Learning Alliances

Rebecca Egolf, I think, recommended The reason YOUR CHURCH must Twitter; making your ministry contagious by Anthony D. Coppedge and I’ve recommended it to several people since buying the $5 e-book about a week ago. So it comes with excellent ecumenical credentials, since her recommendation said, in effect, that it was “good for synagogues, too.” (I noticed that the book is scrupulously non-denominational but it’s clearly American Evangelical.) Indeed I think that the book would be helpful for leaders of all kinds of spiritual and religious communities. Beyond that, it’s a nice example of how to teach people that a tool like Twitter needs to be approached in the context of ongoing social practice. It combines lots of basic how-to instructions and hints at how Twitter could be used in the every-day life of a church. (Because I’m in the final stages of publishing a book myself, I have to mention two typos that I noticed: it should be “Dr. Edwin Land” on page 54 and “People’s lives are busy” on page 29; also when I printed it there were no page numbers which makes it clumsy for referencing passages.) The many screen-shots that are included are very good, too.

There’s a practice. This book is more than just a manual on how to use Twitter. (There are certainly enough of them out there by now.) What struck a chord with me was the feeling that it gave me a window into some of what being a pastor in a church is about. Pastors are pivotal leaders who play a very complex role in their communities. Sometimes they are domain spokespersons, sometimes team leaders (of volunteer or paid teams), and sometimes learners trudging along the path. Most interesting, you get the sense from reading this book that there is a widely distributed community of practice of church pastors who have a lot to learn from each other. (It’s a professionalized occupation, or calling, where seminaries have had a gate-keeping role, so learning from each other may need more support than it did a generation or two ago.) But the book suggests that pastors need to learn from each other about handling issues of connecting with church members selectively and impactfully, with personal privacy, and with marginality (e.g., not just being ‘relevant on Sundays only’). All these issues come up in the context of using Twitter for a church. So, bottom line, the practice of being a pastor is similar to that of leading many other communities of practice. There could be a lot of learning on both sides.

There’s a community. I love the way Coppedge suggests that there’s a real social network out there that can provide examples and support. (And he just names names like spiritual entrepreneur Dave Ferguson or digerati pastor Terry Storch). Following them or Anthony Coppedge himself obviously gives you access to that community. But I found it surprising that his book didn’t mention hashtags. Beyond increasing traffic with such things as #followfriday, hash tags are an obvious way for conversations within a church or among a community of pastors to take place. Why not advocate hashtags like these?

• #pdx1stbaptist
• #t4pastors
• #t4church

There’s a learning agenda. Finally, the book is filled with nice quotes that suggest an authentic learning agenda. For example:

“The Church cannot be content to live in its stained-glass house and throw stones through the picture window of modern culture.” — Robert MacAfee Brown

Although the worry may not be stated in terms of stained glass, I’ve heard Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists voice very similar concerns. Relevance and connection are very important.  Addressing the issue will take more than Twitter.

For a couple of years it wasn’t “a book” but just “an update”.  After our ideas started getting more interesting and more useful, I took to taunting my co-conspirators Etienne Wenger and Nancy White that what is now Digital Habitats “is actually a book.” Later, when we all admitted that it was indeed a book, we decided that it would be faster and easier to self-publish.  We could write what we wanted, address an audience that may not yet exist, and be just as theoretical and just as practical as we wanted.  And we did just that, learning all kinds of things as we went.

In the end we hired Michael Valentine to do the diagrams and book design, Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz to help with the editing, and Sunday Oliver to produce the index.  Even with complete professionals on board with the project, we still maintained a do-it-yourself  style.  But I’m not sure about “fast” or “easy.”

An example of how doing it ourselves makes things not so fast was when we were looking at the “completed” index recently.  We found that we had an entry for “folksonomy” in the glossary but it had disappeared from the book itself.  Should we remove the entry from the glossary even after it was type-set?  We decided that the index entry should point to the glossary and also say “See tagging,” index an entry that still had several mentions in the text.  All well and good except for the fact that Etienne took it as a challenge to improve on the index.  And he did find an instance where we had misspelled Marc Coenders’ name along the way and he will undoubtedly improve the index.  But, working on the index do-it-yourself style has to get squeezed between hosting visitors from Hong Kong and Sydney, flying across the Atlantic Ocean at least once, and finishing overdue reports for less forgiving entities than you, the potential reader of the book.

