Learning Alliances

It was really hot on August 13, the last day of my vacation visiting my brothers in Puerto Rico. But, in more ways than one, it was really cool inside the library at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras, where all of my friends from high school went to college.

I was hosted by José Sanchez-Lugo, a UPR professor I met in the Connected Futures workshop last May. He and his colleagues are doing fascinating work. They are way beyond the “ills of bestness” that Patrick Lambe describes. When I think of fights I’ve had with program evaluators who are trying to make a community of practice initiative fit into a neat pigeonhole, it’s inspiring to see someone launching a bunch of active communities with the original funding from an evaluation effort. Not only have they developed their reflective practice in areas such as collection development or research support, they’ve cooked up new directions for innovation, such as virtual reference or uses of Second Life.

Here’s Liz Pagán’s report (titled, roughly, “yet another distinguished Puerto Rican” :-).  There is a lot of activity in the various blogs and wikis of the communities launched by this project.  (One great thing about this visit, apart from a couple hours with José himself) was that it gave me the chance to practice my “communities of practice” vocabulary in Spanish a week before a project in El Salvador.  Talk about just in time practice!)

CPsquare is having a book club event, where everyone is invited to read a book about communities of practice together. Sounds simple enough, right? Fortunately or unfortunately Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators is a book where, if you’re interested in communities of practice, you might want to read all the book chapters. Not to be thwarted the book club organizers, Bronwyn Stuckey and Jeffrey Keefer organize a process to figure out who in the community wants to be involved, what general themes are most important to them, and within that, which specific chapters we’re going to read together. Ah, now we can sit down with a deep dive into an excellent chapter about how academics in South Africa adopt new technologies and think about teaching, right? No.

It turns out it’s even more complicated. A synchronous read is a wonderful idea but to actually make it happen takes a huge amount of effort. Fortunately, in this case, all the organizers are doing an amazing amount of work. And that includes the book editors, too — evidence that Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth and Isabelle Bourdon love their (and our) topic.

Both the public discussion and the back-channel is filled with all kinds of little efforts, arrangements and negotiations to make sure that everyone has the books in hand on time. How can you deal with the Danish taxman? How’s mail delivery in Kenya? Who can help? Could the publisher do anything? Does the publisher have any responsibility or interest in the matter? Could we somehow find a work-around? What are the constraints?

Well it’s not all worked out yet, but it makes me stop and think: where does the real community work start and end? Isn’t all the angst around getting the stupid book in people’s hands a really important part of a community’s learning? And don’t all those email threads that are now getting longer and longer say something really important about CPsquare’s values? I think so.

It says something about how people care about each other’s individual learning and our collective inquiry. And I don’t think that’s at all trivial.

Several months ago, Diana Larsen presented her work on Agile Retrospectives at ODN. I bought the book on the spot. And later I watched this video where Diana and her co-author talk at the Googleplex:

In this day and age, when so many forums on a favored topic are sold as communities of practice, it’s cool to see people doing the work of convening and cultivating communities without using the name but all the learning vigor imaginable. These agile retrospectives seem to use very little technology in their interactions (apart from flip-charts and yellow stickies), even though the expected members are very technology-literate.

I’m posting this here because CPsquare’s blogs are broken (soon to be moved & updated).

CPsquare book club: We’ll be reading selected chapters from Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators, edited by Chris Kimble, Paul Hildreth, and Isabelle Bourdon. See the table of contents for both volumes. Several of the authors are members or have been involved in CPsquare over the years. All of the authors will be invited to participate in the discussions. Some synchronous events (teleconferences) will be held, but most of the discussion will be asynchronous. If you want to participate in these discussions you should buy the book immediately. Selection of which chapters to read together will begin late July. Actual chapter discussions begin a week later. It’s free to CPsquare members and $50 for non-members. Registration is at: http://www.cpsquare.org/events/index.htm (shouldn’t you really just join?)

We’re beginning a year-long series of monthly visits about multi-membership and bridging across communities with Davee Evans who straddles two communities of practice: the Wikipedia editors community and the Shambhala meditation community. Our first session with Davee will be on Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 20:00

Karen Guldberg and Jenny Mackness have done a raft of interviews with participants and leaders of the Winter 2008 Foundations Workshop and have written a paper about it, getting at issues such as emotion, connectivity, understanding norms, learning tensions/dualities, technology, and identity. We’re scheduling a session in September where previous participants and CPsquare members will be invited to talk about these findings and their implications and application.

