CPsquare

The Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop has always been international and it always feels a bit miraculous when everybody lands “on the same page.”  Since one of the participants suggested that we not just meet online but actually talk, we’ve been having teleconferences as part of our learning and being together.  (I think we started having teleconferences around 2001.)

Our experience in the workshop confirms the notion that the technologies we use bring us together (somewhat more, often to great effect) and yet always exclude some people and always seem to require more planning.  If we want to meet during waking hours, some people are just left out of an international gathering like our workshop.  And if we meet at this time of the year, we have crazy daylight saving shifts to contend with.

Consider the fact that our workshop always has people from Australia, the US, and Europe and stretches across 6 weeks.  We use US time as the constant and our Monday get-togethers for the workshop that starts on October 24 bounce around as follows:

* Next day in Sydney

This particular miracle would simply would not happen reliably without the World Clock!

We’re running the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop again two times this year, starting next on April 4 and (tentatively) on September 12. Since its predecessor first ran in 1998, the workshop has been under continuous redesign as participants from all over the world pitch in and make it better, as new tools become available, and as we formulate new strategies to make it more useful and impactful. For example, recently Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, and I have been thinking about how participation and reification show up in communities and in our workshop. We are developing summaries of each week’s activities as a visible marker and transition to the next. We want to use summaries that work in a workshop setting that are also useful in an ordinary community of practice.

For example, Social Network Graphs are sometimes used to think about the social structure of communities, especially when they are forming. So at the end of week one we use a graph showing how people interact in the workshop’s “Opening Circle.” It represents what people have been doing and provides an opportunity for reflection going forward. At the end of week six, as Practice Lab projects are wrapping up, we’re holding a Share Fair, both because it’s useful for workshop participants to present what they have learned and because Share Fairs are a common and recommended practice. I would like to know what the most useful (and common) reifications that you are seeing in practice! We would appreciate a comment on the CPsquare blog or drop us a line!

The regular activities that we are holding at CPsquare include “Shadow the Leader” (in it’s 5th year), the Research and dissertation series (which has been running more or less since the beginning), a quarterly “field trip” where we visit a community together, and now the monthly “My Practice” series, where people talk about their work and the communities they work with (ranging from HR and medicine, to beekeeping, to software development, to education and on and on). We usually interrupt these regular events with larger scale conferences. Next Fall we are seeking to organize a series of conversations with pioneers — people who were around the Institute for Research on Learning when the community of practice idea was hatched. In June, we are holding a conference on religious communities as communities of practice.

In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) bring up many of the issues that are likely to come up in our conference next June. For example, the graph at right (on page 30) suggests how”a regular place of worship” is such a common experience for Americans compared to other forms of association (and hence learning). Although they come at the topic from a sociologist’s perspective (outside looking in), they provide some fascinating vignettes and insights about how religious practice has evolved in America.

One of the issues that has come up repeatedly over the years in CPsquare is how the surrounding social and economic context (and even “business model”) shapes a community of practice. Putnam and Campbell offer an interesting perspective on that issue in the following two quotes:

However, the congregation as an all-purpose association with members who choose it, belong to it, and make contributions to it is actually a very Protestant model of religious organization. This form and function of the typical American congregation – of whatever religious tradition – is thus a consequence of America’s Protestant heritage. The United States may not be a Protestant nation in law, but its Protestant legacy shapes the contours of the religious landscape. (p 30)

Rather than a congregation with a fixed membership, mosques in Muslim societies were – and continue to be – convenient places into which one steps in order to pray, depending on where one is in the course of the day. . . . But in the United States, mosques inevitably come to resemble churches. (p 31)

From an entirely different angle, a story from a great little book by Richard H. Axelrod, Emily M. Axelrod, Julie Beedon, and Robert W. Jacobs titled You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004) about the very productive coexistence of an Episcopal Church and a Jewish Temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fits right in here. I’m quoting at length (from page 16 on) so you’ll buy the book (notice the different kinds of involvement they mention), because it suggests how learning at many different levels of scale intersect in religious communities, and because it provokes questions about the kind of involvement we seek to encourage in any community we might work with:

It’s important to always stay clear about what you are trying to accomplish since different goals call for different kinds of involvement. Here’s a story that illustrates the point.

A Jewish temple and an Episcopal church share a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan — the longest-standing affiliation of its type in America. Some years ago, the temple and church were in conflict, which threatened the harmony of the relationship. The membership of the temple was growing, but that of the church was not. Members of the temple wanted a larger social hall for celebrating life-cycle events in their community weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and so on. The church wanted to invest its excess funds in charitable works. Initially the boards of each organization met together to see if they could iron out their differences.