So if not “so fast” or “so easy,” does self-publishing still seem like such a good idea?  I think so.  We’re still going to use a print on demand service and sell the book through Amazon and other channels.  But we’ve decided to have CPsquare be the publisher of record in order to segregate the work from other projects and streamline it.  Who knows what surprises lurk in the segregation and streamlining?  As Jean Lave said, “That learning occurs is not problematic. What is learned is always complexly problematic.”

Jean Lave, “The Practice of Learning”, p 3-32 in Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave (eds) Understanding Practice; perspectives on activity and context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

I’ve been on the “leadership team” of the Portland ODN more or less continuously for the last 10 years. I’ve found ODN to be a nice face-to-face home professionally, even though my work is very different from what most OD professionals do. But I thought that being on the leadership team would be fun and give me a view of how a professional community organizes itself over time. It’s been a great opportunity to observe the ups and downs of a community without having to take on an inordinate amount of work.

ODN has been a meeting-oriented community in that it mainly existed on the 2nd Wednesday of the month for a stand-up presentation (with some schmoozing before and afterwards). Moving beyond a flip-chart was a significant shift. The battle to spend money on a website which now serves as a professional directory is now a distant memory. All along, the presentations have been interesting but ad hoc, depending on what people wanted to present more than on an articulated learning agenda. For a while I tried to get people to participate in a note-taking practice so that the questions, answers, and general discussion could be published afterwards. OD folks in general are not early or enthusiastic adopters of technology: often they are the ones who will see technology as getting in the way — between people.

For many years Miriam Lange kept pushing the “Community Consulting Project” (CCP) idea. She just wouldn’t let it die, although many people on the leadership team (including me) didn’t quite get it. The idea was to provide OD consulting services to non-profits who could not pay. It was somewhat independent of the community’s main activities, but with the leadership of Dan Vetter chugged along year after year, giving people new to the field a chance to work with more seasoned professionals and it provided an important kind of public service.

A little more than a year ago the ODN leadership team decided that it needed some support from “outsiders” and asked the CCP folks to pull together a team to help ODN itself. The CCP team, led by Ed Warnock, met with the Leadership Team and did a survey of ODN members and the members of “adjacent” professional communities. The CCP then led the leadership team through a standard kind of “in search of excellence” process, inspired by Jim Collins: focus on what you can uniquely do, disregard the irrelevant activities, identify those middle areas that can be done minimally.

There were two major meetings that I recall. One was a large, four-hour-long carefully scripted meeting with PowerPoint slides that looked at the survey data results and set some priorities. It turned out that the CCP idea was the core on which ODN wanted to build its future, its key differentiator.  The bottom line: ODN would become the best place for interactive learning about the practice of OD. Later there was a much smaller leadership team meeting that took those priorities and tried to put it all in practice.

Based on the program announcements and the sessions I have attended since then, Jerry Zygmuntowicz, as the program chair, has done an amazing job of implementing the change and orientation, making ODN a much more practice-oriented professional association.  That’s really hard to do.  It’s really impressive that the ODN community has pulled this off.  Here are a few characteristics of the process that were outstanding:

• Recognizing that a change was needed: it is far too easy for a community to just drift into irrelevance.
• Gathering information from the community’s environment in a disciplined fashion.
• Focusing the leadership group’s attention on the challenges that the community needed to face. The leadership team more or less put itself in the hands of some good consultants.
• Lack of conflict in the leadership team, so that nobody stood in the way of moving along “the way forward” that emerged in the process.

But here’s another community development principle: one thing leads to another. I just got invited to meet with a group that’s working on extending ODN’s CCP model to provide some support to for-profit organizations!

“In a community, unfinished is good news” — that’s almost completely obvious and common-place in the world of wiki practitioners and wiki masters. That’s who was there at the Recent Changes camp. In a world of proposals and business plans that aim to be “done with it” and iron out uncertainty before things have begun, the wiki view is very refreshing.

If you think you know what a wiki is, you might want to think again. In a way the definition is also incomplete although you can find one in Wikipedia.

Once upon a time there was just “the wiki” — the one and only C2.com. But now there are thousands of instances and people are even writing wiki software from scratch. There are competing indexes of wikis such as:

• http://wiki1001.com/
• http://wikiindex.org/Welcome

One of the interesting themes in the conference was “extending wiki permeability.” Most wikis allow “everyone” to edit their contents. But I saw that model being extended in a number of ways:

• data automatically appended to fan pages by bots (http://blog.fanhistory.com)
• automatic creation of email lists for topic docents (http://wikihow.com)
• “curating” videos instead of editing text (http://www.wikihow.com)
• automatically sharing uploaded photos to flickr from http://www.foodista.com
• creating a “first draft” of a wiki by scraping data from around the internet (http://aboutus.org and  http://www.foodista.com)
• developing database characteristics in many different ways (such as http://wagn.org/ or http://wikiindex.org/Add_a_wiki)
• aiming to share content out in new APIs

In the conference itself, there was plenty of tweeting and chatting and blogging. Wikis live within a larger ecology that’s extremely complex and changing constantly.  But this community regards wikis as the center of the world.