The next Foundations Workshop starts on September 15: http://cpsquare.org/edu/foundations

Our first offering of CPsquare’s “Connected Futures” workshop, about new technologies for communities was very exhilarating, although exhausting for both participants and leaders. We used Twitter, Skype, blogs, wikis, Facebook, social bookmarking, and Web Crossing. It was challenging to keep track of each other but we managed to. We all got a lot out of the experience and we’re intending to offer it again in later this year, after the Foundations Workshop. http://www.cpsquare.org/edu/CP2tech/

Woke up thinking about all that could be done — and that had to be done today.

Before walking the dog, at 6:15 am, I went through the previous night’s email on Outlook, looked at my schedule and made some plans:

• A workshop payment mix-up (money going to a personal Paypal account rather than the CPsquare account) has been fixed. Still 2 transactions to resolve.
• Got the draft of a contract with a government agency. Need to print and send back.
• Ward agreed to write a blurb for the book! Yay! Sent him the 4 MB file right away.
• Got the glossary edits from Peter + Trudy — they look great! Need to respond to their extensive annotations.
• Got plenty of SPAM.
• Jotted a short-to-do list on my composition notebook: send “thank-yous” to the several people who helped during the talk I gave last night at ODN, post the slides on slideshare.

After walking the dog, got to my office around 7:45 am.

• The alert that daughter Liza had logged on to Yahoo IM shows up. I didn’t ping her because I was so busy. When she was with Peace Brigades International in Colombia I always tried to wave, but now that she’s back in the US I don’t bother her as much.
• Had a Skype call with Patricia and Beverly who are spending the day together in Hamburg! At the last minute, we use a Skype chat to move our meeting time forward an hour. Because they were in the same room, we met with Skype Video and took a few snapshots for fun. We talked shop, about books we’re reading, strategies for marketing and survival. We eventually get focused on writing and the deadline. We decide that in alignment with the autoethnographic approach in our paper, the literature review should also be “personal,” focusing on our experience of the literature rather than arguing that we’ve read everything that’s relevant. We decided that June 12 was the “snapshot day” for our autoethnographic vignettes. (Hence, this post, a departure from my habit of reticence.) After the call I find that we had two chat windows going (one with Patricia alone which had most of our notes and another with both Patricia and Beverly, which had some notes from early on) so I pasted them together, interleaving lines using the time stamps. I got the chat transcript in the mail by mid-afternoon.
• Got a phone call from Doug. Thanked him for taking care of the dog while I gave the talk at ODN last night. We talked about sending an email messages to the Portland Shambhala sangha about the building purchase. He needed a phone number, so I mailed him an out-of-date phone list for the community.
• Had a scheduled half hour phone meeting with Rebecka. Send text. Worked on the 2nd draft in Writeboard of a 3-day session for next fall.
• Got an email anticipating Trudy’s surgery.
• Scanned the emails about an effort by the Yi-Tan Guild to document our own teleconference set-up, facilitation, and follow-up procedures. We’ve been using Iotum’s Calliflower tool on Facebook, but it still needs a wiki page to remind ourselves how to do things.
• Exchanged several emails with Naava’s assistant to schedule a meeting with Naava the next day.
• Exchanged IMs with Lauren re: lost password on CPsquare that I’d forgotten to send her, method for avoiding a lost password, scheduling a conference call with 3 community leaders from her company about scope and leadership strategies.
• IMs with wife Nancy who was bragging about her new 22″ monintor. Compared lunch plans, discussed the after-work schedule, grocery pick-up items, and a little blister on her foot. Finished just in time for my noon meeting.
• Had an hour-long teleconference with Debra and four others on her staff (who were together on a speakerphone) about the evaluation report we had just written on the experience of community members in a face-to-face meeting they’d organized. They asked for an overview of the report, although I’d sent it to them a week before. I talked at length — ended up giving a mini-lecture! Recorded it for Louis (partner for this project in DC), but forgot to turn the recording off, so will have to edit!
• At lunch I continue reading Grant McCracken’s “Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture” on the kitchen counter over some warmed-up leftovers. The book has a lot to do with culture and identity construction. I wonder, am I in the business of helping people create new homes for new identities? Today’s snippet gave me some insight into sports and American males that I’d never quite understood (having grown up in Puerto Rico) on p 283:
  

  “As overmighty subjects, they have their own performative powers. A preteen on a basketball court takes possession of the voice-over that belongs to the sports announcer and the color commentator. He uses this to take possession of the pretext, the script, the accomplishment, and the admiration that belong to a celebrity athlete. This is what, in basketball, they call a steal. The preteen has intercepted powers that belong to the meaning makers. It is endemic hubris, a matter-of-fact appropriation of superordinate powers by a subordinate party. The twelve-year-old makes Larry Bird a god and himself Larry Bird. Such subjects are overmighty and increasingly common.”

