CPsquare » waatwaat

Reporting and recruiting

John David Smith — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:50:19 +0000

What are the intentional or accidental collaborative possibilities of a public-facing wiki for CPsquare?

One of my motives behind setting up a wiki for CPsquare that’s outside Web Crossing is that I think it’s high time for us to share more of what we learn. (There’s a lot of learning to be done in the process of sharing and it’s a way for CPsquare as a community to serve a larger learning agenda.) Wikis seem to be a natural tool for that purpose because they lend themselves to sharing the workload.

An example of sharing what we learned that was itself a real learning process was how Sue Wolff led an innovative effort to report on the “Long Life the Platform” Conference about a year ago. During the conference we tried to gather comments in a Web Crossing wiki, but did not get many contributions. Then Sue set up a SurveyMonkey questionnaire to get additional comments (by allowing people to append a comment to a page). She then summarized and compressed the whole thing here:

http://cpsquare.org/2008/04/report-on-the-long-live-the-platform-conference/

I was impressed at the recent Recent Changes Camp how ingrained the whole idea of “reporting out via the conference wiki” can be for a wiki-oriented community:

http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Session_Notes

As an experiment I’ve put together a different kind of report (aiming for the easiest possible but still useful report that we might publish as a minimum) on our public Wiki:

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/WAATWAAT_Conference

(It demonstrates the use of a screen-capture and of an RSS feed Widget, by the way.)

Also, I’m proposing that we put ALL CPsquare help files out in public — often they’re most needed when you can’t get “inside” or are lost…

http://cpsquare.org/wiki/Category:Members_Help (This obviously has a long way to go, but, as Ward Cunningham said recently, “For a community, ‘incomplete’ is good news!”)

I’ve added a widget extension, so that we can include slides, videos, and RSS feeds in CPquare’s wiki. Just to demonstrate the use of the video widget, I’ve inserted some of those CommonCraft videos in these articles:

We want you to request an account on the wiki. It’s set up to require people to identify themselves in advance so that we won’t have a SPAM-removal burden later on.

Won’t you join us in the continuing discussion within CPsquare? The ongoing conversation about who we are and what we’re doing as a community is important. Alternatively, or in addition, jump in and contribute to our Wiki right now!

Practicing wiki preachy

John David Smith — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:13:01 +0000

During our WAATWAAT conference we have looked at a dozen different communities or organizations and had almost as many synchronous meetings. We’ll be sharing more of what we learned as time permits. Meanwhile, since the core discipline of CPsquare is to practice what we preach, we’ve launched a new wiki, where, among other things, we share the materials that were gathered together to launch our conversations.

We expect to consolidate CPsquare resources from far and wide on this wiki. CPsquare members, current and past, as well as friends of CPsquare and others who are involved in the subject of communities of practice are invited to request an account. (Edit privileges will be limited in advance to assure a quality resource, but accounts will be freely given to those who want to contribute.)

WAATWAAT conference cases

John David Smith — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:04:53 +0000

A Conference like CPsquare’s Wikis all around the world and all the way is a way for our community to “work a problem together”, although we invite guests to join us in the process. Part of the process is deciding how to get organized, what questions to ask, what level of analysis is appropriate, what assumptions are “givens” and what assumptions need to be reconsidered. Then there’s the question of “what is a case?” Although not all of the cases being presented will use the this framework, we’ve developed the following framework over the past few weeks to get at the question of “What role do wikis play in the repertoire of a community of practice?”

Depending on the size and complexity of a case being presented, here are some points that we agree are useful in discussions and presentations:

Context or circumstances (how much history or context is useful in presenting this case?)
- Presenting community or organizational or social context: a metaphor or story that gives a glimpse
- Role of “the wiki”
- Other technologies and connections in in use
- People who are involved, interested, leading, evangelizing
- Community assets and constraints
- The topic: what it means to them and how it’s used by writers, editors and readers
Mechanisms and processes (at what level of detail or scope to describe?)
- Presenting technical details, screen-shots, process descriptions, anecdotes
- Sparking interest / curiosity
- Social and technical guidelines for resolving disagreements and legitimacy
- Software features and mechanisms that support interaction
- Time frame and pace of development
- Specialization and breadth of content
- How informality and speed are balanced with quality goals
Direction of development or outcomes (to whom should this make sense and at what level?)
- Presenting positive outcomes, metrics and measures of success (community, practice, domain?)
- Uses and benefits of the wiki pages and the wiki as a whole
- Challenges and possible solutions (brainstorming with group also encouraged)
- Secondary effects

Wikis all around the world and all the way

John David Smith — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:01:25 +0000

How does YOUR community use its wiki? Does it have one? Could it use a wiki more effectively? What would be the implications of adding a wiki or stimulating its use in various ways?

CPsquare’s January conference is about wikis and these very questions. You are invited to join us to discuss these questions and more.

“Wiki all around the world and all the way” will be a short, intensive internet-based conference that’s a follow-on to CPsquare’s Long Live the Platform conference in January of 2008. We will look at wikis from the perspective of communities of practice and as tools for communities. How do wikis work as the principal platform for a community? as an add-on or auxiliary tool? What is the logic of a wiki as a tool for community use? Where did wikis come from and how are they evolving? What other tools work with wikis? What are some of the commercial and open source offerings? What kind of integration issues do communities experience when other tools are added on to a wiki or when a wiki is added on to another tool? Are there some communities that take more naturally to using wikis than others? Are there strategies for hastening wiki adoption in a wiki?

Here’s a tentative schedule (confirmed names are in bold). All teleconferences would be at 20:00 GMT. Each session needs a host and others to summarize and pull it off.

Jan 7 – conference opening: wiki videos and resources, open wiki sandbox, basic wiki resources – Peter+Trudy Johnson-Lenz
Jan 9 – Wiki as basic community software or add-on? KM4Dev (Nancy White) and Kehilliyot (Naava Frank / Caren Levine)
Jan 12 – The of core of the wiki way and its evolution – Ward Cunningham
Jan 14 – Wiki case study: non-profit and government examples
Jan 16 – Wiki as platform element: Moodle and Ecco (Sylvia Currie on SCOPE / Moodle & Eric Sauve on Tomoye’s Ecco’s wiki, and how the SharePoint wiki is integrated into it)
Other sessions to be scheduled
Ongoing a-synchronous discussions

Conference Tag: waatwaat – http://delicious.com/tag/waatwaat

Join CPsquare now or register for the conference separately.