In a session that I hosted on “social hacks aka business models“, Ray King, the CEO of About Us reflected this relentless experimentation, describing how his company had tried six different business models or sources of revenue over time. Each model required a different set of delicate negotiations and agreements with the company’s partners and clients. None of the models was the last word, nor will be.

Evolutions in permeability mean that the communities or businesses that sponsor those wikis are both developing new ways of creating value and new ways of generating revenue. It was striking to me that from this perspective the “direct fund raising appeal from Jimmy Wales” that we’ve recently seen on Wikipedia seems very old fashioned. The campaign might be hard to distinguish from a public radio station’s fund raising. Where’s the wikiness? And it makes me wonder whether Wikipedia’s dominance in the public’s imagination won’t also dominate people’s ideas of what a wiki’s business model should be.

This blog post feels fairly incomplete. I guess that’s OK. Very wiki-like. Here are some of the other URLs that I accessed during the conference:

• http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Creation_myths_of_wiki
• http://2009rcc.org/wagn/Community_Curated_Works_Tools_Social_Practices
• http://www.2009rcc.org
• http://blog.aboutus.com
• http://www.brianna.modernthings.org
• http://www.c2.com
• http://www.communitywiki.org
• http://www.dickipedia.org
• http://www.graspr.com
• http://etherpad.com/ep/blog/
• http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/36964
• http://lego.wikia.com
• http://www.marshallk.com
• http://www.ping.fm
• http://www.rccdoc.notlong.com
• http://www.recessionhacking.org
• http://www.search.twitter.com
• http://www.tagal.us/tag/rcc09
• http://www.twitter.com
• http://www.universaleditbutton.org
• http://www.wikihow.com
• http://www.fanhistory.com
• http://www.foodista.com
• http://wagn.org/home

One of my challenges in talking about communities and technology is that I’m more committed and passionate about “doing it” than talking about it.  Despite getting introduced by the likes of Ward Cunningham as “a researcher,” I’m always more interested in trying to change how we participate in a conversation than in standing on the podium explaining to a passive audience how much more fun real participation really is.  So in my talk at CHIFOO tonight, I am going to talk about communities and technology — but I’m hoping to help augment community participation and push the conversation forward.

Carrie Gilbert, the CHIFOO program chair, and I came up with the idea of a “CHIFOO Tagging Project,” as described on the CHIFOO site:

In keeping with our 2009 Program Series’ theme of “Collaboration,” CHIFOO will be embarking on an experiment in online/offline community-building. Here’s what we’re asking everyone in CHIFOO to do: When you come across online articles, resources, discussions, and so on that you would like to share with the CHIFOO community as a whole, tag them with the del.icio.us bookmark ”chifoo09”.

Because I couldn’t make it to the January meeting and I guess the agenda was full, the project was announced without a lot of context in the website.  So, since December, there have been more than 80 items tagged on Delicious, by fellene, mattholm, pheuser, skry, and, yours truly, smithjd.  Skry, in particular has dived in with gusto, tagging dozens and dozens of things.  I’m going to try to give a lot more context and focus to the idea tonight.

Eventually, I’m hoping that there can be some social, reflective activity around the tagging practice, along the lines of Beth Kanter’s regular summaries of the NPtech tagstream.  I feel like I should demonstrate in place what I’m talking about.  Hence this post.  Being very lazy, I did some screen-scraping and put the tags that were used with chifoo09 in wordle to get a kind of topic summary:

That’s not a bad glimpse into what I think CHIFOO members are thinking about.  I noticed that Wordle will take a URL, so thinking that producing a really easy summary of a tag stream without having to resort to screen-scraping and regular expressions and time consuming geekery, I inserted the tag’s url: http://delicious.com/tag/chifoo09 .  This is what I got:

Twitter? That didn’t make much sense. Digging a bit, it turns out that Wordle was looking at the default 10 tagged items, and an 11-year-old blogger named Gloson from Malasia was featured at the top of the page.  Well, perhaps he should have a voice in the CHIFOO conversation.  Have a look.  Discuss.

I guess like every tagstream, there is more in it than you can possibly explore in one sitting.  You have to have some decision rules to prevent getting lost.  Here’s one rule: what are the most-tagged items that are also tagged with the CHIFOO09 tag?  Here are the three most-frequently-tagged:

• 22,708
• 11,698
• 7,128

That’s a pretty pretty geeky set of items.