• Retrieved and formatted the chat transcript for yesterday’s Winter 2008 workshop group “reunion” meeting from Web Crossing. Retrieved the audio recording from the phone bridge, saved it, and put a link to it together with the chat room notes in an email to the whole group.
• The postman dropped off a copy of Groundswell, a book that Shirley read and recommended and that has an amazing publicity machine behind it.
• Finally made some progress with my idea of using screen captures to create a diagram about platform integration and compatibility for our book on Technology Stewardship for Communities. Put five different screen-shots into one diagram with enough room for a lot of annotations and sent it to Etienne. This has been the most troubling diagram in the book.
• Ended the day editing a summary of Marc’s book. His ideas are great and now are starting to emerge from a murky translation.

Sources:

• Outlook - various folders [Inbox, sent messages, project folder]
• Skype history
• Paper notebook (log)
• Trillian history function
• RescueTime

Notice that RescueTime misses the hour-long conversation with Debra et al.

I changed ISP’s and thus web and email servers and it’s been quite an adventure in technology stewardship (supporting myself in this case)! Here are a few of the steps along the way:

• I decided to reduce costs and increase my site’s flexibility, foregoing the wonderful, bullet-proof services at Easystreet a few months ago. As I mulled the conversion process, I realized that I could use myself and my transition as a dress rehearsal for a similar, but more complex, move I have planned for CPsquare (although CPsquare’s move is not really optional, like mine was).
• There are so many themes out there, with with so many subtle differences. Wow. After a lot of browsing, I chose the Connections theme by Patricia Müller, installed it and started making modifications. Previously I’d found recommendations for Firebug — a tool that helps you with the editing process. I decided to use Firebug.
• I downloaded and installed the Firebug add-on, noting that there were different versions for Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. Thinking that Firefox 3 had just been released the previous day, I decided to be conservative and stick with Firefox 2. When I fired up Firebug, I found that I was missing “DOM Inspector.” So I downloaded Firefox 3 and then un-installed Firefox completely and then got Firebug working and then, finally, set about working on my site.
  
• I decided to change the header picture on my website. I broke down and got a new copy of Snagit, version 9. Wow, that made pasting the photos together so easy!
• I used Wordpress’ nifty XML export and import feature to move all the pages over from the old site. A small problem: the site was too big to import. I looked at the import file with a text editor and found that there were tens of thousands of “post meta tag” records, all of them identical, all of them looking bogus. In retrospect this was a bit foolhardy, but I went onto the old site and deleted all of the post meta tags, operating directly on the SQL database. After that, the export and import files were a lot smaller and presto! all of the content from one site appeared on the other, including pictures! (I think I did loose the categories on postings in the new site, so I’ll have to go back in and classify everything by hand, which is probably not a bad thing to do, but is very likely to not get done, what with all the other projects I have going.)
• I figured out URLs that would remain functional before and after the domain name switch (or at least I thought I figured them out). I got to where I was ready to flip the switch (even though there are many pages that remained to be replicated on the new site). This involved telling Wordpress that the new site’s name was something ugly like http://pdxwebsitehosting/~accountname.
• With that subterfuge in place, I added content and fixed parameters on the new Wordpress-powered website. I even made the theme “Widget-aware” thinking that when it came to CPsquare’s move, one of my goals is to make it easy for other people to maintain and modify the website. That yielded little insights such as “PHP scoops up a file named ‘functions.php’ in a directory if it finds a reference to a function that has not been defined, and executes it without a whimper.” Of course, everything you learn on an expedition like this is tentative, subject to future disproof.
• When I was more or less ready, I found my password for the domain name registry and flipped the switch. Nothing seemed to happen. Except that I could no longer use the ugly name to fix the messy loose ends on the new site, since “learningalliances.net” still pointed back to the old web server on Easystreet. The hours passed. As my nerves jangled, I looked around and discovered that my new email server was already receiving email, although I could only send email via the old email server. It occurred to me to go down the street to a coffee shop and, using their wi-fi, I discovered that the switch had occurred, although Easystreet seemed to over-ride it with a local domain-name table. (This was confirmed by one of the very helpful help-desk folks at Easystreet, who also said he could not over-ride it, so I’d have to wait for the change till the expert arrived on Monday morning.) So I spent the weekend receiving email on the new site with a browser-based email client and sending email out via the old site using Outlook.
• By Monday morning at around 10 am, the new site was working, email was working, and I think I can even post to the new version of Wordpress!

What did I learn?

