TechStew

An issue that comes up fairly regularly among emerging online communities of practice is negotiating what it means to participate.

Ross Mayfield’s posting, Power Law of Participation from 2006 is a great resource. His accompanying graph, taken from flickr, speaks volumes.

Thanks to abalone and coyenator, whose twitter exchange pointed me in this direction by citing Ross Mayfield’s recent slideshare presentation posted on Socialtext.

“Imagine all the people sharing all the world” – John Lennon

Two days and three field trips later, I once again find myself wondering about the power of imagination in community formation.

CPSquare’s Connected Futures workshop participants spent time over the last two days learning about three online communities: Beth Kanter lead us through the NpTech story, Bev Traynor provided us with an in-depth look at CIARIS, and Vance Stevens herded us through Webheads in Action.

Each community has its own idiosyncratic origins. Each community defines itself in different ways. They all rely on experimentation and community leadership as they continue to develop and evolve.

NpTech is often described as a “loosely coupled community.” Members primarily participate through their contributions of tagging resources. The “there” of the community lies in these resources and in the facilitation by NpTech leadership. CIARIS appears to be a more ‘traditional” platform-centric online community; the website houses the workspace where individuals and groups engage in learning around a particular domain, social inclusion, and its different permutations Webheads in Action, consonant with its grass roots, hippy sensibility, sprawls across cyberspace like picnickers on an infinite lawn.

One question that consistently arose was “how does one become a member of this community?” The intent of the question was not an issue of signing onto a site or discussion list. Rather, when does one recognize that he or she is part of the community? To what extent does the community need to recognize the individual member? Are there reciprocal transactions of identity that must occur?

In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines nations as imagined political communities. They are imagined “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (p. 6).” Imagination, it appears, is key to identity and to affiliation in communities.

Membership in any community seems to me to be a leap of faith and an act of imagination.

The first Connected Futures: New Social Strategies and Tools for Communities of Practice workshop sponsored by CPsquare, the begins this week.

The goals of this five week workshop are to help participants:

• Become more confident scanning the marketplace for tools to support a community’s ongoing activities
• Develop a deeper understanding of how new tools are chosen, adopted and supported in communities
• Have productive and lasting social connections with other participants, leaders and community conveners.

Participants will have the opportunity to develop plans for integrating new social strategies and technologies into their communities of practice. Best of all, they will work with colleagues who share similar interests and who bring with them a variety of experiences and expertise.

The workshop will be facilitated by some of the most creative minds and practitioners in this arena, including: Beth Kanter, Beverly Trayner, Bronwyn Stuckey, Etienne Wenger, John Smith, Nancy White, Nick Noakes, Shawn Callahan, Shirley Williams, and Susanne Nyrop. The workshop should prove to be an enormously Grand Adventure and learning event! Come join the fun – and look here for more thoughts about it as it unfolds.

There are several public venues that will highlight the workshop’s content as it progresses:

Connected Futures April – May 2008 blog
Connected Futures CP2tech01 Twitter feed
Tools for Communities wiki

Also, be sure to look for postings that are tagged cp2tech01 (Spring 2008 workshop) and cp2tech (general)

And don’t forget to keep an eye out for the soon to be published, much anticpated book, Technology Stewardship for Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith. Stay tuned to Technology for Communities for more information!

Long live the platform! That’s the theme of a three week online event sponsored by CPsquare, the community of practice for communities of practice.

John Smith of LearningAlliances and CPsquare frames the issue:

I’ve thought for a long time that how you look at and assess the fit between a community and its platform matters a lot. Writing the book with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White and several other activities in CPsquare have convinced me that an “outsider’s vew” (whatever that means) can be so mis-leading.
(LearningAlliances Post, Long Live the Platform)

Conference participants will explore platforms old and new through the perspective of community.

The event runs online from January 14-February 1, 2008. Platforms, case studies, synchronous and asynchronous events will focus on Q2learning, Tomoye, Web Crossing, drupal, Ruby on Rails, Ning, Moodle, and Facebook, and how they are used in support of communities of practice. See CPsquare for details and registration.

In addition to the platform event, CPsquare is accepting registration for their Foundations of CoPs workshop which starts on January 28. And look for information about their new workshop on CoPs and Web 2.0 tools - coming soon in conjunction with the eagerly anticipated publication of the aforementioned book on CoPs and technology by Etienne Wenger, John Smith and Nancy White.

Be there - and be (CP)square!

Of course you do.

Lots and lots of live cultures are living in your communities of practice.

How cool is that? …and how challenging…?

Take something as simple and as complex as a conference call.

For many communities of practice, conference calls are a primary means of community communication – the place where members meet to check in, build relationships, problem solve, share information, and otherwise conduct the work of their community.

A preliminary surf of the web shows basic “how-tos” for managing conference calls. Most of these guides tend to focus on common facilitation techniques that are intended to provide structures and norms for productive outcomes. They rarely address the cultural assumptions underlying specific communities of practice, or the assumptions behind what it means to be “productive.”

The issue of culture struck me while on a conference call about conference calls. During the call, members of a distributed community of practice shared their practices of how they ran calls with their own CoPs. Some conducted their conference calls with the controlled finesse of a concert conductor. Others were more improvisational. And of course there were those who worked somewhere in between or who preferred to flow from one style to another.

Below are some examples of cultural norms that surfaced in the call:

• Speaking in turn, in an orderly fashion
• Speaking out of turn – interruptions are regarded as part of the conversation rather than as digressions
• Building in periods of reflective silence (and being able to tolerate this silence and understand it as productive within the context of the culture)
• Backchanneling during the call usually via email or IMing – some consider it rude that participants are multitasking; for others, it is an important way of actively engaging with colleagues to connect, share information, exchange comments, etc.
• Revolving membership in the community – people are constantly joining or leaving the community; the community is constantly changing
• Consistent membership in the community – people maintain their membership over time and might know each other from other venues

Community members shared some of their facilitation techniques for conference calls:

• Prime participants in advance of a call by sending out a provocative question to get them thinking about the topic
• Provide an outline of the call in advance, with stopping points
• Ask a key question at the beginning of the call that serves to measure issues common to the group, learn more about individual members’ work, break the ice by having each member participate, and launch the conversation
• Create a safe environment through the use of taxonomies questions – moving the group from factual, safe questions to more creative, analytic ones
• Have participants ask questions about the content of the call as part of the introduction process and as a way to uncover issues that are important to members
• Limit the length of presentations to 15 minutes or breaking them up with more interactive segments
• Use facilitation techniques adapted from face to face meetings, like fishbowl activities to model problem-solving and other process-oriented situations.

Whatever the culture of your community, customs and norms will emerge and change as it coalesces and matures. At the heart of these cultural issues is the ability to recognize them, appreciate them, and negotiate them.

Care to Share?

What are some of your favorite facilitation techniques for your community of practice? How do they reflect your community’s cultural norms and goals?

Learn More:

Conference call practices to generate knowledge and record learning by John D. Smith and Shawn Callahan with comments from Madelyn Blair

Facilitating to Lead! Leadership Strategies for a Networked World by Ingrid Bens, published by Jossey-Bass, 2006. See especially pp. 86-90.

Good practice for phone-based CoP teleconferences by Kate Pugh

Telephone Conference Call Tips by Nancy White