What are other stopping rules?

Almost 10 years ago I decided to focus full time on communities of practice and pretty much everything I’ve done professionally ever since then has revolved around that one subject.  I’ve learned a lot about how to support and understand communities and even gotten better at explaining what I do to for a living other people.  (At a funeral last night it only took me about 45 seconds to start reducing the puzzled look when an acquaintance asked me, “What is it that you do again?”)

Once I do explain it to people they’ll often say, “Wow, that’s a pretty narrow niche!”  It’s true, but look at three talks that I’m working on right now:

• Provided that the trains run smoothly in Spain, today I’m meeting with people from the ministry of education in Colombia to give feedback on a plan for communities of practice for educators.  It’s fascinating to see all the connections between education in the US and in Colombia.  It’s a bit of extra effort to read their plan, which is in Spanish.  It took me a while, for example to figure out that “taslapada” was a typo and they meant “traslapada” (overlapped).  Before I figured it out, I was grumbling to myself, “Why do educators have to use such obscure language?”
• Next Wednesday night I’m giving a talk at CHIFOO that feels ambitious to me.  I’m trying to do two different things. First, I’m arguing that design “in a Web 2.0 world” has to start with communities, not end there, as an afterthought.  And second I’m pushing the idea of getting everyone to tag stuff that’s relevant to the year’s discussions (”Collaboration at Work: Putting the ‘Us’ in User Experience”).  I think a lot of people have found that once a community finds its groove in face-to-face mode, it’s difficult to add a tool to its repertoire, even when the community is made up of folks that are as smart as the CHIFOO folks.  (Maybe it will be eaiser than I’ve thought, since any face-to-face discussion more than 50 items have been tagged so far since I proposed the tag in early December: http://delicious.com/tag/chifoo09.
• The Wednesday after that I’m doing a talk with Beverly Trayner at  the Human Capital Institute.  I’m afraid that we’ve promised to explain how all the world’s e-learning problems can be solved in one hour.  Not only that, we’re doing the presentation on a webinar platform which has not been my favorite type of software but which I’m finally going to have to deal with.

So I may be very “niched”, but I’m also feeling very stretched.  Yay!

Ward Cunningham just recently set up his own channel on YouTube and has edited a conversation we had last Fall.  His philosophy for conducting interviews is simple and effective: make guests feel comfortable and ask them questions that make them look good. He did a great job making me feel comfortable.

We start by talking about how, in writing the book, we tried to not “just” be experts, but to also get at our experience and the more intimate level at which communities live. At the very end I remember to tell him that his interaction with the community that formed on his wiki was one of the first instances where I glimpsed what the role of a technology steward might be about.  It has taken a lot of work to write about “less technical” people might take on the role, but I’m convinced that you don’t have to be a Ward Cunningham to serve your community with respect to its technology needs.

My work as a tech steward and community leader involves dealing with a lot of little sets of data that comes from different sources.  As our communities live on more and more different platforms, for example, it becomes a messier and more complicated job to keep track of who’s on which platform, and we often need to put it together to get an overview.  In a formal environment all of the complexity would be handled by SQL queries or match-merge operations with tools like SAS (which I grew up on).  In an informal environment, we end up using use tools like spread-sheets (like Excel or Google’s) that allow us to do most of the work until we need to do a match merge.  That means we need to combine data from two sources, matching (joining records) where possible and interleaving where a match doesn’t occur.  Very basic, very boring and error-prone to do by hand.

Until now, using an idea from Phillipp Lenssen, Google Apps Hacks (Sebastopol, CA: OReilly, 2008) http://isbn.nu/9780596515881.  Here’s how you do it, following the idea on page 202.

Open a new google doc:

Insert the unique data (e.g., “the key”) from the one source (preferably sorted):

The typical case is a list of email addresses.  Note that you’d only put the email addresses themselves, not all the other information that you have associated with the email address.

Save it.  Then overwrite it by “selecting all” and inserting the corresponding data from the other source (also sorted) and then save again.

Now, under the “Tools” drop down menu, select “Revision history”,

Check the boxes and press “Compare versions”.  You get this very nice little listing:

The lines that are in one source but not the other are colored and you can easily tell which source they come from.  The lines that match (are in both sources) are black. Now you can go back to your Excel spread-sheet or wherever and do the rest of the process by hand.  It’s much easier to do because you have an easy-to-use listing showing where matches (and mis-matches) occur.

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.)