CPsquare

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!

We’re pleased to announce that CPsquare members are offering “Connected futures: New social strategies and tools for communities of practice” — a five week workshop for community managers, designers and conveners to explore social strategies and  tools to support them (referred to by some as Web2.0) for the second time.  It starts November 10, 2008.  We anticipate offering it twice a year. This workshop is a hands-on, practice-shifting, dive into using new technologies to meet community needs. At the end of this workshop, participants can expect to:

• Become more confident in managing and combining tools to support a community’s orientation and ongoing activities
• Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools enable one another, are adopted and supported in communities
• Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, leaders and community conveners.

New technology stewards are especially encouraged to join us. The workshop includes virtual field trips to successful communities and deep dives into the use of new tools. We will explore many freely available technologies, including web conferencing, teleconferences, blogging, RSS syndication, microblogging, social bookmarking and tagging, wikis, mashups, and social networking.  Each aspect has the support of experts and leaders in areas such as organizational, educational, government and enterprise communities. Participants will work through a process of thinking through new social strategies and technologies to support the ongoing life of their respective communities of practice. Participants will also receive an advance electronic copy (PDF) of parts of the forthcoming book “Digital habitats: stewarding technology for Communities” (Wenger, White, and Smith 2008).

More information about the workshop is here:

http://cpsquare.org/edu/cp2tech/

Registration page is here:

http://admin.cpsquare.org/Default.aspx?pageId=72847

It’s true that we’re forcing it into the calendar, offering it without a lot of advance notice, but we’re trying to build on the experience of the first offering in the Spring of 2008.   We’ve decided that we can’t really claim to offer a “practice-altering” workshop unless the presenters collectively practice offering it — at least twice  year.

One thing we’re exploring this time is how different Web 2.0 tools build on each other.  That matters in a workshop setting, but it also shows up in the trajectories of individuals and communities.  Another is how to use a new “Action Notebook” chapter in “Digital Futures” in a workshop context.

One of the persistent questions we get from people who are thinking of doing the Foundations Workshop is about “how much time it takes to participate?” I think there are two approaches to the question, so I’m proposing a straight answer and a deeper answer.

The straight answer is that, generally, the more time people spend on it, the more satisfied they seem to be with the whole experience. Since participation and involvement is completely voluntary, the actual amount of time seems to vary a lot — from a couple hours a week up to 10-15 hours per week. (Occasionally there’s someone who just moves into the site and decides its their new home, so they’ve even spent more time than that…

We do try to model a number of stratagems to accommodate the participation of busy people in a community — like making audio recordings of the several synchronous events (available along with chat transcripts that give a sense of what was discussed). For some people, what takes a lot of time is becoming familiar with the technology (mainly a web conferencing platform) so the total amount of time depends on people’s background and familiarity with the technology.

The deeper answer has to do with the nature of communities of practice themselves. To the extent that the workshop really is similar to a community of practice, the time it takes is difficult measure. When the workshop is running, I find that conversations from it are running in my head almost all the time. Would that count? We try to encourage participants to bring their existing community projects to the workshop so that it becomes more ambiguous whether time is “for their project” or “for the workshop.” To the extent that participants accomplish real work in the workshop, the time is “free,” right?

Another aspect of the deeper answer is that people’s practice of participation changes over the course of seven weeks, so that we all become much more skillful at squeezing in 2 minutes here and 5 there to check-in and add a comment or kibitz or keep a conversation going. Those activities and competence at that practice are important and change the way we spend our time in many areas, although they certainly make time-keeping messy.

Of course, we have to admit that everyone involved in the workshop is pretty enthusiastic about the subject and about the way we are exploring it together, so we may be guilty of modeling a general behavior of spending too much time and we are disciplined in other areas, but not in tracking time the time it takes to participate. You will have to be the judge of that, I guess.

After last January’s Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop, Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness conducted in-depth interviews with almost half of the participants to try to understand what was going on in the workshop — with a view to describing what lessons could be applied elsewhere. They’ve presented their work at a conference and will soon be submitting it to a journal.

The Foundations Workshop is truly an ensemble, community production, so continuing in that spirit, if’ you’ve participated in the Foundations Workshop previously (or are a member of CPsquare), you’re invited to read and discuss their work during the coming week. And, after reading their working paper, please join us to talk with them in a teleconference next Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 20:00 GMT on the CPsquare phone bridge.

You may already have access to the discussion space (which contains the paper and a PowerPoint presentation that we’ll use on Thursday). If not, get in touch (mentioning which workshop you attended). It would be great to be able to reflect on their good work and help them take it further. The stated goals of their research are:

• to appreciate the learner perceptions and experience of the learning environment in terms of the domain, the community and practice; how did learners make use of the learning space offered by the workshop and co-create their learning through interactions with each other?
• to understand the interrelationship between communities of practice, advancing technologies, social and emotional dimensions and learning in this community