After these sessions, the temple leaders thought that the project was clear: the work they faced was to decide whether or not to build an expanded social hall. They planned to hold a few meetings with the board’s audit committee to determine the financial feasibility of such an effort (Know-How Involvement). They talked about what it would take to encourage members of the congregation to contribute to a fund raising campaign (a creative variation of Arms and Legs Involvement you might call “Checkbook and Wallet Involvement”). But as they explored the situation further, they uncovered a more fundamental question: “What kind of temple do we want to be ?”

Suddenly, the entire project changed. The temple leadership knew they needed to engage the entire congregation in such a significant question. In conversations about their collective future (Care and commitment Involvement). A vision for the temple community gradually emerged. At the same time, they also got clearer about the nature of their relationship with their church partners. This new clarity made it relatively easy to resolve the building issues. They proceeded to build a beautiful new worship area, social hall, and educational classrooms that have benefited both congregations — with strong backing from across the congregations’ members.

Today, the space shared by the temple and the church is the best utilized building in Ann Arbor. Schools, community groups, fitness classes, and lifetime learning programs are all housed there for below-market fees. This met the church’s need for charitable works. These various groups have also provided a substantial source of income, defraying the costs borne by the temple and church for the construction project. The lesson: as you get clearer about what you’re trying to accomplish, you’ll get clearer about the kinds of involvement you need.

Just think how much learning is happening in that story!  To me it suggests that if people are involved in something important, the learning takes care of itself.  Are involvement and learning goals aligned for your community?

We’re launching the Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop starting Monday September 13.  Registration is open through Monday morning.

The conversations, projects, ideas and experiences we share in the workshop always reflect the field as it evolves.  So the workshop is always new in many ways.  Workshop participants and mentors always bring new issues and new settings that are fascinating.  As one mentor (who is from New York) said in a meeting with the workshop organizers today, “It’s so great that the participant roster is so international!  Not dominated by Americans.”

Of course the workshop design is constantly evolving, too.  A couple of our current innovations / experiments are:

• Reading a text carefully together and interleaving comments and questions in a Google Doc.  We tie that text and and those comments to the more open-ended and meandering conversations that we have in our forum spaces.
• We consciously try to keep a community of practice philosophy and a community cultivation practice thread running through the entire workshop.  What would we do without one or the other?  How does one inform the other?  What tensions do we notice between the two?
• We have always worked on designing good ways to participate in the workshop and reflecting on those ways collectively.  Recently we have been experimenting with new ways of capturing (or reifying) that participation as a reciprocal design perspective.  Each week we try to demonstrate a summarization technique or technology that communities can usefully apply.

August is turning out to be a busy month for CPsquare members: we’re visiting with a community leader from a big software company, reflecting with Etienne and Beverly on the on multiple layers of the BEtreat that they hosted during July, and we’re wrapping up a year of inquiry around business models for public communities of practice

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

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.

Although we try to make the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop as much not like school as we can, it always seems like some participants refer to it as “a class” and indeed it does have to have some elements of a class.  Like a beginning and an end.

We do try to embed real community-development features into both the beginning and the end of the workshop.  At the beginning of the workshop we invest a good bit of time exposing what a great resource the workshop participants are for our collective learning.  At the end we talk about how the inquiry could continue individually and collectively through participation in CPsquare events.

But we’ve found that when people arrive too late for the beginning of the workshop, their experience really is compromised.  So it’s OK for people to start one or two days late, but if they miss that deadline, they have to wait for the beginning of the next workshop.  That compromised experience is evidence for our claim that the Foundations Workshop is as much about an experience of participation as it is a conversation about the nature of participation and it’s impact on learning.

Unfortunately today I discovered that a setting on our administrative server was set so that it looked like registration was closed three days before the beginning of the workshop, not two days afterward.  It’s now fixed and registration is open for another four days.

In considering whether to take the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, a PhD student in the healthcare field wrote asking whether the workshop would be useful to her, given what she was doing:

I am going to examine what [communities of practice are already there in an academic health care setting] …. or as I suspect the lack of of them… and hopefully determine what those challenges [to their development] are, using an institutional ethnography approach.

I wrote back that …

Detecting silence or absence is huge, and they are only visible with careful ethnographic observation informed by theory. Last week the keynote at the http://epic2009.com conference was Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who ended up working for the Financial Times and noticed that there was an awful lot of silence around the global debt markets in 2007, despite the fact that they were much larger than the equity markets. There were a lot of reasons to not pay much attention to the debt markets at that time. Careful ethnography that paid off in the most unlikely setting.

