collective note-taking in CPsquare teleconferences — occasionally with different versions of the same sentence — is a group process for converging on the truth — the sense of the group. (Similar to wikipedia articles converging on “the truth”?) We wondered what it means when everyone is absorbed in the thinking and stops taking notes, which does happen.

What’s the best platform on which communities of practice can gather? There are a lot of choices and the choices seem to be multiplying. We’ve been following Beth Kanter for almost a year, trying to understand the community that is loosely organized around the nptech tag as an example of a new kind of platform. Add Facebook, Twitter, and the other new entrants in the field and you have too many choices.

But more traditional platforms like Tomoye’s Echo, Q2learning’s eCommunity, or Web Crossing’s offerings are still home to many, many communities. (We couldn’t resist going to look at one community that uses 6 different open-source platforms for it’s “platform”.) And you actually have to pay to use them! Join us for a three-week conference looking at many different platforms (new and old) through the eyes of their communities.

Rather than asking which platform is “the best” we are asking, “what kinds of communities thrives on each of these quite different platforms?” We’re inviting community leaders, technology stewards, and software vendors to all spend three weeks together thinking about issues of common concern.

The event is organized by CPsquare members and is open to guests who register here. (CPsquare members who are presenting or facilitating can bring a guest for free.)

Every month for the last year, CPsquare members have gathered together to talk with Robert Tollen, the leader of a distributed health support community named MPD-Support-L. It’s like “Grand Rounds” in that world-class diagnosticians show up on the call, but the conversations benefit everyone, not just the patient, who is remarkably healthy.

I heard about Robert Tollen through a friend whose father-in-law had been helped by the MPD-support-L list before he died from one of the several rare blood diseases known as myeloproliferative disorders. Although Tollen wasn’t sure what exactly what we wanted or why, he generously agreed to participate. In the end he said that the monthly telephone conference calls were a “terrific experience” for him and they certainly were for us, too. At first he thought he wouldn’t have anything to say, but it turned out that he had a lot to say, like most good leaders of successful communities.

I thought of the “Grand Rounds” format because many of the conversations in CPsquare are inherently problem-oriented. They focus on challenging situations that demand immediate, short-term help, where a community is being launched, is experiencing growing pains, or is dealing with new technologies. And after several years in existence, CPsquare needed to focus on a healthy community – and in greater depth – as its life played out over a longer period of time. It’s interesting to note that Sir William Osler, considered by many to be the father of modern medicine, invented “Grand Rounds” at Johns Hopkins and lent his name (“Osler-Vaquez disease”) to polycythemia vera, one of the several myeloproliferative diseases.

It’s hard to say everything we learned from the experience. (It’s not hard to see why “Grand Rounds” is described as an important ritual of medical education.) First of all, there’s something very useful about being in regular contact with someone like Robert Tollen, who is so generous of his time in helping people cope with a disease that’s complex and sometimes life-threatening. Second, it’s remarkable how deeply involved a community leader can be in the domain issues of a community of practice: I remember noticing in one of our conversations how very many topics led right back to the scientific intricacies of diagnosis and treatment. Third, it’s remarkable how many little technical pieces work together to support the MPD-Support community.

The MPD-Support list has about 2500 subscribers and is open to patients, family members, and health professionals: http://members.aol.com/mpdsupport/ . It’s been running since 1994 and has members from 41 different countries. A priest in his 30’s who had one of the MPD diseases used the list to find that more advanced medical care for the disease was available in Italy, compared to where he lived in Australia, so he got a job in the Vatican. A 16-year old girl in the UK heard about the choices that others who had taken a hard look at their situations had made. And in the thousands of messages over the years, Tollen balances the various needs that people have to talk about vitamins, herbs, home remedies, and other alternatives while staunchly supporting a scientific approach to medicine that Osler would certainly applaud. It turns out that Tollen receives and circulates information about scientific discoveries related to MPD before it comes to the attention of all but the most specialized hematologists around the world.

There are many facets to any given community. Each participant in the calls seemed to bring out another one: Joitske Hulsebosch from The Netherlands, with an international development perspective; Sherry Spence, an epidemiologist from Colorado; Derek Chirnside, an instructional innovator from New Zealand; Etienne Wenger, a writer of books on communities of practice who asks very good questions; Sandra Walden Pearson, a social change agent from Australia. There were many others, whose names escape me, who helped reveal a very rich world inhabited by a retired man in Florida who’s figured out what works for his community.

Although an email list has been the backbone for the MPD-Support community since it graduated from a distribution list 12 years ago, Tollen uses a surprising array of auxiliary tools to support his community. In an “always on” Web 2.0 world of Frappr maps, it turns out there are a lot of email-based tools to send reminders (www.memotome.com), alerts (e.g., Google), etc. A real-life community is likely to depend on many different tools.

Where does an active support list like Tollen’s lead? Suddenly Tollen is speaking to physicians and researchers at a conference, he’s compiling a list of 400 frequently asked questions, he’s conducting the most detailed survey of people who suffer from the MPD diseases, and for the first time he may just be giving voice to a community with an “orphan disease,” which fortunately makes for a very interesting dozen episodes of CPsquare’s “Grand Rounds.”