• Everything is connected to everything, and you change the pieces to understand how each one works with the others.
• This kind of change involves a lot of just-in-time learning and is nerve-racking.
• The tools for doing this kind of job are really impressive.
• It’s time to get my head out of the computer and start working on a long list of things that have gotten deferred in the meantime.

During the Council meeting at the Portland Shambhala Center last week, Paul Refalo, the Center’s director observed that he can always give two alternative responses to the question of “How’s the Shambhala Center?” He can say that things are falling apart and that they are just coming together. And he said he could give substantial detail for either assessment. Joan Sears, the Treasurer, said the same paradox applied to the Center’s finances. The same week that she’d worry because of two requests to stop automatic dues payments would somehow be balanced by surprisingly generous new members who sign up. Over the years I’ve found that a Shambhala Center is a great example for thinking about the balance between an organization that provides education and services to its members and a community of practice with all the emergence that makes communities lively.

There’s nothing new, in a way, about our proposal for improving the tools for providing legs and pockets that communities of practice could use. What Josien Kapma and I are talking about is making it easier for communities to become just slightly more like organizations, along the lines of Clay Shirky’s airline passengers rights example in Here Comes Everybody. Our point is that somehow technology has helped the informal and conversational side without supporting the formal and financial side as much (or at least keeping them quite separate). Getting the learning and the informal side to coexist with the other side — so that neither one is subordinate or compromised — is quite the trick. It involves technology stewardship as well as leadership.

Joitske’s comments about transparency remind me that transparency is conventional, collectively understood and never completely absolute (whether in a community of practice or in other settings). That leads me to the question of, “What community-like characteristics are essential when adding organization-like characteristics?” I think here are some important ones:

• Negotiation of meaning. Communities grow around some fundamental openness to their practice and what it means. That makes them and their finances kind of messy. But it also implies a capacity for resolving or repairing disagreements. Groups that are all talk and no practice may not really need pockets because they don’t need legs.
• A history of learning together, so there is some authentic social capital. Sharing real capital (in modest amounts, according to the community’s maturity) ought to be completely natural. A learning path suggests that legs are needed.
• Communities have developed practices of being together in ways that create value that’s not fundamentally monetary but occasionally depends on having the cash to support being together. Having someone else, like Google, monetize being together, may or may not be OK. Better to have your own pockets than live in someone else’s.
• Distributed leadership and several overlapping systems of status means that different people can speak or act on behalf of a community in different regards. Somebody may spend money on behalf of the community without necessarily being the paragon of polished practice. But some kind of integrity is negotiated or the community falls apart.
• A wide periphery and enough of a sense of identity. The whole point is that “people like me would help,” perhaps by contributing money. Our own journey is connected to that of the communities we belong to.

One idea that occurs to me is that for the scheme we’re thinking of to work, there needs to be a repository that can catch the left-overs when communities fall apart. That might be an interesting new role for CPsquare, provided that at that moment it’s coming together, not falling apart.

A dollar is not a dollar: it depends on which stash it’s kept in.

Josien Kapma and I have been doggedly working in and around CPsquare on the question of how to put pockets and legs on small online communities for at least a year. By legs, we mean helping communities get places (usually requiring the expenditure of effort and or money). By pockets, we mean helping communities have stashes of money. A Facebook example follows. We’ve got a session accepted for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen. We’ve mostly tried to look at existing communities but recently thought we might learn more if we took a design fantasy approach.

Jean Lave’s ideas about how families manage their money have been very provoking for me because they help me get my head away from an accounting view and into a more informal and intuitive view. In Cognition in Practice, she talks about how families have many different “stashes” of money with negotiated, collectively understood rules for moving money between the stashes. Expenditures of a certain sort are made from one stash and not the other. This is like fund accounting in higher education. So a dollar is not a dollar: it’s value and meaning and usability depends on which stash it’s kept in. Universities, for example, can be in dire financial straits in one fund and be quite wealthy in another fund. Funds can borrow from one another, but they have to pay it back. This diagram suggests what some of the stashes and money flows in a complex family look like:

So to develop a Facebook example. What if there were a little “Facebook app” that were tied to a group (not an individual, where most of them are now). Imagine a group that would form around Bronwyn Stuckey’s “Community Capers” project. It has a Facebook Group (it’s so easy to join) and a blog (it’s so easy to follow) and a calendar (it’s so easy to add it to your own calendar so events show up). Why not a bank account and a little money management system? Here are some things it might do:

• Gather donations from guests, members or participants. (Might want to put limits on amounts of money, so it stays informal.)
• Provide a way to send gifts (gift certificates) to speakers or others who make a significant contribution (like send a specific book to everyone who contributes to an event). (Might want to limit payments so they go through Paypal.)
• Allow the group to pay for infrastructure like domain names, elluminate costs, phone conferencing costs (for people calling from France, for example), storage (lots of audio files, etc.)
• Allow the group to throw its weight around by giving a scholarship to someone, paying for travel, or do other good deeds (according to its values and goals).

