Learning Alliances

I’m working with several meta-communities: communities of practice made up of people who are themselves supporting communities.  Of course CPsquare is very much my “main meta-community” but I’m a bit surprised at how these meta-communities are turning up.  (I guess I shouldn’t be, since that’s where I started 10 years ago working to get a meta-community going at StorageTek.)

Talking about communities of practice can be pretty tricky, straining the patience of the action-oriented folks if it goes on too long and making the analytical types anxious if conversations get too loose.  These communities face a raft of issues about leadership, technology, boundaries, and purpose.  In a couple of these meta-communities I’ve introduced the concept of regular “experiments”, borrowing an idea in Derby and Larsen’s Agile retrospectives. (They aren’t talking about communities of practice, but in a way that’s what their book is about.)  Collective experiments are a useful activity no matter what a community’s domain might be, but with a CoP meta-community the can be especially helpful.

Here are some of the questions that come up in meta communities, all of which are in some way a matter of balancing opposites:

• What exactly are our goals as community leaders?  Is it legitimate to find new goals as we go and if so, how do we do that?  Could we develop richer and more useful frameworks to evaluate our selves and our work?

• If we’re trying to “improve our practice as leaders” we have to figure out what, exactly, our practice is.  How do we do that?  Compared to what other roles do we define ourselves?

• How do we get into the nitty gritty of making comparisons between practices and experiments of different members — so that we dig in enough without getting too personal?

• Can we simultaneously stand inside and outside of our practice?  We want to be critical enough without too much navel-gazing and without getting mechanical about what we’re doing.

The point about experiments is that none of these questions need to be answered in the abstract or “for ever.”  They need to be answered in practice, for the moment.  Swapping stories is obviously a core practice in this kind of work, but that can be too sloppy and too informal.  Charlotte Linde’s discussion about places and occasions for remembering and telling stories suggests to me that “experiments” are a great umbrella to get the right stories out.  Just as Jerome Bruner talks about how the law is all about formalized stories, I think that “experiments” are a nice framework for formalizing stories about community leadership.

From that perspective the whole art of community leadership might come down to providing good occasions for practitioners to remember together what works and what doesn’t.  It applies to meta-communities as well as garden variety communities of practice.

—- References:

Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Agile Retrospectives; making good teams great (Raleigh, NC: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006) http://isbn.nu/0977616649

Charlotte Linde, Working the Past; Narrative and Institutional Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)  http://isbn.nu/9780195140293

Jerome Bruner, Making Stories; Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)  http://isbn.nu/9780674010994

IT University lobby during the AoIR 9.0 Conference

CPsquare has a long tradition of holding “sidecar events,” where we meet before or after (and hang out together during) a related conference. In October, we had a sidecar event after the AoIR 9.0 meeting in Copenhagen. The larger conference justifies the effort and expense of travel and gives a smaller (day long) CPsquare event a special focus. Having a CPsquare posse during the conference makes it much more fun and more useful, too. The posse acts as a kind of “search and comment upon” social lens: I find it tremendously useful to have a known set of interacting people debriefing the parallel sessions, even when we all go to different ones.  When many of us go to the same session, like a plenary talk, “the posse” focuses on what was presented over a longer period of time and with more depth than if the group of fellow-attendees were less connected.

One of the plenary sessions at AoIR was Rich Ling’s (http://www.richardling.com/ on “Taken for grantedness of technologies.” He spoke as a sociologist about how a technology becomes so common that it’s taken for granted and thus becomes invisible. At that point someone who doesn’t have access to it becomes a problem or a burden for everyone else. He talked about automobiles and mobile phones as examples. It seems to me that communities like CPsquare and our AoIR posse are a lens that makes technologies visible some of the time and then invisible at other points in time.

I had the opportunity to experience “taken for grantedness” of cell phones first-hand. I didn’t have a mobile phone that works in Europe. It would have been very handy while I figured out the train, metro, and bus system in Copenhagen. But not having one made me kind of a problem for the rest of the group whenever I was lost or late.

There were several ways in which the CPsquare posse was a lens on my ownership of and access to a mobile phone.

• I probably wouldn’t have heard Rich Ling or have started thinking about technology adoption at that society-wide level without CPsquare’s side-car event. As a result I’ve been paying a lot more attention to mobile phone adoption.
• A connection with Thomas Mathiasen through CPsquare (I got to know him in one of the Foundations of CoPs workshops in 2001) made attending the conference more economical and was a great opportunity to get reacquainted. But staying at the Mathiasen household caused me to travel further and more frequently in Copenhagen than the rest of the CPsquare posse, all of whom stayed in the same hotel. Hence more of a need for me to have a mobile phone.
• The reason it didn’t occur to me that I needed a mobile phone was that I’ve observed other CPsquare members who are based in the US, spend far more time than I do in Europe, and seem to get along just fine. Why bother figuring something out when I can just copy the technology adoption behavior of others in my community?
• The posse’s schedule of meeting times and meeting points was constantly under re-negotiation, as people arrived by train or plane or automobile and as individual schedules dictated. Some CPsquare folks didn’t participate in the the AoIR conference at all, some participated for four days running and some just picked a few of the events. The EPIC conference and our CPsquare dialog complicated the schedule. All of that meant that a mobile phone was a necessity.
• Once I was synchronized with the CPsquare folks, I could depend on others for phone contact (we published several mobile phones internally, so that people could request that a locked door be opened, etc.). A mobile phone was indispensable, but I personally did not have to have one.

