CPsquare

CPsquare, SCOPE and Online Community Enthusiasts are sponsoring a share fair on Thursday May 12 from 20:00 to 22:00 GMT about planning and running excellent online events for communities. (An event about designing events!  How recursive!) It’s a great opportunity to share some of what we’ve learned about what works in our communities. Would you like to share?

• 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”

Some field trips take longer to pull together than others.  The CPsquare / SCOPE visit to and with KM4Dev has taken longer than most and feels like a much bigger deal than most.  For one thing there has been a great deal of overlap between the two communities.  KM4Dev is notable for being very productive and quite informal community in a global sector that is both complex and with its share of command-and-control style organizations. Also, it seems like this is an inflection point in the life of KM4Dev.  It has grown from about 500 members at the beginning of 2008 to over 1500 today.

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.

This is an open invitation to two upcoming events related to planning events.

1) SCoPE seminar (online)

Online Conferences: Professional Development for a Networked Era, a 2-week online seminar at SCoPE, begins on Monday, April 11, 2011. During this event we will share experiences and advice on how to plan or participate effectively in an online professional development conference. Our facilitators, Lynn Anderson and Terry Anderson, have written a book based on their research and experiences. It will be of interest to anyone who has participated in an online conference of any kind, which is just about everybody! As with all SCoPE activities, you are welcome to participate according to your own time and interests, and there is no registration required. Just show up! Please join the dialogue; together we can improve the online conference experience.

We will kick off the seminar with a Web Conference in Elluminate – Monday, April 11, 10:00 PDT, 17:00 GMT

2) Gathering of Online Community Enthusiasts

The second event is the 3rd annual Gathering of Online Community Enthusiasts, (OCE2011) May 12, 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The theme this year is planning excellent community events and will be a full day of talking about and experiencing various event formats, strategies, and technologies. There will be an opportunity to participate from a distance as well, so watch the OCE2011 space in SCoPE. If you plan to attend, RSVP here.

These days we are all pulled in many directions, including conversations and communities that pique our curiosity or compel our participation for one reason or another.  The conversations about communities of practice are a case in point.  Nobody can follow them all, or read everything that’s written about communities of practice.  Google says there are 29 million pages when you search for the term.

You have to resort to some shortcuts to follow the conversation about communities of practice or just try to catch up.  I have been impressed with recent conversations about communities of practice in LinkedIn, for example.  It’s not a place where I would expect to find the topic pop up.  In one recent conversation, however, a bunch of references to good articles were cited and Nicky Hayward-Wright ended up not only gathering them together but organizing them into a wonderful update to the Healthcare page on CPsquare’s Wiki bibliography. When you think of it each one of the bibliographies in CPsquare’s Wiki points to a conversation as well.  Which brings up the question of the different flavors or meanings of the term.

Thanks to Bev Trayner, I just bumped into a comprehensive bibliography in the business and organizational studies literature that is a full length study of the concept by Enrique Murrillo.  Murillo talks about how the concept’s “interpretive viability” makes it flexible but also has associated risks. Murrillo suggests that the recent decline in practitioner-oriented journals is “a symptom of the CoP concept becoming mainstream, an accepted addition to the Management vernacular.”

Essentially, how you use the term is kind of situated — say on whether you’re in healthcare or in business or education — or in the theory-construction business.  (In his keynote talk at the Networked Learning Conference in Aalborg last May, Etienne Wenger suggested that whether you use the term or not depends on what you want to do.)  I have to say that conversations in  LinkedIn, CPsquare and com-prac among others, which lean on, borrow from, and occasionally heckle the academic literatures, are alive and well. Keeping a conversation going is an art with enduring interest.  Even when you think you’ve figured it out, it seems there are surprises and more to learn.  (For example, I thought that Digital Habitats would lead to more of a conversation about technology stewardship than it has so far.  I wonder why?)

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?

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

Are you a doctoral student doing research related to Communities of Practice?

We are a group of doctoral students and about-to-be doctoral students attending various universities around the globe. We are members of a virtual CoP who share resources via Diigo, discuss our own research on CoPs and strategize about the challenges of doctoral students in several forums such as:

• What’s Under the Bell Jar?,
• Issues of Doctoral Student Life,
• Proposals, and
• PhD Musings.

We also have a PhD support group that meets via phone conference once a month. We are also planning some special events for the fall semester. If you are a potential doctoral student, you are welcome also. We are developing a wiki with information about universities you might want to consider if you are interested in doing research related to Communities of Practice.

If you would like to join our Community of Practice, we are just organizing and would love to have your participation. Membership is open to all members of CPSquare. If you are already a member, you will find our forums under “Projects” on the CPSquare website. If you are not a member, we invite you to join CPSquare, which has many other activities and benefits as well. Click here: CPSquare Membership.

If you have questions, please email us at cp2phd (at) cpsquare (dot) org.

NOTE: We also don’t mind hearing from those of you who have jumped this hurdle  — experience is a great teacher and we value the knowledge of those who have obtained their PhDs already.

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.

We are about to launch the SEEDING 2.0 conference. We have rich and varied cases to look at together:

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

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