The key is to make this kind of thing as easy as setting up a group. And to make it really transparent. That might mean:

• A group has a couple of different stashes which are clearly labeled
• When you give, you designate the stash it goes into
• Moving money between stashes is rule-bound and explicit
• Different people have different levels of control over different stashes
• All the transactions are clear to everyone, showing up on a group “Wall” or something.
• Imagine the possibilities: “groups like yours spent their $5 on items like …”

– References

Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

One of the issues around participation in communities of practice is “having enough time.” We challenge people to declare that they have enough time before participating in a CPsquare workshop. But people have always experienced a lot of desire and some disappointment during the Foundations workshop. It seems like there is always more to be said, another angle to consider. It turns out that the Connected Futures workshop is the same in that regard. Nobody has as much time as they’d like.

It’s amusing to hear Clay Shirky’s response to a TV producer who asks, “Where do people find the time?” Bottom line: people have less and less time for screens that don’t have a mouse attached, where you can’t do something that’s meaningful. We are actually confronted by a surplus of time if we look at it from the right point of view.

Although in fact doing one of these CPsquare workshops (whether as a leader or a participant) involves sitting in front of a computer for many hours, in some ways its a lot of exercise. They’re designed so that you have to do a lot of stuff: you can’t just sit there. Although people going through the experience do so as individuals, it’s usually on behalf of an organization or a cause or some kind of intention that’s beyond themselves as individuals. Diabetes could be a useful metaphor to think about the consequences of spending time in a different way. This article in the April 24th 2008 issue of The Economist (”How to spend it; A region awash with oil money has one or two clouds on the horizon“), talks about how sedentary the population as a whole has become in some
middle-east countries, leading to very high rates of diabetes. But it caught
my imagination as a way to step back and think about how we spend time on a larger scale:

Diabetes is a useful metaphor for the Gulf’s present problems. The region’s economies are struggling to absorb petrodollars, accumulating like glucose in the bloodstream. The risk they face is the economic equivalent of renal failure: inflation, a hollowing-out of the non-oil sector, and a young, growing workforce in chronic need of outside labour to supplement it.

The analogy is that learning passively is like consuming too much candy, year in and year out. It gets you high, but it can have long-term, quite negative consequences. I guess it could be that with the intellectual equivalent of renal failure you get lazy about chopping wood, don’t know when you need to learn and you might be kidding yourself when you think you know. Or something.

Now if we could just get CPsquare workshops to involve heart-pounding, aerobic exercise, too!

In a simpler setting, when we’re launching the Foundations Workshop, for example, I have developed a whole set of heuristics for figuring out when people are engaged and the degree to which they are connecting with the group. Some of the tell-tales I use include:

• Have they logged on?
• Have they sent me their picture (avatar) or uploaded it themselves?
• Have they posted something?
• Is there evidence that they are navigating in different places and have some sense of what it means to post in different places?

During the first few weeks of a workshop, I have found a lot of different ways to model useful online behaviors, including:

• Expressing enthusiasm
• Disclosing essential information in a conversational way (rather than in an instruction page)
• Acknowledging and correcting mishaps
• Using the technology-mediated environment for contracting and engagement (rather than just information storage and retrieval)

But what is being presented in the Foundations Workshop is how to collaborate and be together in a community. That seems rather simpler than modeling or presenting technology stewardship. (I guess I’m thinking out loud here about what I find challenging so far about this workshop.)

In this workshop we’re establishing presence and making a lot of connections. People are asked to get access to:

• a wiki
• Web Crossing
• a blog
• del.icio.us
• Skype
• Flickr
• an RSS reader
• Twitter

And then we’re trying to connect all of these tools together. So needless to say, people establish themselves on these tools incrementally and as one of the workshop’s technology stewards, I try to connect them all. There are some ways in which the process I’m following seems unique:

• Trying to get everyone up and running at the same time — as opposed to a gradual gathering of people and technologies
• Trying to establish both a private face and a public one for a group
• Trying to support everyone more or less equally (obviously some technologies are old hat to some people and others are struggling with several new tools all at once)

Trying to compress a process in a workshop has all kinds of implications that are surprising. And I know that I don’t even see all of the issues yet. What am I missing?