It seems to me that good wifi connectivity enables posses and networks to form at big conferences, bringing all kinds of social and technical opportunities into focus. I really like it when you can actually see a community participating in a conference on Twitter. (Not just for esthetic reasons, either, because it provides a nice way to pick up useful stuff when people are chatting with each other and you can overhear.) IT University provided pretty good service at the AoIR Conference, although the conference volume was too much for it some of the time. During Rich Ling’s talk, I happened to be sitting next to Shirley Williams and Tim Jordan, who had just given a talk about hackers immediately before the presentation I did with Beverly Trayner and Patricia Arnold. I noticed Shirley gave up tweeting about the plenary talk because the wifi crashed. I managed to buy Tim Jordan’s Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism before I gave up. (That’s a very good read, by the way.)

Last week was the fall vacation for universities in Denmark, so their facilities were used for conferences such as AoIR 9.0 and EPIC 2008.  Many of the people who participated in either conference did not seem to know about the other one, even though to me there were many connections and overlaps. There was a big contingent from CPsquare traveling to Denmark, mostly to AoIR.

Outside the EPIC Conference in Copenhagen
Originally uploaded by xeeliz

Beverly Trayner and I had been corresponding with Gitti Jordan about a CPsquare-sponsored dialog on Sunday October 19, so to get the conversation going we snuck into the EPIC conference to join a workshop she was leading on Mobile Work and Mobile Lives. After we’d looked around to determine whether we could get in, we had a coffee waiting for the conference attendees to finish lunch and talked about billing rates and business models.

Once we had begged to be admitted and had sat down to talk with people, we were surprised and delighted at how welcomed we felt and we both ended up being the reporters for our respective discussion groups. Here’s roughly what I reported on for one of the three groups:

1. Looking at issues such as worker and work mobility, work at a distance and with distant partners as daily practices:
   • We tend to frame these questions at an individual level, at the risk of missing opportunities and problems at the ensemble level.
   • Collaborating and living with people at a distance, across many time zones now seems to be the norm, but it’s also a challenge we can’t quite handle or necessarily understand.
   • We need to look at implications both for “the workplace” as well as for “the home.”
2. Big themes for mobile workers who collaborate at a distance:
   • What does it mean to have roots? Where is home?
   • Is multi-location, multi-time zone work liberating or enslaving?
   • How bound up is our thinking about these issues with our own social status, seeing all these issues as pertaining mainly to “knowledge workers”?
   • Is the germination of powerful ideas still necessarily a co-located, face-to-face event?
   • How can we be so obsessed with purposeful research while relying on serendipitous encounters and surprising discoveries?
   • Can we “stand outside” somehow to understand the importance of “where we live” physically and in terms of the succession of generations?
3. There were all kinds of issues on the edge of our awareness, that fell into two main areas:
   • How can we “study” these phenomena? What is “observation” (can we do it at a distance)? What kinds of scale issues are there?
   • What would the value of insights into these issues be (were we to understand them)?

It was really fun!

Gene Smith observes in his book on Tagging that Cialdini’s idea of “social proof” explains a lot about why social tagging is useful.  Smith’s book is full of insights and suggestions for software designers, but also seems very useful from a tech steward’s perspective.  And “social proof” is one of the reasons that communities of practice are so powerful for spreading practice (whether good or bad, whether about technology or not).  Among other things seeing that others in your community are paying attention to something is proof that it’s important.

A few weekends ago I helped design an event that brought together volunteer administrators from Shambhala Centers in the Northwest region.  I had pushed for the idea that the whole day should be focused on sharing administrative, financial, instructional, or technology practices.  It was a great day.

But during afternon the report-outs it was surprising how the people who were in sessions focusing on fund-raising or leadership or schedule coordination had so much more enthusiasm for using technology to do their work than the people we had brought together to talk about technology as such.  I think we didn’t provide enough social proof that technology was relevant to the functioning of a little meditation community.

It’s really great when special-purpose websites are mashed together.  The effect is multiplicative.  For example, Twemes.com, although it has a really ugly pattern for a background, is elegant and simple and combines:

• “Tweets” from twitter.com that have a particular hashtag
• Photos from flickr.com that have the same hashtag
• links from delicious.com that have that same hashtag

Here’s a silly example:

http://twemes.com/tlapd08

It turns out that the combination of those three special-purpose sites is very nice for supporting events, whether face-to-face or otherwise, allowing a group of people who agree on a tag to combine messages and resources on the fly.  Here’s a more serious example, where a lot of people at a recent Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas used it to share resources and for back-channel chatting during the conference:

http://twemes.com/c20

It’s a bit of a problem that a short tag like “c20″ because it can have different meanings to different people, so that one person’s use of the tag can be remarkably different from another’s.  But it’s even more of a problem that for some reason Twemes seems to have only one-fourth of the tweets with a given hashtag.  That’s my count with the silly “Talk Like A Pirate Day” tag. At this point Twemes has 4 tweets, while the same tag (without the photos or delicious links) on Twitter’s own search site has 13.  I would rather have Twitter be transparent and let others do the mashing!

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.