I can’t resist asking whether you’ve bumped into Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) http://isbn.nu/9780195140293 … a fellow-alum of the Institute for Research on Learning with Etienne. She’s using a vast ethnographic study of an insurance company, she sets up a powerful analytical framework and one of her chapters is about silence and “stories that are not told”… Well worth the read.

Contact with Etienne is an important part of the workshop experience. He’s great to talk to — and he has a great way of sharing access to current practice in many different settings. But it’s also really important to participate in a wider conversation of people who are exploring and applying these ideas in all kinds of settings. The practice of cultivating communities takes more than research.

While I’m at it, I’m hoping you’ve connected with this group (or at least read their stuff). Fung Kee Fung, Goubanova and Crossly are 3 of the authors who’ve all done the Foundations workshop (at one time or another):

http://www.implementationscience.com/imedia/1788022150101911_article.pdf

A final thought: if part of what you’re looking for is absence of communities of practice (partly with a view of suggesting change to enhance learning in a complex system), you need to develop a pretty sensitive eye for the diverse kinds of communities that are fully functional out there. This workshop can’t be the last word on that subject, but it does bust some of the stereotypes that many of us adopted from reading about the “Turbodudes at Shell” in Cultivating Communities of Practice.

To accommodate travel schedules, we are delaying the beginning of the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop by one week.  It now will start on September 21.  It runs through November 6.

There is nothing like a project to focus community effort.  The leaders of the “Connected Futures” workshop are in more or less constant touch planning version 3.  This post is a little out-take from our conversations as as we get ready to launch.

The initial idea of the workshop was introduced by email, and followed by several conference calls, using a phone bridge and Skype chat for note taking. A wiki was used to develop material and regular calls used to keep up to date with development. Throughout both of the previous runs of the course a Skype chat was kept open for the facilitators.

The first run of the workshop, had a “home base” in Web Crossing, with other technologies introduced during the five weeks. The second run used a Google Group as the home base.  This time we’re using a beautiful implementation of Drupal designed by Howard Rheingold and friends.  Although the home base matters, all the other technologies that are used during the workshop matter as well because:

1. Choosing and using technology is a primary topic of the workshop
2. The workshop leaders seek to present the workshop in a transparent way, where the practice of organizing and presenting is open
3. Workshop participants are themselves invited to introduce technologies to the group — and explain the logic of adding a specific tool

Each home base choice and the additional technologies that were introduced open new possibilities and create some frustrations for everyone (participants as well as workshop leaders), including dilemmas about where to post things, the chance of missing what was considered important, and monitoring each other’s “presence” in the workshop.

We keep re-writing the workshop description as we think through the details, building on our experience from last time.  Beverly Trayner inserted an off-hand comment in a draft of the Participant’s Handbook, “Of course, it’s the reason that we choose the tools we use in the workshop that’s really interesting.”  Or was that Nancy White?  This is not a scholarly environment where you get to keep track of who contributed what.

We don’t know or can’t say all the reasons for picking a tool — each of the workshop leaders probably has different reasons because each brings a different perspective. And each offering is an experiment — an instance of practice that hopefully gets better and better.

One reason that the tools we use for this workshop seems problematic and keeps changing is that there is an inherent tension in the workshop because of our practice orientation:

• The tools we choose have to work for workshop participants, to help us work and learn together creatively for 5 weeks;
• but they also are for illustration and experimentation — they are supposed to illustrate what you can do at home and how you might think about the choices you  continually make on behalf of your community;
• and finally we are constantly picking up new tools or using them in new ways (e.g., copying interesting uses from the communities we are involved in)!

Nevertheless, here are some top-of-mind criteria for the tools we are using in this workshop:

• Collectively they serve different purposes and they are varied enough for us to do those various tasks together.  We try to demonstrate the various things that communities frequently do together using the different tools that are available.
• They are common tools, not too exotic.  We have a bias toward open source or readily available tools.
• They work together more or less, although they were not “designed together.”  Dealing with the reality of separately designed tools is something community leaders and technology stewards have to deal with every day.  We illustrate diverse possibilities but also have critical conversations about the challenges that these tools raise for communities and their leaders.
• We’re not using too many tools: as practitioners we want to share everything, but previous workshops suggest that enough experience with each tool and with the issues that come up when they are combined is more useful than a shallow survey of everything that’s out there.

And  here are the tools we’re using this time through:

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!